Defeating SPAM (Was ADV: International Trade)

From: Jerome Fine <jhfine_at_idirect.com>
Date: Thu Mar 7 21:40:06 2002

>James B. DiGriz wrote:

> No, I don't spam, of course not. There are people dumb enough of course
> not to know yet that spamming is moronic and counterproductive as a
> business practice, and there will be until everyone has been on the net
> for some time, and there are also people who think it's a clever way to
> annoy people.

Jerome Fine replies:

I will shortly be shifting to my "newer" system and changing ISP at the
same time, so a change of e-mail address is necessary. My new address
will be <jhfinepw4z_at_compsys.to> (just in case anyone is interested).
The four characters preceding the 'at' will be chosen at random and
changed whenever I become annoyed enough with the volume of spam.

While any e-mail address I use in the future will be active and can be
replied to at the time, if anyone in the future wants to reply or contact
me after the four characters preceding the 'at' have been retired, they
can replace them with the four digits of the current year. I have not
finalized this as yet, so if anyone can see a flaw in this arrangement,
please advise. I calculated the number of different combinations of
four random alphanumeric characters at over a million (36 ** 4).

In case anyone is wondering, I will be using Windows 98 second
edition with Netscape V4.78 and with multiple user ids activated.
While it took a couple of days to figure out, I will have ONLY ONE
set of mail files and one set of newsgroup files. I will still need a
different set of settings files for each user id - I have not figured that
part out as yet - it is probably either impossible or not worth the
extra effort.

Just an observation. If most people adopted a similar method,
only a tiny fraction of spam would ever get delivered to those
individuals. I realize that it will be a bit inconvenient when I
switch e-mail addresses, but the default semi-permanent
e-mail address will hopefully take care of that.

Based on all the comments I have seen about spam, I hope that
the above will be of interest.

Sincerely yours,

Jerome Fine
Received on Thu Mar 07 2002 - 21:40:06 GMT