[CLUE-Talk] Oh No! Not Again! (spam spam spam spam ...)

[Charles Oriez]

At 10:17 PM 4/15/2003 -0600, David Willson wrote:

>Just so you know, I have now gotten more spam-bitching than spam.  Is it
>ever possible for the cure to be worse than the disease?

The only way for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.



>It took me one
>second to delete IBM's email (which I couldn't have gotten from the
>sign-up sheet, because I didn't sign it, IIRC),

However, by the time you deleted it, your ISP already paid for the cost of 
the storage on the server, you took the time to download, etc.  If 1/10th 
of 1% of every business in the world sent you one spam a month, you'd be 
spending 1 second deleting each spam and never have time to do anything else.



>and it's taken me five
>minutes or more to delete all the bitching, and try to figure out what
>exactly the Big Deal was...  Maybe we could try not to ~quite~ so
>sensitive about this...?

The big deal is that spammers are thieving scum who are trying to steal a 
communications medium and make it worthless for useful two way 
communications.  They steal resources.  They forge addresses to hide their 
point of origination because they don't want to be shut down or deal with 
the bounces, letting other ISPs deal with the bounces.  They route their 
traffic through open relays and open proxies, tying up someone else's 
resources instead of their own.  Most of them are criminals, trying to con 
you out of money, ship porn to your children, and load your machine with 
trojans, viruses, and expensive dialers, and engage in DOS attacks.

The problem is not being too sensitive - it isn't being sensitive 
enough.  If every person reported every spam they received, and if every 
honest ISP terminated their spammers on sight, and used the dnsbl's to 
block the ISPs who weren't honest, the problem would go away.  I report all 
spam, and my ISP uses fiveten and spamcop to block spam, among others.  I 
then use procmail to block spam havens like verio, argentina, and brazil 
that my ISP doesn't block.  However, every spam that doesn't get reported 
before the spammer's point of origin makes it onto spamcop is one I have to 
deal with.

Don't want to take the time to figure out the headers on your own?  Sign up 
for a free reporting account at http://spamcop.net

With that, I'm down to about 3 or 4 spams per day on average.