Comments for Yes, it's getting worse.

Comment from David on 2006-11-14

2006-11-14T21:59:34Z

I agree. I`m also getting tons more of the foul stuff and I used to get virtually none. Whatever happened to legal moves to curb spam? Is there no deterrent these days? Perhaps a few draconian penalties might help. The swines who send this rubbish should have every appendage removed, very, very slowly!

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Comment from Russ Tully on 2006-11-13

2006-11-14T00:25:49Z

Spam is a real pain. My ISP does a pretty good job of filtering but some legit e-mails do get trashed in the process, perhaps a small price to pay for not having to slog through myriads of junk just to salvage one or two e-mails. I have found that changing my e-mail address is effective for a while anyway, although it is a royal pain!

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Comment from Thor Johnson on 2006-11-13

2006-11-13T15:01:38Z

There was something that was working... The Blue Frog. Unfortunately spamming/botnets are large-scale industries now, so BlueFrog found themselves posted as a target & the spammers were able to take out TypePad (!) and TuCows (!!!).

The project is slowly continuing as the okopippi project, but it isn't something that you can use *now*.

The war is big enough to take out large "unsuspecting" (Neither TypePad nor TuCows knew that they were going to be attacked... but both have *huge* pipes that are good enough for just about anything else) hosts. It would be interesting to see if they can take out *aware* hosts.

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Comment from Daniel Ullman on 2006-11-06

2006-11-06T22:37:32Z

All of the junk email that makes it pass my junk email filter are gifs. I simply set a filter to look for Content-Type: image/gif; in the body. Those are directed to trash but remain unread. A sort by sender and off they go.

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A comment on: Yes, it's getting worse.

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Comment from Leo Notenboom on 2006-11-05

2006-11-06T07:08:05Z

I actually agree that SMTP is weak, and a large part of the problem, technically. Just about any solution that allows for absolute sender verification would go a long way to helping. Problem is getting all th e player to agree on any standard.

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Comment from Mike on 2006-11-05

2006-11-06T03:33:56Z

I don't think we're ever going to find a solution to the spam problem if we continue our marriage to the SMTP protocol. In short SMTP is simply too trusting. It assumes all inbound messages are ok until there is reason to think otherwise. It needs to be tightened up.

I personally think we should switch to a token-based protocol. Let's say I want to send Leo a message. I type the email and send the message through my ISP's mail server. Instead of directly forwarding the message to Leo's email server, my server simply sends a "token," or a notification that there's a message waiting to be downloaded from my server. Leo decides he wants to read Mike's email and downloads it from my ISP's mail server. This would all be a behind-the-scenes process that would be as seamless as email reading is now.

This system would have some authentication built-in (Leo knows who the email comes from because he's downloading it from his server)..and it would be reversible (if Mike turns out to be a spammer, Mike's ISP pulls the plug on his mailbox AND all of the unread spam message he's sent out would also be deleted).

I'm keeping this short because I don't want to grandstand. But if you're interested, I've posted more ideas about why this would work in a blog post. http://occubola.com/blog/?p=43

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Comment from Peggy Champlin on 2006-11-05

2006-11-06T03:33:11Z

You might want to give SpamBayes a try: http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/. There's a plugin for Outlook. I get over 750 spam messages a day, so I need serious help!

This program learns from you what you consider spam and what you don't. It puts messages over a certain threshold in a Junk Email folder and messages it's not quite sure about in a Junk Suspects folder. There are Delete As Spam and Recover from Spam buttons installed on the SpamBayes toolbar, so it's really easy to train it on new types of messages.

I've been using it for almost 2 years now, and I get very little spam in my Inbox, some messages to check in my Junk Suspects box, and a ton of messages in my Junk Email box. I used to check the junk folder to make sure there weren't any false positives in there, but I never found any, so I don't look anymore. (I don't filter any messages at my webhost or ISP.)

As you can tell, I like it a lot. I can't even imagine not using it with all the garbage I get!

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A comment on: Yes, it's getting worse.

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