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:
> Your recent submission to TELECOM Digest was rejected. If you feel it
> should be printed, please resubmit it with the Secret Word as part of
> the subject line.
> Editor, TELECOM Digest
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: First of all, thanks very much for your
excellent item on Cell phone power radiation and cancer. Maybe your
explanation along with Charles Gray's referral to the magazine article
will suffice for _a long time_.
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]
John Stahl (aljon@stny.rr.com)