Re: [OT] Verification required?
Re: [OT] Verification required?
- Subject: Re: [OT] Verification required?
- From: Walter Ian Kaye <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 28 Dec 2003 18:18:53 -0800
At 06:04p -0500 12/28/2003, Graff didst inscribe upon an electronic papyrus:
I simply use Mail.app and its junk filter.
I wrote my own spam filter in Perl. It runs on my ISP account, and
deletes 99% of incoming spam. Spam accounts for about 90% of my
incoming mail (measured in bytes; I'll eventually add real
statistical reporting to my script. Since the spam is removed before
downloading, my client app (Eudora) doesn't even see it.
I wrote it out of frustration, as I'm sure many programs are written. ;)
This works since I only get a dozen or so spam a day between my 3
e-mail accounts. I've had these addresses for about 5 years or so.
Why so low? I never give my real e-mail address to any business
unless I am sure they won't resell it. I only give my e-mail
addresses to people I have met personally (online is fine as long as
it wasn't impersonal) and often.
That works for some people, and is an important general practice, but
will be *far* from sufficient for many others, such as myself.
I never read any of the stupid e-cards that friends and family send
to me, those sometimes serve as e-mail address collectors and
visiting the web address for the e-card verifies your e-mail address.
Which of those card services have "re-used" your email address?
Or are you only guessing?
I would say that if you are getting more than a couple of dozen spam
per day then cut your losses and get a new e-mail address.
Those of us with custom domain names cannot do that; there is no way
to prevent spammers from making up addresses like sales@, info@,
dev@, webmaster@, view@, and mangling addresses like webmaster@ into
bmastgr@ or walter@ into er@, and random addresses like
psufoiapsdy_czu@, etc.
Also, there is domain name spoofing such that spam appears to come
from us, and bounces for those spams or viruses (due to made-up
addresses) come back to us.
All of the junk mail services are merely stopgap measures. They
have some amount of success at the expense of flexibility and they
suffer from both false positives and false negatives.
Yeah, the trick is fine-tuning the threshholds. I set up my
server-side filter to do both 'delete' and 'trash' so the 100%-sure
spam gets destroyed and the not-so-sure messages go in the trash file
so I can retrieve the occasional false positive (one or two a month
[or more if I just screwed something up!]).
I have among the lowest volume of spam and I'm pretty sure its
because I just don't take any risks with my e-mail addresses.
And because you don't have your own domain names.
-boo
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