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| If you receive spam
from an email at Campbells.org, please be assured that we had nothing to do
with it. Such spam is the work of professional spammers, who choose a
domain name at random, then use fictitious addresses at that domain name for
return addresses in their spam.
The email infrastructure is indifferent to imposture, which means that there is nothing to prevent a person from sending email to millions of address using any return address he chooses. If you think it's annoying to receive spam from Campbells.org, consider that the Postmaster for Campbells.org receives hundreds of "bounce" messages via email per day--one for each undeliverable spam. We also receive a few abusive emails from people (such as yourself) who don't understand that we're just the victims of blatant forgery. The current email infrastructure was designed in academia during the very early days of the internet, long before any commercial use was permitted. Today, this design, which relies on trust and good citizenship, seems almost comically naive. The spam problem is a difficult one: how do we prevent unauthorized uses and generally anti-social behavior from miscreants without imposing an undue burden on ordinary users? Smart people all over the world are thinking about this, so we'll eventually find a compromise between ease-of-use and ease-of-misuse.
Best, Joe Campbell |
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