I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

Dear EFF: Please Practise What You Preach

The EFF (who I support) have published a new white paper, claiming that anti-spam technologies are a danger to freedom of speech.

It’s a point that they’ve tried to raise before—Their pathetically fuckwitted, tediously illinformed sysadmin created a mad stink in February 2003, claiming that the Razor distributed anti-spam system was being abused to deliberately block MoveOn.org and EFF emails.

As I’ve stated before, spam is very much in the eye of the beholder. That “Unsolicited” at the front of UCE is problematic, since there’s no way for a system to know whether the receiver solicited the mail.

But in the meantime, EFF, can you please fix your mailing list sign-ups to verified opt-in. Currently, it is easy to sign up any email address to their EFFector newsletter, with no notification or validation to the address in question. Just enter an address as you join their Action Center, and voila, unsolicited bulk email will be sent to the recipient of your choice.

EFF: Fix this, become a good member of the mass email community, and perhaps then I’ll take your anti-anti-spam rhetoric seriously.

Update to add: Justin helpfully takes the time to debogusify some of the technical cluelessness of the paper.

Let’s Face It

Paging the LazyWeb! My desired plugin for Thunderbird:

People use Avatars on message boards and in instant messaging. There have been standards for years to include them in email. I’d love to see a Thunderbird plugin which displays them.

Preferably all of the following “standards” should be supported.

• Ye olde classic X-Face header. It’s XBM-tastic!
• The new, poorly-named PNG+MIME Face Header
• The X-Image-Url(Daniel J. Luke’s Weblog: Picture in Mail (X-Image-Url)) header which is used by Apple Mail
• The sending email address’s Gravatar

Surely someone with knowledge of XUL can knock this out fairly quickly. All the image-displaying stuff is baked right in. You just need to code the part that understands the headers.