TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: Trial Shows How Spammers Operate

Re: Trial Shows How Spammers Operate

Scott Dorsey (kludge@panix.com)
24 Nov 2004 13:40:54 -0500

Dan Lanciani <ddl@danlan.com> wrote:

>jdj@now.here (jdj) wrote:

>> On Wed, 17 Nov 2004 03:12:34 -0500, Dan Lanciani wrote:

>>> Interesting. I didn't realize that this was considered a bad thing.

>> There are a lot of people who equate receiving spam to stepping in
>> what the cat leaves on the lawn.

> This makes no sense. How exactly can you avoid "receiving spam"?

By removing spammers.

If every single one of us here went and injured a single spammer, the
spam problem would be more or less gone. In fact, if one person beat
Ralsky up with a baseball bat, I think we'd all see about a 50% drop
in spam.

> Obviously. But why should I care? The point of the response is to
> tell people who were neither sending spam nor forging their address
> that their mail has been incorrectly identified as spam. Note that I
> do not include the body of the original message in my automated
> response, so you can't use my filter to reflect spam to a third party.

The problem is that the number of people in that category is a very
small one, and the number of people who receive misdirected bounces is
a very high one. The cure is worse than the disease.

Note that on the whole, the vast majority of messages that your spam
cleaner detects will actually be spam, and therefore will not have an
accurate return address. In fact, the vast majority of messages
received at all will actually be spam, if your statistics are anything
like mine. I figure about 90% of the messages arriving at my server
are spam, and that is after router filtering.

scott

-- "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

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