Re: *** ADMIN: Spam

John:

Checkbook business decisions are the way to go of course. But there's a minor 
technical clarification.

It is not true that spam will only arrive if the list or whatever has been 
mined. Spam e-mail can arrive without any list mining nor newsgroup mining nor 
purchased databases of e-mail addresses. Case in point:

I had an ISP account for a year or two where I _NEVER_ used the e-mail. I had 
other e-mail accounts and simply didn't need it. Eventually, I decided to put 
it to use and I configured Netscape Messenger for it. Upon the very first 
access, I had some 600 spam e-mails waiting for me. There had never been any 
reference to that address anywhere.

After a bit of research I learned that some spam programs are available that 
_generate_ various reasonable addresses to send to. If there's no reply back 
from the server saying that the address is no good, then the generated address 
is kept... and added to address databases for sale, etc., etc.

The point is simply that you can get spam no matter how careful you are and it 
might not be anyone's fault (except the spammer). And that's where the 
checkbook decisions are important.

I also recommend forwarding _ALL_ spam immediately to utc@ftc.gov just to make 
sure that the federal spam database gets updated and used.

Tom Liotta

midrange-l-request@midrange.com wrote:

>From: "John Earl" <john.earl@powertechgroup.com>
>
>David,
>
>The easiest way for us to "complain with our budgets" is to publish a list
>of known spamming companies.  They are easy enough to spot, just post a
>couple of messages to the list with an email address that has never been
>used anywhere else.
>
>Any direct email that is received to that account is sent from a spammer who
>mines this list.  A "hall of shame" page on midrange.com would then be in
>order.
>
>jte
>
>--
>John Earl - CTO
>The Powertech Group Inc. Seattle, Washington
>www.powertechgroup.com  john.earl@powertechgroup.com
>
>Phone: +1-253-872-7788
>Fax:      +1-253-872-7904
>--
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "David Gibbs" <david@midrange.com>
>To: <midrange-l@midrange.com>
>Sent: Wednesday, August 14, 2002 7:06 PM
>Subject: *** ADMIN: Spam
>
>
>> Folks:
>>
>> It's come to my attention that some AS400 / iSeries vendors have, once
>> again, been mining midrange.com mailing lists for email addresses.
>>
>> Unforunately, often there is nothing I can do to stop this unless there is
>> clear indication of the identify of the subscriber.
>>
>> My suggestion is two fold ...
>>
>> 1. Complain with your budgets ... simply refuse to do business with the
>> vendor in question.
>>
>> 2. Complain to the vendors ISP.  A good resource for this is
>www.spamcop.net.
>>
>> I am investigating a way to completely spam-proof all messages on the
>> mailing lists ... it won't be a perfect solution, but it will be
>> adequate.  Unforunately, it's also not very easy ... so it will take quite
>> some time to implement.  For those of you interested, it will be based on
>> the Tagged Message Delivery Agent (TMDA).  Information can be found at
>> http://tmda.net.

--
Tom Liotta
The PowerTech Group, Inc.
19426 68th Avenue South
Kent, WA 98032
Phone  253-872-7788
Fax    253-872-7904
http://www.powertechgroup.com



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