[PLUG] Reporting SPAM (was Using spamassassin's tagging...)

B. Thoen bthoen at gisnet.com
Fri Oct 17 09:43:02 UTC 2003


On Fri, 17 Oct 2003, Paul Johnson wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 17, 2003 at 08:11:26AM -0600, B. Thoen wrote:
> > Reporting it either costs me money or takes up too much time, which are 
> > both resources I don't want to spend on this irritating practice. I tried 
> > reporting it once upon a time, but the results proved it doesn't have any 
> > measurable effect. My SPAM load is still increasing.
> 
> Give it two months before passing judgement about whether or not
> reporting works.  What, you thought it was going to happen overnight?
> 

One only has to look at the spam statistics (see 
http://www.raingod.com/angus/Computing/Internet/Spam/Statistics/) to 
realize that efforts like SpamCop are not getting the job done. 
They're not even making a dent in the load.  Pretty soon, people with 
small personal servers (like me) are going to be getting so much spam that 
it will look the same as a permanent DDoS attack.

I think we need to get rid of anonymous e-mail for starters. If such a
system could be set up, I think I'd shut down sendmail and use the new
service. It's the same thing as abandoning Usenet for private,
spam-excluded mailing lists. Then people can choose to use a secure mail
system or stick with the chaotic anarchy of the current system.

In the old days, the anarchy was great, but then you had to learn the lore 
to join the tribe. Now any idiot can get into the game, and there's too 
many. You can't fight massed ignorance head-on. Best to just step aside 
and let it blunder into some other obstacle. But we need a choice; right 
now we don't have much, and it doesn't take a genius to see the 
catastrophe coming.

- Bill Thoen






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