SPAN style="DISPLAY: none" spams

[Tom Anderson]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tony L. Svanstrom" <tony at moon.pp.se>
> TA> to me, deleting all HTML is the ugliest possible hack.
>
> Come on, I almost want to call troll on that one...

Whatever...

> If you were to get a (snailmail) envelope with 1 page containing all the 
> data
> that you want, and then, in the same envelope, the same data but on 10 
> pages
> and in a format making it harder for you to "access" it (read, understand, 
> work
> with etc); then you wouldn't think twice about discarding those unwanted 
> 10
> pages.

I wouldn't want to receive Time magazine as black-and-white, single-spaced, 
unformatted 8.5x11 sheets stapled together.

> I bet they're happier than a lot of us, but... If you seriously compare
> wanting my text- messages to be just text-messages with living without
> electricity (which a lot of amish use, in a limited way) then you're just 
> an
> [insert friendlier version of the word "idiot" here].

Actually, I think the analogy works quite well, and no, Amish do not use 
electricity.  If they do, they are Mennonite, not Amish.  You specifically 
said, "...we'll of course see a lot more spam using flash, java and even MP3 
to get their message to the user.  The more fancy stuff we allow in our 
e-mails, the easier we'll make it for the (future) spammers to play the 
evolution game".  If directly advocating against the advancement of 
technology is not analogous to Luddites or Amish, I don't know what is.  I'm 
not saying that I want to receive Java in my email, but I'm not going to 
rule out anything.  Maybe MP3 emails (voice mails) will be very useful.  In 
fact, if I could get my cellphone voicemails in my email inbox, that'd be 
awesome.  You can't just make a blanket statement that this or that will be 
useful or unuseful.  It just stifles innovation.  The Luddites believed that 
industrialization would eliminate jobs and make everyone poor, but I would 
argue for just the opposite.  Most of what we enjoy in the world today is 
due to industrialization.  Maybe HTML emails aren't of the same caliber, but 
maybe they are.  You can't just say, that's it, no more innovation, what 
we've got now works well enough, I don't want anything new.  If you do, 
you're a Luddite.

> TA> Mozilla works fine for me.  I don't get any popups.
>
> Bad news for ya here, you're not the whole world.

Yeah, too bad the whole world doesn't learn to use Firefox instead of IE.

> TA> Sooner if any of the M$ propaganda about Longhorn/Vista is true (BTW, 
> buy
> TA> MSFT while it's cheap).
>
> You're trusting Microsoft to save the Internet from some of it's 
> problems... I
> think it's best said in the Fish Licence-sketch (Monty Python): "You are a
> looney."

Nope, I'm not trusting Microsoft to do anything... I use Linux.  However, 
the security enhancements in IE7 and Windows Vista are coming along and 
they're almost on par with Linux and Mac OSX.  Given this, fewer spyware and 
viruses will be able to penetrate new systems (as of 2006 whenever it starts 
getting deployed) and maintain the armies of zombies currently used for 
spamming.  When this happens, the spam problem will be greatly diminished if 
not entirely eliminated.  Spam rarely originates from servers anymore 
because they get shut down too quickly or added to blacklists.  Ditto for 
open relays.  Most spam relies on worms and viruses.  Once that venue is 
largely removed, there's not much left.  And I'm not claiming that all worms 
and viruses will be eliminated, because that's simply not in the cards, but 
if there aren't enough compromised systems to make spamming profitable, the 
spammers will vacate that arena and leave it to the script kiddies again.

> TA> looking up spamvertized URLs in block lists.
>
> How? What tools/lists are you using for that?

http://orderamidchaos.com/bogofilter/stripsearch

multi.surbl.org
sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org

I only use these two lists since they already catch like 95% of the URLs. 
You could use more if you wanted though.  In the past 7 days, I received 3 
false negatives and 1 unsure out of over 500 messages.  Three of them were 
the same phishing scam.  I figure that when I'm only correcting one error 
every day or two, I no longer have a spam "problem".  It's just a slight 
nuisance like it was back in the early nineties when I just hit the delete 
button.

Tom