On Fri, 18 Jul 2003 17:41:53 -0400 (EDT), (Sir
Edgar) wrote:

This may be a foolish question with an obvious answer but I have to ask
it. Why do posters put a "phony" address on their posts without a note
in their text to that effect?
snip...
... I sent an e-mail to the address shown. [snip]
Actually I felt rather annoyed that I had taken the time and trouble to
help someone with a problem and I was writing to a "ghost".

Sir Edgar, it's generally considered good manners to respond to a
usenet posting on usenet and not by direct email. People use false
email addresses primarily to avoid spam, but that's a seperate issue
from the one you posed about being annoyed that an email from you
bounced back.

Today, storage space is dirt cheap, but it wasn't always so. In the
dim dark days of early usenet, those who had email boxes paid a lot
more for the space they took on their ISP's server than we do now.
Because of that, it was considered bad form to reply by email to a
usenet posting. You simply didn't take up someone's email server
space with an answer that could be read "for free" by the original
poster on usenet. Bad form and all that...

The convention still (largely) holds. Although members of this group
and I correspond with each other off group all the time, if a question
is asked on _this_ forum, I reply on this forum, and I don't copy it
to the poster's private email address. It may, nowadays, be a quaint
custom, but I still think it's courteous not to impose on someone's
email box without invitation.

Since this is usenet it's almost certain that others will have
differing opinions, but I'm sticking with mine. ;

Hope this helped,

Michael Baglio
Chapel Hill