why hasn't there been software that could watch incoming messages, and sayy if > 10,000 messages come thru with the same subject line, flip those over to a "suspect" pile
There is something similar to this. It's called SpamShield, and it's a Perl module that watches for a big spike in incoming connections
from a particular IP. I hope to get it set up soon on the mail server I help maintain. Further details at their website:
Exactly -- my first impression was "They really are smart, aren't they?"
[#include unixfan_disclaimer], but honestly: look at the advantages of Unix over Windows in so many situations. I'd always kind of wondered if MS was ignoring those problems/advantages for marketing purposes, or if they Just Didn't Get It. Looks like the former, which is reassuring.
Another strike against Windows is the GUI: "GUI operations are essentially impossible to script. With large numbers of servers, it is impractical to use the GUI to carry out installation tasks or regular maintenance tasks."
I love Unix. But a huge reason for this unnatural affection is the command line, and the enhancements Unix has made to it (pipes, file descriptors, everything-is-a-file, shell scripting).
Even if Microsoft turned around tomorrow and made everything GPL, fixed their security holes and sent chocolates and hookers to Linus and RMS, I'd still prefer Unix for the power of the command line.
In Windows, the command line almost seems like an optional afterthought. In Unix, it's the other way around. (Disclaimer: I'm partly joking, and much more familiar w/U. than M [as I'm sure everyone can tell].) And I think for admin purposes, that makes Unix the more powerful choice.
I agree with the poster above. Someone else put it very well in a post to an earlier article re: spam when they said that it doesn't *matter* to the spammer if you filter out their pitches. If you were that pissed off about spam, you weren't going to buy it anyway, and sending email is so ridiculously cheap it would cost them more to think about it than just to send it off.
The problem is not you, or me, or anyone who reads Slashdot, or anyone who has any sort of clue, technical or not. The problem is that one idiot ordering makes up for 10^x angry people hitting delete or mark as junk or using SpamAssassin. It's the idiot who orders from spammers we need to be apply the clue-by-four to.
I loved the heck out of your performance in Free Enterprise, and I have to ask: any more rap stylings coming out? Will you be guest starring on Eminem's next? Has Nelly asked you to give a shout out? Are you and Chuck D planning a world tour?
Still in alpha, true. I've d/l the newest build and am testing this. Still in the process of training for spam, but I'm really excited about this.
As I've
mentioned before, this'll be a boon both for poor helpdesk slobs like me and end users: I'll be able to say, "Here, download this" and have it work for them (a bit of effort to train, true, but a simple process). It'll let them get rid of (or at least manage) spam, and keep me from having to come up w/answers to questions like "But why can't you just STOP it?"
Anyhow, just my $0.02...and congrats to Moz developers. You are all, collectively, My Man.
Okay, so now that I've read the manual...close, *very* close to what I'm after. But for my customers it's not quite there yet:
They'll have to install Perl as well
and they have to run a command-line program (if I'm reading the manual right; haven't run Perl on Windows, so feel free to correct me) to train it.
Keep in mind that I'm after something I can recommend to retirees and soccer moms; the few times I have to send 'em to the command line are inevitably painful (and why not? it's not like they've ever needed to use it before, or that they have any idea what this big black window you can't click in is supposed to do -- it's completely outside what they know. And no, that's not a flame -- they're not bad people for not knowing what to do with a DOS prompt).
These folks will have kept their good mail (probably), but who the hell keeps spam? Which means they'll need to train it repeatedly as spam comes in (if I'm reading the man. right) and that means repeated command line work...and that's not gonna fly with most people I work for/help out.
Well shet my mouth, you're right...my fault: I assumed that "Perl script" meant Unix-only (or at least -mostly). But that was hardly a rant; if I had ranted, you wouldn't be left standing.:-)
Oh man, that looks perfect...sorry, see my post below re: something for Windows users. We use SpamAssassin, and I'd love something that would let people filter by the score. OE doesn't let you filter on any header, but this does...sweet. Thanks for the tip.
I work on the helpdesk of a small ISP; I also take care of the spam filtering, and answer abuse@. We recently added SpamAssassin, and God does it rock. (The big spike you see is me getting MRTG to graph what SA catches now; it's 6-10 times better than what we used to catch.)
But I still get complaints from our customers about spam that gets through. Just the other day a crapload got through because it was relatively subdued spam (no webbugs, NO LINE OF YELLING, etc); unfortunately, it also advertised pictures of young boys having sex. It's hard to explain why it's very, very hard to filter for this sort of thing, especially when I'm going through the talk for the nth time this week. (I need a good analogy that non-geeks can understand; I'm still looking.)
The good folks at DeerSoft have a version of SpamAssassin for Outlook, and are promising one for OE Real Soon Now. But I would loooooooooooooooooooooooove a good spam program -- this or SA or something else -- that I could point our customers to. Download, double-click, say yes, and bam it's installed. I can figure out how to install this on a Unix box; I could probably, eventually figure out how to do it on a Windows box; there's no way the customers could do it.
Or am I missing good, free spam filtering for Windows? Can anyone point me in the right direction?
Slightly OT: There has got to be a huge market for setting up spam filtering for small businesses. My idea: Tell 'em that if they provide the box -- an old Pentium or 486 will do -- I'll set up spam filtering and a firewall on it, set up some maintenance tools (whitelist this, firewall that). They get great mail service, I get $x00.
Re:Education instead of cushioning.
on
E-Mail Size Limits?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Been looking for a place to throw in my $0.02 Cdn, so here I go.
I work for a small ISP (mostly dialup, a few ADSL). Incoming limit for
email is, I believe, 8MB, which I think works out to 5MB for a binary
file when encoded. (Feel free to correct me, people.) We have more
than a few business customers on dialup, and every now and then we'll
get a secretary calling up asking why the quarterly report got
rejected by our mail server. The answer, of course, is that it's a 10MB
Excel spreadsheet, it's too big, and our mail server refused it.
Email Is Not How You Transfer Large Files, Especially Over
Dialup: It takes forever, people use crappy modems (I *hate* hearing
the words "ess emm fifty-six") that get disconnected in the middle of a
download, and there's no way for them to start where they left off.
*Plus*, inna meantime their other email, which is inevitably of the
highest importance, is sitting behind said quarterly report, and they
can't get at it.
FTP or HTTP, by contrast, combined w/a download manager of some
description, would be great. (I was going to moan about how I'd love a
Windows version of the insanely great wget, but hey! turns out there is
one...sweet!) It would be The Right Thing, it wouldn't hold up
their email, and you'd be able to resume if you were disconnected.
I agree that teaching the user is also The Right Thing, and I try
to do so when I can. But -- I'm thinking about one customer in
particular; I haven't had to talk to her in a while, but she's a good
example -- how do I explain this to someone who just wants the frigging
report, and to whom it's obvious that her ISP is only standing in her way, and is pissed off as a result?
Part of the problem, I'll admit, is that we don't have a ready alternative
right now to hand her: we don't offer FTP space at the moment for
our users. I'd love it if we had the intranet-/internet-facing FTP +
Samba space mentioned in a post above, but that's not going to happen
anytime soon. (Though now that I think of it, it would be easy to set
up some space and just tell people about it when they need it; give them
access for, say, 24 hours, then kill the account. Hm...)
I'm asking for help on this, not throwing up my hands and giving up.
I've figured out the Right (quickest) way to talk people through setting
up a dialup connection, or changing their modem settings, or getting the
information from them I need to figure out what's wrong. But I haven't
been able to figure out how to explain Email + Multi-Megabyte
Attachments + Dialup == Bad yet. How do you guys do it?
Most virus's follow the pattern of being at
first increasingly virulent and deadly to their
hosts. Then over time as they begin to kill too
manyhosts and the evolve to become less virulent
as a survival strategy. at the same time the
surviving hosts have become better at killing
them.
Or, following what may have happened
w/mitochondria, they start performing useful
functions...say, drivers for graphics cards. Or
would that prove Microsoft's point about the GPL
being viral?
Hehe...for some reason the idea of building a ping server strikes me as funny.
We tested it in the workshop by hooking it up to a 3Com X500 Terabit Switch, and using over 500 RedHat servers to ping -f. This baby handled it well -- the time we'd spent optimizing the Oracle backend really paid off.
Yeah. Or maybe I should just have more coffee...
Oh sure, I find out NOW...
on
Lego Segway
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Cust. Service Dept.
Amazon.com
customerservice@amazon.com
Dear Sir/Madam:
I regret to inform you that I must cancel my current reservation for the Segway, currently listed at $7999.95 (US).
I would like to place another order for the following items now:
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone else here reminded of CompuServe? Or GE? Or Prodigy?
Works fine for me. C'mon, I can't be the only one who's set this up, right?
There is something similar to this. It's called SpamShield, and it's a Perl module that watches for a big spike in incoming connections from a particular IP. I hope to get it set up soon on the mail server I help maintain. Further details at their website:
www.spamshield.org
and at this article on OnLAMP:
Spamshield: A Perl-Based Spam Filter for Sendmail
LOL...was gonna reply, but I'll let yours stand in my place. :-)
Well, yes -- but I mean from the standpoint of Getting Stuff Done. For that, in Windows, you use the GUI. In Unix, you use the command line.
[#include unixfan_disclaimer], but honestly: look at the advantages of Unix over Windows in so many situations. I'd always kind of wondered if MS was ignoring those problems/advantages for marketing purposes, or if they Just Didn't Get It. Looks like the former, which is reassuring.
Another strike against Windows is the GUI: "GUI operations are essentially impossible to script. With large numbers of servers, it is impractical to use the GUI to carry out installation tasks or regular maintenance tasks."
I love Unix. But a huge reason for this unnatural affection is the command line, and the enhancements Unix has made to it (pipes, file descriptors, everything-is-a-file, shell scripting). Even if Microsoft turned around tomorrow and made everything GPL, fixed their security holes and sent chocolates and hookers to Linus and RMS, I'd still prefer Unix for the power of the command line.
In Windows, the command line almost seems like an optional afterthought. In Unix, it's the other way around. (Disclaimer: I'm partly joking, and much more familiar w/U. than M [as I'm sure everyone can tell].) And I think for admin purposes, that makes Unix the more powerful choice.
The problem is not you, or me, or anyone who reads Slashdot, or anyone who has any sort of clue, technical or not. The problem is that one idiot ordering makes up for 10^x angry people hitting delete or mark as junk or using SpamAssassin. It's the idiot who orders from spammers we need to be apply the clue-by-four to.
As I've mentioned before, this'll be a boon both for poor helpdesk slobs like me and end users: I'll be able to say, "Here, download this" and have it work for them (a bit of effort to train, true, but a simple process). It'll let them get rid of (or at least manage) spam, and keep me from having to come up w/answers to questions like "But why can't you just STOP it?"
Anyhow, just my $0.02...and congrats to Moz developers. You are all, collectively, My Man.
It's not only Canada's most powerful supercomputer, it's the only one controlled from space.
Keep in mind that I'm after something I can recommend to retirees and soccer moms; the few times I have to send 'em to the command line are inevitably painful (and why not? it's not like they've ever needed to use it before, or that they have any idea what this big black window you can't click in is supposed to do -- it's completely outside what they know. And no, that's not a flame -- they're not bad people for not knowing what to do with a DOS prompt).
These folks will have kept their good mail (probably), but who the hell keeps spam? Which means they'll need to train it repeatedly as spam comes in (if I'm reading the man. right) and that means repeated command line work...and that's not gonna fly with most people I work for/help out.
Well shet my mouth, you're right...my fault: I assumed that "Perl script" meant Unix-only (or at least -mostly). But that was hardly a rant; if I had ranted, you wouldn't be left standing. :-)
Super-sweet! Thanks for the link.
Oh man, that looks perfect...sorry, see my post below re: something for Windows users. We use SpamAssassin, and I'd love something that would let people filter by the score. OE doesn't let you filter on any header, but this does...sweet. Thanks for the tip.
I work on the helpdesk of a small ISP; I also take care of the spam filtering, and answer abuse@. We recently added SpamAssassin, and God does it rock. (The big spike you see is me getting MRTG to graph what SA catches now; it's 6-10 times better than what we used to catch.)
But I still get complaints from our customers about spam that gets through. Just the other day a crapload got through because it was relatively subdued spam (no webbugs, NO LINE OF YELLING, etc); unfortunately, it also advertised pictures of young boys having sex. It's hard to explain why it's very, very hard to filter for this sort of thing, especially when I'm going through the talk for the nth time this week. (I need a good analogy that non-geeks can understand; I'm still looking.)
The good folks at DeerSoft have a version of SpamAssassin for Outlook, and are promising one for OE Real Soon Now. But I would loooooooooooooooooooooooove a good spam program -- this or SA or something else -- that I could point our customers to. Download, double-click, say yes, and bam it's installed. I can figure out how to install this on a Unix box; I could probably, eventually figure out how to do it on a Windows box; there's no way the customers could do it.
Or am I missing good, free spam filtering for Windows? Can anyone point me in the right direction?
Slightly OT: There has got to be a huge market for setting up spam filtering for small businesses. My idea: Tell 'em that if they provide the box -- an old Pentium or 486 will do -- I'll set up spam filtering and a firewall on it, set up some maintenance tools (whitelist this, firewall that). They get great mail service, I get $x00.
I work for a small ISP (mostly dialup, a few ADSL). Incoming limit for email is, I believe, 8MB, which I think works out to 5MB for a binary file when encoded. (Feel free to correct me, people.) We have more than a few business customers on dialup, and every now and then we'll get a secretary calling up asking why the quarterly report got rejected by our mail server. The answer, of course, is that it's a 10MB Excel spreadsheet, it's too big, and our mail server refused it.
Email Is Not How You Transfer Large Files, Especially Over Dialup: It takes forever, people use crappy modems (I *hate* hearing the words "ess emm fifty-six") that get disconnected in the middle of a download, and there's no way for them to start where they left off. *Plus*, inna meantime their other email, which is inevitably of the highest importance, is sitting behind said quarterly report, and they can't get at it.
FTP or HTTP, by contrast, combined w/a download manager of some description, would be great. (I was going to moan about how I'd love a Windows version of the insanely great wget, but hey! turns out there is one...sweet!) It would be The Right Thing, it wouldn't hold up their email, and you'd be able to resume if you were disconnected.
I agree that teaching the user is also The Right Thing, and I try to do so when I can. But -- I'm thinking about one customer in particular; I haven't had to talk to her in a while, but she's a good example -- how do I explain this to someone who just wants the frigging report, and to whom it's obvious that her ISP is only standing in her way, and is pissed off as a result?
Part of the problem, I'll admit, is that we don't have a ready alternative right now to hand her: we don't offer FTP space at the moment for our users. I'd love it if we had the intranet-/internet-facing FTP + Samba space mentioned in a post above, but that's not going to happen anytime soon. (Though now that I think of it, it would be easy to set up some space and just tell people about it when they need it; give them access for, say, 24 hours, then kill the account. Hm...)
I'm asking for help on this, not throwing up my hands and giving up. I've figured out the Right (quickest) way to talk people through setting up a dialup connection, or changing their modem settings, or getting the information from them I need to figure out what's wrong. But I haven't been able to figure out how to explain Email + Multi-Megabyte Attachments + Dialup == Bad yet. How do you guys do it?
Or, following what may have happened w/mitochondria, they start performing useful functions...say, drivers for graphics cards. Or would that prove Microsoft's point about the GPL being viral?
(Joke! Joke!)
No kidding. Surely they're taking the piss.
Guess we know which kernel guru has started taking $ from Google!
We tested it in the workshop by hooking it up to a 3Com X500 Terabit Switch, and using over 500 RedHat servers to ping -f. This baby handled it well -- the time we'd spent optimizing the Oracle backend really paid off.
Yeah. Or maybe I should just have more coffee...
Amazon.com
customerservice@amazon.com
Dear Sir/Madam:
I regret to inform you that I must cancel my current reservation for the Segway, currently listed at $7999.95 (US).
I would like to place another order for the following items now:
- Three MindStorms Lego Robot Kits, version 2.0, at $24.95 each
- One copy of How To Build a Segway Human Transporter for only Fifty Dollars (O'Reilly Press) at $69.95
- One Flux Capacitor at $499.95
I trust that a credit to my account will be arranged.Thank you in advance for your prompt action in this matter.
Sincerely,
Saint Aardvark the Carpeted
Seriously, thanks for the info.
http://t3-v-mcnicol.ilaw.com.au/
And another:
http://t3-v-mcnicol.ilaw.com.au/