Re: News gateway problem

Alan Brown (alan@papaioea.manawatu.gen.nz)
23 Nov 1996 23:02:24 +1300


In article <199611170607.BAA18739@denali.ccs.neu.edu>,
Albert Cahalan <albert@ccs.neu.edu> wrote:

>I do NOT want my email address in any header. I am getting
>way too much spam, all of it because of this list. What is
>the mailing list for? It is to hide from the usenet spam.
>If spam was OK, we would just use a newsgroup and spare vger.

The list is not for spam avoidance. If it was it wouldn't be being
gatewayed into linux.dev.kernel.

FWIW, my standard response to spammage is to forward copies to the
postmaster at all sites in the headers, plus all sites mentioned in the
bodies, plus for professional spam outfits, their SOA holders and network
suppliers, plus the National Fraud Information centre
(nfic@internetmci.com, http://www.fraud.com)

I have about a 15% sucess rating at getting professional spam sites
disconnected from their suppliers and about 40% on spam accounts.

Other sucessful attacks on spammers is to throw mail at their
autoresponders looping to itself or back to the real spammer's address.

One professional spam site phoned me up from Canada and threatened to sue
me for crashing their autoresponders. My resonse was "See you in Court in
NZ". That was 6 months ago. He no longer has a network connection.

Mailbombing is crude but effective. UDP is even more effective - ask Prodigy.

Take a good look at the headers of spam received to the list. Odds are
you'll find that a lot of the spammage comes from dorks who think they're
posting to Usenet. This type of twit is easily shut down.

I currently get at least 20 pieces of spam mail a day. I respond to all
of it and volume received is going _down_ for me, not up. It used to be
more like 30 a day.

FWIW it's easy to add spam sites/addresses into a sendmail/qmail refuse
list and I'm suprised vger hasn't done this. Lists of spam sites are
posted regularly in various news admin groups.

AB

-- 
"Abba are much better then Green day, Offspring, American Music Club, The 
 Exponents, The Cranberries and Graham Brazier because they had good tunes 
 and an effortless ability to encase 'em in pretty damned stunning pop 
 arrangements." --Chris Knox