[Libri] Dara's query

[Mako Hill]

On Sat, Sep 07, 2002 at 05:20:19PM -0400, der Geist, der stets verneint wrote:
> I know this spam, too, Dara, and I am as surprised as you to see it--no idea
> how it ended up here.

Spammers routinely scan the web for valid email addresses. I'm sure
that the list address simply showed up on one of these scans. I
received between 20 and 100 spams a day, the vast majority of which
come from mailing lists--It's a fact of life on the Internet right
now.

I'm assuming that this particular spam was a variant of the extremely
popular 419 scam. It certainly is serious as people have lost millions
to these types of letter.

Check out http://www.419fraud.com/419_contacts.htm for a list of
contacts and legal authorities that can report this email to if you
wish.

> The College takes the issue of spam quite seriously and will be
> especially concerned if spammers are now invading our mailing lists.

They have been to some degree for a long time and there's little we're
able to do about it except locking down the lists as you have done.

There is spam filtering software that is an option but no software
will catch them all and worse yet, there will always be false
positives. The best way to do it is to install spam filtering software
on your our computer (spamassassin is a popular software you may be
able to set up if you have telnet/ssh access to your mail
server. There are many others as well). My spamfilter actually
filtered out the email that is the subject of this discussion.

If it bothers you enough, ask your administrator about spamassassin or
other spam filtering software. This way you can go through the spam
every once in a while to check for false positives.


-- 
B. Mako Hill
mako at bork.hampshire.edu
http://yukidoke.org/~mako/
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