[VoIP] OT- Spam

[David Josephson]

Jayson Smith wrote:
> Hi all,
>
>      I am getting fed up with spam. A few weeks ago, I apparently got added
> to somebody's mailing list. All of a sudden, I started getting many, many
<snip>

A lot of questions there, but we've all been there, so you'll get 
sympathy. I have been posting stuff on the internet for more than ten 
years, so I'm on a lot of spam lists -- I  get about 1,000 a day, most 
of which are dropped at my server.

To answer the last question first, no, there isn't any way to get back 
to the spammers. It's counterproductive to send them anything, because 
all you do is confirm that they have reached you, which means your 
address is now verified and therefore worth more.

The easiest spam filters are built in to email programs like 
Thunderbird. Most of these support blacklisting, whitelisting, pattern 
matches and all sorts of variants. You have to spend some time training 
the program. The inherent problem with this approach is that you still 
have to download the whole message from the server if you want the 
filter to read it.

The best filters run on your mail server, and filter your mail before it 
ever gets to your inbox. All of the various methods you described can be 
applied, but you need your own server. I use "SpamBouncer" 
(www.spambouncer.org) which was written by Catherine Hampton, who seems 
to have stopped working on it about a year ago, but it works fine. It is 
very processing-intensive and can slow a server down if you get a lot of 
mail. It uses a weighted average according to how spammy it thinks a 
message is, and is very smart about how it works. Another popular 
alternative of the same sort but written in perl, is SpamAssassin. I 
will probably switch to SpamAssassin if SpamBouncer continues without 
updates for much longer. The fellow who runs the first ISP I used, 
rahul.net, uses SpamAssassin.

Spamcop and other blacklists are useful against a certain type of 
spammer, but not against all, especially not against spambot sources 
which come from random hijacked machines.

There are SpamAssassin-type filters that go into your mailbox and read 
your mail, and delete or move messages into spam folders. They can run 
on the same machine where you read your mail or on another machine 
anywhere -- the mail server doesn't know the difference between these 
programs moving your mail around and you doing it yourself. Some of my 
friends use Spamihilator http://www.spamihilator.com which is one of 
these and seems to work OK, and is free.

Having a bunch of different email addresses doesn't help anymore, you 
just get more spam. For a while I kept a list of about 50 and could 
figure out where the spammers had gotten my name from. Then I realized 
it didn't matter, the solution was the same anyway, and now I got 
multiple copies of each spam, addressed to different accounts.

There is another nasty approach that some of my friends use. Some other, 
mutual, friends refuse to email the friends who use this software, so 
beware. This is also software that runs on the mail server, and it only 
allows mail from people on your whitelist. You can add names to your 
whitelist, and it automatically bounces a mail back to the sender if the 
sender isn't on the whitelist. The bounce mail has a simple 
click-to-confirm response so a human can manually add him or herself to 
your whitelist and get the message through in a few minutes, but a lot 
of people are wary of clicking any links in emails. You can read all 
about this at http://tmda.net

Cheers

David Josephson