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UUNet Is The Number 1 Spam Host
An anonymous reader submits "Statistics for February have UUnet leading the Spamhaus top 10 worst Spam ISPs chart. The Register point out that ISPs like UUnet and Abovenet continue to host spammers despite advertising anti-spam AUPs." And the competition is probably wishing they had as much luck.
Could this probably be because UUNet in my understanding is one of the largest ISP's?
Veni, Vidi, Velcro!
...goes around. I'm sure when spam block become so vicious that ISP's like this are blocked off they will either go under or change their mind
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
why would the competition would have luck by hosting SPAMMERS? get payed because of all the traffic?
------
mmmm round and soft...
I know not where it comes from, but I know where it goes. About 500 pieces of it each day, most of it filtered. I have to wonder aloud, with such a deluge, do any of these fools pushing junk actually believe such an onslaught will generate business?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The easiest way to stop spam is as follows:
Step 1: Buy an aluminum baseball bat.
Step 2: Find spammer.
Step 3: Beat spammer with aluminum baseball bat.
Step 4: Sell what is left of spammer to Hormel, makers of spam.
Step 5: Deposit money into legal fund for defense against spam. (Baseball bat Distribution center)
It's indeed possible to catch most of it with good filtering (I get over a hundred a day and catch about 95% of it -- but I'm using a webmail account so I don't have control over the filtering), but it's still clogging up the net and wasting everybody's bandwidth.
Sometimes I wonder if we'd "feel" a big difference in net responsiveness (browsing, file transfer, latency in online gaming, etc) if all spam stopped suddenly. Probably.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
Spammers can sneak into even the most STRINGENT anti-spam ISP network. A stolen credit card that works only once gets a spammer an account that can deliver many thousands of letters before they're shut down. UUnet isn't spam-friendly anymore than Rackspace is spam-friendly. Spam is going nowhere until good authentication techniques are implemented internet-wide.
... or does anyone really think that these guys are NOT aware of this?
Big ISPs which can afford to lose customers talk shit and do nothing. You know as well as I do that it's going to be us, the end-users, who have to be proactive about this. These ISPs don't give a fuck. They're probably run by cable school drop-outs.
I think it's pretty much been proven that this is wishful thinking. When a provider starts blocking large stretches of IP blocks owned by a particular ISP like UUNet, average users scream bloody murder. My prediction is UUNet will do nothing, and nothing will happen to UUNet. Sad but true.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
UUNet is probably just trying to get as many customers as possible.
I'm not sure if this reasoning is sound if we're talking about regular accounts, unless spammers are paying for their bandwidth (a thing I expect they avoid doing at all cost).
A regular customer who checks email once a day should be a lot more profitable to a ISP than someone who sends spam all day long.
Of course things are probably different with commercial accounts... I'm not familiar with UUNet so I don't know if they are a commercial only ISP.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
problem is when it catchs important mail and then you have to check for 1 good in hundreds of bad ones
/ss
263.net/263.com bombs me pretty consistently, I think it's chinese. It suggests pretty strongly to me that a lot of this "Chinese censorship" stuff is crap. If you've got the dough, then you can do as you please in the PRC.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Large portions of UUNet have been listed by the various anti-spam blacklists, such as Spamhaus, and all of UUNet is blacklisted in SPEWS. These providers are the scum of the Earth. They will delay, misdirect, and outright lie to keep their sweet large contracts with the spammers, at the expense of all their other customers.
Do you want to put your faith in a business that is indirectly lining the pockets of spammers?
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.
Until the spam takes up so much bandwidth for you to download and filter.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Its time for ISP's to take responsiblity for the shit that they host. Didint Gates say that spam will be dead by 2006? ( http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/24/tech/mai n595595.shtml). Time to start breaking down doors Bill. I guess he could just use a backdoor in to the spammers running windows.
Do they use stolen credit cards regularly? I wouldn't think so. You can get away with spam a lot of the time without legal conseqences but credit card fraud is another matter. Wouldn't any spammer that did this sort of thing get caught fast? Or do they go through chained proxies to do it all and regularly get away with it?
UUNet should give known spammers on their network their own IP range. If you spam, you get moved into that range. Those who don't want their crap can then easily filter it out by blocking those allocated spammer IPs. And the ISP still gets paid.
Customers who are running legitimate mail servers can stay out of that range as long as they don't break the AUP. The ISP doesn't even have to kill port 25 on the spammer IPs. They could simply limit the amount of bandwidth that can be used to something like 10MB per day on port 25. Which is reasonable. There's no incentive to out and out ban those IPs if no massive amount of junk can come out of them. The spammer is just forcibly restricted until they can behave themselves. At which time they can go back to a less restricted IP range.
I don't think there's any law that says ISPs can't selectivly put people in certain IP ranges. I don't think spammers have any way to fight it under current anti-discrimination laws. If you can even call it discrimination since it's would be based solely on the actions of the person and not who they are.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Before this debate gets too out of hand, has anyone weighted amount of spam vs. size of network?
UUNet is a large, large carrier with many networks globally. Are they the worst spammer because they have the most network entry/exit points, or are they unfairly attacked here because they are just large?
The spammers seem to be able to circumvent the Bayesian filters nowadays - about half the spam now gets through Mozilla Thunderbird's. :-/
I suspect it's the practice of putting random words at the end of the e-mails that does it.
The reason UUNET is known as a facilitator of the largest amount of spam is that they are the largest ISP. And many of their customers have what is called an open relay. Since most UUNET customers send thier outbound mail through mail.uu.net (UUNET's mail relay), spammers that find an open relay send email that looks as if it is coming from a UUNET customer (and UUNET's mail relay.) This is a problem that UUNET tries to remedy, but educating a I-D-10-T customer )not to mention 10,000 customers) about his/their own mail server's open relaying capabilities is difficult to say the least. If a spammer tries to use UUNET's mail relays directly, it does not last long and eventually he is told to take his buisness elsewhere. The people that think that UUNET is using spammers to make more money are just plain ignorant.
At issue is the business model for interconnection agreements between carriers. When an IP carrier interconnects with another, the basic metric to see who pays whom and how much is the download/upload ratio of the connecting carrier. Peering (at-cost interconnects) is only granted to carriers with whom there is a level upload/download ratio.
So if you're an IP carrier with no or little hosting on your network, you mostly download from your interconnects. Therefore you pay more to interconnect with the big IP backbones like UUnet.
If you're UUnet, there is an economic incentive for you to host spammers, because it boosts your upload; therefore you pay less (or, in the case of UUnet, get more money) on interconnects.
If I was UUnet, I don't see why I would waste money on fighting spammers who (1) are my customers and (2) increase my bottom line by boosting upload at interconnects.
By considering all packets to be equal on the backbone, you're averaging "unwanted" traffic vs. "useful" traffic such as web traffic (aka porn). The side effect of this is, you're paying for spam with your Internet connection.
Comcast is a joke, and not a funny one, hence many people have not been transitioned from attbi.com addresses to comcast.net ones.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
<sarcasm>Thanks for sharing.</sarcasm>
Do you believe that being boastful in your sig has anything to do with real credibility? You should check your vanity and leave your background to your user page where it belongs. And start using your sig for inane jokes, strange quotes and unusual observations like a typical slashdotter.
"Plaque is a figment of the liberal media and the dental industry to scare you into buying useless appliances and pastes." --Master Shake
Oh the irony...
I particularly enjoy the "Ads by Google" in the banner at right of the article, for
Bulk Mailer
Reach 500,000 opt-in recipients
and Bulk Email List
Low Cost Bulk Email Marketing Full Email Reports.
I thought that UUnet was just a backbone? I know that my ISP is a small local cable company, and that in turn they get their connection from UUnet. I'm not sure that a regular home user can get an account there. And yes, it is by far the nation's largest ISP, this probably has something to do with the problem in more ways then one. It's the MS syndrome: if you are big enough, you're going to be the most-targeted for lots of malicious things. At the same time, being the biggest means not worrying as much about taking care of your customers: where else are they going to go?
once you go slack, you never go back
A domain of a spammer listed for level13 was rooted. OR did a spammer root all of this users domains and use them to spam?
p
This is just untrue. UUNET sets limits on the amount of email a customer sends out. If they want to send over that limit, they have to document why and confirm that the emails are actually wanted. If it is determined that someone is spamming they are warned once. Then thier service is cut off and they are told to take thier business elsewhere. The problem is open relays as I explained in my post lower down in the thread.
Yeah, spammers are also using HTML tags, eg viagra, which in a HTML-enabled email client will just show viagra, but this kills a lot of filter. these guys are trying out another approach to deal with this though.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
of course, I've used blacklists and whitelists on my acct (from softhome.net). They also have a thing called greylisting (some opensource guy came up with the idea; sry, don't have linkie) which is like the telezapper I have on my phone; it holds an email and doesn't tell the sender's server if it was successfull or not [timeout] then waits for the sender's server to try again and since most spammers use a mass-mailing program that uses a "take it or leave it" tactic, it catches most spam.
Of course, I've added ppl I know to a whitelist so there's no delay and added IP ranges (typically uunet or above.net and some from the UK, china, korea, etc.) [Class B and Class C] to my perma-blacklist. Being able to blacklist IP ranges {or even mail that doesn't have a sender address regardless of IP) is very useful. I don't get spam that's mailed directly to me anymore (still get some spam that's sent to a mailing list like sourceforge's MLs, though).
One odd thing I've noticed is that softhome's implementation of one of the blacklisting options has changed and effectively blocks all email that's not ok'd by me (the blank sender address filter that is). But it's ok, most ppl I know get placed on my whitelist or if I'm sending to some company, I make sure I add the companies domain(s) to my whitelist as well. Hey, it's a small price to pay for lack of spam.
Also, if someone legit tries to email me and gets blocked, they get an error from their host that reports that "the server doesn't like them". Good for those pesky relatives...hehehe
Background: 25/M/Asexual(spores); Ninja Master, Superspy, and Fry Cook; Diploma, Shaolin Class of '93; PhD in Ass-kicking, BMF Correspondance School, 2001
Does anyone remember when UUNet was black listed? Or when Rogers was blacklisted?
Those were the days... but the age of activist sys admins is gone... we have been replaced with dot bomb drop outs who care about nothing more than a few $$$.
We are finished.
And think about it... what antispam technique can you think of that is more effective than filters and less intrusive (IE less clicking) to the users?
Loads of things are effective but all make the user work harder than they would by just deleting the spam.
Think of spam as an advert in your newspapaer or a commercial on TV. You're fucked and nothing can be done about it. Get a TIVO and suck it up.
E.
Sunday: 429 emails, 1 valid. It's not often like that, some days I get as many as 10 valid for about the same overall volume.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I run a report daily that tells me where my Bayesian-identified spam came from (IP address and host name via reverse lookup).
Out of the approximately 16 daily reports in my inbox, only two addresses are uu.net. I'm seeing comcast.net (37 occurences) and adelphia.net (29 occurences) a lot more, by comparison.
My experience with UUNet:-
1. In 2000 a spammer in Louisiana forges one of my domains in spam runs sent via UUNet - I get tens of thousands of bounces and hundreds of complaints.
2. I complain to UUNet - no action.
3. I phone UUNet security as the runs are being sent - no action.
4. Every weekend for 2 months this happens and I get sick of it.
5. I start to autobounce all this junk back to abuse@uunet.com.
6. Spammer sends a run using a different ISP.
7. UUNet gets really pissed that I bounce 1000 mails to abuse@uunet.com which didn't originate from their network (with some justification).
8. UUNet block all access from my class C to their servers.
9. The spam runs sent via UUNet continue....
Forward to 2004, I still can't send mail to uunet.com!
Filtering is **NOT** the solution. Blocking spamsources at the origin **IS**.
Hehheh, at the bottom of that page:
This site is protected by The Do-Not-Slashdot ACT 1996
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
And without spam filtering, you'd still have to check for small numbers of good messages buried in a mountain of bad ones, only you'd have to do it every single day rather than just occasionally. This to me is a step forward, not a reason to avoid filtering.
It is really to bad to hear such negative things about UUNET. They are one of the early pioneers of the Internet providing the east coast Unix to Unix (UU) network of universities. Maybe their early academic roots of open, unfettered access kept them from seeing the need to clamp down in later days.
Don
I am a UUNet/Worldcom customer and have multiple pipes to my network from their backbone. I think they have one of the best-performing backbones on the Internet.
Unfortunately, while I am happy with UUNet's performance and stability, I am even more unhappy with their apathy towards their network being clogged by spam traffic. And at least 40% of the bandwidth I pay for is consumed by unwanted UCE, so they actually profit from this crap. As a result, there's not much incentive for them to address it. And I have to grudgingly pass these expenses on to my customers.
But UUNet is not any different from other top-tier ISPs. They hide behind the "common carrier" metaphor, using it as an excuse to justify a large portion of the bandwidth they sell to others which is unuseable due to spamming.
I can't help but think if I ordered a telephone line, and 40-60% of the time I had "noise" interfereing with my ability to communicate, that the phone company would be obligated to resolve the situation. Unfortunately, with ISPs, there doesn't seem to be anyone at the top that really gives a damn, nor any incentive on their part to address the situation.
You **CAN** convey **EMPHASIS** with just bold or CAPITALS.
I bought viagra online from a florida spammer. After I received the Viagra, I filed a lawsuit against the spammer, then settled for $7500.
Fight Spammers!
nearly all spams contain a link to somewhere. I just filter out the domains those links go to since no legitimate e-mail will contain a link to those domains. You also can't hide the destination of a link if you don't leave the harvesting solely up to an automated system.
Takes care of most of the spam. And it costs spammers money every time they get a new domain so I can deal with what little spam gets through before the filter is updated. I've put hundreds of domains in my Mercury Mail filter which equals thousands of dollars worth of domains that are now useless for sending spam through my mail server. And it doesn't matter how distorted the header or body is. The domain can't be distorted or it won't work as a link.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Quack, quack.
My experience is that Thunderbird's spam filter is unfinished (as it is an alpha product). Spambayes catches 99% of all spam for me. It's proven better than even spamassassin. It will even work with Thunderbird.
Daniel
to just automatically move an account over to a spam IP if port 25 traffic gets too much than to pull the account entirely. Cox Communications supposedly already has an automated system to redistribute IPs (mine's never changed). So it's not something drastic that would need to be implemented.
As other people have mentioned, relays are a big part of the problem. It's better to "punish" ignorant customers by moving them to a restricted port 25 IP than to cut them off entirely. By moving them there's no harm no foul since they weren't the ones directly spamming anyway and probably won't notice they were moved.
If they do notice and call then the ISP can tell them to do something about their excessive e-mail sending and point them at the AUP. It's all very quick and painless to resolve the issue since it's the customer that has to take action to speak with people and not the company making the calls. People who have to call when they know they broke the rules are far less likely to do anything.
Cox recently cut off incomming port 25. Probably because of myDoom. I'm not about to call and complain because I was trying to run a spam can on my home system. Outgoing port 25 has been blocked since I got the service. And it would be a waste of time and money for them to call me and yell at me. They quietly cut off my server and I just shut my mouth about it.
By having a no harm no foul automated system you can punish a spammer as soon as say X MB of e-mails get sent in Y amount of time. Versus finding out about it later after it's too late and gigs of e-mails have been sent.
Automatically kicking customers entirely is just asking for trouble because the ignorant (those who unknowingly relay) will be kicked which will result in bad PR where there should be none.
You can still kick the spammer entirely. It's just a matter of starting with a little punishment and then escelating only as nesseccary.
Kicking a customer should be the last resort when just limiting port 25 traffic is sufficient.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
In the couple weeks I've had this sig, I have yet to receive a single troll mod.
So, no, not going to change my sig, as it quite nicely explains my feelings for both Bush and Kerry.
The issue of spammers is fairly unrelated to the different major bandwidth suppliers. We have three different providers here and spammers rarely request or care which network we put them on. They just want to get their 1.5 day's of major spamming done before we shut them down. The issue is what is going on at data centers to stop spammers quickly and what is being done on the internet to make spamming unprofitable.
./revolution
Perhaps this would hurt spammers the only place that counts - in the pocketbook. When a message is confirmed as spam then have a filter extract all the urls from the message and place them in a file. Have an hourly cron job visit that list of urls and download using wget everything at that url and all of it's subfolders - and delete the files after downloading - and bypass the proxy if you have one - these are all wget options. Have the hourly cron job keep only the last 10,000 or so urls so that there is some semblance of only downloading current spam urls.
This process, if followed by millions of spam haters (perhaps we could have a public spam url website that would let people fetch a hundred urls at a time to work on that we could upload our own spam urls to), would apply the slashdot-effect to all the spammers. Bandwidth costs money for them - it's the only way to make 'em stop.
I agree that blocking is preferable to filtering. Filtering is like solving gun violence by improving emergency room medicine.
However, as an interim step, it's better than not to have Bayesian filters and well-staffed ERs.
Just FYI, UUnet is now owned by MCI. UUnet/MCI also have a large amount of dial-up (modem) POPs, which is resold through other companies and used by end users. They also offer DSL in some markets.
All of this is in addition to them being the largest backbone.
all I want to say is that you can't trust filters 100% :) and they can't let themselves to miss it.
it does not matter much to people who use e-mail to forward chain letters if they miss some message - but there are also people who run business which depends on e-mail (hey I don't mean on spammers)
/ss
I was getting deluged by uu.net originated spam, and of course abuse@uu.net is ignored.
Finally I resorted to bouncing all uu.net originated spam to sales@uu.net and info@uu.net
make the sales scum suffer the same problem they inflict on everyone else by selling their pink contracts.
Some of the indignant replies from the sales staff were quite amusing. I guess they told their spammers to delete me from thier spam runs, as the volume quickly dropped and then finally stopped completely.
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2, Act 4, Scene 2
Firstly, all ISPs (and corperations, schools, unis and so on) should block port 25 by default.
Those that want to run a mailserver for legitimate reasons can do so but anyone who hasnt speicificly said "I want to run a SMTP server on my connection" will be prevented from doing so (this would cut out 99% of the spam comming from spam zombie boxes)
Second, close open relays (if you need to have an "open machine" run some kind of SMTP authentication)
Thirdly, implement SPF for more hosts and more clients (if you want to run your own mail server with xxx@mydomain.com addresses but relay through mailservers at ISP, work etc, just add those SMTP servers to the SPF record)
And forthly, be more proactive in blacklisting ISPs that are known spam havens (if enough people block the IP ranges of bulletproofspamhosting.com, spammers wont be able to get their messages through and bulletproofspamhosting.com will go out of business when the spammers leave)
If its a regular ISP with non-spam customers as well, pressure from the non-spam customers (especially if those non-spam customers are big) might convince the ISP to dump the spamers.
Eventually, if this happens enough, ISPs will realize that hosting spamers means that they will be blacklisted.
I've been running mimedefang alongside spamassassin and graphdefang to help catch my spam.
Something really interesting happened the other day. I noticed that > 90% of my spam was coming from the IP 206.46.164.23 | 22
So, I happily blacklisted the host.
Whereupon, I began getting complaints that users were unable to send mail to us from Yahoo!
I promptly made the discovery that Yahoo!'s servers are happily sending me over 90% of all my spam. It despicable.
I know they're not anyone's favorite company, but it's worth noting that AOL is not anywhere on the top 10 list. Not so many years ago (less than 5), they used to top that list most of the time, and the rest of the time they were in the top 3 (not necc. Spamhaus's list, but Spamcop's definitely, back when they meant something).
Having been involved in the work, I can tell you that AOL was one of the first, if not the first, large ISP to implement tagging of outbound email with the true email address of the sender, regardless of whether or not they put it in there (the X-Apparently-From header that AOL inserted). Also close to the first, or the first, to implement outbound filtering of email for spam. When the second one was put into place, I watched the ranking and saw AOL drop from #1 to nowhere on the top 10.
-Todd
"The details of my life are quite inconsequential..."
The spammyness of your web hosting ISP can be a major factor. When you sign up with a host company, either dedicated or shared, you are assigned an IP address from their "pool". If you get an IP from a former spammer life is not good!
I got an IP address that was blacked listed by SPEWS once. Much of my email would not work and the web host company would not change my IP. They suggested I contact SPEWS. I later learned that the host company was a spammer magnet and I was not alone. I switched companies and all is well.
Jeff
The major ISPs charge in a metered fashion. That means all their customers pay by the MB, GB, etc. A spammer who uses bandwidth to send spam is going to pay for all that data - but so will the end user in the ISP's system. The ISP knows that spam is an issue, but it provides them with zero-maintenance traffic, constantly running up the user's 'meter'. In a capitalist society, profit is always the motive. The ISP doesn't just charge you what the bandwidth costs them... They add a percentage that equals profit. [Begin technically inaccurate but wholly educational example] XISP has a fixed cost of 10 cents per Gigabyte of traffic, upstream or down. They charge 12.5 cents per Gig. Spammer_X sends out 20GB of spam. He pays the ISP $2.50 for that privilege. Since cost was $2, they made 50 cents. Now, assume that the mail is primarily directed at ISPs who lease lines from XISP, and who pay that same 12.5 cents per Gig. If they get 60% of the downstream covered, they'll be able to make another $1.50 off the traffic they originated. So for transferring 20GB across their own network, they made $4 on something that cost them $2. THAT is why the "Common Carriers" take their time getting rid of spammers. The longer they can let the guy spew his mail, the more 'incidental revenue' they can scrape together.
Self-referential sigs are rarely entertaining.
How do you know that the company or site named had any thing to do with the spam? If putting an URL in a mass-mailing is enough to get the owners of that URL punished (financially or legally), then you will see joe-job spam used as yet another means to harrass uninvolved third parties.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Gee, isn't it deceptive trade to say one thing and do another? Is failure to enforce a published contract, saying that everyone has to abide by it fraudulant?
On the email servers I manage, UUNet, Level3, Shaw, Cox, and Above.net are all almost completely blocked. The bounce message says "This site does not accept email by default from your current ISP. Please call xxx-xxx-xxxx to request whitelisting."
I love it when spammers call and try to get whitelisted. Like I've never heard of SpamCop, SpamHaus, SPEWS or News.Admin.Net-Abuse.Sightings...
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
I was thinking about that the other day. Then I got to wondering how much CPU-time I was spending on spam filtering which led to my thinking about how much electricity I was using to filter spam. Then I started to think about all the electricity being used by computers moving the mail and routers between network points and so on. It didn't take long before my mind boggled.
Spam is often touted as being better than physical junk mail as it doesn't use all that paper. There are however, other costs. All that electricity has to be generated and that can't be good for the enviroment.
The next time someone says spam is a hassle but doesn't really cost them anything, remind them what went into getting that spam to them.
Yes, true, but I think it's possible to throw away the stuff that is most definitely spam (SpamAssassin score of 10+), leaving just the very likely spam messages (SpamAssassin score from 5 to 10) for you to check occasionally in your Spam folder. Personally, I throw away anything that's 6+ and move the 4-6 stuff into a Spam folder for end-of-the-day review.
My ISP is blocking all outgoing port 25 connections.
More and more ISP's force this onto their home users and render the Internet less usable.
Granted, it gives them a little more control over the email traffic - it has to go through *their* mail-server, so they can set preciser rules (limit the number of emails per minute or so) - but it also limits my freedom to do with my connection what I want.
And this only because some idiots catch some Windows malware and turn into zombies.
Why am I pissed off? Sounds like a good idea?
Yeah, except that their SysAdmins, that dont trust me, arent good enough to keep their own mailserver running. And if I have to wait 1 hour to get my mail send, just because they prevent me from delivering it myself, I'm pissed.
And I really liked to read my error logs to find out instantly if there are problems with an email instead of waiting 2 days till my ISP sends me a : "I've tried several times and still wasnt able to deliver it"-message.
Finally, I dont like the whole : "let's protect our stupid lusers from themself"-strategy.
Educate them, instead of putting them in a cotton wool cage.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof for my post which this sig is too small to contain.
I'd say I run about the same risk of accidentially deleting a non-spam message in a fenzy of spam deleting. You can't trust yourself 100% either. Alls I can say is that I love my Bayesian filter. :-P
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
The spamoo link in the grandparent comment works. However, when I tried to learn "About Spamoo" on the General Menu in the page, it only produced the required page SOME of the time for me. I had to try several times before it brought up the requested page.
So, it may be that a link in a comment, in and of itself, won't get one /.'d, but apparently a link in a comment.... to a site whose functionality is partially implemented as aspx's ;-), is sufficient to earn one partial /.'ing. I wonder what their server's horsepower is, and if it's doing anything else this evening.....