Slashdot Mirror
Did You Really Want To Read That Spam?
Henn writes "The BBC is carrying
a story about computers that track how much attention you are paying and the "worth" of individual messages. Based on these criterion, it adjusts how intrusive to make the alerts. The story is fairly short, however you can find more depth
over here." Interesting ideas, but for me it's becomming less about time- my filters catch 80% of my spam, meaning it only takes me 10-20 minutes to deal with it, and more about bandwidth. At home, on my modem, downloading several megs of spam seriously interferes with my ability to work. Yay spam!
I'm really sorry, but I have to be the grammar dork this morning:
;-)
"Based on these criterion [...]"?
This is incorrect.
"Based on these criteria [...]"?
This is correct.
I mean, you wouldn't say, "Based on these fact," would you?
-/-
Mikey-San
Burninating karma at the speed of TROGDOR!
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
...with their online email. They pay attention to how much you pay attention to different types of email and then tries to put most of the spam in a "Bulk Mail" folder.
John
You are a very lucky man Mr. Bird. I'm using various filters and I receive over 700k per day, often over 1MB. It's not me either. I signed up for a new account on an ISP and didn't use it for anything but shell access (no email, no newsgroups). My email address for that ISP was never shared, yet I was receiving about 20 spams per day starting with the very minute I signed up. Spammers now just spam random addresses for ISP domain names, it's unavoidable. Honestly, I have trouble believing you get as little spam as you do with usenet postings and purchasing. I would think that either there's a spam filter somewhere and you're not aware of it or you're leading a charmed life!
Zed's dead baby. Zed's dead.
Your filters suck. Try POPFile, a cross-platform open-source mail sorter. Once it is properly trained you shouldn't get less than 90% accuracy and you will probably get even higher.
That's what I did in the mid 90s, naively failing to forsee the magnitude of the coming Spam Problem. I still technically have access to the mailbox for the address that I used, but it is effectively DoSed because it is so close to 100% spam that I can't tell the difference, and if anyone is sending "real" mail to that address, they can be sure I'm never going to see it (probably bounces due to quota most of the time). It's about one Megabyte per day.
Nowdays, I'm a lot less promiscuous with my "real" address. I learned from my mistake.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
A four-letter word springs to mind: RTFA.
(Or RTFS - read the la-la-laa submission)
The messages the article and the submitter are talking about are the various alerts, instant messages etc. that interrupt our concentration.
The device described in the article monitors the attention of the user and uses it to prioritise different messages the user sees; the pdf-link gives more details about the technology.
I repeat: the article is far more interesting than Yet Another Solution to Spam.
--Antti
[ Antti Rasinen ]
Spam is easy to stop. Forget using this filter crap and start requiring that unrecognized senders go through a confirmation step. For a good pre-canned solution, use tmda. Or, you can do what I did and write a custom confirmation system in procmail, which takes some skill but is enormously fun.
Note that for for this solution, you should have access to a real email server, whether your own or at a hosting company; the confirmation software has to run somewhere. For personal use, I recommend a hosting service, even if you do have a mail server at home. That puts the spam bandwidth somewhere other than your personal internet pipe. There's always fetchmail to pull mail off of your hosting service.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
I've got Herbivore (my anti-spam program) set up to retrieve my mail from the mail server every 2.5 minutes and I've never noticed a slowdown from spam. Most spam messages aren't very big. They include links to images instead of the actual images. Still, I guess 1000 messages at 2K each is around 2MB but spread that over 24 hours and there's very little impact on my work.
<shamelessplug> :-)
If you're interested in Herbivore enter "slashdot" as the promotional code when you join to get 2 years free.
</shamelessplug>
Not exactly. You put information out on the web for the purpose of it being accessible -- if you didn't want it to be accessible, you wouldn't put it on the web. You don't set up an email address for the purpose of getting spam (hopefully not, at least). And if you consider penis enlargement and other such spam 'informative and useful mail', well, no comment :P.
All of these people complain about slashdot linking to pages, but you won't see them stop clicking on the links to help solve the problem. Although I do believe they could be a little more considerate about linking to small personal pages, it is the responsibility of the web server's administrator to set up policies to avoid bandwidth overusage. There are hundreds of ways a website can get its bandwidth eaten up like crazy, including being in the top 10 on a google search, being linked by any large news site, or just rampantly (un)lucky word-of-mouth. If the system administrator of a web server has done nothing to compensate for cases of usage spikes, it is not slashdot's place to do it for them.
Mozilla has a few features you may be unaware of:
-
View->Message Body As. This menu option lets you decide how you view HTML e-mail. Either as-received, as "simplified HTML" where most of the dangerous tags are deleted, or as "plain text". I usually use the "plain text" feature.
-
Do not load remote images in Mail & Newsgroup messages. This checkbox in the Privacy & Security->Images of the preferences does what it says. If an HTML mail message has a remote image, it won't load. Images sent as a part of the mail will be displayed. This effectively disables "web beacons", "bugs" and other similar methods for determining if you've read mail messages.
-
Enable JavaScript for Mail & Newsgroups checkbox in the Advanced->Scripts & Plugins page of the preference does what it says. Disabling JavaScript in mail is another good way to keep spammers from knowing if you've read their spam or not.
-
On that same preferences page is a checkbox for Enable Plugins for Mail & Newsgroups - you probably never want to enable this. I have yet to see a legitimate reason for receiving any kind of plugin-based content in any mail message.
I've been finding that the Mozilla people seem to be doing a good job of adding useful anti-spam features to their Mail & News client.-- David