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dan_linder

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dan_linder
·4 bulan yang lalu·discuss
Then compare wording and structure with other bills proposed elsewhere to look for single sources trying to legalize an agenda or retry after earlier failed attempts.
dan_linder
·8 bulan yang lalu·discuss
Upvoted because that’s about the only way to get the message away.

But having said that, please don’t do that (use the “report spam” as a method to stop one specific action).

I was the technical lead for a small hobbyist group for an American sports car which was 100% mailing-list since it started in 1994. I joined the mailing list in 1996, and was asked to help (and finally take over) as the technical lead around 2004.

We had spam traffic pretty well handled with multiple opt-in confirmations: at sign-up, and yearly on the sign-in date. And every email had the proper headers for mailing lists, each subject line was prepended with “[TheNameOfTheList]”, as well as a human readable block of text at the bottom of each email with the proper way to sign out.

With all that going on, we were really solid until about 2015 or so.

Somewhere between there and the early 2020’s we started getting silently blackholed more and more by the largest email handlers (at the time, AT&T, Yahoo, and GMail). Long time subscribers would email me directly and I’d scour the mailing list system for a hint of what happened.

Finally through a friend of a friend we got hooked up with another person inside one of those mail handlers. They couldn’t confirm our mailing list specifically, but they said that even a single “mark as spam” report by any of their email users would blackhole the entire email for ALL of their users. No notification to us, no notification to the other users, just emails went missing.

By the time we determined what was going on, and having nobody at those companies to work with, we had dropped from a high of well over 4K users to below 300. We tried switching over to a Google Groups backed mailing list (around 2022), but by then the damage had been done and the few that still remained were not all that interested in being participants. I don’t think the GGroups list has had a message (aside from the “Hey, is this list still on?” test emails) in years.

So, please refrain from using the “mark as spam” for anything but pure SPAM emails.
dan_linder
·9 bulan yang lalu·discuss
> Curious what the purpose of calling a pay phone is? (wasn't possible in my country)

Mostly for the humor value for an on-air radio show. I’m sure were pre-arranged just to make sure they got something usable, but I can see the occasion where a random person walking by and hearing the pay phone RINGING would cause them to pause. As a teenager I would have picked it up in a heartbeat (even not having heard the radio shows).

As for other “purposes” I’ve seen some crime/drama shows where the bad guy tells someone to go to the corner pay phone and answer it when it rings at a specific time. Horrible idea now as the phone systems would easily record the number that called it, but up until the early 2000’s it would be one option. Today I would guess dropping a burner phone in an envelope for the “victim” would be a more likely movie trope…

(Source: I’m from the US and remember a few radio stations doing this in the 1980’s and 1990’s.)
dan_linder
·9 bulan yang lalu·discuss
I remember working with a guy who was the internal IBM rep (we were in corporate tech support in the late 1990’s and we were a BIG IBM reseller, so my friend got lots of bennies at work) and he had a PPC 605 (not the 615 IIRC), but he ran AIX on it (we were in the AIX and Unix support team).

Man I was jealous!