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Fighting the Hydra -- A Spam Warrior's Tale
Selanit writes "Salon has an interesting article about the battle against spam from the viewpoint of Suresh Ramasubramanian, a sysadmin working in Hong Kong. His most interesting complaint concerns the fragmentation of anti-spam forces: not only does he have to deal with spammers, but also with anti-spammers who assume because his company is Chinese that he isn't doing anything about spam. Hmm ... decentralized opponents striking from the shadows against quarreling allies. Does this sound familiar to anyone else?"
No matter what he does, he can't please everyone. According to Tiffiany Mork, senior abuse engineer at Allegiance Internet, a very thick skin is a requirement for an abuse-desk worker. Her typical day includes verbal harassment, screaming, threats, and "all manner of nasty things."
Like that is different from working in any other kind of helpdesk!
This whole spammers versus spamblockers has proven to be a destructive arms race.
Many legitimate machines and users - even whole ISPs - unfairly end up on blacklists, while the spammers just find another way through.
The spamblocker tools and their heuristics get smarter, but don't forget that spammers keep up with these tools and constantly find new ways around them.
I was using Razor and SpamAssassin for months. Formidable combination - networked blocklists plus pattern matching. Gave me a bit of peace. Very few false negatives. But in the last month, I've seen a whole new generation of spam coming through that the filters don't even touch.
Peace has finally come from a package called Active Spam Killer, a package which works from a white list, and provides a convenient way for new correspondents to get themselves onto the whitelist.
There are other whitelist-based packages, such as TMDA, but ASK is simple and painless to set up.
Result?
Spams to my mailbox have gone from 40 a day to zero.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...