This is new...

From: Bruce Lane <kyrrin_at_jps.net>
Date: Tue Apr 14 09:22:45 1998

At 06:05 14-04-98 -0700, you wrote:

>This is new. Just brought the uVAX up again. I sent ONE message to Usenet
>mentioning the address.
>I now made it to some luser's spam list!

        <snip>

>The question is, just out of curiosity, when did Usenet deteriorate to the
>point that spamming started?

        Uhhhh... where have you been? ;-)

        The spam problem on Usenet has been going on for at least the last three
years. It happened shortly after NSF lifted the ban on commercial traffic
and the 'net became better known to the public. Sure enough, a bunch of
marketeers with more greed than brains saw Usenet as a vast new territory
instead of what it was intended to be.

        The spam started. It has been throttled back to a degree, thanks largely
to the efforts of the anti-spam crowd (consisting mainly of sysadmins), but
it is still there.

        Best advice I can give for posting to Usenet is to put a munged address in
the 'From' and 'Reply-To' fields. One of my faves is 'SpamTrap_at_[127.0.0.1]'

        Then, put your real address as a phrase in the text body of the message,
along with some special characters inserted. Example:

        kyr{rin} a-t j[p]s <d>ot n=e=t

        Perfectly readable to a human, gibberish to a spam-bot (those nasty little
cyber-bugs that crawl around the newsgroups harvesting addresses).

>Was it around the time AOL let people on Internet? :)

        Actually, the AOL crowd is more often chosen as a target than the
experienced folk.


-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Bruce Lane, Sysop, The Dragon's Cave BBS (Fidonet 1:343/272)
(Hamateur: WD6EOS) (E-mail: kyrrin_at_jps.net)
"Our science can only describe an object, event, or living thing in our own
human terms. It cannot, in any way, define any of them..."
Received on Tue Apr 14 1998 - 09:22:45 BST