Charities - are they allowed to do this?

djc wibbled on Tuesday 12 January 2010 16:22

Yes - and also gives a convenient way to auto-file them to various different mail folders :)

What would be really cool would be a local admin email address I can bounce the throwaway emails to with a one line instruction, like "kill this account" or "expires 2010-03-23" (Ideal for one off transactions where I will never use the address again).

Reply to
Tim W
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Good idea - pretty simple to implement that here!

Reply to
Bob Eager

I don't know: I've never bothered. I do know you can 'blackhole' some addresses so perhaps the answer is 'yes'?

Any time I'm asked for an email address I create an appropriate one. Bloggs Tea Cosies would get bloggsteacosies@.... It's quite amusing when I do that on the phone as they often say 'No, not our address, yours'.

Both deny it but they're the only ones to get those unique addresses and the chances of a spammer making them up has got to be ultra remote.

Reply to
F

it may well not be policy, but its a quick way for an underpaid sysadmin to pick up an extra grand on the side.

I take it as read that any email address I use online will become a spam target.

I used to use one for every shop, but I cant be arsed now. I just use a new one every so often, and after a few months, ditch it.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Bob Eager wibbled on Tuesday 12 January 2010 17:12

I pondered a web interface to flat files (could be dbm or RDBMS but my "site" is so tiny, flat files will do) - in the end, I decided, if I'm looking at an email client, I'd rather stay in it, not move to a web browser for this one op. Bit like using the DSPAM/Dovecot integration (antispam module for Dovecot) - user simply drags messages in or out of the Junk folder to retrain DSPAM, no faffing with the web interface or funny email addresses.

In fact, that gives me a better idea - if I can do something with the antispam module, I ought to be able to set up another couple of magic IMAP folders called "Kill" and "KillInAMonth" (or week or whatever) for disabling the throwaways. Even easier then.

On an aside, I wonder how easy or not it would be to do this sort of stuff with Exchange - never having touched it?

Reply to
Tim W

Most mail domain mail redirectors will allow you to set up a zillion aliases to a single mailbox, provided you own the domain.

That's all I do.

From time to time an alias gets added and one deleted.

Since I have no default mail routing, the rest presumably get dropped or bounced.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

I tried the different addresses for different shops but decided it wasn't worth it. The address I use just for shop sites etc. has been in use for a number of years. it doesn't get any spam despite being used on who knows how many sites over the years.

Reply to
chris French

(apologies for putting the followup here but I accidentally deleted Tim's article!)

What I do for span is have two buttons on the toolbar (Claws Mail). One for spam, one for mideidentified spam. Each forwards the appropriate message *as an attachment* to a special mailbox (one for each). A script of the mail server periodically extracts the messages and feeds them to bogofilter, to train it. The mail server obviously uses bogofilter.

I could easily have another button (and associated email address) to send addresses to be deleted from my accepted addresses.

Reply to
Bob Eager

Would still think they were rude if they were collecting for the dyslexia association:-)?

I personally choose not to give to beggars, and that means (IMHO) anything from beggars in the street, charities thrusting a collection tin up my nose right up to charities knocking on my door.

I work for two charities and I only give financial support to one of them. I also refuse to help either of them with collections in the street, outside football grounds etc

Adam

Reply to
ARWadsworth

Bob Eager wibbled on Tuesday 12 January 2010 20:49

Claws as in the parallel fork of Sylpheed?

That's most neat. Sticking to Thunderbird, I should start having a go with what extensions can do... I'd love to add some minor features.

Reply to
Tim W

That's the one. I'm finding it does practically everything I want, having switched to it a few months ago. This is on FreeBSD, as is the mail server.

Sorry about the typos - worse than usual, probably the painful shoulder..

Reply to
Bob Eager

Bob Eager wibbled on Tuesday 12 January 2010 22:16

I should have a look at that again. I find Thunderbird is stable and does everything I mostly want out of the box (but I use knode for USENET - Thunderbird is OK but it doesn't totally do it for me).

It's nice that IMAP4 has finally settled down despite Washington University's best attempts to conjure up an over complicated and proper "committee" protocol. I read the RFCs once - nearly fried my head. I was ecstatic when dovecot came on the scene after putting up with wu-imap for years (config involved patching the source for what we wanted to do which wasn't anything special). Yes, the latter is just a reference implementation and it was pretty stable. But so inflexible. Dovecot just seems to do more right by default, like server side indexing (great for mbox over NFS, well great for mbox full stop), sending the right information down the the client about server folder locations - and the config file is sane and featureful. since looking at antispam and its predecessor, I'm getting really impressed by what can be done in plugin modules with very little coding.

I remember back in the late 90's wanting there to be one decent IMAP client and willing the death of POP3. Now there's a pretty wide choice for every platform.

None of this impressed my ex boss though - he read his email with "more" and "grep" - proper bloke ;->

I just blame the cheese crumbs in my keyboard...

Reply to
Tim W

I use easyfundraising.org.uk for online shopping - the commissions the charity gets are less (in some cases half) what they would get if they ran their own affiliate scheme, but there are loads of retailers so it saves the charity a lot of work. If you put through a couple of car/ home insurance policies and some big Screwfix orders it's quite easy to reach =A3100+ donations a year for the charity, and costs you nothing.

Owain

Reply to
Owain

And books, of course.

Sadly some charity shops send very little profit to HQ once the rent and manager's salary [1] has been paid. Then HQ take their slice.

Owain

[1] A lot of charity shops have paid managers, part or full time.
Reply to
Owain

Forgotten what I tried, might have been knode. Got flamed after a day, because of 'whatever-it-was's' strange treatment of followups.

I now use Pan.

I don't use IMAP - no real need - but when I last looked, implementations were patchy on the platform I then used.

I collect mail via SMTP (run a server). From there, it's POP3 within the house - wrote my own POP3 server eons ago and ported it very easily to the mail server.

Reply to
Bob Eager

No, I would think they were dure :-)

I'll get me coat....

Reply to
The Medway Handyman

Some of the chugging is done by private organisations working for profit for themselves. A typical re-imbursement for them would be

100% of the first years donations.

As on the daytime TV ads for animal welfare ( showing eg. kittens by the hundredweight threatened with being boiled down for glue ) the charity is only concerned with amassing contact details which they use to phone the old dears with the hard sell treatment to get them to up their direct debit every few months, not to mention the possibilty of getting them to change their will.

After all all those conferences in 5 star hotels in Singapore or Rio etc ( along with associated business class airfares ) keep on beckoning.

My sister (a trained lawyer) discovered the local bishop was charging his membership to a Pole Dancing Club to his expense account at the church.

She reported this to the Charity Comissioners, who were quite nonplussed. Presumably ,they said, the trustees of the Charity knew what was going on and were happy with it, as far as they were concerned if the Trustees were happy about it it was fine by them.

Hound dogs, the lot of them.

Derek

Reply to
Derek Geldard

It was back in the days of dial-up, with multiple mail users at home. I had a simple POP3 client that just fetched all the mail and stored it locally, then a POP3 server to let the rest of the family collect their mail when they wanted it, without more dialling in. Similar for collecting outgoing mail; sent every time I went online.

Reply to
Bob Eager

A large charity shop where I used to live near Nottingham had to close due to the greedy council putting the rates up to an uneconomical point. The shop (and several others) in the centre closed for the same reason. Within months all the windows were smashed and graffiti everywhere then the rest of the shops closed - nobody wanted to shop there any more. Now the council get no revenue at all. The centre is now dead apart from a co-op supermarket.

Reply to
David in Normandy

If there's one nearby I would strongly commend Emmaus to you;

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"Giving homeless people a bed ... and a reason for getting out of it."

We donate all our charity stuff to them, and have bought a number of items. They also sell VHS videos for sufficiently little money that I buy them to watch and then donate them back - cheaper than renting them (not that you can rent VHS videos any more...)

Reply to
Huge

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