Anti-Spam Questions? (Was: A Special Announcement ...)

From: Richard Erlacher <edick_at_idcomm.com>
Date: Thu Jan 31 11:06:09 2002

What I do is use a HOTMAIL address as the address advertised for replies on
the usenet. The result is that HOTMAIL gets my usenet replies, which aren't
that many, and, since HOTMAIL already has bulk-mail filtering in place, it
finds bulk mailings and routes them to a "junk-mail" mailbox, which I can, if
I wish, peruse when I have time, or, it automatically ages and then dumps them
after two weeks. It's not perfect, but it's pretty useful. Moreover, you can
see what sorts of things fall through their spam filters and subsequently
"block" them from your primary mailbox. That way, you eventually get rid of
some of them. Unfortunately, the email tools provided by HOTMAIL are rather
lame, but it's that or have the extra distraction on my other email accounts.

Of course, one big problem with spam filtering is that the spammers only use
each email address once. The consequence is that blocking them does
absolutely no good.

Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jerome Fine" <jhfine_at_postoffice.idirect.com>
To: <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2002 9:23 AM
Subject: Re: Anti-Spam Questions? (Was: A Special Announcement ...)


> >Clint Wolff (VAX collector) wrote:
>
> > When I was with Qwest.net, I received very little spam, but I also gave
> > my email address to very few companies, and NEVER posted to Usenet with
> > it (even spam-ified)...
>
> Jerome Fine replies:
>
> Well, Usenet is where I would like to be able to have individuals respond
from.
> Can anyone suggest how to set up an e-mail address that can be easily
> modified with human instructions of a few words, but is not able to be
> mined by a spam search program? I could probably add 4 extra random
> letters to my name (in front of the _at_) and have them replaced by the 4
digits
> for the year (2002) and change that every year as required. The fall back
> to the year would only be used when the 4 random character version is
> deactivated due to too much spam. Has anyone ever tried this method?
>
> Or the 4 extra random characters could always be fake?
>
> > When I switched to Earthlink, my mailbox was full of spam before I even
> > got the DSL line connected. I turned on their 'Spaminator' filter, and
> > haven't received any since. YMMV.
>
> Does that mean that Earthlink was "selling" your e-mail address?
>
> > Since most of these people are sending email out to a CDROM full of
> > addresses, playing dead doesn't help. I occasionally get junk mail at
> > work that lists a few other addresses, and one had two of MY old
> > addresses from 10 years ago.
>
> What will happen when junk e-mail to dead addresses accounts for
> 99% of all e-mail traffic? Is there any way that the source for every
> e-mail could be made a part of the internet protocol? That would be
> required as the first step in stopping unsolicited e-mail messages.
>
> Sincerely yours,
>
> Jerome Fine
>
>
Received on Thu Jan 31 2002 - 11:06:09 GMT