I use SpamAssassin to sort and tag the spam server-side, with my threshold set at 5. Or rather I should say the ISP hosting my domain uses SpamAssassin, I don't have full control over the mail server.
Then I use Mailwasher mainly to preview the messages on the server before downloading them. Mailwasher has its own filters to tag and bag spam, and they're pretty good. Do NOT use Mailwasher's fake bounce feature, it only contributes to the problem. I get the full source of the messages before downloading and report them to SpamCop.
I then use Mozilla Mail for the actual downloading and reading, which of course has its own Bayesian filtering, but messages have already gone through two other filters before they reach it. The funny thing is that even though I preview the messages with Mailwasher, I don't delete them on the server, I want them for training purposes.
I use throw-away accounts on SpamGourmet if I need to sign up for anything online.
I only get maybe three spams a week to my real email address, so all of this may be a tad extreme. But perhaps this paranoia (I'm also very protective of my email address to begin with) is *why* I get so little spam.
My Hotmail account, OTOH, was getting about 20-30 per day, five or six of those were making it past the filters into my inbox. Since I don't use the account for much serious correspondance, I finally set myself to "Exclusive" and whitelisted those few domains that I actually want to get mail from.
Don't forget the spammers. We can take a few IPs away from them as well.
Most spam seems to be routing through China these days anyway. Birds, meet stone.
Re:Just mentioned the Club...
on
The Big Kerplop
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I was a huge fan of Encyclopedia Brown. Some time in the fourth grade I discovered the Mad Scientists Club when I came across one of the books in a used book store with a cover illustration by Leonard Shortall, the artist who did all the EB illustrations.
There was also a series of kid's mystery type books (along the lines of Encyclopedia Brown) about Hawkeye Collins, a kid who drew pictures of the scenes of crimes, thus spotting the clues and saving the day. It was pretty derivative of EB, but since I also loved drawing at that age they really appealed to me.
And speaking of Encyclopedia Brown and kid's geek adventure stories, one of my favorite books was Secret Agents Four, by Donald J Sobol (who wrote EB.) Ahh nostalgia. Kids these days all want to go to Hogwarts, but when I was a 11 I wanted to open a detective agency in my garage.
The quote says nothing about laws, but it does refer to the constitutionality of unsolicited advertising, which is of course the entire point of quoting it in the first place. Sure it's out of context, but it serves to counter the parent's false belief that spam is protected by the first ammendment, which as far as I know, it is not.
Oft-quoted blurb from NYTimes article "Tangled up in Spam" (PDF) by James Gleick:
Many people who hate spam believe, honorably enough, that it's protected as free speech. It is not. The Supreme Court has made clear that individuals may preserve a threshold of privacy. ''Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit,'' wrote Chief Justice Warren Burger in a 1970 decision. ''We therefore categorically reject the argument that a vendor has a right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another.''
China has actually written three books, King Rat was his first, a sort of updated Pied Piper story I'm told. I've only read PSS and totally loved it. A friend of mine has read all three and highly recommends all of them. She has yet to steer me wrong. I'll read The Scar next and King Rat whenever I can find a copy somewhere.
That's a prime example of a clueless marketroid. A legitimate, responsible company that wishes to use email marketing should perform their due diligence when purchasing a mailing list or hiring a bulk mailer, and demand proof of permission on every single address the message is sent to. Spammers can't be bothered to maintain a truly permission-based double-opt-in list of qualified leads. Their business model is based on quantity, not quality.
So, if a responsible company wants to use email marketing, they should do it in-house and maintain their own double-opt-in list. Anyone who hires a third party bulk mailer is hiring a criminal.
The original lawsuit was newsworthy because it was a cartel of spammers attempting direct legal action against a system which blocks their messages, claiming that Spamhaus restricts their free speech and free trade.
The Spamhaus response is just a followup to the earlier story, and is an interesting insight into the fraudulent dishonest mindset of spammers by pointing out the falsehoods in the suit.
This whole issue is newsworthy because it calls attention to the overall deceptive sleaze of spam in general, it is NOT a legitimate business. While the racketeering story posted earlier isn't quite the right solution, I do think that if the courts are made more aware of the shady (and sometimes outright illegal) business practices of spammers, more anti-spam suits will be won and more anti-spam laws will be passed. Spam is a crime that just hasn't been made illegal yet.
Also, here's some amusing dirt on the lawyer who filed the suit (and registered the EMarketersAmerica domain.)
Re:Wil's on fark too
on
Dancing Barefoot
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Several years back I sent a short message to Terry Pratchett after finding his email address on alt.fan.pratchett, to which he is a regular poster. I didn't have much to say except to thank him for writing such great stories and I was sure he was so deluged with pointless fan-email that I would never get any acknowledgment from him. I was stunned to receieve a reply within 24 hours, to which I replied in kind, and 24 hours later got a reply to my reply to his reply. I could have tried to keep the correspondance going, but decided to stop pestering him at that point.
Eight years, two computers and four email addresses later, I still have copies of those four messages saved on a floppy somewhere. That level of personal contact is much cooler than any autograph.
We do get lots of junk mail from the u.s. post office (they could easily filter that, but they don't), yet we complain about spam the most... why?
A few reasons. For one thing, spam is new, but we've been getting junk snail mail for years so we've had more time to adjust to it as a fact of life. Spam has seen a massive surge in the past year or so and people who weren't especially bothered by it in 2001 are now getting 300+ messages per day in their hotmail accounts.
Secondly, we trust snail mail more because it's distributed by the government and the senders have to pay for it and follow certain regulated procedures. While it's still unsolicited and still an invasion of privacy, it's generally legitimate and we take it on faith that there is an accountable, legitimate business behind it. The vast majority of spam is shady and sleazy, selling pyramid schemes and unapproved drugs and beastie porn, sent blindly to people who didn't ask for it and have no interest in it, by spammers who hide their identities and steal resources to do it.
We tolerate pushy salesmen at car dealerships because they work for a real company and are just doing their jobs. If snail junk mail is the pushy salesman, spam is the shifty guy in a trenchcoat standing in an alley going "psst, hey buddy, wanna Rolex?"
"We believe that just like in television, the _creative_ you build is what gets shown, the technology should not get in the way," said Allie Savarino, senior vice president for global marketing.
Only someone in marketing can use the word "creative" as a noun and not be considered an illiterate retard.
Also, "interstitial" in Marketese translates as "interruption" to everyone else.
As we all know, the only way to truly stop spam is to make it an ineffective marketing tool. Legislation alone is not the answer because the spammers are already unethical and won't bat a lash to break the law. Filtering alone is not the answer because we've all seen how spammers find new ways to sneak around the filters. (I got one the other day with a paragraph of nonsensical pseudo-academic bullshit tacked onto the end, to evade the new Bayesian filters. Not many spams contain the phrase "grammatical paradigm.")
But I think a combination of legal and technical methods can do a lot to stifle the spamdemic. This small victory just establishes legal precedent which can be cited and refered to in later cases.
Of course, one of the most effective anti-spam methods is simply educating Internet users about spam and how to avoid it. The success rate on bulk email marketing is already pathetically low, but if it's reduced to 0 the spammers will stop on their own.
I seem to remember seeing Ralksy's address somewhere (wink, nudge)... he's a resident of Michigan. Now we just need every citizen of the state to sue him for a couple hundred bucks each.
Slashdot Mirror
I use SpamAssassin to sort and tag the spam server-side, with my threshold set at 5. Or rather I should say the ISP hosting my domain uses SpamAssassin, I don't have full control over the mail server.
Then I use Mailwasher mainly to preview the messages on the server before downloading them. Mailwasher has its own filters to tag and bag spam, and they're pretty good. Do NOT use Mailwasher's fake bounce feature, it only contributes to the problem. I get the full source of the messages before downloading and report them to SpamCop.
I then use Mozilla Mail for the actual downloading and reading, which of course has its own Bayesian filtering, but messages have already gone through two other filters before they reach it. The funny thing is that even though I preview the messages with Mailwasher, I don't delete them on the server, I want them for training purposes.
I use throw-away accounts on SpamGourmet if I need to sign up for anything online.
I only get maybe three spams a week to my real email address, so all of this may be a tad extreme. But perhaps this paranoia (I'm also very protective of my email address to begin with) is *why* I get so little spam.
My Hotmail account, OTOH, was getting about 20-30 per day, five or six of those were making it past the filters into my inbox. Since I don't use the account for much serious correspondance, I finally set myself to "Exclusive" and whitelisted those few domains that I actually want to get mail from.
teehee... "Sorry, links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled."
9
The url for cut-n-paste action: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17018
I spent some time the other day digging through Getty and got so sick of the extra scrolling I actually opened IE.
Don't forget the spammers. We can take a few IPs away from them as well.
Most spam seems to be routing through China these days anyway. Birds, meet stone.
I was a huge fan of Encyclopedia Brown. Some time in the fourth grade I discovered the Mad Scientists Club when I came across one of the books in a used book store with a cover illustration by Leonard Shortall, the artist who did all the EB illustrations.
There was also a series of kid's mystery type books (along the lines of Encyclopedia Brown) about Hawkeye Collins, a kid who drew pictures of the scenes of crimes, thus spotting the clues and saving the day. It was pretty derivative of EB, but since I also loved drawing at that age they really appealed to me.
And speaking of Encyclopedia Brown and kid's geek adventure stories, one of my favorite books was Secret Agents Four, by Donald J Sobol (who wrote EB.) Ahh nostalgia. Kids these days all want to go to Hogwarts, but when I was a 11 I wanted to open a detective agency in my garage.
The quote says nothing about laws, but it does refer to the constitutionality of unsolicited advertising, which is of course the entire point of quoting it in the first place. Sure it's out of context, but it serves to counter the parent's false belief that spam is protected by the first ammendment, which as far as I know, it is not.
China has actually written three books, King Rat was his first, a sort of updated Pied Piper story I'm told. I've only read PSS and totally loved it. A friend of mine has read all three and highly recommends all of them. She has yet to steer me wrong. I'll read The Scar next and King Rat whenever I can find a copy somewhere.
Rule #2 - Spammers lie.
That's a prime example of a clueless marketroid. A legitimate, responsible company that wishes to use email marketing should perform their due diligence when purchasing a mailing list or hiring a bulk mailer, and demand proof of permission on every single address the message is sent to. Spammers can't be bothered to maintain a truly permission-based double-opt-in list of qualified leads. Their business model is based on quantity, not quality.
So, if a responsible company wants to use email marketing, they should do it in-house and maintain their own double-opt-in list. Anyone who hires a third party bulk mailer is hiring a criminal.
I actually came up with two lame puns for this and couldn't decide which one to use, so here's both.
Dawn the Vampire Slayer... So each week we just watch a sunrise? Boring.
Dawn the Vampire Slayer... So *that's* what the blue liquid was in Blade.
The original lawsuit was newsworthy because it was a cartel of spammers attempting direct legal action against a system which blocks their messages, claiming that Spamhaus restricts their free speech and free trade.
The Spamhaus response is just a followup to the earlier story, and is an interesting insight into the fraudulent dishonest mindset of spammers by pointing out the falsehoods in the suit.
This whole issue is newsworthy because it calls attention to the overall deceptive sleaze of spam in general, it is NOT a legitimate business. While the racketeering story posted earlier isn't quite the right solution, I do think that if the courts are made more aware of the shady (and sometimes outright illegal) business practices of spammers, more anti-spam suits will be won and more anti-spam laws will be passed. Spam is a crime that just hasn't been made illegal yet.
Should be "defendants"
Also, here's some amusing dirt on the lawyer who filed the suit (and registered the EMarketersAmerica domain.)
Several years back I sent a short message to Terry Pratchett after finding his email address on alt.fan.pratchett, to which he is a regular poster. I didn't have much to say except to thank him for writing such great stories and I was sure he was so deluged with pointless fan-email that I would never get any acknowledgment from him. I was stunned to receieve a reply within 24 hours, to which I replied in kind, and 24 hours later got a reply to my reply to his reply. I could have tried to keep the correspondance going, but decided to stop pestering him at that point.
Eight years, two computers and four email addresses later, I still have copies of those four messages saved on a floppy somewhere. That level of personal contact is much cooler than any autograph.
A few reasons. For one thing, spam is new, but we've been getting junk snail mail for years so we've had more time to adjust to it as a fact of life. Spam has seen a massive surge in the past year or so and people who weren't especially bothered by it in 2001 are now getting 300+ messages per day in their hotmail accounts.
Secondly, we trust snail mail more because it's distributed by the government and the senders have to pay for it and follow certain regulated procedures. While it's still unsolicited and still an invasion of privacy, it's generally legitimate and we take it on faith that there is an accountable, legitimate business behind it. The vast majority of spam is shady and sleazy, selling pyramid schemes and unapproved drugs and beastie porn, sent blindly to people who didn't ask for it and have no interest in it, by spammers who hide their identities and steal resources to do it.
We tolerate pushy salesmen at car dealerships because they work for a real company and are just doing their jobs. If snail junk mail is the pushy salesman, spam is the shifty guy in a trenchcoat standing in an alley going "psst, hey buddy, wanna Rolex?"
"We believe that just like in television, the _creative_ you build is what gets shown, the technology should not get in the way," said Allie Savarino, senior vice president for global marketing.
Only someone in marketing can use the word "creative" as a noun and not be considered an illiterate retard.
Also, "interstitial" in Marketese translates as "interruption" to everyone else.
As we all know, the only way to truly stop spam is to make it an ineffective marketing tool. Legislation alone is not the answer because the spammers are already unethical and won't bat a lash to break the law. Filtering alone is not the answer because we've all seen how spammers find new ways to sneak around the filters. (I got one the other day with a paragraph of nonsensical pseudo-academic bullshit tacked onto the end, to evade the new Bayesian filters. Not many spams contain the phrase "grammatical paradigm.")
But I think a combination of legal and technical methods can do a lot to stifle the spamdemic. This small victory just establishes legal precedent which can be cited and refered to in later cases.
Of course, one of the most effective anti-spam methods is simply educating Internet users about spam and how to avoid it. The success rate on bulk email marketing is already pathetically low, but if it's reduced to 0 the spammers will stop on their own.
mmm... calimari.
I seem to remember seeing Ralksy's address somewhere (wink, nudge)... he's a resident of Michigan. Now we just need every citizen of the state to sue him for a couple hundred bucks each.
Old news.