Using invalid.com email addresses

[Stephen Hansen]

On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 10:13 PM, D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy at druid.net> wrote:

> Damn!  I missed the @invalid.com in the address.  I'm not sure why I
> just didn't do this before but @invalid.com just went into my
> blacklist.
>
> Does anyone else think that that behaviour is just rude, not to mention
> in violation of the RFCs?
>

It may or may not be in violation of the RFCs, but the modern reality of the
internet makes certain "rules" of the RFC's meaningless.

Spam is a major issue for some people; and some people do not want their
email address to be trivially harvested, and usenet exposes that address
very easy. You will frequently see people mutate their address, sometimes
they'll do so in such a way that if you look at it you'll know that if you
remove parts you will get a real address-- these people allow for personal
direct communication. Others don't really want to receive any email at all
based on their newsgroup posting, and want all of your messages to go to the
group instead-- they generally provide an email address which is utterly
meaningless.

It may or may not violate certain RFC's, but there's nothing rude about it.
Its people trying to engage a community and yet hold some measure of control
over how they engage that community. They have every right, IMHO, regardless
of what an RFC may say.

People who may use an invalid.com address simply don't want to be contacted
individually and directly. Why is that rude? They post to a public forum,
and they simply want to communicate solely in that public forum. They have
no moral obligation to provide a means for personal or direct communication,
in my mind at least. To me, demanding a real address from people in the
usenet medium which has nothing even vaguely like privacy protection is
rude. If someone chooses to provide it, great. If not, just as fine. One is
obligated only to share with us what they wish, and all power to them in
whatever capacity they wish to share.

--S
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