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He is not ugly at all: (he's the first in the row)

Uppage there are a few of the expected calls for government regulation of email that we see every time there is a story about spam, and there are the obligitory anecdotes about the hundreds of spam emails that some poor souls find every day in thier inbox.

So here is my usual post about how asking the government to regulate everything is a bad idea, and how I have little sympathy for the poor saps who are getting flooded with thousands of spam emails a day that makes it difficult for them to see the one or two legitimate emails that thier friends might send them each year.

First law. Bad idea because it won't work. As long as there are different countries with seperate governments that have differing attitudes towards the internet, commerce, and law it will be impossible to legislate spam out of existance. That is not to say that I am supporting the idea of one government rulling all peoples or that I am advocating any sort if international treaty on regulating email and the internet.

Far from it.

What I am saying is there are good methods of reducing the flow of spam to your in-box to a trickle, possibly blocking the spam flow completely.

Use a provider that is as concerned about stopping the spam as you are. That means no AOL, no MSN, no Hotmail, etc. These companies are notorious for not only allowing you to get spam flooded, but for allowing thier customers to send spam and not discontiuing accounts that are being used as fake "reply to" and "from" addresses. There are other companies that are just as irresponsible as the ones I mentioned, so you should not think that I am saying that these companies are the only ones that should be avoided.

If you like using the same email and access provider (I've been hijacking friends access accounts for years now), then you should know that smaller access providers often are more responsive to user's (knowlegable and legitimate) complaints than large companies. As an added bonus, thier access rates tend to be low, and they are as if not more reliable than thier corporate competitors.

If you like using a separate provider for email, ask around, do some searches, and choose one that has effective filtering/blocking of spam included in thier basic package.

You can filter the mail yourself with one of the many spam blocking services or filters that are readily available on the internet. Here are some links to some of the blacklists and filters that I know about:

ORDB

MAPS

junkfilter

Bogofilter

SpamCop

SpamBouncer

There are others, some services are free, some charge money. If you are going to use a filter on your own machine that is not part of a service, I highly reccomend that you stick with Free Software so you can learn something about how it works.

You should learn as much about the problem and potential solutions as possible by reading articles about spam that may be not quite as sensational as the currently popular "spammer hunting" genre, but are a little richer in detail and technique. Here is a good primer including some good links, and there's lots of good info on dealing with spam around the web.

You should attempt to encourage your provider to take an active role in helping users avoid spam troubles, either by providing information on how users can filter spam on thier own machines, by providing spam blocking/filtering service, or by allowing users to install thier own .procmailrc in thier shell account (if they provide thier subscribers with a shell acc

Spam is a social problem, just like any other type of fraud.

Yes, often the goods and/or services promoted through spam are fraud, but spam itself is not fraud. It is advertising.

As for the problem, I see it as a technical problem, as in "Why can't my damn service provider reject email with forged headers, from unsecured servers, from ISP's that are notorious for hosting spamers, and is obviously and easily recognised as spam by even the most half-assed filters? I guess I'll have to get my service somewhere else or check and filter it myself."

I haven't been "on the 'net" all that long (about seven years), but I still wonder when it happened that my fellow "netizens" started begging to be regulated. If you have a spam problem, do something about it. Learn something about the problems with open relays, irresponsible ISPs and how touse procmail to filter spam.

Help others learn by pointing them in the right direction.

Encourage your provider to take proper measures to stop spam from entering or exiting thier domain, and put pressure on other providers to do the same.

Don't use services that encourage spammers (Hotmail, AOL, MSN, Mail.com, etc)

Stop asking lawmakers who don't understand the problem to do something about it.

I'm getting quite fed up with all the anti-spam rhetoric around the 'Net. All kinds of figures fly around as to the cost and magnitude of the spam problem, but most of them are obviously biased and the methodology by which they are obtained is genrally fuzzy at best. It reminds one of the figures quoted by the BSA for software piracy, or the figures quoted by the RIAA for music piracy: that is, they factor in all kinds of "intangible" costs, are based on questionable assumptions, and are impossible to verify.

It is clear that spam is a nuisance. But spam filters work miracles, and they don't have to be fashionable Bayesian classifiers either. Simple treshold or trigger based filters work extremely well for individual mail accounts. Such as junkfilter, or SpamAssassin.

Now some people will argue that filters don't solve the problem: by the time the mail arrives in somebody's inbox, the damage has been done, the network resources have been wasted and the CPU time has been spent. But that argument is meaningless without a means to quantify the costs. And again, where are the figures? How can we even reliably estimate the figures?

It stands to reason that many people benefit from inflating the costs of spam. Meanwhile nobody questions the figures because everybody hates spam. Notice how Barry manages to almost, but not quite, evade question #7 in this interview.

Spam: the non-issue that everyone loves to hate.

I don't know what all the fuss about Bayesian filtering is about. Treshold based filtering, such as junkfilter and SpamAssassin seems to work just fine. One reason they work so well is because they do not moronically scan the message body for keywords, but they incorporate lots of meta information: such as whether the message has a valid Date: header, whether the name of the sender makes sense, whether a plain-text copy is included with an HTML mail, etcetera.

The The OpenBSD Development Team!

Wow, another overkill solution for a non-problem. junkfilter is good enough for me.

Also try JunkFilter

Once you get past ignoring their little disclaimer go get JunkFilter - addon scripts for procmail that that help eat spam... Personally I send it to a Spam-JF IMAP folder just in case it gets something important. In the last 2+ years of using it only a couple emails have been misclassified (plus I'm even running an old version!). Time to go upgrade...

I have found Junkfilter for Procmail effective at stopping 99% of all of my spam. It filters out about 3-5 spam messages per day.

This is just one more reason to leave JF_OPT_MSN=1!