A History Of AT&T, Take 2 >>
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(Mis)Uses of Technology

by Mike Masnick

Tue, Aug 20th 2002 10:12am





Spam Vigilantes

from the hmm dept

I wonder if I'm going to regret signing up for SpamCop. They did, after all, once accuse me (incorrectly) of spamming, but the situation was quickly cleared up without any problem - though, just between me and my ISP and not with SpamCop. However, my hosting company told me that in the past month SpamCop has unfairly blocked a number of their sites, and and now I'm reading (via Dan Gillmor's latest) about how SpamCop forced Ed Felten's website offline, after someone accidentally reported a message that recommended his site as spam. SpamCop (not surprisingly) makes it nearly impossible to reach a human being that you can contact. They apparently did nothing to rectify the problem, despite the fact that everyone involved (Ed Felten, the guy who sent the original email, the guy who reported the spam, and the ISP involved) all determined that nothing wrong had been done. It's a bit scary that these shoot-first-that's-it policies on spam are taking over.

3 Comments | Leave a Comment..


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  1.  

    ORBS was a 'shoot first ban protestors' "service"

    identicon
    alternatives, Aug 20th, 2002 @ 11:03am

    ORBS was a 'spam stopping' "service" that maintained a seperate blocking list for people who found the baseless and aggressive relay testing to be a problem, and told them such.

    I asked to be tested again until he had proof that I had an open relay. So Alan and Co put me in the ORBS list.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  

    SpamAssassin.

    identicon
    Dr_Stein, Aug 20th, 2002 @ 5:38pm

    That's all we need. Doesn't delete SPAM, but merely tags it and allows you to do what you wish with it.
    That doesn't change the fact that our mail servers are still getting bombarded with SPAM and the spammers don't care, because they know that it's often difficult to catch them.

    Somewhere on the net, there's a paper detailing what a scam MAPS (and the organizations Paul Vixie set up) have turned out to be.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  3.  

    Re: SpamAssassin.

    identicon
    mememe, Aug 21st, 2002 @ 1:13am

    Excellent system. Traps most of the spam I get sent and has very few false positives. Some Nigerian scams still get through though for some reason.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


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