Stripsearch

[s. keeling]

Incoming from Chris Fortune:
> > That's an accuracy of 99.87% and growing.
> 
> could this be the end of spam as we know it?

Poor assumption: spam doesn't get through, therefore spammers will
stop.  You wish!  This assumes spammers have more than two brain cells
to rub together.

On a personal POTS dialup account, I /dev/null more than a thousand a
week.  I auto-report non-APNIC related spam to spamcop.  The fact that
I never see the spam (I only see spamcop replies to auto-reported
spam) has no bearing on whether it'll continue to be sent.

Spam is equivalent to dandelions.  Their job is to spread.  It's not
impossible to remain free of them, but it does take time, energy, and
diligence.  Most victims don't have limitless amounts of all three.
Pull the flower off a dandelion, and what do the roots care?
Nothing.  They'll keep on doing their job, no matter what.  Three
days later, yet another flower.

Spam is a two-stage industry; those collecting victim email addresses,
and those (suckers) buying spamming collections from the collectors.
Kill a spammer's account and what have you done?  You've
inconvenienced a sucker.  You haven't had any effect on the stage-one
collectors.

The solution to spam is not to be found in killing spammers, nor in
protecting yourself from spam (however satisfying or valuable those
may be).

ObBF: Between agressive procmail recipes (APNIC IPs --> /dev/null) and
Spamassassin running on my ISP shell account, Bogofilter (running as
the last defence on my home box) has nothing to do.  Seldom does BF here
detect spam.  Most spam I receive is already reported, Spamassassin
(easily) detected spam (--> /dev/null).

The really smart spammers can always come up with spam generic enough
to slide by _once_, which is all the really smart spammers (suckers)
care about.  Those are the ones that get through.  Once.  About three
a week.

I often wonder how long my ISP is going to tolerate all that crap
coming at me.  It's all dutifully auto-forwarded to the ISP's spambox,
which is used to train SA.  But still, wouldn't it be simpler for them
to refuse to accept mail for someone like me who (apparently) goes out
of his way to attract so much crap?

I never see any spam.  So why is this so depressing?  Because, despite
the excellence of my defences, it just keeps on coming _anyway_.  My
procmail logfile is bloody depressing reading.

fsck.


[btw, APNIC related spam goes to /dev/null because (in my experience)
reporting it has had absolutely no effect whatsoever on the spammers'
accounts.] 


-- 
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
(*)    http://www.spots.ab.ca/~keeling      Please don't Cc: me.
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