Re: Dealing with spam
Coyt D. Watters (watters.10@osu.edu)
Wed, 23 Apr 1997 16:40:21 -0500
> Well, I personally dislike the idea of intentionally posting
> anything to USENET with munged headers (particularly when posting an
> FAQ), because I believe in adhearing to the RFC and posting with a
> valid return address. Also, I find that the value of the replies
> that I've received to the FAQ and to my regular postings far
> outweighs the nusiance of receiving spam messages.
>
> Personally, I use procmail to send 'make money fast' stuff to
> /dev/null, and to bounce back anything from cyberpromo.com or
> savetrees.com back to about ten or fifteen different (valid)
> addresses at cyberpromo.com. I've recently done the same for the
> cyber-broadcasting.com domain. For me, that takes care of maybe 80%
> of the junk that I receive; as for the rest, I usually call up the
> 'Administrative Contact' listed in whois for the originating site
> (which may not be the same as the domain listed in the From: header,
> due to intenional address forgeries), and complain about spam coming
> from their site. I've actually received helpful responses from a
> couple of sites (most notably, bigger.net) after doing this. I
> figure that it costs me less than a quarter to make the phone call,
> and it's well worth it, considering what I'd have to pay to upgrade
> my disk space and CPU to handle a massive increase in spam messages.
I have just been forwarding the SPAMs to the postmaster at the site
in question, and the next two sites up in the chain between the
spammer and me. At least a few spammers have been slowed down by
having their uplinks go away.
I have also been pulling complete copies (including headers) to paper
of cash SPAMs and mailing them to the Postal Inspector for my region.
Since the Post Office and FBI are starting to really look at
Internet Fraud, I figure while they're at it they should maybe lean
on some of these Ca$h spammers.
FWIW, I only get 5-10 Spams a week typically, about half of them
clueless (i.e a REAL email address) cash spams, the others are
savetrees etc.
-Coyt
"The Internet - It's only electrons..."