Text 142, 76 rader
Skriven 2004-12-19 16:04:46 av Gerald Miller (1:342/512)
    Kommentar till text 141 av mark lewis (1:3634/12)
Ärende: Fighting Spam
=====================
Hello mark,

    Responding to a post in the INTERNET area:
    On Sunday December 19 2004 at 14:20,
    mark lewis [1:3634/12] wrote to Gerald Miller,
    about: Fighting Spam

 GM>> I will try cross-posting this message into the echo and you
 GM>> can see if it shows up there.  If the message arrives, we'll
 GM>> just carry on with the topic.
 ml> looks like it worked... everyone else interested is welcome to join,
 ml> too...

I think the "key" may have been the crossposting / seeding (after I created
the folder and reworked my Squish.cfg).  <g>
I'll have to remember that little trick the next time I want to link to an
echo -- I've never linked to an echo that rapidly!

To bring the people in this echo up to date:

You and I were discussing email spam and the abuse of using the recipient's
email address as the sender's originating email address.  You say that such
is a very common practise.  I haven't found that (yet), but I suspect it
will certainly get worse before it gets better.

You said:

 ml> i, too, use MWP but i've stopped using its "report to spamcop"
 ml> finction because it doesn't filter out all the stuff that can be in
 ml> the spam that may carry your address or other indicator which address
 ml> is doing the reporting... instead, i use a program called Abuse and
 ml> manually edit the spam before running abuse on it... since i use
 ml> something other than outlook or outlook express, i have to copy and
 ml> paste the message source to abuse in much the same was as i do (at
 ml> times) with spamcop...

 ml>    http://spam-abuse.sourceforge.net/

Okay.  I never used spamcop for reporting the abuse, but I did use the
DNSBL feature for checking the originator's ISP site from within MWP
(MailWasherPro).

You also said to check out:

   http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=62174

and

   http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/spam-abuse/Abuse.zip?download

so, I went to the last site, downloaded, installed and configured the
program on my WinXPP machine (didn't bother doing the same on my W98SE box
because the spammers haven't been successful in associating my user name
with the email address, yet).

I did send email to MWP support, asking what did they suggest in regards to
the spammers that wanted to use my email address as their originating email
address...  MWP's response was less than ideal -- "put your own email
address into the Blacklist and then send email to everyone in your Friends
list with a notice that they will have to use a 'keyword' in the subject
line, and then set up the Filter section to mark each mail with the
'keyword' in the Subject field as legitimate mail".  I am NOT impressed!

I guess their suggestion does have some merits.  But, how would that 'fly'
with businesses that I deal with?

I think a better solution would be to choose a more obscure email address
and then notify everyone of the address change.

Any opinions?

           Cheers ... Gerald

... Under capitalism man exploits man; under socialism the reverse is true.
--- GoldED+/DPMI32 v1.1.5-040330 [msg of December 19, 2004]
 * Origin: Any excuse will serve a tiger, use random numbers. (1:342/512)