Subject: [Asrg] Quotation

From: Hadmut Danisch <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2003 20:32:12 -0800

From http://www.emaildepot.net/, a commercial provider for
address lists for spamming:

   The 1,000,000 email addresses that we provide each week are general,
   non-targeted addresses, and are about 90% USA-based.  These are not
   opt-in addresses, but we have removed many of the flamers and
   trouble-makers from the lists. We run them all through our commercial
   grade verification programs to ensure deliverability. 

Lovely. Let's become "trouble-makers".

Hadmut
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From: [email-masked] (Justin Mason)
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2003 22:41:30 -0800

> Lovely. Let's become "trouble-makers".

Aha.  That explains something I've been wondering about.  Spammers are
often keen to get hold of the address of people who complain about spam;
hence the disguised email addrs in headers, HTML comments etc.
I assumed it was for "revenge" actions like joe-jobs.

In fact, it's to clean lists of "trouble-makers", to reduce abuse
complaints.

A good reason for us all to complain, then!

--j.

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From: Kee Hinckley <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2003 11:21:10 -0500

>In fact, it's to clean lists of "trouble-makers", to reduce abuse

That used to be true.  But I now get as much spam sent to 
abuse@domain-name as to any other address.  So some may be doing 
that, but it's certainly not the majority.
-- 
Kee Hinckley
http://www.puremessaging.com/        Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/   Writings on Technology and Society

I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
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From: mathew <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2003 09:32:09 -0500

> Lovely. Let's become "trouble-makers".

For a while, I would complain about every single spam. I'd track down 
the owner of the web site being advertised, and complain to their ISP. 
It worked quite well--at a time when other people I knew with 
well-known public e-mail addresses were getting 20-30 spams a day, I 
was getting 2-3.

I noticed that the spam I got was the real dregs, from folk with room 
temperature IQ. They'd send HTML as the body of a text/plain e-mail 
message, filled with spelling mistakes, advertising chest enlargement 
creams and other products only a really gullible moron would buy. So it 
seemed that by complaining, I filtered out the even-remotely-smart 
spammers.

However, over the last year or so, complaining simply stopped working 
as a strategy. There are too many spammers now who don't care how much 
trouble they cause, and too many morons. So now I get 60-80 pieces of 
spam a day, almost all so inept that SpamAssassin has no trouble 
filtering them out. I've yet to get a single false-positive, in fact.

mathew