You are more that welcome to fill in the blank, so long as you understand that other will be filling that blank as well.

But, but... Seven hundred? I'd say that's more than enough just cause to commence with the burninatin'.

But see if you can make them read this first.

I used to use a dialup account, and because it got switched to freebie status after I did some work for the ISP it's still there. I usually run a script that uses it as a spam honeypot, feeding spam into the Vipul's Razor database. There have been no outgoing posts from that account for nearly five years, now.

Last month my server nearly fell over (thank you, Swen-A worm) and the honeypot script stalled. I got back to it after a month, to find 10,650 spams waiting for me.

The question I'm always asking myself is: is my spam still manageable because I have a better filter, or am I just "lucky" (i.e. "insufficiently famous")?

No. Apparently the sucker-to-sensible ratio is extremely low, and, I'd guess, falling. As I'm sure you already know, spammers operate on the basis that it costs them almost nothing to send out a million e-mails. If just one sucker responds and pays them 50 dollars, the million spam are more than paid for, and every sucker after that is clear profit. You don't need very many suckers to make a living.

I'd guess that the number of suckers who respond to spam is falling simply because the amount of spam being sent is rising. I suspect that spammers are finding they have to send out more and more spam to net a profitable number of suckers. One plus is that I no longer regularly get the offers to send me mass-marketing e-mail software and/or CDs with a million guaranteed e-mail addresses (they haven't entirely disappeared, but they used to be a daily occurance).

Adverts for porn sites, though, are going up. As are adverts for Viagra and penis-enlarging stuff. The best subject-line I ever heard of, though, was "Increase the size of your penis broth". Cockery and cookery in one easy spam...

Lately, I've been getting a lot of prescription drug spam, some Nigerian Scam spam, and the occasional missive regarding my genitals. I haven't seen much porn spam in a while, though.

Because spammers develop ways to hide behind innocent victims more easily than probably any other kind of criminal. See "joe job".

It's poor consolation, but there's a site that collects Nigerian Spam tales at http://www.scamorama.com/ . Apparently, there are lots of easily amused people out there who take great pleasure at stringing along Nigerian spammers in a variety of ways. Most amusing are the ones where someone manages to scam the scammer out of something of value.

Sometimes, I think of sending an e-mail to a Nigerian scammer (they went away for a while, but they're beginning to come back now) saying I'd love to participate, but all my funds are currently tied up with similar plans from (list 4 or 5 of the other scam e-mails).

-- Ed

Inevitably, when the bastards (These guys aren't gentle pranksters, folks; they'll physically assault any mark dumb enough to get on a plane to a "meeting location" with money in hand) copped to the fact that they were being toyed with, I was cautioned NOT TO TELL ANYONE!!!! AN EYE IS UPON YOU, WALK AWAY IT IS MOST DANGEROUS TO CONTINUE!!!!

Not quite as artistic as the guy who pretended to be Randolph Carter, and no use against general spam, but a modestly rewarding little game nonetheless.

When I got ready to go to Toronto for worldcon, I emailed our web email=master and said, "we need to put a stop to this because at the current rate, after being out of office for 10 days, I could have upwards of 15,000 emails, 99.9% of which I do not need to even see. What can you do about that?"

He said, "Can you cut off the @atwood email." And I said yes, all my CLIENTS have my home and new WORK emails as well as my cell, work and home phone. So he did. And my work spam went to 0,

On my home email, I get about 20 a weeek, but they go into the "junk' folder before I have to read them. I like that.

Paula Helm Murray

I am really, really pissed that I have to do this, but my old address is on every spammer's list in the universe, because I had it before there was such a thing as spam.

I'm on it. I'm almost convinced it as my opening-on-Halloween production of The Tempest that called down Isabel on DC... that leaves tonight's dress rehearsal to recalibrate the distances...

I use a scripting language called Rebol for such administrative tasks, www.rebol.com, and there is a free script that allows you to look at the emails on your account without downloading, and deleting the ones you don't like.

these scripts are available from http://www.agora-dev.org/forums/view.php?bn=rebol_prjnvxprod&key=1061826280

and the version of Rebol that you would want, which is free for personal use, is at http://www.rebol.com/view-platforms.shtml

writing ones own small scripts to deal with unwanted email annoyances is often a matter of a few lines with Rebol, as can be seen here:

http://www.rebol.com/docs/core23/rebolcore-13.html#section-10.2

hope no one takes offence at this info, I just find it to be a particularly helpful tool for working with email. I am not affiliated with RebolTech in any way, other than as a satisfied user of their product /end-shill :)

I still use good old-fashioned Pine for my email, which means I _don't_ download before deleting. As time goes on, Pine is looking better and better. (It also seems to be impervious to most viruses sent by email.)

Unless one's ISP is sufficiently decent as to run SpamAssassin or its equivalents, one is reduced to doing some kind of client-side filtering. (Even bryan's rebol scripts constitute client-side filtering, although they do avoid the need to download bulky attachment spam and virii.)

Which brings us to a point we've been overlooking: Suppose some huge percentage of the Internet-using population uses effective spam filtering, and only a fraction of the people who don't will actually respond to the spam they receive.

Then spammers will be sending colossal quantities of traffic, most of which gets deleted on delivery. People like us won't see it, because we're smart enough to use smart filtering. But it still gets transmitted, still ties up backbone bandwidth, still demands the attention of the SMTP servers through which our email passes before it lands in our smart Bayesian filters.

How long will it be before the tide of spam rises to the point of being a vast distributed denial-of-service attack on every mail server on the Internet?

But the principle has to be sound. If it's not worth one eurocent to you to tell me something, I cdon't want to hear it. End of spam.

The mail has an indication attached to it that this nominal fee has been charged; this indication can -- certainly would be -- forged.

The only sufficent technical fix for spam is absolutely ironclad cryptographic handshaking throughout the entire transmission chain in combination with reliably unique ids for senders. Such an infrastructure could be built; it would destroy any possibility of privacy for anyone, but it could be built.

It would seem to be much less expensive to criminalize spam, and to actually arrest the people involved. The only expense there is the recognition that abolishing direct marketing is the Right Thing To Do.

That is, this proposal doesn't prevent you from setting up an account with some ISP, giving them a bag of cash, and sending mail through them.

ISPs that allow anonymous accounts are of course then a possible choke-point for anyone who wants to crack down on anonymity, but that's to some extent already true (look at the history of anonymous remailers).

Criminalising spam will only work if it is done on a global basis. That's not going to happen. It is or shortly will be, criminal within the EU. That hasn't done me any good.

As for the damage done to academic email -- there are lots of technical fixes possible. mass mailing lists could be replaced by RSS feeds or gated news servers. I read high-volume mailing lists through a news server anyway. That makes much more sense as an interface. And they are, at the moment, surprisingly free of spam. they're very easy to set up.

All this seems to me a lot easier and more practical than persuading corrupt governments like that of the Ukraine -- or Florida -- that they should do the right thing by us.

Thanks, Mez.

Thanks, Mez.