Spammed I am... (re-titled) (1 Viewer)

[StevenFC]

I decided to fight back against spam today, so I wanted to use an email address that was created when I first got my internet account a couple of years ago.

Well, the spammers got the last laugh on me with that one. 1034 messages and 7 viruses waiting for me. So much for using that address. Five minutes. That's all I want. Five minutes alone with one of those punks to express my displeasure.

 

[Greg*go]

I guess your mailbox was full then.

 

[SethH]

Did you guys see the article about postage for e-mail? Apparently some big shots in the industry, Gates included, are fighting for a "postage" for e-mail. It wouldn't cost anything, but would require something like a ten-second waiting period for each e-mail, so that would be very little time to normal users, but spammers who send out thousands/millions of messages would be very disrupted by it.

 

[Glenn Overholt]

You mean like only being able to send out 1 email every 10 seconds? That would be super! Where can I sign up?

Glenn

PS - can we include ISP's on this?

 

[Wayne Bundrick]

Spammers would just increase the number of servers to distribute the load.

Hell, they already have, if we are to believe that spammers are responsible for the latest worm viruses that turn infected PCs into distributed attack zombies.

 

[Seth--L]

Gates has also suggested requiring people to flat-out pay for each piece of email that they send .

I've personally had a lot of luck with spam filters, especially the one in the latest version of Eudora. Out of the 100+ spam messages I receive a day, only one or two make it into my in-box.

Spam is the unfortunate result of a free mail system. I think it would be best to just let things stay status-quo. The more you fight spam, the more the fundamental nature of email will change (there probably will be a very real push to charge postage for email in a few years, and people will use spam to help argue that policy).

 

[Gabriel_Lam]

Yeah, it just kills me. I get roughly 800-900 pieces of spam on an average day (up to 5000 on a bad day).

Get yourself some sort of spam filter. They definitely help.

 

[Wayne Bundrick]

Microsoft has numerous irons in the fire here. Another one of their ideas is "EMail Caller ID" which will go a long way toward eliminating falsified From: headers. The receiving mail server will use DNS to get a list of the IP addresses of the computers that are authorized to send email from the domain given in the From: header. If the sending mail server is on the list, it's okay, if not, it's probably spam (and it's probably in violation of the Can Spam Act for falsifying its origin). Microsoft's idea is just a patent-encumbered version of the existing SPF system (see http://spf.pobox.com ). Leave it to Microsoft to add their own shit to an open standard instead of just endorsing it.

 

[Wayne Bundrick]

I've had very good results using the POPfile proxy to filter my mail.

 

[Gabriel_Lam]

I have the old free beta of Cloudmark, which integrates directly into outlook. If anyone wants the file to try out, just email me.