Pat,
What the heck is the Secret Word? I can't find one in the last issue of Telecom Digest!
John Stahl
At 12/21/2006 09:03 PM, you wrote:
Now regards the 'secret word'. I announced it here a long time ago, and the reason for not repeating it every day is that the spammers would pick up on it and use it as part of the headers in their spam. I will assure you, however, that your use of the Secret Word in the subject line of your message moves your message out of the queue and directly to the top of the list of messages to be printed. I trust in Spam Assassin, but I suspect it is a misplaced trust, since although about 300 items each day arrive and are deliberatly tossed into the spam bucket by the mail program here, an additional 200 or so fall into my 'legitimate' mail queue by virtue of the creative ways they have of spelling the word starting with /V/ having to do with sexual enhancement and the multitude of ways one can spell sex acts and male or female sex organs. No matter how many adjustments are made to Spam Assassin, there is always some way to get around it, and beat Spam Assassin at its own game. With my spam vrs. legit mail here running most days in excess of 95 percent, my decision was it will be easier to default it all to the spam bucket. And of course, a demand is made of me a hundred times of day to please re-open my (closed due to fraud) e-Bay, PayPal, or you name the bank credit card; just type in your social and credit card numbers via the imposter's cgi-bin and we will all be on the straight and narrow once again.
So my response was simply to replace my autoack message with one saying 'your submission refused, etc' (see the example above you sent me). I do peek into the 'legitimate' mailbox however as time permits and pick out the known and familiar names and run their stuff anyway. But those folks who _do_ include the Secret Word get their (truly) legit mail forwarded yet another time to a place of honor here.
About fifty years ago, on CBS Radio, there was a very humorous man named Groucho Marx with a program called 'You Bet Your Life'. Every day, Groucho had a guest; he and the guest would banter on various topics. At the start of each show however, the announcer would whisper to the studio and radio audience, "today, the Secret Word is 'telecom' (or whatever it happened to be)" and then in the course of the broadcast, if the special guest happened to use the Secret Word (for example in a sentence) all hell would break loose. A cuckoo bird flew up on the stage and flitted around, fireworks went off, the audience would yell and hoot, and Groucho, would stand there with a deadpan look on his face would say "you said the Secret Word" and give the guest a couple hundred dollars in prize money, taking it out of his own pocket. Many days, the guest did NOT say the secret word, that was fine if he did or did not say it. As often as not however, the guest did NOT say the secret word, a lot like most of my email these days. Groucho -- indeed all the Marx brothers -- were quite funny in their movies and on the radio; some of you must feel likewise about Spam, thinking that it is quite humorous. I see nothing funny about it at all. PAT]