I use a hotmail account for situations as you've described. Just the other
day, I got a chilly little notice from them indicating that they were about
to purge a few of my files because I had a lot of stuff there. I had, on
that day, received 76 new emails, of which 72 were spam. 6 of those were
spam with sender addresses within HOTMAIL. I figure they can't be doing
much to discourage spamming if they go right ahead and forward what they
obviously recognize as having counterfeited their own domain into the sender
address.
Hotmail has a destination, i.e. abuse_at_hotmail.com, to which you're
encouraged to send your complaints, particularly in the form of uncommented
forwarded spam, complete with headers. Now, I don't know that they DO
anything, but you'll get this neat little reply from them, indicating that
they do a bunch of stuff to discourage spamming via their facilities. They
also tell you that some folks counterfeit their domain as a sender address,
and how you can tell it's a counterfeit address, etc.
What I think would help would be if the domain from which spam originated
were blocked from sending email, particularly for the larger concerns whose
income/existent is dependent on large volumes of mail, etc, THEY would take
steps to prevent it. If it were simply made impossible to send the same
message to more than one destination address, that would help, as would
disallowing sending the same message twice.
I'm not an expert, and I don't doubt that the spammers will find another way
to do the same thing. What disturbs me is that they're chewing up bandwidth
that we're all eventually going to have to pay for in one way or another,
most probably by paying for internet bandwidth the way we pay for long
distance phone service. Now, that would help get rid of those annoying
little 800KB "greeting cards" of which those little old ladies like to send
thousands a day, but the spammers would still chew up the bandwidth.
Regulation is an ugly thing, and it's not likely that the sort of regulation
that people in the US come up with will help anything. They're always
trying to legislate good sense, particularly the folks living near the San
Andreas fault, who are apparently the world leaders in this. It's not their
domain alone, however. The type of regulation that will come about as a
result is likely to be the sort of regulation that folks like Adrianna
Huffington promote, i.e. don't let anybody put anything out on the internet
just in case my little kid might stumble into something I don't want him/her
to see. They are overreacting, aren't they? Gawd! I have never run into a
nudie by accident, and, quite frankly, I can't even find decent ones when I
want to!
Nevertheless, it would be nice to watch the halftime show at the superbowl
and see them take the 100 worst spammers and slowly dip them into a solder
pot.
<end of rant>
Dick
-----Original Message-----
From: Christian Fandt <cfandt_at_netsync.net>
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
<classiccmp_at_u.washington.edu>
Date: Tuesday, November 23, 1999 12:22 PM
Subject: Re: Own Your Own Internet Store
>Upon the date 12:29 PM 11/23/99 +0000, sports111opp_at_hotmail.com said
>something like:
>
><rudely intrusive HTML msg snipped>
>
>Could these guys have sent this as a vindictive attempt at getting back at
>us for your good attempt at LARTting them Bruce? If so, *really* LART them
>next time :-) But that Hotmail account helps to make them a bit invisible
>I think. BTW, you asked u.wash to try to limit access to the list only to
>those who are subscribers. I hope they don't take the simple route and
>simply bar any Hotmail-sourced messages from getting through. Some
>ClassicCmp subscribers could use Hotmail as a quick, simple email provider
>-especially if they're traveling, etc.
>
>Regards, Chris
>-- --
>Christian Fandt, Electronic/Electrical Historian
>Jamestown, NY USA cfandt_at_netsync.net
> Member of Antique Wireless Association
> URL: http://www.antiquewireless.org/
Received on Tue Nov 23 1999 - 14:35:15 GMT