OT: Spam

[Gryphin]

Different artical
ISPs Escalate War on Spam

AOL joins Microsoft in new, tougher efforts to squash spam.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/...022003X,00.asp

:: Caution, Pop ups ::

[Tenryu]

ya, there's a lot of low-life out there spamming. I have all sorts of filters and they still get through. Every time I open my email I have to delete half a dozen or more spams. i bet I get about 20 a day at least. It's a huge pain.

the ones I hate worst are the stealth type that pretend to be a friend or a business order confirmation. Like subjects:

Tenryu! Hey old friend, how ya been?!

or

Your order confirmation.

Then you open the crap and it's some BS-scum-bag-rat-turd toilet licking slime mold trying to sell you crap. {Sincere apologies to everyday slime molds which are several evolutionary levels above the spammers}

[David E. Gervais]

Personally I think the only real solution is to have e-mail programs have a feature called "Keep-filter" the exact opposite of a "kill-filter". you add the e-mails you accept to it. Any and everything else gets automatically deleted! Voila no more spam, unless it's from someone you know! Basically a "IF not someone I know THEN delete!" feature.

It's not a perfect solution, but it would certainly help in my case. I too get tons of spam, and I have close to 1000 kill filters and I make it a habbit to kill the host not the sender. ie anysender: @xyz.com as opposed to anysender: itsmethecat@xyz.com. and I still get 10-20 spam/day. about 4-6 get through my filters and get thrown into my kill file! increasing the number of kill-filters I have.

Oh, and reporting to msn yahoo, hotmail etc might get the sending address canned but the user just creates a new account. dungheap0002@msn 0003, 0004, etc! it never ends!

just MHO! Cheers!

P.S. another thing, it's very easy to send e-mail and change the name of the sender to anything you like. I could send an e-mail and mark the return address as thisisafakename@nowherenearhere.com and it would get sent without so much as a error message to say it's an invalid 'sender' address! This is another possible avenue to 'correct' in order to avoid spam! But I digress, sorry!

[ February 21, 2003, 14:28: Message edited by: David E. Gervais ]

[tesco samoa]

I went after bell nexxia and won... As I informed Bell canada that I would be charging 7.95 per email from nexxia ( owned by bell ) because of Caps placed on by sympatico ( owned by bell ).
Now no spam from them.

[Desdinova]

Originally posted by David E. Gervais:
P.S. another thing, it's very easy to send e-mail and change the name of the sender to anything you like. I could send an e-mail and mark the return address as thisisafakename@nowherenearhere.com and it would get sent without so much as a error message to say it's an invalid 'sender' address! This is another possible avenue to 'correct' in order to avoid spam! But I digress, sorry!

so i found out. imagine my surprise when i started getting spam from myself.

[DirectorTsaarx]

Some spam filter software from a recent issue of "Maximum PC" magazine:

Spam Gourmet weblink
POPfile weblink

And there's an open-source tool called "Tagged Message Delivery Agent" that can be installed on mail servers and acts as a blacklist/whitelist. One of the functions it can do is hold the first message from a given e-ddress, send a message back to that e-ddress requesting a reply to confirm identity. If/when such a reply is received, that e-ddress is added to the "whitelist". URL for TMDA is:

Tagged Message Delivery Agent weblink

[Instar]

I got a great book that addresses spam, computer security, etc. Its called "Steal This Computer Book" 2nd Ed. Its great, it has a CD with a lot of neato tools, and a guide to fight back against spammers (how to lookup the ISP, get the spammer's address, etc). Id reccomend it for anyone slightly interested in computer security stuff (It is not very technical, it assumes that you know how to use the basic tools on a computer, and thats it)