spam revisited

[Duston, Hal]

Mike,

The solution I use for my own person email is to block 
all email that doesn't contain my own personal address 
in either the TO, or CC header.  This blocks a great 
deal of the spam I recieve.  Another pattern I have 
noticed is that much spam has a code way over to the 
righthand side of the SUBJECT header.  So if we 
possibly were able to block email with say 5 spaces 
in a row in the SUBJECT, that would also block a great 
deal of spam.

Some of the spam received here on the group was 
created by a live person on the other end, and sent 
directly to the list.  That would be very difficult 
to block with out completely closing the list to 
posting by non-subscribers.  This would most like 
remove most of this type of spam, and all of the 
other types of spam since I seriously doubt that 
more is done than attempt to send to the given 
address in an automated way.

The other difficulty lies in the fact that many 
of the headers in a received spam are actually 
incorrect.  So, even if yahoo.com is in the FROM 
header it might not actually be involved in the 
spam in anyway.

On a personal note, I am in the process of migrating 
my own email _to_ a yahoo account.

Statistics for list kclug as of Fri Sep 21 09:53:39 CDT 2001

    183 unique subscribers.

    105 unique domains.

     90 domains occuring only once.

Top fifteen domains:
     27 kc.rr.com
     13 hotmail.com
     11 yahoo.com
     10 home.com
      5 swbell.net
      4 sprintspectrum.com
      4 earthlink.net
      4 aol.com
      3 sound.net
      2 waddell.com
      2 leavenworth.army.mil
      2 kcnet.com
      2 kc.net
      2 jimani.com
      2 illiana.net

Hal

mike neuliep [mailto:mike at illiana.net] wrote:
> 
> Hello, I am interested in knowning how the list members 
> feel about spam.  I've been receiving an increasing 
> amount of spam in my personal mail box lately and I have 
> been looking into something more radical than a merely 
> an access list of common spammers.  I'm considering a 
> commercial service that works with sendmail that 
> incrementally downloads an abuse list daily and will 
> reject e-mail from those domains of known spammers.  
> This will undoubtedly block many of the large ISP and 
> free e-mail services too such as hotmail, yahoo-mail and 
> aol.  I am quite aware that some of our members use these 
> services to post to the group.  I'm hoping you guys could 
> help me weigh the benefits and pitfalls of such a system.
> One thing is for sure though, manual additions to the 
> access database take up time that I could be doing better 
> things and it is probably not the best solution to our 
> problem.
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> 	Mike Neuliep