Slashdot Mirror
MSNBC: Offices Remain Spam Free Zones
Makarand writes "Thanks to a good job done by the tech staff and filtering software, office
workers in the US are not bothered by spam mail and the value of email
communications has not eroded. A survey conducted by Pew Internet & American
Life Project, whose findings are reported in this article by MSNBC.com, found that spam is certainly a problem for personal email accounts but not
for company provided email accounts. This is contrary to the
perception that American workers are wasting too much time battling spam." YMMV.
For those clueless like me, "Your Mileage May Vary"... Acronyms getting out of control...
I can't even find a good IMAP spam filter!
... :)
If you have access to the IMAP server, like I do, I recommend using Spamprobe. It's a Bayesian filter and, along with a few procmail filters to weed out Asian spam, my inbox remains pretty clean.
Now, if someone would make a half-decent IMAP *client*
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
Everyone needs to check out popfile.sourceforge.net. It's GPL, dead easy to set up and use, and quite frankly, it's brilliant. It uses naive Bayesian filtering, catches about 99% of my spam, and rarely if ever catches a non spam message by mistake. Spammers are going to HATE this tool. Try it. You won't be sorry.
Prove it using sneakemail. It's too late for you to do anything about netop now, but using sneakemail can save you a lot of aggravation since you set up an e-mail address PER mailing list. If you get spam at one of them, you know who sold your address.
Also, don't use your real e-mail address for anything related to comdex!!!!! You will drown under the spam.
We use spamcop.net at work. It's gets 95% of the spam. The thing which made us move on it was female employees complaining of sexually explicit spam from porn sites--with an HTML enabled mail reader, sometimes the first thing they saw was some pornographic picture.
Unless a company makes a best effort to protect people from exposure to offensive material (as defined by them, within reason), the company could be sued by the employee for creating a hostile workplace. While I haven't heard of cases of this yet, it's only a matter of time. (I hope I didn't give anyone any ideas here...)
We've been experimenting with spamassassin, and it's roughly as good as spamcop (as to how much spam gets through to the end user), but it's free. Note: spamcop and spamassassin have to completely different approaches to determining what is spam.
I suspect "Netop" sold thier email list, that was the last newsletter I opted in. But how do you prove it?
Use the method I use: Get your own domain name -- they're cheap and worth it for the control you get -- and set the email so that mail sent to undefined addresses forwards to you. Use an external account to read this email, and do *not* give this address to *anybody*. Then, when you sign up for a list at a place like Netop, give them netop@yourdomain.com as your address. Then, any spam you get as a result of them selling your address will be addressed to netop@ your domain, which is quite easy to detect.
This method has other advantages; it makes managing the email lists you are subscribed to easier, for instance. As far as places I have detected mining/address selling, Slashdot is mined quite often (as if it shouldn't be obvious). But the main advantages of this method are that it's easy to set up, requires no effort at all after you get it set up, and if an address at your domain starts getting spam, you can shut it down.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
SpamAssassin is ready for exchange.
Deersoft.com
hrm, we use complex filtering software and techniques, and i still get lots of spam. i receive about 200 work related emails each day to a certain account, and about 25% of that is spam.
...
what i really wonder though is how many legitimate (non-spams) emails i never receive because of filtering software! i frequently get email or calls from people who claim they sent email that i never received. i also frequently get mailing list bounce warning emails (primarily from securityfocus lists though) claiming that emails sent to me are bouncing. hrm
-- ken williams
The link to remove posts from Google's usenet archive is here. There are a couple of stipulations in order for automatic removal to be possible. One, the "From" address on the usenet post must point to the real, unmunged email address under your control. Two, you must register and confirm a groups.google utility account from that same address (you can do so at the above link). The parent's parent's poster should be able to meet both of these qualifications.
If you find that you have a large number of posts that you need removed, I wrote a PHP script called NukePost which will remove huge batches from the Google archive at once. The script simulates a browser session and makes all the required, repetative form posts at Google's controller site for you. All you need are the Message-IDs of the offending posts. I may write a groups.google spider to retrieve those in the future.
In situations where it's obvious that you made the post but you can't qualify for automatic removal, an email to groups-support {at} google should get you taken care of. You need to include a few things in your message, details are here.
I've heard rumors that Google maintains a separate usenet archive for paying customers (i.e. governments, corporations) to browse, which does not honor the removal requests or the X-No-Archive header - though I have absolutely nothing to back that up with - so it's possible that nuking posts is a futile effort. It should keep the cheap spammers away, at least.
Shaun
PHPLabs Supersite
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!