[Lowfer] spamming

[John Davis]

I don't believe the spam you are receiving is a direct consequence of
signing up for the RSGB reflector, Eric.  This group has been remarkably
free of spam coming in through the list since the posting policy changes
were made several weeks ago.  I warmly congratulate and thank all those
responsible!

Any time a person's e-mail address appears in machine-readable form in a
document on a server anywhere on the Internet, it WILL eventually be
harvested and placed on spam lists.  The lowfer@qth reflector is more likely
the means by which your address got in the system, as it were, simply
because you've been here longer.

The problem with rejecting entire domain names is that some of them are
perfectly valid and used by a high percentage of the people from whom you do
want to hear.  Take aol.com, for instance.  You may not receive the copy of
*this* message that I sent through RSGB if you reject the AOL domain name in
the From field, because it was sent from my AOL account.  Thirty million of
us use AOL for at least part of our e-mail needs, including several members
of both reflectors.  Unlike Microsoft's Hotmail subsidiary, AOL really is
serious about not allowing its users to spam.  The vast majority of junk
e-mails with aol.com in the From field or even the Return field are just
plain falsified.

And while it is true that a lot of junk mail does come from Taiwan, and you
may not have any correspondents who live there, I think (by contrast) you'll
find a lot of members of the RSBG list have addresses ending in .de, who
would dispute that "these domains are only good for spamming."

Wouldn't want to throw out the baby with the bath water.  :)

John




>Hi,
>
>Several weeks ago I signed up for the blacksheep LF reflector.  Even
>before receiving actual reflector mail I started getting spam.  I've
>considered employing some sort of filter, but that is not my style.
>
>Instead, I've merely directed my sendmail daemon to reject email from such
>pseudo-ISPs as aol.com, geocities.com, verizon.net, domains ending in .de
>or .tw, etc, etc.  These are all domains that are only good for spamming.
>
>I will be tuning this over time.  I apologize in advance if any of you who
>mail me directly receive any ugly automated messages from my mail server.
>
>Regards,
>Eric
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>From the Lowfer mailing list
>Send messages to: Lowfer@mailman.qth.net
>To sub/unsub visit: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/lowfer