Spam Problem [was: List etiquette]

[Lawrence Weeks]

Once upon a time (Thu Dec 18), Wayne wrote:
> At 07:38 AM 12/18/2003, you wrote:

>> 2.) Please either close your message with your real name or have
>> it in the from line of your message.  ....  understand you may
>> want anonymity but on this list we pretty much know each other so
>> there isn't any reason for it.

> I've got a privacy gripe that came up recently [though it's too
> late to fix it:( ]

Actually, it was too late to fix it before I changed that. I used to
have a restrictive robots.txt file, which restricted indexing of the
archives. Legit web-bots respected that. But the spammers didn't. So
the archives were getting indexed all the time, just not by Google and
Altavista and such. I then installed some tricks in the web server to
try to prevent that, but it too was overcome. The access logs showed
constant indexing of the archives, despite my blacklisting IPs and
other tactics. The next step would have been to password protect
the archives.

However, I decided to just give in. Google does a far better job of
indexing it than I can, and... the reality is, you will get spam if
you have an email address and you send email. It's going to wind up
someplace on a page or in a list where they will find it. Or they'll
get you through a dictionary attack. Today, I get about 60,000 (sixty
thousand) spam messages a month. I use SpamAssassin. It protects
my account pretty well, but I was still getting several hundred/a
thousand spam messages through monthly. I have now installed TMDA
(www.tmda.net), so I should basically never see a spam message in
my inbox again. Or at least very, very rarely. Send a message to me,
and you'll see why.

> I created my wmc_sr20 address as an alias to my permanent address,
> just for use with this list and the forums.  I'm not sure when the
> change occurred, but it has started getting *heavily* spammed in
> the last several weeks.

Actually, when I switched the list to Mailman in Dec 2001, I never
bothered to attempt to protect the archives. They have been indexed
since then. And, they were indexed before despite my efforts. If
something happened in the last few weeks, it doesn't correlate to
any particular event here.

If you are capable, I strongly suggest investigating a TMDA-like
system. It should largely eliminate e-mail spam.

Larry
--
Lawrence Weeks                                    lweeks@anabasis.net
Anabasis Consulting Ltd