[PLUG] Email spam...

[Dave Clemans]

> ... It's frustrating, 
> anyone can sign you up for something where there seem to 
> be no rules that a content provider has to honor to get 
> you off their mailing lists.  ...

Spammer gangs are CONTINOUSLY taking email addresses found by their
dirty trick programs, and "laundering" them by submitting those
addresses to whatever site they can find.  That is the source of their
claims that they have hundreds of millions (or more; I saw a piece of
spam recently that claimed the con artist had 2.8 billion email
addresses, all of which were eager to receive msgs from the con
artists clients).

A few years ago a reporter (in the Seattle area, I think), followed up
one of the ads you occasionally see stuck up on telephone poles about
making money with your home computer.  The so called job he was given
was to register lists of email addresses with different sites.  He was
to be paid a few cents per address.

Spammer gangs also sign up for mailing lists (like the ones associated
with sourceforge projects, etc.) and try to use their membership status
to get a list of members.  They then add those addresses to their ill
gotten lists, trade them back and forth to try to hide their origin,
sign them up for lists so they can claim you've "opted in", etc.

That's just a small bit of my rants on spam....

More related to the the original message, you can try blocking senders
using your firewall, but you could easily hit capacity problems.  It's
better to block using sendmail, postfix, etc. access lists.

I currently have almost 8000 ip addresses, email addresses, domains and
sub-domains blocked because spammer gangs have used them to "try" to
send junk to me.  The list grows on average by at least 10-20 a week.

dgc