On 22 Feb 2001, at 9:40, Edward Reid wrote:
> Oh, also beware of messages that say "are you my cousin"
Ok, with these you really should scan the message. For example, my wife
is working on her family lineage, and sometimes obtains email addresses
3rd or 4th hand. When she writes to the person, she takes the time to
explain who she is, what she is doing, and how this person might be related
into her family tree. In her case, the court house in a particular county
burned down in the early 1900's, taking all the county records with it,
including birth and death notices, old property transfers, etc. So to work
around this blockage she's had to go laterally on her family tree to find data,
sometimes contacting cousins 3 and 4 times removed.
> or "didn't we correspond about XXX recently". These are probes. If you
> respond, your address gets added to a list of "verified active" email
> addresses. This is naturally a more valuable, preferred list for the
> spammers.
>
> Edward Reid
I've set up certain items in my mailsorter to drop everything from certain
hosts (yahoo, hotmail, hinet, asiaweb frex) into my crap file, or from some
patterns (3 or more $ together, or more than 2 !). Then I provide an out for
legitimate readers -- if they include a certain magic phrase in the message or
headers it does not get dumped into the crap file. This phrase can be
something simple like "I am not spam" which you explain to the readers is
the magic phrase. Almost no spammers use this phrase, they often will say
'This message is not spam, it's a one time direct mailing yadda yadda'.
Since the spammers aren't really reading your FAQ or newsgroup, you are
fairly safe in including your magic phrase in a message sent to the
readership.
The internet, billions of electrons with nothing better to do.
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