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Old 14 Jul 2019, 01:51 AM   #18
communicant
Cornerstone of the Community
 
Join Date: Jul 2009
Posts: 879
a plea for sanity and reason instead of sarcasm and mockery

It troubles me to post a personal note about a fellow member of the forum, and I hope that my doing so does not overly vex the moderators -- please try to regard it in parliamentary terms as a "point of personal privilege."

Janusz has announced that he is putting me on his "ignore" list (something which he could perfectly well have done in decorous silence if he wished to spare himself the pain which the mere existence of my posts in a thread apparently causes him, though of course noöne is forcing him at gunpoint to read them if he finds them so intolerably odious; but no, he had to announce to the forum at large that he was placing me on the "ignore" list so he would not even know that I had posted at all, like a bully on a playground proudly trumpeting his decision to send some object of scorn to Coventry), so he will not, of course, be seeing this message. I note, however, that his public announcement of his banishing me from his ken could have no practical purpose other than to indulge an unlovely impulse to share his mysterious scorn with others and to inflict insult and distress. I have encountered nothing like it since grade school -- all that was lacking was his dancing around me with thumbs in his ears, wiggling his other fingers and chanting "nyah-nyah-na-nyah-nyah" like a hostile ten-year-old.

What have I done to offend him? That is not a rhetorical question. I post this because I am asking the forum for an honest evaluation of the messages preceding his announcement of his forthcoming action -- is there anyone here who thinks that anything I wrote could reasonably be considered offensive to him, even at a stretch? He complains sarcastically about my vocabulary (a complaint which is further reminiscent of a cruel schoolboy who reflexively heaps abuse on any contemporary who exhibits the slightest literacy), and darkly refers to knowledge of "multiple languages," in an apparent effort to catalogue yet another sin.

Is there anything in my post in that thread that invited such a response? I literally cannot imagine what the man is talking about, except that he seems irrationally to resent my having posted at all in a EuMX thread he had started, apparently in some way that he finds insufficiently relevant to his original post.

Please, if any member of the forum finds his words and action justified, tell me. I want to know. It would be wonderful if one or more forum members expressed an opinion that he was out of line (and those posts he would indeed see -- or at least be aware of their existence -- as he would not yet have got around to blocking any members who wrote them), but if you would rather not step into the public arena in such a cause, please PM me, even if it is only to say that you have something to say to me, whereupon I'll PM you an email address where you can write to me even more privately.

For some unknown reason I seem to rub Janusz the wrong way and always have done, for ten years, ever since I joined this forum. It is his responsibility, however, as a presumably adult member of this forum, to contain his personal animadversions, especially when they are unjustified, and not inflict them on the forum at large (or indeed, for that matter, on their individual target in the first place). Indeed, I believe his behavior in this case merits a rebuke from the moderators, or even being banned or at least warned, but that is for others to determine. Life being as it is, however, it is probably I who will be banned or warned instead, for this post may perhaps be deemed an "insult" as forbidden in Edwin's rules, because I did not do as Janusz did and cloak a manifestation of childish and persistent hatred in a subtle and indirect mode of delivery.

As for the original merits of the topic, if Janusz believes that I misunderstand virus or spam scanning, then why not simply say so, and in the spirit of the forum educate me, instead of mounting a slyly indirect attack as part of a gratuitous announcement that he was blocking me?

My question boiled down to this: why should the appearance of an anatomical term (used clinically and not lasciviously) in the text of an email sent from EuMX, with a CC to an address at VFEmail, have caused that CC to be marked as spam when it arrived, and left traces in the headers that a Hungarian medical laboratory with a blocked IP, a credit reporting service, and another odd and shady entity had somehow been invoked along the way? And was it EuMX's or VFEmail's software that caused this to occur?

Those seem to me like eminently proper and acceptable questions to ask in a forum devoted to a discussion of matters pertaining to email. Instead of taking them up, however, Janusz chose to mock me for implied vanity about vocabulary, to make clear his general dislike and annoyance, and then announced to the world his decision to instruct the forum's machinery to make my future posts invisible to him, all without ever having replied to or taken up my original post in any way at all.

He has behaved appallingly, and I hope either the moderators or some member or members of the forum will tell him so. If not (or if I end up being tarred as the guilty party instead), then I shall know beyond doubt that the world has well and truly gone utterly and irretrievably mad.
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