FTC Encourages Consumers to Forward Them Spam

Burl Ives writes "See this CNN Article. 'The FTC encourages consumers to forward any spam they receive to the e-mail address uce@ftc.gov'. I'd say if they've posted their e-mail on the web, they are probably getting as much as the rest of us already, which isn't to say I'm not hoping to see some discussion of using the statistical spam sorters to auto forward a lot to them in encouragement..." I've been using SpamAssassin for some time now with excellent results. Perhaps now I need to have my spam folder auto-forward to the FTC as well.

Comments

Sample .procmailrc and .forward file

[Anonymous Coward]

To use with spamassasin username is "cartman"

bash-2.05$ cat .forward
"|IFS=' ' && exec /usr/bin/procmail -f- || exit 75 #cartman"

bash-2.05$ cat .procmailrc
LOGFILE=/home/cartman/proc.log

:0fw
| /home/cartman/SpamAssassin/spamassassin -P -c /home/cartman/SpamAssassin/rules

:0:
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
/dev/null

Yeah and lets stay anonymous not to be a carma whore...

/cartman

Re:Some costs of spam.

[realgone]

Ah, the "lost time" argument -- rhetoric at its most manipulative and least accurate. (Nothing personal against you, arkham. Your post was actually an entertaining read.)

The fallacy here is in assuming that every employee exists in a continual "on-and-working" state from the moment she sits down at her desk. Under such an assumption, 10 seconds spent doing something else equals 10 seconds of quantifiable production loss. Problem is, most white-color jobs are task based: I need to get X done today, where X equals a presentation, a subroutine, a sales call to Duluth -- whatever. Ten seconds spent doing something else don't result in 10 seconds less of X.

The only place where these efficiencies would truly come into play is repetitive (and, might I add, borderline inhumane) assembly line work like meatpacking. And I'm assuming most meatpackers are less concerned about getting spam than making it.

Heck, given the original argument, we could calculate astronomical amounts of monetary loss for just about everything. Employee time spent blinking could bankrupt a third world country. The time spent typing smiley faces? There goes Luxemburg. =)

SpamAssassin

[ceswiedler]

For me, the killer app for using Linux at home was fetchmail / IMAP / procmail / SpamAssassin. I was using POP3 to download email from several accounts, into mail clients at home and at work. I was tired of re-downloading the same messages, and of sorting the messages into folders in one place and having those changes not reflected other places.

So I set up my Linux server, which up to that point didn't do much except NAT, to fetchmail my messages from various accounts, run them through procmail and Spamassassin, and then publish the messages via IMAP. Now my email is accessible from anywhere, through an IMAP client or over the web (running IMP) or through ssh/pine. It's filtered for spam and sorted into folders, and I can back it up easily.

I wish Mozilla mail supported addressbooks stored in IMAP folders, but instead I have to run an LDAP server (way overkill) to manage contacts. IMP's address book component, Turba, is just about the only LDAP client which acts like a sensible contact manager and allows adding / editing entries.

I'm serious when I say this is a killer app for me. Before, I could have replaced my Linux server with a NAT router and not really missed it. Now it's essential to the way I work and communicate.

Re:What will they do?

[Coppit]

They prosecute when they can. And (blatant self promotion) they use grepmail to help them. I got a bug report from a guy on the project:

Specifically, grepmail -r reports a grand total of 3,046,173 messages, but MHonArc generated only 2,558,869 HTML files.

And you thought your mail archive was big. ;)