Spam Lives
from the forever dept
An article telling us what we all know already (unfortunately). Spam messages are like cockroaches. You can’t kill them. The article points out that the industry isn’t really doing anything to police itself (despite what they say) and most spammers aren’t really a part of any “industry” anyway. It’s nice that the FTC is “cracking down” on spam, but really they’re just sending mean angry letters to spammers. Basically, he’s saying that we’re just going to have to suck it up and deal with all this spam. I’m not yet so pessimistic, but I’ll admit it’s not looking good.
Comments on “Spam Lives”
You can kill cockroaches
But you can’t kill them all short of destroying the whole house.
Supposidly spam is protected by free speech. Yet there are laws against sending unsolicted spam faxes, so why doesn’t the 1st Ammendment apply to them?
Anyway can a programmer exercise their free speech by writing software to filter out and trash spam before it even reaches the recipient’s inbox? Then the programmer can exercise their right to free enterprize by selling the spam killing app to ISP’s and those running their own servers.
Re: You can kill cockroaches
Um, there is a rest of the world you know. Such things as “first amendment” don’t exist out here for the vast majority of people. Offshore spam doesn’t respond to legal threats!!
Re: Re: You can kill cockroaches
>Um, there is a rest of the world you know. Such things as “first amendment” don’t exist out here for the vast majority of people. Offshore spam doesn’t respond to legal threats!!
Well, duh! That is why the person was advocating summarily trashing spam coming from off shore. Evenstill, it isn’t someone in a developing country sending the spam, it is some jerk in the USA, spam just passes through off shore servers to avoid legal threats.
Ya wanna see something happen about off shore spam. Wait until some nut case brings down important servers such as military or infrastucture service by mail bombing them from off shore. Politicians don’t seem to care about John Q. Public until they suffer the same condition.
Only ~100% effective solution so far
I recommend installing ASK active spam killer on your mail server. When someone sends you an email for the first time they get an autogenerated reply that they have to just click ‘Reply’ and ‘Send’ on. After that the original mail goes through as does all their subsequent mail. Since spams tends to be sent from forged or temporary accounts it should have near perfect success cutting out spam. You need Python installed on your server though.
Phillip.
Re: Only ~100% effective solution so far
My experience with such “white list” and “approval” solutions are that people get pissed off that they receive this bounce back and have to go through an extra step to email you. It confuses the non-tech savvy people and annoys the tech savvy ones. Maybe if it becomes more well known… but in the meantime, I don’t want to anger everyone who tries to send me an email.
Re: Re: White lists
>My experience with such “white list” and “approval” solutions are that people get pissed off that they receive this bounce back and have to go through an extra step to email you. It confuses the non-tech savvy people and annoys the tech savvy ones. Maybe if it becomes more well known… but in the meantime, I don’t want to anger everyone who tries to send me an email.
Yes, better to have it held on the server and then you approve the messages. As to filters, also trash sight unseen anything that is routed through foriegn servers, spammers seem to like open relays in developing countries.