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SendMail CTO Sounds Off On Spam and FTC
CowboyRobot writes "Eric Allman takes his well-deserved turn in commenting on the state of spam, the dark future, and the need for intervention.
He calls spam an "arms race" where "in the long run everyone loses (except the arms dealers)."
As you might imagine, he's on our side, and he does a good job of clearly describing the current state of spam, and the possible solutions."
Speak for yourself. I haven't gotten a spam in months, although my quarantine box has caught thousands. My kids aren't going to know what spam is because they'll never see one.
This is what both the Razor and DCC projects are about, although their approaches differ slightly.
This is almost exactly what the DCC does. This strategy works very well for certain types of spam, but it doesn't catch everything and needs manual intervention to allow legitimate mailing list traffic through.
Host your own websites, anywhere!
If you remember this article from the nytimes posted a while back. This guy really seemed to appreciate out of office reply. An anecdote? Yes, but from a self-proclaimed spammer.
It would get complicated as Spammers would start inserting random stuff into each email they send to get around these filters. Though the key spam phrases and format would still be there, so is likely to be picked up by something like Spamassassin.
That already exists.
It's called the Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse (http://www.rhyolite.com/dcc). I use the DCC as part of my SpamAssassin configuration (sitewide, called by Exim) and around 85% of spam I receive is already listed in the DCC. The latest version (2.60) of SpamAssassin, plus the SBL plus the DCC works as a very effective shield. My JE (link in the sig) describes my recent experience with SA 2.60.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
OK: here's a year-old ComputerWorld article documenting a study that did exactly that. Its title? Unsubscribing from spam counterproductive.
The best anecdote/example/statistic?So this study found that unsubscribing made spam volumes more than double.
Feeling better now?
All you have to do is follow one of the unsubscribe links, one of the ones that go to a page you tye in your email address, not the ones that encode it. And then type an email address, one that gets no spam.
As I have access to mail server logs, I typed in a non-existence address, a random string of letters.
The address gets about 30 rejects a day.
This not only shows spammers not only ignore unsubscribe requests, but they completely ignore the fact said addresses don't even exist.
And, no, I'm not providing logs. This is an easy enough test to run, and I'm deliberately never exposing that address in any forum ever again as an experiment. It's not dictionary attackable, and it's all from that single unsubscribe.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
ISP's are doing everything they can to stop spam, their main problem is their Naive users, stupid enough to open attachments infecting their PC's, turning them into Spam Proxies.
So, when you get spam from a particular ISP, this spam is not because the ISP "permits" the spam, it's because their customers are clueless and open attachments and use buggy operaing systems like WinBlows making it so easy for them to do these stupid things like open attachments, not patch their OS when a new bug is discovered, or whatever.
Of course ISP's COULD be a little more pro-active in educating their users about the dangers of opening up unknown attachments, or offering their users a link they can go to eliminate their infections. They ALSO could get a little more agressive in cutting service to those stupid peope who DONT dis-infect their machines and remove the trojans.