On 2015-01-31 at 14:52 +0000, Edward Ned Harvey (lopser) wrote: > FWIW, I have never had this problem. > > The vast majority of people here saying they've had this problem are using > common domains like @gmail.com
Yes, and this is because of human cognition problems, not because of any problems at the common domain. The issue is entirely around people not understanding the importance of "what comes after the at-sign", spotting the bit which relates to "them" and, egocentrically, only paying attention to that part of the address. Whatever domains are most common "at the moment" will suffer from one fact: a bell curve extended over a population sample the size of "Internet users" will still have a rather large absolute count of people who are fifth sigma idiots. The people who suffer are those who got "lucky" enough to get a base form of an address in a common domain. I used to be an SRE in the Gmail team. One of the perks of the job was a stance that if you could figure out enough about how the accounts system worked to override the checks against a minimum length on an @gmail.com address, you were allowed to do so as a reward for learning how the product worked. So for a while I was <[email protected]>. I ended up terminating the account. The official stance that too-short addresses *in the common shared domain* attract too much spam was absolutely 100% true. Not even Gmail's spam filters could sufficiently help me. There were at least three people convinced that they had that address. Before terminating the account to stop dealing with the spam, I mostly made cursory attempts to educate, if I could figure out the correct address, or I just deleted it. I rarely took direct action to the detriment of the idiots, because taking advantage of idiocy just doesn't sit well with me. One of the few exceptions was when I received a copy of an exam paper, dated a couple of days after the receipt date. I made sure to figure out the educational establishment and whose class it was and to forward a copy onto them, letting them know the address used, so that they could figure out the cheat. Seriously, cheating sits poorly enough with me to start with, but if you're a college student who can't even get your own email address right, there's no _way_ that you should get away with attempts to cheat on your exam. It's just too dangerous when bridge-builders faked their way through their education. -Phil _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
