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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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On being part of the problem... 3 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • Complaining hasn't worked. Period.

    Bouncing hasn't worked. Period.

    Now we're trying to remove the economy of spam, by making sure the user never sees the spam. I think hitting the Spammers in the wallet is the only place they're going to take any notice.
    • I know complaining and bouncing haven't worked--the first are ignored, the second spoofed to bother some poor sucker somewhere else in the world. But making spam silently disappear on the end-user's machine doesn't help much either. The spammers don't give a damn if some of their spam gets filtered, as they expect almost all of it to be ignored anyway.

      The problem with the anti-spam software is it's actually taken away some of the disincentives that mail admins used to use. When AOL blacklists your IP address, none of your spam gets through and you notice that. When 90% of AOL users kick in anti-spam filters that means that 10% will not, and who cares that 90% of the work is wasted? These guys brag about million-message an hour delivery capabilities. Each one's so cheap that the silently tossed ones are irrelevant, especially as these weasels are looking at 0.0015% response rates anyway. Mail caught by spam filters is lost in the noise of mail deleted as spam anyway.

      Do I like and use anti-spam software? Heck yes. But using it has, ultimately, increased the spam load on my server rather than decreased it, which is why I want a bigger solution.

      • What I recommend is modifying qpsmtpd's spamassassin capabilities to reject rather than filter if you see a high scoring spam.

        I don't recommend this to everyone, as some people have mail that SpamAssassin scores rather highly, but for regular geeks it's probably a good idea.

        I do feel sympathy though. I know exactly what you mean. But I don't really have a solution yet. :-/
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