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Spam Archive opening FTP service December 4
Saint Aardvark writes "The FTP archives for spamarchive.org will be opening on December 4, according to this Wired article. But there already appear to be some archives available." I tried saving my spam for awhile just for giggles, but seeing that file grow to 100+ megs made me so angry I had to delete it. Currently getting ~200 spam every day, and now often they attach images so they are 100k+. Yay Internet!
who actually gets loads of spam every day?
I get about 3 per day (3 too many!)
You always hear about these poor suckers getting 200 or so a day, but how many of us actrually have to put up with that much stuff? If I got that much, I'd just switch email accounts, cos I just wouldn't put up with it.
I'm not defending spam here, but I'm just kinda curious how much people actually do get on average.
Really, all you need to do is manage your address properly from the beginning, don't do obvious spam-lure tactics with it, use sneakemail/other aliasing and you're set.
Seriously ... in the last year, maybe 3 total spams have come to my main address. (They're all the same spam too. Something about skin care. Weird.)
(Raises hand)
I do. Let's check. This morning I have:
30 spams that are not directly addressed to me,
130 spams that are directly addressed to my Verio email address,
5 spams addressed directly to my personal address.
Hmmm so I think I know what the problem is.
Verio sold my email address to every spam-merchant in the world.
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Digitally signing a message with a private key would eliminate forged From fields. We just need to make it easy to do for the average e-mail user.
Absolutely. At any rate I fail to understant what all the hoo ha is about. This is about freedom. Abuse of freedom is an inevitable other side of the coin. All snailmail boxes in North America are full of spam mail. The bloody thing keeps postal workers and printers in business. It's enterpreneurship. Ignore it, destroy it if you can't stand it and get on with life outside spam.
It's not the net's fault. Blame (or shoot) the spammer's.
:)
Well, some people ask for it by using their personal email account for signing up on sites, posting on usenet etc. Use an email account for these purposes, and the personal email account for friends and family. I don't receive any spam on my personal email account.
- wget spamarchive
- grep emailaddresses spamarchive
- mail emailaddresses
- ???
You know the rest...Well, some people ask for it by using their personal email account for signing up on sites, posting on usenet etc.
Yeah, like those rape victims that were asking for it by wearing short skirts.
Nobody 'asked for it'. Don't you even resent the fact that spammers have made it impossible to post on Usenet with a legitimate e-mail address? Doesn't it piss you off that you have to be paranoid if some less-computer-savvy friend tells some web site to mail an article to you or sends you an online greeting card? Don't you get annoyed that every e-mail address that you post, no matter for what reason, get spammed?
Blame the criminals, not the victims.
I'm sure much leakage is because of underhanded ISPs, companies selling email, and the like.
But in my case--and many people's--the main problem is that I am a public personality. I do things where there is good reason to disclose my email address to strangers (in my case, because I am a writer). A lot of those strangers write me for very legitimate reasons, but obviously once an email is made public you cannot keep it to only the good guys.
It doesn't apply so much to me personally, but a similar situation is where email addresses are listed in directories--company, organizations, and so on. In those cases also, you need to publish your email to let legitimate correspondence contact you.
I've always been a little puzzled by the (somewhat naive) folks who think to answer the spam problem by hiding their email from everywhere it might leak. There are various tricks for doing this, false addresses, complex usernames, different accounts, etc. That only really works for people--typically college kids or younger--who never need to DO anything in the world. For the rest of us, hiding an email address would be like hiding our snailmail address from business contacts, because we might get junk mail from releasing it.
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If you look at them, it looks like the headers have been hand parsed. No doubt for privacy reasons. But for example, there are no RECEIVED headers, which even though often forged are needed to test RBL heuristics and many other DNS tests.
Each archive should tell you whether EVERY mail has been hand-verified to be spam. This is not clarified.
The archives are not "versioned". They should be, so if any of the corpuses need to be corrected, people know.
Overall it looks clumsily put together.