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Collateral Damage in the Spam War
MarkedMan writes "The link points to a well researched article on Spam lists and those innocently appended to them. I have seen this myself with MailWasher. A posting will come through as potential spam, with the the bounce already red-flagged, but it is actually from a legitimate source. Only happens once or twice a month but still cause for worry.
" I've found that Spam Assassin has made life easier, but I still have to ban domains like yahoo.com, hotmail.com, mail.com - and *.ru and *.cn. I sort through the spam periodically, but the collateral damage is still there.
(this is similar to a comment I posted to the other recent fax SPAM story. it has been expanded.)
:)
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I highly recommend using TMDA on your mail server to defeat SPAM. It works by maintaining a whitelist of valid senders. If someone emails you and they are not in the whitelist, then they receive a confirmation request email. They must reply to it in order to be added to the whitelist (at which point, TMDA will deliver their original message, and allow all new ones to pass through). No having to report SPAMs, no worry of maintaining a never ending blacklist. No blocking of entire domains, no having to "sort through the spam periodically". TMDA does it all for you, putting a minor inconvenience on first-time senders.
The end result is that I get no SPAM. Zero, zlich, nada, not one -- with no effort on my part.
I believe there are other packages out there similar to TMDA that you may want to try. Regardless, I'm convinced that a whitelist-centric strategy is the way to beat SPAM.
Note: You still must take into account mailinglists or other situations where you are going to receive mail from an unknown source that won't be able to process the confirm request (such as some online purchase confirmation), and this is where qmail aliases can come in handy. Ie, justin-linux, justin-sears, etc, and just throw them away if you ever get SPAM. TMDA even has some features to help with this, such as hash-generated addresses that self-destruct after a period of time.
Still, for all other purposes you can keep your normal address. No need for SPAM armoring ever again
-Justin
If idiotic pricks didn't ...
I'm dreaming of course.
Yes, you're dreaming.
About one in 100 (somewhere between 1 in 50 and one in 200) people in the general population is a psychopath. This is a (set of?) brain disfunction(s) that amounts to "no conscience". (Think "colorblind" but with respect to harm-to-others. But it's not known yet whether it's genetic, foetal insult, or what.) Additionally there are "sociopaths" - similar symptoms but as a result of training and social factors rather than an organic problem.
Some fraction of these people learn a moral, ethical, or legal code to compensate for their affliction. They can become honest, productive, and/or beneficial citizens. In some positions (such as political or military leadership or business administration) they can even excell, because their judgement about actions that will hurt other people is not as biased by immediate emotional concern. But many do not learn a code (or learn a defective one). From these come the bulk of the criminals, scam artists, tyrants, white-collar crooks, and so on.
In the absense of compensation a psychopath will be looking out solely for number one. It's not well correlated with intelligence - some are stupid, some very smart. A significant number will be able to handle spamming tools, and be willing to go for the immediate benefit to them (even if it's small), regardless of the damage to others or even long-term consequences.
Yes, Virgina, there ARE evil people.
Much of the social and legal institutions of all civilizations are dedicated to the problem of this small-but-effective population of psychopaths. In particular, legal systems exist to give them a set of rules to live by, a set of personal bad consequences for violating them (so acts that harm the law-abiding become bad for "number one"), and to remove from circulation those who just don't get it.
Short of genocide against psychopaths we will continue to have a plague of spammers for at least as long as people think there's money to be made (or fun to be had) and it won't get you busted.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Absolutely. Without pitting customers of ISPs against each other, i.e., the legitimate ones against the spammers, the ISPs will be happy to serve both. I'd suggest that if an ISP allows any spamming, block it -- wholesale. Either you have an agressive policy against SPAM or you lose your privilege to send mail to my servers. Your customers don't like it? Tough. Make your network spam-unfriendly.
The last thing the ISPs want is for their regular customers to be aware that they are allowing spammers to use their network. It's kind of like the phone company selling caller ID block to telemarketers and caller ID and privacy manager to residential customers. If the spam blacklists cause users to confront the reality that their ISP is knowingly hosting spammers or not bothering to monitor people sending out 10e+06 emails at a time, then they might just demand that their ISP get out of the spam business. Because unlike (most) telcos, ISPs don't have monopolies, and customers can switch.
if you run your own linux server, just edit /etc/alias with something like:
ebay: me
then save, and run "newaliases"
on the web form for ebay, then type in:
ebay@mydomain.net
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
This helps track websites that "lie" about reselling your e-mail address.
Even honest companies are a problem -- i do the same trick you do, and about a year ago, i started getting porn spam to the address i used only at 1800flowers.com. They swore they didn't give it to anyone, and i believe them.
What i'm sure happened is this: Some DBA, or some temp, or whatever, did a one-line SQL query to pull out every email address in their database, and then sold that list.
So even if you trust the company to not sell your address, it just takes one bad employee to screw you over.
Of course, their database also has my credit card, so the same DBA could have run off with that. So far, i haven't had any fraudulent charges. But that's what you gotta read over every single charge on your credit card bill, every single money.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Spammers always seem to be coming up with newer and better ways to thwart our attempts to avoid them. But do the people who go to such lengths to avoid spam EVER buy anything from spammers? EVER?
I always hear "Spam works because people like your grandmother buy stuff from them, and if they get one sale, that makes it worthwhile." To which I respond, "My grandmother's alive?!" But crawling for *AT*DOT* isn't going to catch such un-tech-savvy people. Those people are going to leave their addresses unencrypted.
So let me pose this question: has spam become less a means of advertising than an all-out war, with nothing at stake other than showing that you can beat the other side?
grep -ri 'should work'