Replies to "Spam"

Reply #1

From: "cricketsarge" (cricketsarge@bbv.net)
Date: Sunday, January 05, 2003 11:44 PM

Hello Pat! I clicked on the reply button to the rant about SPAM and I was surprised to see that you had no replies!

All I can tell you is that I am just as annoyed as you are...but I have a different twist on the spam issue.

I have found that a lot of the credit card companies that I do business with send spam to my mail box. I join up (sometimes even being charged a fee) to be able to access my account or pay my bill on the internet, and the next thing I know, they are spamming the shit out of me! It is the same with their stupid ass telemarketing calls, whhich is another issue altogether.

Anyway...just my 2 cents worth!

Nancy

That's just the nature of the beast. You should have a "spam catcher" account for things you know will just generate spam, like yahoo.com or hotmail.com. And for God's sake, if a credit card company is going to charge you to see yer statement and make payments, DROP THEM! Check out CitiBank. Their online stuff is free, and they have the COOLEST Virtual Number thing for shopping online.

Reply #2

From: "S Ungstad" (sungstad@pcisys.net)
Date: Friday, December 12, 2003 2:28 PM

Pat,

Distorting your email address with some obvious added stuff: "name_no@spam_isp.net" is fairly affective at avoiding spam because most spam is sent to addresses found by robots. I see your email address on your pages is not protected this way. I did this with all my mailto links, and while I do get spam, not so much that it's a huge problem. If you post this be sure to distort my address in some obvious way, and I'd recommend you also distort other peoples addresses. Problem is, of course, that not all humans are smart enough to make the required corrections. Oh well!

The press about cracking down on spammers makes me a bit nervous. We don't want another McCarthy witch hunt. It happens that an old "friend" of mine put me in a spammer list on his web site. Obviously he didn't like something I sent him, but I'm not sure what. He takes himself way to seriously and perhaps a joke about engineers offended his ego. Our mutual friends understand the clash of personalities, but the rest of the world has no such perspective. Unhappily, all I can do is ignore him.

Something I "discovered" not long ago, is that what makes you a "geek" is probably that you say exactly what you think, and that you are not extremely careful who you say it to. Apparently, "popular" people are very careful what they say to who. What's more, they consider this to be the intelligent way to relate to others, and something "everyone knows". Myself, I think everyone needs to know the hard truth. Anything else is dangerous and disrespectful. Most of the world's problems, religion, politics etc, are routed in vanity and unfair self interest.

I think spam is here to stay, like junk mail in the post. Whether it works or not will eventually be understood and the traffic will settle down accordingly. Messing with "free speech" is very dangerous. As the American founding fathers understood, power corrupts, so no one can be trusted with it for long. There is an old expression something like, "I don't agree with you but I will defend your right to express your opinion".

As it happens, I do agree with most of your comment, but your style is a bit "in-your-face" confrontational. Maybe that's for the best, maybe not. I dunno. But I think you let YOUR OWN vanity get in the way of judging "Arny". Just because he's a big muscular guy does not mean he's stupid, and being sure that everything you say is defensible is NOT the mark of true intelligence. It's all relative. Someone had to replace the previous dysfunctional governor. If he had to run as a republican to do it, that doesn't really matter. Lets give him some time and see how things work out. He has come a long way from a skinny little kid in Austria.

Steve

Arnold had no political history, he just ran on... nothing! What in the world did the voters think were doing? Anyway, this is 'bout spam, not Arnold.
I shouldn’t have to “protect” my email address at all. It has little to do with effectiveness. Actually, it’s not that effective,

Reply #3

From: "druidwood1" (druidwood1@netzero.net)
Date: Monday, December 15, 2003 11:35 PM

Actually, what we really need is for some computer wizard to tell us how to SEND BACK their spam, once a minute, every minute, from now until doomsday. If the get all. of their spam back, multiplied, from everyone they send it to, everything will grind to a screeching halt, and someone will have to outlaw any non solicited email.

I have no idea how this could be done, but I'd loive to spam the spammers out of business.

Back in the olden days, it was just that simple, but spammers (mostly crooks) always find a way around stuff. What they do a lot now is forge the email header so it looks like the mail came from someone else, so if you complain to the sender, yer usually talking to some guy who has no clue what yer doing.
As for the "unsubscribe me" links and such, they never work. Usually they are a form page that goes nowhere, or a dead email address.

Reply #4

From: "Peter Christensen" (pc@nterscope.com)
Date: Wednesday, December 17, 2003 12:47 PM

Pat,

With as much hype that is surrounding SPAM right now I just knew this page would be exploding! I was the Chief Information Officer for a company here in Florida before starting my own consulting firm and let me give you some facts:

Unfortunately, "SPAM" is the same as getting junk mail. You do have an option - just throw it away.
It DOES work! Yes, I have read the theory but it does work. There are hundreds if not thousands of sites that offer "Affiliate Programs" to do nothing but generate email addresses of potential clients. And yes, you can make a mint! Can you believe that you can get up to $10 an email address? But that is another story.
Marketing pros like MBNA and even Citibank pay for leads / emails. It is the nature of the beast and there is a right and wrong way to "SPAM" people.

To solve the problem we have to understand the problem. The problem is that there are too, many idiots out there that think they are an "internet genius". They buy leads and attempt to hide their email addresses and sell unsolicited crap. Since they do have a primitive understanding of technology, some are very skilled at hiding return email addresses and IP's. But the real problem is "How did they get my email address to begin with?" Almost everyone signs up for something and thus the list is born. Look, send your friends legitimate email address and get a "fake" account for all the crap you sign up for on the Internet. Now that I have that off my shoulders, let's look on how to fix it.

The Internet is one of the few places on earth where everyone (with a computer) can browse, shop and interact with anyone and everything. To truly stop real "SPAM" there should be rules in place that restrict the delivery of email. I (not that I am an internet genius) am in favor of only accepting email with valid email addresses. Like a letter - if it doesn't have a good return address don't accept it. If you have the "balls" (no offense ladies) to send it, be prepared to get it back. And if you don't want the service send an email back to them. Trust me, it doesn't sound like a real threat, but return emails are a pain in the butt to keep up with or file. The sender can't ignore them because they eat up space just like your computer gets eaten up with space. With a valid return email address you can then "SPAM" the sender with your "SPAM". Make a game out of it.

Okay, before I go let me drop some info on why I believe junk mail and "Spam" exist.

Mail pieces are expected to have a 1% return or buy rate per mailing. Doesn't sound like a lot does it? Okay let's do some math. If you send out 100 pieces of mail and it costs you $0.50 per piece then you will spend $50. And if the product you are selling costs $149.99 and it costs you $25 to make it then you just made $74.99. Now multiply that by the millions. Thus junk mail.
Believe it or not you can get up to a 6% return or buy rate per emailing campaign. Uh-oh, now we are talking real money! Now the math. If it costs you $0.01 per email and you send out 100 emails it will cost you $1. And you still sell it at $149.99 and it still costs you $25 to make it then you just made $123.99 per customer which is now 5..let's see.. that would be $619.95. What would you do?

I have enjoyed your forum (although the language could be tapered a bit) and keep exercising your right free speech. Thanks,

        I see you decided to go with the short reply, eh?
        You say that there are “too many idiots” out there. I agree with ya, but without all those idiots, I’d get almost no spam at all. I mean, I hardly ever get spam promoting reputable products. The majority of the shit are “penis enlargement ads” or “cheap financing ads.” One could say that anyone stupid enough to buy shit from unsolicited email is stupid enough to get ripped off, but why do I have to slog through 100+ bullshit emails a day because some people are really fucking stupid?
        Just because there is (nearly) no overhead cost does not give spammers the right to abuse a very important thing. I know people who hardley ever answer their email anymore because there is too much shit to delete.

Reply #5

From: Tom Anderson (tanderso.public+pquinn@oac-design.com)
Date: Wednesday, December 01, 2004 1:55 PM

Some tricks to deal with spam:

Use domain name system block lists (dnsbl). Check out www.dnsbl.com. You install them in your MTA (sendmail, postfix, whatever) and they'll block over 50% of your spam with a bounce message returned to the spammer. Just be sure to use objective lists rather than subjective ones.
Use a good content filter. Bayesian filters are good. Try bogofilter in particular... bogofilter.sourceforge.net.
Use the "details" feature of sendmail. Put a "+details" after your username in order to identify the source of spam. For instance, the address I've supplied to this site is tanderso.public+pquinn@oac-design.com. This will show up in my tanderso.public box no matter what I put after the plus sign. But I can tell where I supplied the address now without going through the trouble of making a special account. So if some site has a privacy policy, I can call them on it. Moreover, I can simply block anymore email to this address+details combo. And if you take off the +details part, it is automatically filtered as spam, since the address is never used without it. Not an end-all spam solution, but at least you can tell when credit card companies violate their policies.
Use address obfuscation when posting addresses to your website in order to prevent harvesting. For instance, instead of using my email, which any robot will grab and start spamming, you could do this:

The "email" function can be written as follows:

function email(address,domain,description)
{
   var at = String.fromCharCode(64);
   if (!description) { description = address+at+domain; }
   document.write("<a href='mailto:"+address+at+domain+"'>"+description+"</a>");
}

Few robots have the sophistication to decipher that level of javascript. You'll stay off quite a few lists this way.

The second above eliminates 99.9% of my spam, even with none of the other solutions. The first just lets my mailserver conserve bandwidth and processor cycles by allowing the second to do less work. The third is more for curiosity and political purposes. The fourth helps keep your address from being spoofed by a spammer and receiving a bunch of failure messages from servers too stupid to do a reverse lookup.

Hope that helps.