[Coco] [Color Computer] Re: OFF TOPIC! by golly..(spam)

[George's Coco Address]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gene Heskett" Sent: Thursday, February 23, 2006 4:10 PM
> On Thursday 23 February 2006 12:15, George Ramsower wrote:
>>Gene,
>>
>> I've pretty much eliminated spam to my computer by making sure that
>> all my email addresses are secure.
>> I do this mostly by creating a new email addy for special events,
>> such as the coco list. Hence the addy I use for this list.
>> When some yahoo joins the group to steal that addy, it's a very
>> isolated event. If this continues, I'll just unsubscribe, create a
>> new email and subscribe again with that one... until it happens
>> again.
>> Another example is if I go to a website(as in dipwad.com) and have to
>> sign up for something, I use an email addy such as
>> dipwad at mywebsite.com and if they spam it, then I know who did it. I
>> then reconfigure that addy to forward all the email back to them,
>> usually webmaster at dipwad.com. The spams usually stop right away.
>> This is more fun than "Spam Assassin" or any other method, takes less
>> time and my inbox is clean.
>
> There's a 'yesbut' to that George.  Mailing agents are smart enough to
> stop a round robin loop most of the time, and while you might feel good
> doing it, the chances that you'll actually forward it to the right
> person are someplace between point double ought zip and none because
> the return addresses are from some zombie machine who has no idea his
> box has been rooted & converted into a zombie relay, for exactly that
> purpose.  I've tried that on a couple of the more blatant abusers, like
> uol.com.br but they have it rigged to bounce the mail if you aren't a
> customer, so I get it back in 2 minutes or less.
>
> Generally speaking its nothing more than a waste of bandwidth, something
> these guys could care less about only if they were dead.  The real
> secret to reducing it somewhat is to make it expensive for the spamemr
> in terms of time.  I know of more than one mail server that imposes a
> 30 second delay in the connect, and only if they try again after that
> 30 seconds has expired will the message be accepted for delivery.  That
> will cut it 90% right there cause they won't stick around and waste the
> time.  Thats real easy to do in qmail, no idea how hard it is for other
> server software though.
>

 This would be true in most cases. However, in MY case, it isn't. The only 
exception is when the spammers randomly create an email address to send to. 
My websites get thousands of those a day, but the mail server just tosses 
them to a black hole somewhere and I don't have a clue about them. If they 
accidentally hit one that I do use, so be it.
 My contact email addresses on my websites are generated with java script 
and an email harvester can't see it. Only a real person with a browser can 
see it.
 I do get an occasional request to help someone keep their 41 million 
dollars in Nigeria, but it's rare.
 The spam forwarding only lasts a couple of days. I then just delete the 
whole thing and forget it. Life is easier this way.

George