Re: Are SA User's ALL Idiots?
From: Vanguard (rztqf6v02-nix_at_sneakemail-nix.com)
Date: 08/31/03
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Date: Sun, 31 Aug 2003 04:16:41 GMT
"wlcna" <wlcna@nospam.com> wrote in message
news:Qpd4b.17283$Ih1.6303765@newssrv26.news.prodigy.com
> <snip>
> I'd say a perhaps better solution is further work on development of a
> large community of users that together agree to do one thing:
> systematically block emails from *entire blocks* of IP addresses
> owned by ISPs that allow spam to continue.
Kinda sounds like SpamNet (that I don't use anymore) in which the
community of e-mail users use report and vote on whether or not an item
was spam. The premise here is that you hope more non-spammers vote on
the e-mail as spam than spammers voting that it isn't spam.
The concept of blocking IP addresses is already in place with DNSBLs
(DNS blacklists) which products like SpamPal (which I use now) uses to
determine if a message is spam or not based on *where* it originated.
Problem here is that someone can end up on a DNSBL who isn't a spammer
but someone on their ISP is; i.e., you get penalized because of some
other user of your same ISP. I've found that my sister's ISP got on a
blacklist so her e-mails to me look like spam (presuming that I haven't
whitelisted her). Her ISP soon got the blacklists to narrow down their
IP range and maybe they killed the spammer's account (which means
blacklisting works to pressure ISPs to kill spammers). Sometimes the
off-hand and uneducated response is that the sender move to a different
ISP. Works okay if you have a choice of dial-up providers in your area
but is not a valid solution for those using cable or DSL access since it
is rare that there is more than one such provider in that user's area.
Some blacklists get really carried away. If, for examply, you subscribe
to Rhyolyte's list, you end up blocking all e-mails from almost all free
webmail providers. SPEWS was a bit too agressive for me, too,
especially since they never could be contacted, their algorithms would
change without notice, and basically they never produced any
qualifications for their history of actions regarding the blockage of an
IP block (and you couldn't tell much from their status record for a
block as to what specific actions they took to coerce an ISP or rectify
their error or *when* these events occurred). Still, spammers don't
like those DNSBLs and there have been several DDoS attacks against
several of the list providers.
Regardless of which technique is used, you still get false positives.
This means you still need to occasionally monitor the "hold" list but
presumably you only look at the headers to find the e-mails that you
want to get and to thereafter exclude or whitelist from the suspect
e-mails. The auto-whitelist feature in SpamPal has some value in trying
to whitelist your good senders but some users have reported flaws in its
algorithms; I'm still waiting to see when it auto-whitelists a "bad"
sender for me. Although SpamPal is handy for identifying most of the
spam that I receive, I still use its Bayesian plug-in to historically
statistically weight the words within an e-mail to catch spam that
emanates from yet-to-be-detected spam sources. Their HTML-Modify
plug-in strips out the nasties in HTML-formatted e-mails, while the
Quarantine plug-in lets me keep an archived copy of the spam-tagged
e-mails in case HTML-Modify makes an e-mail unusable, like when
receiving a billing confirmation from an online order that has graphics
or is otherwise dependent on the HTML coding that HTML-Modify stripped
out. Now I have to come up with a script to expire those auto-archived
quarantined messages so they don't sit around too long on my disk and
waste space.
Although I am now using SpamPal and its plug-ins (all free), I'm still
looking around for that magic bullet, well-integrated, and easy-to-use
product that eliminates the spam but not any good e-mails and doesn't
infuriate my senders with challenges and require them to send another
e-mail or spews "challenge spam" onto innocents. I can spray my house
to wipe out most of the bugs but I cannot so poison it that it becomes
unlivable. So far, and without anything superlative to replace it, I've
settled on SpamPal and its plug-ins. When I find something better in
its anti-spam shielding AND ease-of-use AND without assaulting other
e-mail users then I'll switch to that. I've tested the freebie
solutions but next are to check out the demos for the stuff you have to
pay for (as long as it isn't crippled). Sure beats watching the boob
tube.
-- ____________________________________________________________ ** Share with others. Post replies in the newsgroup. ** If present, remove all "-nix" from my email address. ____________________________________________________________
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