[PLUG-TALK] Online greeting cards - DON'T!

Keith Lofstrom keithl at kl-ic.com
Tue May 9 20:06:39 UTC 2006


Keith wrote:
> If you are ever tempted to use one of those online greeting card
> sites, DON'T.  If one of your friends or relatives does, admonish
> them with a two by four.  These sites collect email addresses for
> spammers.  One of my wife's relatives gave her address to one of
> these criminal organizations, and now she (with one email address)
> is gettimg more spam than I get with a half-dozen.   And that is
> AFTER grey-listing and Spamassassin; at the front end, she must be
> getting three or four spams a minute.  Time to re-tune Spamassassin.

On Mon, May 08, 2006 at 02:26:38PM -0700, AthlonRob wrote:
> I hate those online greeting cards because they suck...
> 
> Long ago I decided hiding my email address was a waste of time.  Spammers
> are going to get my address eventually... why try and delay the
> inevitable?
> 
> So I put it out there all over the place and don't care if it lands on
> spammers' lists.
> 
> I believe if your spam fighting technique relies on hiding your email
> address from spammers, you're going to find yourself in a world of hurt
> when the spammers DO get your address (as you can probably testify to
> today).

Good point, but there is no single magic bullet for spam.  You should
obscure your address, AND use greylisting, AND block IPs, AND use
blacklists, AND use Spamassassin, AND pay ninjas to track down and
kill spammers, AND ... Er, uh, forget the last one.  :-)

If your address is widely released, there will be more spam passing
through all the other filtering steps, finally reaching Spamassassin. 
Tuning Spamassassin becomes increasingly difficult as you try to
make it more accurate;  spam that has been carefully crafted to make
it through all the filters is likely to also be carefully crafted to
survive Spamassassin.  The knowledge of you gathered by the online
greeting card process ("oh, so they know Fred at fredfoo at fum.com")
will help that automatic crafting process.

Again, this is all a matter of percentages.  My server is getting
about 30 spam attempts a minute, and about 3 per day make it through
all the filtering steps to reach me.  My wife is now getting 4 per
day.  It does not help matters if indiscriminate spreading of email
addresses turns the 30 spams per minute into 40.  We both publish
our email addresses publically in select venues, but the spammers
will have to do at least some work to find them.  I do not want to
make their task any easier by handing the email addresses to them
on a silver platter.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs



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