permaculture

[neshura <neshura@gmail.com>]

Just to speak up for the admin...
Spam isn't something you can blame on one list or your email being
publicly available on an archive website somewhere. The longer that an
address has been in continuous use, the greater the gross amount of
spam it will get -- email-list trading over time guarantees increasing
amounts of spam, even if you only gave out your email to a site that
one time eight years ago and now totally regret it.

Every time you use your email as a login on some site that has a fine
print privacy policy that you don't read, chances are quite good that
your email address will be sold or traded as a direct result. (I have
hordes of email addresses, many of which have been retired after
becoming unusable.)

It's no one's responsibility but your own to guard your address and
keep it private (i.e. don't use your real email as a registration for
any sites, bulletin boards, newsletters, discussion groups, or other
online services) if you don't want to get spammed. Ounce of
prevention, etc. etc. As far as cures, I don't work for gmail but I
will totally plug it too -- their spam prevention is good. I get no
more than 10 spam emails a day at most, and my gmail address is
plastered all over the net. I'd put their catch rate at 85%. I've
gotten all my family using it, and the difference between an
unfiltered mailbox from an uncaring ISP versus a gmail account is
night and day -- my mother was getting 100s of spam emails a day
before.

A not-quite-as-revelevant note though -- spam's an annoyance, but if
you find yourself on the receiving end of phishing emails, help out
the phishing-fighters and your fellow netizens by forwarding the
emails: http://www.antiphishing.org/report_phishing.html

Google WILL rule the world some day.

On 11/26/05, Lawrence F. London, Jr. <lfl@intrex.net> wrote:
> treaclemine@intranet.org wrote:
> > Good afternoon,
> >
> >       I'm no Unix sysadmin, but I do think that everyone has
> > a responsibility to make sure that _someone_ is blocking spam to their
> > email account.  If you do not have the expertise yourself, there are
> > plenty of people who can help you - and your ISP have an obligation to
> > do so.
>
> Your ISP can and will do that. Mine does and I have gottten a lot less spam 
> since they installed their blocking scripts.
>
>
> >       Part of my solution is separate email addresses, but not
> > everyone can do that, either.
> >
> >       The Internet is a powerful tool, so we need to take time to
> > make sure we are using it safely.
>
>
> I repeat, apart from bndwidth wasting and the fact that, short of what your 
> ISP removes upstream, the spam
> will have already arrived in your email before you can spot and delete it. 
> However you can quickly and painlessly
> locate, tag and very quickly delete it with software such as Mozilla's mail 
> client (Mozilla and Firefox/Thunderbird).
> On a scale of 1 to 10 this reduced the aggravation from 8 to .5.
>
> LL
>
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