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NYTimes: Tangled Up in Spam
ezekieldas writes "Congratulations to the SpamAssassin developers and community! There's a mention of SA in the NYTMag as "one of the best tools for network administrators..." in an extensive article entitled
Tangled Up in Spam.
The article is quite substantial and the author, James Gleick, is more technically educated than what we've come to expect from the big press. Central to the story is the complexity in dealing with spam effectively in both technical and legal terms and the confusion it brings upon the neophyte. The conclusion drawn may be oversimplified but nonetheless pragmatic: 1) forged headers should be illegal 2) a specific header entry should identify the email as unsolicited."
The one big feature missing for me in evolution is a spam filter. Fortunately, spamassassin works great even if you have to run it locally. Here are some instructions for evolution users who need to run it locally or are lucky enough to have spamassassin installed on their mail server.
The uneducated guy that send this story in, need to know that was instrumental in taking Chaos theory from an obscure science in Santa Fe into something that almost every scientific discipline benefits from. Incl CS. .
Help fight continental drift.
illegal is great in theory, but there is no possible way to enforce that on a world wide basis.
It's impossible to enforce almost any laws with 100% effectiveness, but that does mean that we should ignore the problem. If some sleazeball in Florida hires a firm in Korea to spam me, put his ass in jail.
white lists are the only way to stop spam.
I'm amazed by this user-hostile suggestion every time I hear it. Suppose you post your resumé on Monster.com. Who are you going to whitelist? Suppose your friend changes ISPs and then tries to e-mail you his new address? It won't be whitelisted, so it will bounce. Suppose to fill out a tech support request form. You don't know the address of the person that will contact you (or even if they will be the same domain as the web site).
Some more clarification:
-it's not on a scale of 10 - the SA score can go as high as necessary. I got 27 the other day. Your threshold will be configurable (sometime next week) to "high" (3.0), "normal" (7.5), or "low" (12.0), or a custom number. You'll also have custom whitelists and blacklists.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
SpamAssassin's a great idea, but for the non-technically minded user, POPFile's the best choice. Bayesian filters, learning, kickass UI, and a Windows installer (and Perl for other platforms.)
If you just want a fake email address that is "valid", use whatever@example.com
example.com is an official internet blackhole, sanctioned by RFC. It is what everyone is supposed to use in books, demonstrations, etc, similar to 555-XXXX phone numbers on TV.
Better strategy.... But requires having control of your own mail server...
.forward-amazon and have it put mail in /dev/null. Alternatively you could use procmail or maildrop in the dot-forward file to perform per-extension filtering or bounce messages to explain why the mail will never be read, in case legitimate mail tries to come into that box, perhaps with a random, unique extension provided for them to try a legitimate box. Not only do you have an effective mechanism for filtering out unwanted mail by source and outdated email, you also have a way to track how your email gets out. It has worked quite well. Last week I got three spams, and blocked that address. Aside from that and a couple of other incidents in the past year (about 8 or 9 spam mails total), the signal to noise ratio in that mailbox is excellent.
I run my own mail server. I have Postfix configured to forward username-@the.server to username@the.server by default. So, for example, I registered with amazon username-amazon, and it gets to me. If this email is ever put on a list, I'll complain to amazon, and then create a
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
For what it's worth, an ever-so-slightly longer version, lacking a few bits of Times editing, is posted here, at my own site. And may I say how helpful and fascinating the many Slashdot discussions of this subject have been?
Heh. I assume you are honestly asking and not bragging about how little SPAM you get to make me jealous...
Here are the vectors for getting on lists that I know of;
- using a valid email address in newsgroups
- using a valid email address on a web page
- using a valid email address in form properties in a web page
- using a valid email address on a mailing list or web-forum
- using a valid email address for domain registration contacts
- using a valid email address to sign a web page up for a search spider
- having an email address that can be "brute forced" (i.e. almost all of them)
- your pal puts an email address in an "e-vite" or "e-greeting"
- getting a virus that spreads via email
And above all, being naive about the workings of the Internet, when only a few weeks of ignorance will permenently get the address out there "in the wild". Just about everybody is this at one at one time or another.
Some people cannot avoid having email addresses hung out there on the Internet, so getting on the lists is more or less inevitable if you are doing business or communicating on the Internet in any meaningful way. Since I cannot ignore what comes in the boxes I run, I MUST sort through whatever arrives. That makes SPAM a big issue for me.
Your usage of your email addresses is probably typical (not on web pages and so on..) but you are probably fortunate to both be clueful about it and not dealing with your email address publicly available out of necessity.
"the author, James Gleick, is more technically educated than what we've come to expect from the big press."
Maybe because after many years as a reporter, he founded Pipeline, one of the first big ISPs.
Can't wait for the new tricks spammers will use to disable anti-spam programs.
Wait no more. I got a spam today that purported to be an apology for how the sender got my address, something like "so sorry, but these stupid porn sites like [link] must have sent me a virus. I can't believe my kids are visiting sites like [another link] even though I never go to sites like [yet another link], blah blah blah."
I have to admire the creativity of spammers even as I wish for Bad Things to happen to them.