| nettime's_intruder_alert on Thu, 13 Feb 2003 20:28:32 +0100 (CET) |
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| <nettime> spamfree-full digest [arrest x2, guderian, cramer, hwang, jett] |
ADV: Enjoy a spam-free inbox
Spam Arrest <info@spamarrest.com>
Spam Arrest <info@spamarrest.com>
Re: Okay, that does it -- Armageddon is too good for us
Carl Guderian <carlg@vermilion-sands.com>
Re: <nettime> Okay, that does it -- Armageddon is too good for us
Florian Cramer <cantsin@zedat.fu-berlin.de>
Re: admin note/RFC: 'antispam' services and nettime
Benjamin Geer <ben@beroul.uklinux.net>
Francis Hwang <sera@fhwang.net>
Re: Okay, that does it -- Armageddon is too good for us
"N Jett" <njett@hotmail.com>
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From: Spam Arrest <info@spamarrest.com>
To: Announcer <nettime-l@bbs.thing.net>
Subject: ADV: Enjoy a spam-free inbox
Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2003 03:14:44 -0800
You may remember recently sending an email to a Spam Arrest customer,
<...>
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From: Spam Arrest <info@spamarrest.com>
To: "nettime's_roving_reporter" <nettime@bbs.thing.net>
Subject: ADV: Enjoy a spam-free inbox
Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2003 03:14:44 -0800
You may remember recently sending an email to a Spam Arrest customer,
<...>
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Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2003 12:01:19 +0100
From: Carl Guderian <carlg@vermilion-sands.com>
Subject: Re: <nettime> Okay, that does it -- Armageddon is too good for us
It's the boiler room, squeezed out of meatspace into cyberspace. Telemarketers
used to sell a service to take you of national dial lists, claiming to have
the "kill codes." Spammers are one-person boiler rooms, and they pick up where
the modern boiler operation, studied in Stevenson's "Boiler Rooms and Other
Telephone Scams" (1998) left off.
For all that Extropian prattle over evolving into virtuality, it's the boiler
rooms that have truly achieved it.
Carl
Bruce Sterling wrote:
> *Why am I getting spam from Spam Arrest?
> Is mankind devoid of shame? -- bruces
<...>
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Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2003 16:11:24 +0100
From: Florian Cramer <cantsin@zedat.fu-berlin.de>
Subject: Re: <nettime> admin note/RFC: 'antispam' services and nettime
Am Donnerstag, 13. Februar 2003 um 00:57:02 Uhr (-0500) schrieb
nettime's_janitors:
> thoughts?
Nettimers looking for a working, non-intrusive spam filter should have a
serious look at SpamAssassin <http://spamassassin.org/>, a free software
tool (under the Perl Artistic License) available for Unix-like operating
systems and, in combination with a local POP3 proxy, for Windows
(see <http://mcd.perlmonk.org/pop3proxy/>). For MacOS X installation
instructions, see <http://rhumba.pair.com/ben/docs/sa.html>.
Among network administrators, SpamAssassin is widely considered the only
working solution against spam. As it is written in Perl, it creates
high CPU loads though and is a solution for client PCs rather than for
mail servers themselves.
On Unix-like operating systems, I would recommend using SpamAssassin in
conjunction with procmail, i.e. filter mailing lists through procmail
first and only the rest with SpamAssassin, like:
:0fw
| spamassassin
:0:
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
$HOME/Mail/junk
-F
--
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/
http://www.complit.fu-berlin.de/institut/lehrpersonal/cramer.html
GnuPG/PGP public key ID 3200C7BA, finger cantsin@mail.zedat.fu-berlin.de
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From: Benjamin Geer <ben@beroul.uklinux.net>
Subject: Re: <nettime> admin note/RFC: 'antispam' services and nettime
Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2003 10:10:38 +0000
On Thursday 13 February 2003 5:57 am, nettime's_janitors wrote:
> but a better solution, we think, is to automatically unsubscribe anyone
> subscriber who misconfigures a spam-blocking account. if the person values
> nettime (or any other affected list), then s/he can sort out the problem;
> if not, oh well.
As someone who administers a lot of lists, I agree completely. As the number
of subscribers (and lists) per list admin increases, the list admin simply
cannot scale well enough to sort out everyone's subscription and mail
delivery issues for them. I do my best, particularly when a subscriber
knows there's a problem, and writes to the admin address to ask for help. In
general, though, I think the only practical approach is to remind people to
heed the advice of RFC 1855 (Netiquette Guidelines) [1] -- 'It is your
responsibility to learn how the lists work' -- and to unsubscribe them when
you can't send them email because their Hotmail inbox is full, or when their
'I'm on vacation' message is spamming everyone who posts to the list, etc.
In practice, someone who cares about receiving mail from nettime will surely
notice that they haven't received any in a while, and will either suspect
that their spam filter is at fault, or at least ask the nettime moderators
for help.
I'd recommend putting something in the 'welcome to nettime' email, in all
caps with lots of asterisks around it, asking people to make sure that mail
from nettime will get through their spam filter.
You could even have two addresses for writing to the nettime admins: the
standard one, which would just send an auto-reply containing a nettime FAQ
(including the info about spam filters), and another, harder-to-find one for
people whose question isn't in the FAQ.
Ben
[1] http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1855.html
________________________________________________________________________
This email has been scanned for all viruses by the MessageLabs SkyScan
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________________________________________________________________________
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Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2003 07:43:47 -0500
From: Francis Hwang <sera@fhwang.net>
Subject: Re: <nettime> admin note/RFC: 'antispam' services and nettime
I'm not sure if this sort of solution will catch on, in the
long-term. I suppose if you're a casual net user who doesn't often
get contacted by strangers for legit reasons this is fine. But
anybody who has any significant online presence is bound to get
contacted by strangers for legit reasons -- hell, it happens to me at
least once a week -- and it seems really rude to me to tell them
"prove to me you're a human before I look at your message." If you're
really worried about it, do the tried-and-true solution of
maintaining two email addresses: one for people you know, the other
for the world-at-large. When you get a real email in your public
inbox, tell them about the private addresses. Easier than maintaining
a whitelist, that's for sure ...
On the level of list-maintenance, I'm not sure how much of an
annoyance this is. These verification emails probably get sent to the
Reply-To or From address -- which on Nettime as on many other lists,
should be the original poster, not the entire list. Which is Bruce
Sterling got the verification email for posting something to Nettime.
The Nettime folks themselves are probably receiving these emails when
they send out emails to the list directly, making digests or
announcements, directly.
Is it even technically possible for these businesses to even
whitelist a mailing-list? It's possible that their code may not have
accounted for this circumstance. For non-bulk-email, your code's
going to look at the Reply-To: or From: headers, since that's where
the interesting data is. But for mailing lists, the interesting info
is in the To: field, and they probably haven't bothered to account
for that. Sloppiness is everywhere.
I don't know if I would advise Nettime to unsubscribe people who use
these services. That's more unnecessary work for the admins. Instead,
it might be simply more effective to treat these messages as what
they are: Another form of spam. You don't attack spam personally, you
filter it. And you tell all your list subscribers how to filter it.
(If you're posting to a mailing list, you open yourself up to major
email-address harvesting anyway.)
This spam, luckily enough, will be much easier to filter than most
spam. It'll have consistent, non-forged headers. Ignoring it should
be a piece of cake.
Francis
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From: "N Jett" <njett@hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: <nettime> Okay, that does it -- Armageddon is too good for us
Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2003 07:41:12 +0000
Shame has been going out of fashion since at least the Enlightenment; and
isn't it doubly ironic that their spam has now been shared with all of us on
nettime? Rather effective at spreading itself... :) Not that I'm making
accusations - I was spammed with that Bush/Iraq as Nigerian Banking Scam and
forwarded it along to my coworkers. Strange days have found us.
njett - http://gogobot.blogspot.com
>*Why am I getting spam from Spam Arrest?
>Is mankind devoid of shame? -- bruces
<...>
Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE*
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