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!
...is like a day without sunshine.
CmdrTaco still uses a modem to work from home? What happened to the slashdot house? That modern oasis of nerdlyness with a mythical amount of bandwidth?
Great, the more I ignore it, the more annoying it will be. I'm glad I have a reasonably spam proof e-mail system.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
This is bound to impose on corporate synergy. Spam filter developers need to think 'out of the box', possibly utilising the power of OSS development.
At home, on my modem, downloading several megs of spam seriously interferes with my ability to work.
So how do you think operators of websites feel when their sites are brought to their knees and/or they are hit with huge and unexpected ISP bills, because of an article posted on your company's website ? How do you think these operators feel when said effects become little more than a running joke on your company's website ?
If you can't see the parallel between spam and slashdotting, then you're not being fair. What's that old saw about the goose and the gander ?
It's always a trade off as to how we want to administer our mail server. The more spammers lists we add in, the less spam we get, but we end up bouncing a lot of legit mail and having to deal with clients who get rejected for spam. Of course, why anyone wants to put penis enlargement in a normal email subject line is beyond me.
/24.
Case in point: If you follow the letter of the spec, you really are supposed to reject email which comes from a server who's forward and reverse lookups don't match, or who are missing either. Logic behind this is to block people on DSL lines who have a DHCP-assigned IP address from sending spam through one of the few ISP's who aren't yet blocking outbound port 25 traffic.
Unfortunately, what this ends up doing is pissing off a lot of people who run their own little mail server in their office of 20 people, and don't have it configured correctly in the DNS, or something like that.
So, it's hard to know where the line is. Spam costs us money either way - but it costs us less money in bandwidth than in tech support, so we're inclined to go for slightly less strict spam rules (aka good sendmail rules and only one spam db instead of like 6 of them) so that we don't have to deal with the customer complaints. Surprisingly, few customers complain about spam, compared to customers who complain about spam rejections. I would attribute that to the fact that, even with only light spam filtering, we still catch a lot of spam (I would say probably 80%), and what gets through, most people accept as an inevitibility. But, the bandwidth issue is small, because spam constitutes incomming bandwidth, and as a webhosting provider, incomming bandwidth is never in short supply.
Now, if we catch someone doing spamming on the network (outgoing), we deal with that damn quick. Some of those spam lists, if they catch you, will block your entire
~Will
sig?
I get my share of spam too.. but I really have to question getting several MB of spam a day. The only spam I get larger than a normal 2k message are people trying to pass virus files. What have you done to get yourself so adored by spammers? I have two email addresses that get 95% of my email - one since 1990 and the other from 1994 and do a fair amount of purchasing and usenet posting (the past few years with my email blocked - but its certainly in the archives), but I dont think I've ever had more than 100k in a day. I wonder what others on here feel is a typical amount of spam?
I love my yahoo account. It's the only address I give out publicly, and the bulk folder works wonders. Grabs easily 99% of all my spam. Unfortunately, that 1% is still a problem -- when you get hundreds of s-mails a day, that 1% becomes a largish number -- but I diligently report it to the yahoo spam-cops. :)
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson