Wed, 08 Sep 2004

The end of an era

For many years, as a member of the ACM, the IEEE and the IEEE Computer Society, I’ve benefited from those organisations’ provision of free email aliases. When I got those addresses, they provided a benefit in the form of a permanent personal address and helped to insulate me from possible loss of other addresses; but I’ve had my own domains for many years now and there’s no real reason to fear their loss, so that’s less of a benefit. And, with the rising tide of spam, the aliases are a problem. I can’t block email addressed to them without breaking the entire system because a refusal to accept the offending email by my server would then see the forwarding system attempting to send a bounce message to the spammers and that leads to madness.

So, with some reluctance, I’ve been weaning my contacts off those aliases for the past couple of years and have now asked the organisations to cancel them. I believe everybody now knows that the aliases have been cancelled, but this is to confirm it for anybody who has missed out on hearing. As of now, the aliases gjb@acm.org, gjb@ieee.org and gjb@computer.org are no longer a means to contact me. I suppose this also means I will have to generate a new PGP key without mention of those identities.

Although I was able to cancel two of them easily on a web form, the third one required several emails and even when they cancelled it, the change did not take effect until several days later because there is a delay of 1 business day before changes to their database propagate to their servers—and this is an organisation of computer professionals.

Posted at: 07:02

Path: /technology   |  permalink