Slashdot Mirror
Email (As We Know It) Doomed?
Mephie writes "A pretty interesting article at Slate.com takes a look at how spam may be killing email as we know it. With the increase of spam, the argument is made that more users will switch from blacklisting spammers to 'whitelisting' specific, trusted addresses, making email more like instant messaging: if you're not on someone's 'buddy list,' you have to prove you're an actual person (e.g. identify a word in an image) to send a message." May be?
Another doomsayer, give me a break, the Internet is going to fall apart in $random years, we'll be swimming in spam and popup ads, hackers will wage "cyberwar" on our "infostructure" unless we do something about it. Whatever. Use the proper tools. By now if you're still swamped in spam/popups/adware, then you're an idiot.
The moron who cut me off on the road this morning is a danger to motorists, highways are doomed to failure!
Then, I should ofcourse plug this Openchallenge submission about Learning e-mail classifier:The use of a naive bayesian algorithm in automatically filtering spam and classifying e-mail has been discussed and also implemented in the past. Implement an automatic e-mail classifier system which works together with an IMAP server. The system should: a) constantly refine the database used to classify messages either by periodically re-analyzing the IMAP folders or by tracking each incoming message and periodically checking to which folder the user actually moves each message. b) assign each incoming message an extra header item which contains the path of the IMAP folder where the message belongs according to the classification algorithm.
Also, you could also mine your site for smammers like this.
So, my point is that just during last two years the spam problem has exceeded so much that there is enough interest in fighting it seriously. Spam will die.
At least with email, some people feel obligated to write it in an understandable format, with periods and paragraphs and all of that jazz.
I'm not looking forward to a client sending me a message asking "hay u - can u plz giv me ur hostin $$s 4 a dedicated surver cuz r bizniz haz a webby n we wood lik ur survece 2 suply r webby thnx b ur bud 4eva"
If you have a mail box that where you don't recieve any legitimate mail, then, of course, you will have a very high percentange of junk. It's not rocket science. The more people use it, the less of an annoyance that small percentage of junk is.
I'm afraid not. E-Mail allows me to send a message, or respond when I want to. Much better flexibility than IM.
Spam will catch up. There are already a small number of spamers working IM effectively, and it could get as bad as e-mail at any time.
Yeah, e-mail is going to be outdated, just like postal-mail has long been outdated, and telephones have been outdated. You heard it here first... According to 'JeffSh', IM is going to replace them all...
</sarcasm>
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
One of the advantages of being a lot smarter than my computer is that it takes me probably less than 1 second to read the subject line of a mail and delete it in the case of spam.
Even at 50 spam mails a day, it probably will take less than a minute of my time... Like most people I have multiple accounts, one for subscribing to god knows what and the other as my genuine address.
I know it's irritating, but surely people aren't getting that pissed off with it ? I mean, maybe they need to gain perspective rather than change email, because lets face it, it's damn handy.
tom-george.comBecause geeks rate higher t
I just can't really see email going away, especially not in favor of IM. Emails true usefulness, the thing that makes it a 'killer app' is that it is asynchronous. Unlike IM, when I send someone an email, it is unnecessary for them to be online, or have their IM client running in order to receive my message. Their email server is more than happy to hold their email for them until they can get it, and allows them to respond when they can.
Additionally, it's not like IM is spam-free. A quick google search reveals a growing business in providing anti-spam tools to IM users, so I doubt that making email more IM-like will help, though I do see some limited use of whitelists to be beneficial.
Businesses however, can never get away with using whitelists, or even most blacklists to reduce the amount of spam they have to deal with. I know that at our company, we cannot block nearly the number of netblocks that we would like to, as we need communicate with customers almost exclusively by email, and cannot afford to lock out potential buyers for any reason.
The solution to the spam problem is not an easy one, especially not for businesses, but small steps forward are made all the time, in better pattern matching, address lookup, etc that one day will (hopefully) allow for spam to be stopped, or at least to stem the tide...
The anti-spam movement has been saying this since 1997. It's about time the world woke up and realized how badly the spammers have trashed the effectiveness of email. I know I block using several DNSbl's, a huge access.db with spamassassin picking up the slack that the others miss. I have had to whitelist people whose email gets caught in the other traps.
To me, I dream of the day we can go back to simply leaving email unfiltered and where we receive only that mail we would normally expect, not drivel from marketoons who think that email is the next best thing to handbills posted on my front door. I'm tired of having to update my access.db. I'm tired of keeping up all the diligence, watching logs to see what legitimate mail might have bounced.
Thank you, you rotten, spamming assholes and all the idiots that ever bought anything advertised in spam email.
Rich
Subject: bulk email received from one of your account
hi,
I just received a unsollicited bulk email from one of your email adress : e8johan@etek.chalmers.se
Here's a copy of the first few lines of this email :
Received: from mail.etek.chalmers.se (129.16.32.20)
by mta448.mail.yahoo.com with SMTP; 10 Oct 2001 17:48:42 -0700 (PDT)
Message-Id:
From: e8johan@etek.chalmers.se
Subject: product for you... but i think u need to buy it
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2002 3:47:35 +0200
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1251"
Online Drugstore can have your order of discounted Viagra shipped to you for
only 5 minutes of your time!!!
http://www.justgottago.com/od/azzbc/
No Prior Prescriptions Needed
-Licensed U.S. Physicians are ready to fill your order
-Guaranteed Lowest Prices Available
-Discreet Mailing directly to your home or office
Just visit http://www.justgottago.com/od/azzbc/ and enjoy the good life today!!!
So now, your account will be shut down without any warning, that's it ?
#include "coucou.h"
Not sure how having an email address that no-one knows about helps strangers to contact you, unless the strangers are clairvoyant or trying addresses at random.
Wouldn't one solution be for people to put non-mailto email forms on their websites for people who don't know them and keep their email addresses for people they do know?
Virtually serving coffee
The reason I like e-mail is that it is asynchronous. If I want synchronous communication, I use the telephone.
The telephone gets bombarded with equally determined spammers and yet that hasn't changed. Certainly, you might not pick up the phone if it's not a number you recognise, but you're still going to look. It's the same for email.
The only reason email will go away is when mobile (cell) phones become as convenient and cheap a way to communicate as email currently is.
I agree with your ambition for zero tolerance.
Problem however is that before you start suing (or perhaps rather before you start winning cases), there is the problem of how to define spam.
For a recipient its easy do tell if an incoming mail is percieved as spam or not.
Its more complicated when it comes to the legal part.
Is opt in/out options enough to make an adverisment legal? - in some countries yse
Is it legal to send advs. to adresses gathered on your own website? - mostly yes
Is it legal to sell mailadrs gathered on your site? - yes, espscially if you warned people of it
Unsolicited mail - here the problem is to prove it's unsolicited...
So in the end its not all that easy to in legal terms define what is spam and what is not
Sorry for my poor spelling...
While I don't use email, myself, anymore, simply because I find it all too encumbering, I find the idea that email itself will die amusing. Yeah, sure. That's like Ford Manufacturing just up and going out of business. What do you suggest? We all begin using carrier pigeons again?
It suddenly makes me wonder, though, has the spam industry really contributed anything overall to the technology at hand? HAve they developed anything open-source and worthwhile that everyone can use, in an attempt to come up with a 'better way to spam'. Further, I wonder how those people are able to sleep at night. I wonder how truly effective spam actually is. At motivating the user to purchase the product, that is, not just pissing them off so badly that they swear away eCommerce all together (as I've seen happen).
I digress - Email isn't going to die. It's just one of those struggles of good versus evil where new tech rises to combat bad tech and the bad tech turns around and does something else. Rinse and repeat.
Informatus Technologicus
The explosion of spam is in a way similar to population explosion -- looks life-threatening at first sight but is actually something that will stabilize over time. Game theory gives an insight to what happens in the long run. Consider a population of peaceful creatures. If there is a mutant creature that is agressive, it will have an advantage over the peaceful creatures, and will multiply. But soon, there will be enough agressive creatures that they will start to fight with and kill each other. Thus the populations of both peaceful creatures and aggressive creatures will stabilize. Such situations are well-studied in game theory; the resulting steady state is known as a Nash equilibrium .
It is early days yet for spam; that is why spammers are so successful and predictions based on extrapolation of spam based on the current growth rate are unnecessarily alarmist. But soon there will be so many spammers that spamming no longer guarantees a profit. The ratio of spam to total mail will stabilize, and spam filtering technology will mature so that the vast majority of spam will never reach the user. Sure, spam will be a minor inconvenience, but no more than that.
I get bugger all Spam, at work or at home. Could this be because I always tick the "don't spam me" boxes. And because I don't put real email addresses on the internet.
Strange isn't it.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Bayesian filters base their rules on your own personal spam folder and normal folder. So the spammer's filter will react differently to everyone else's, meaning that they will find it impossible to stay one step ahead of everyone else.
Of course, it passing through their own filter will be a helpful guaruntee that it will pass through some filters - the problem is with a bayesian filter it is thought that spammers will only be able to say "Click here" - anything more will be detecting. See the slashdot article I linked to anyway for more details, I'm only repeating what I've read elsewhere.
Look, it is not hard to understand. Spammers send out their garbage because someone is responding with cash or a legitimate email address that can be sold to other spammers. If you are posting your email address to a public area (e.g., Usenet), then you might as well get a new email address.
Here's a tip: use a throwaway account (Hotmail/Yahoo) for all your on-line purchases, and use your ISP email address for personal communications. Never, ever post your ISP address anywhere and never use it for on-line purchases. Once your throwaway account starts getting spam, get another one. Never, ever respond to any spam with "remove," "take me off your list," or "you #$(&*#@$!!!!"
If everyone did that, then most spam would dry up and blow away. (And if my 89-yr old Grandmaw can do it, so can you!)
Yeah, right.
``Yeah, e-mail is going to be outdated, just like postal-mail has long been outdated, and telephones have been outdated. You heard it here first... According to 'JeffSh', IM is going to replace them all...
''
Call me a net junkie, but this is indeed the case for me. I hardly receive or send any snail mail, and I only occasionally get phone calls. About half of the conversation I partake in is face to face, the rest is electronic (email, IRC, IM).
With the advent of VoIP, we can voice chat with others around the world at lower rates than would be possible over the phone (Speak Freely rules), largely obsoleting the telephone for personal communication between people with suitably equipped computers.
The Internet _is_ revolutionarizing society even now. I know that many people and organizations prefer doing things the old way, but I also know that many people prefer the comfort of doing everything in one place. Since especially the younger generations tend to fall in the latter category, it is likely that computerized communication and business will dominate in the future. Computers haven't taken over the whole world yet, but they're getting there. That's why we need Open systems, so that whose who want can shape their world, instead of being fully dependent on giant multinationals.
---
"There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a
vacuum."
-- Arthur C. Clarke
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Spam filtering in mail clients is futile. The filtered messages still consume network bandwidth, CPU cycles and storage space on the MTA's and MDA's. Almost every spam message I have ever received had forged sender addresses, and were relayed through a third party MTA. An MTA should ONLY accept messages SENT BY or DESTINED TO users in their own domains. This way the spammers would be unable to hide their identities, and shutting down the offender's accounts would be easy. IMHO, blacklisting open relays is perfectly acceptable. Heck, we should even DNS-blackhole them out of existence !
"And you are dying so slowly, you believe to be living" - Bertrand Besigye
Sure, its annoying but i dont think its going to stop e-mail. Heck i even watch tv and they have chopped the damn shows up into small bits. Im more annoyed by popups and banners that any spam ive ever received.
HTTP/1.1 400
And that is without a load of "133t d00d5" speak. It is easy to dump Viagra and penis enalrgement ads automagically into the trash but misspellings and alternative representations can cause problems, even a space between letters (i.e., V I A G R A) can fool simpler filters. Also there is the problem of false positives, a problem when you discuss your visit to Scunthorpe.
See my journal, I write things there
And to address the spam issue, there is none with IM clients. All you have to do is set the client to only receive messages from people on your contact list. Poof, no more IM spam.
Yeah, but, well, isn't that the point of this article?
Part of the problem with ICQ is that your username is a number. Not only that, but a sequential number so a spammer can message a whole range of people with a simple broadcast. Nothing like having your boss sit next to you when your spam just pops up at you. A lot of people don't do IM whitelisting. Friends change screen names, or maybe you give it out to someone and you just don't have theirs yet.
OK i thought of a way to stop spam. It is very simple. Charge people to send e-mail. Yep, let's say you charge .0001 per e-mail that is sent out. That would be 100 e-mails for a penny. Spamming would then be unprofitable, and people would gladly pay a few cents a month to stop spam.
Now this may be a situation like the mouse putting a bell on the cat, great idea impossible implementation, but I don't understand enough about e-mail to know.
Comments as to why it wouldn't work?
Would your ISP have terminated their spammer if SPEWS hadn't escalated their listing to the whole /16?
The ISP in question leases servers one by one to individuals and companies. They hand over the root password, and off you go. So what exactly does slashdot think they should do?
The best they can do is to close the accounts of spammers once they are reported. But since their entry level machines cost under $100 up front, one spam campaign per machine is still viable. So maybe slashdot thinks that hosting should become more expensive? I'm sorry, but the SPEW thing just isn't going to work unless we want far more intrusion by ISPs.
If it took a /16 block to force them to terminate him, then certainly no number of polite mails to abuse@ would have worked.
The /16 block thing didn't work either, the support guy basically said 'the people refusing your mail are cretins, they'll probably get over it'. Which they did.
Virtually serving coffee
That's the point of the article, isn't it?
It was once the case that you could spread your email address around the internet without phear of deluge of canned meat product. If you wanted to talk to other people about Captain Picard's flytying techniques, you made a post to rec.arts.startrek.troutfishing (with your email address in your .sig), and, along with follow-ups, etc., somebody would email you back. The kicker is they wouldn't be selling you something.
Spam hasn't killed usenet, email, or the internet in general, but it sure has changed the way we do things.
--
bachiatari na torisetsu o yome!
i've had the same set of working email addresses for 5+ years and i get maybe 1 spam out of 1000+ legitimate emails a day. i never spam-proof my email addresses on message boards/usenet/mailing lists either.
i block mail using dsbl.org, spamcop and a few simple procmail rules (when a spam does get through, i block that company via procmail). i don't ever lose legitimate mail, and i don't get any of the "anonymous spam" i used to get from people pretending to be @hotmail.com/yahoo.com/etc.
clearly the reason that these people claim that blacklists don't work is because they're not using them.
The only thing that anti-spam laws will do is have unintended consequences, perhaps of restricting legit email.
Bullshit.
Look at Washington state, or California, or any of the other sites that have anti-spam laws... I don't see anyone complaining about legitimate email being restricted, but I do hear about spammers being sued, and people collecting money.. and it is doing something, because 1/2 of the spam I get now has a disclaimer of "this isn't intended for people in Washington, California, etc.. if you are in one of these states, please don't sue me" at the bottom.
The laws are working.
If you are posting your email address to a public area (e.g., Usenet), then you might as well get a new email address.
Ahh what wonderful logic - "if you want your email address to be useful to you, then you better not tell anyone about it" - which, of course, makes it useless.
Providers should immediatly block all traffic to any server, which is used for spamming.
/dev/null
Webspace-Providers, who host homepages which are promoted via spam email, should delete these homepages.
-----
spammer of month: netm*ils.com
let's mv netm*ils.com
The problem is not you, or me, or anyone who reads Slashdot, or anyone who has any sort of clue, technical or not. The problem is that one idiot ordering makes up for 10^x angry people hitting delete or mark as junk or using SpamAssassin. It's the idiot who orders from spammers we need to be apply the clue-by-four to.
Carousel is a lie!
... and yet they insist that they require an e-mail adress from you. The form doesn't even submit correctly if you leave your mail adress out.
;)
And how exactly do you expect them to REPLY to you if you don't put an address in there? I have this very problem on one of my larger sites, people whine about having to enter an email address, and yet when I ask them how it is I can contact them to reply to their query, they often cannot give me a sensible and or straight reply.
I've often thought that the email protocols need updating to only accept email from reputable addresses (reputable being no faked headers). I won't go into the fine print, I'll leave that for the patent
You don't need to do anything but promptly and efficently respond to spam complaints, by terminating accounts. Maybe change your TOS on your cheaper accounts so you can throttle port 25 traffic. You don't need to do any of the extreme things mentioned. From the reports in this case, it looks like the ISP had no real interest in preventing spam, even in the face of complaints, so a block is exactly what they needed to get a boot.
The ISP in question leases servers one by one to individuals and companies. They hand over the root password, and off you go. So what exactly does slashdot think they should do?
How about just what the previous poster said:
shut them down if they start spamming, which would fall into "none of the above"
the SPEW thing just isn't going to work unless we want far more intrusion by ISPs.
Bullshit. It works right now (you're living proof!) Your ISP is spam-friendly, and everybody who uses SPEWS won't accept mail from them. If you don't like the fact that you're 'collateral damage', then change ISPs, to one that has a clue - then everybody's happy; you're not blacklisted, your brain-dead former ISP keeps it's customers, the spammers have a home which can't send spam to people who don't want it.
Sometimes I wonder. How much money is there, really, in the SPAM buisness? Let me rephrase that... how much money is there to be made by selling things to the people you SPAM?
I don't know of anyone who's bought from a SPAMer. Not one. No one I know seems to know of someone who's done that either. Even at two degrees of seperation that's a fairly large number of people.
I've often wondered if the money to be made in SPAMing comes from selling the "verified" address list you've aquired to other SPAMers. The messages seem to serve as a form of confirmation (afterall, you know which ones get returned as undeliverable).
For some reason it wouldn't supprise me to learn that the turnover in the SPAM industry is very high and that it's just feeding on itself... a kind of twisted pyramid scheme.
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
Would your ISP have terminated their spammer if SPEWS hadn't escalated their listing to the whole /16?
Read what he said first. He clearly stated that SPEWS starts by blocking smaller IPs and notifies the ISP. If the ISP doesn't response, they block a larger range, until the ISP feels compelled to terminate the spammer's account.
If you're an ISP and want to avoid being blocked by SPEWS, it seems like all you really have to do is reply to abuse reports and terminate the offending account. See, Was THAT so hard?
How's that for a brilliant plan?
Jesus, I'd hate to see how you blow your personal problems out of proportion.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
It's harder to understand than you know then. Spammers send out their garbage because they think someone will buy their product. But have you noticed how many products you get pitched to you exactly once? The spammer isn't successful, he gives up, he curses the spam-enabler who sold him the Millions of Addresses CD for US $295.00. And the spam-enabler finds another sucker.
It doesn't matter if nobody buys the product. What matters is that the spamware peddlers keep going and going and going...
I have had several serious misunderstandings with people when communicating over IM.
Instant messaging is a difficult medium. It as immediate as conversation, but without being as clear and concise as email or other forms of writing. With most writing you read back what you wrote to make sure that you didn't accidently write something that can be misunderstood. Since IMs happen in (almost) real time this sort of care is not generally used. Also people do not type at the same rate so the thread of the converstation is often lost.
If the subject is important I always use another medium.
You mean I almost lost customers because of a problem that had nothing to do with me and over which I had no control, along with a few thousand other completely innocent people, and the bad guy is still in business?
The spammer is still in business, and still blacklisted by SPEWS, as are those who shelter him. The spammer is no longer on your ISP, who are no longer on the blacklist (though the record is still there for reference). The spammer's life is made far more difficult; his mails bounce, his ISP finds that their other customers are complaining about their mails too, and then finds out why... The career spammer becomes a Jonah, whose presence at an ISP has the potential to sink it. That's the idea.
SPEWS aren't in this to make friends. They're in this to inflict damage on spam-friendly ISPs, and force them to change their ways. And it's working. Check the original record on the spammer who caused all this trouble: he's been thrown off Rackspace and Cavecreek, two of the blackest hats on the net. They ignore every abuse@ email they get, but they can't pretend SPEWS doesn't exist.
As for you? You're a customer of an ISP who is sheltering spammers, and unfortunately you're likely to be collateral damage when the daisycutters come in. Too bad. Be glad your ISP killed the spammer, and that you only suffered for a week. Some people decide to make a fight of it, they posture grandly in news.admin.net-abuse.email ranting on about their upcoming lawsuite and their right to frea speach, and meanwhile the list stays there, denying them mail access to a large slice of the net... Your ISP is hopefully now on the side of the angels, and will be sure not to let this happen again. If it does happen again, I suggest you look for a different provider.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I'm afraid not. E-Mail allows me to send a message, or respond when I want to. Much better flexibility than IM.
Actually, when I used ICQ, I admired it's treatment of messages as mini-emails. If you were offline when you got a message, it would be available for you when you logged back in.
Therefore, it's perfect for sending offline important messenges that need greater priority than spam-neighbored emails (which people classicaly think to check periodically instead of continuously).
Effectively, ICQ was equivalent to an email client with a heirarchy of per-sender mail-boxes, where only the most activly recieved are up front (such as a spline tree). If you could set the "you've-got-mail" equivalent-tone to only activate when a top tier (say 10 senders) give you new mail, then you'd effectively have the same thing, though for high-volumen, it wouldn't be as efficient (due to TCP session per message-group, and header over-head).
-Michael
I already effectively have a "white list" of people I know that i automatically accept e-mail from. Anything flagged by SpamAssassin is then dumped to one folder, and everything else to a separate folder to be checked.
E-mail from people on the "white list" get a response alot quicker than other people.
I think filter do not solve the problem at its base; it only cure the symptom. Spam still get sent, you just don't see them in your inbox. Since you will have to download and process them, you are still paying the "cost".
... twice!
Also, people who configure and use spam filter are VERY unlikely to buy anything from spam. For spammer, these people are just part of the deadweight anyway. So even if 99% of the population would use spam filter, it would be of no use in curbing the problem if this is the 99% that would not buy from spam anyway.
At it's base, the problem can only be solved by reducing the value of spam to spammer. There are two ways to accomplish : augment the cost of spamming or lower the return.
Various way exist to augment the cost of spamming. Having them banned from their ISP is one of these, but its effectiveness is limited : eventually, spammer will move where they are tolerated (ie China) and spam from there unpunished. Other possibilities include the morally objectionnable one, like infiltrating spammer circle, poisoning their address list and hacking their infrastructure.
Spam is profitable because, apparently, some people are dumb enough to fall for it. If less people would fall for it, spam would be less profitable thus less common. In that respect, awarness campaign should be done. The question is : who would pay for it ? I say the major ISP should at least try to educated a tiny little bit their new customer on the subject. Something anybody could do however is, if you know somebody who falled for spam, please hit him with a cluestick
:wq
Since harbouring spammers costs other clients of theirs business, it is their job to make sure that they are not harbouring spammers. Since they do not know who will be a spammer, the way to do that is make the cost of being a spammer harboured on their system more than spammers wish to do so. The easy way to do that is that they should modify their subscription mechanism so that should the customer violate the terms of the service, they get a big hefty charge. And/or a possible lawsuit.
Yes, this is inconvenient from your point of view. But not as inconvenient as not having your mail accepted, n'est ce pas?
And yeah, it sucks from your point of view as one of thousands who are collateral damage. I understand that. It sucks from my point of view the other way as one of millions who are collateral damage. I don't think you understand that. And I don't think that you have any better answer than SPEWS either.
Here's a problem with a whitelist account: you buy something at Amazon.com and Amazon helpfully sends you an email confirmation. A challenge will bounce back to Amazon who has no capability to respond to it. Sure you could add amazon.com to your whitelist, but after a while every spam you get will be from xxx@amazon.com. To make whitelists work Amazon needs to tell you at purchase time: "we will send you a confirmation email from shipping889034@amazon.com", so you can add it to your whitelist. And hopefully they use a unique sender address for each customer. Without this everyone will still need a non-whitelist account for their purchases; an account that will soon be flooded with spam.
Build a man a fire and he will be warm for a night; set him on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life.
But IM is a type of white-list by default. People are used to this kind of set up. I use ICQ, so I'll use it as an example. Other systems may not have these same features.
I've set my account to always require authorization. No one gets to add me to their list if I don't want to. (OK, this mechanism is client side, or at least was a couple years ago when I checked. Still, explicitely blacklisting people, to varying levels, is almost as easy as whitelisting someone. Add to ignore, add to invisible. Done.)
No one I know just randomly adds me to their ICQ list. There are so few of these requests anyways, it's easy enough to check out the requester's info and decide whether it's legitimate or not.
Messages from people not on my list get deleted without even being read, and if there was an option to do this automatically, I'd turn it on.
Turned off all the other messaging crap, like web pager, email gateway, etc. It's all spam, no one I know would use it legitimately to contact me.
IM does not have to be disruptive, contrary to popular belief.
Set file transfers to be autoaccepted and minimized from people on your list. Everyone else gets denied.
Turn off all sound effects... ugh.
Set incoming messages to no notification, flash in try only. No windows will automatically open or pop up to disturb whatever you are doing.
So IM does not have to be anything like email. Sure, you can go balls out and enable everything, and make it way worse than any email system devised. There is nothing ICQ spammers can do to me aside from me seeing their id number just before I delete it. Big deal. You can even let the message sit unread for weeks, and it won't bother you.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"