At 12:24 AM -0500 3/30/03, John R Levine wrote:
> A message asking to be added to my mailing list. Spam was simply the
URL in the .signature. I would have fallen for it but they went a
touch too far and included a picture as well.
Did they actually want to get on your list, or was the return address a
fake? I've seen some pretty egregious wallpaper in legit mail.
It was an ad for a subscription soft-porn site--from a legitimate
return address. The address they used was not listed as the contact
address for any of the mailing lists I run.
> A message to abuse complaining about spam. The spam was the message
that they were "complaining" about.
Seen some of those, never had much trouble figuring them out.
How? The message being complained about looked like spam. I
frequently get complaints about spam that never came from my system
or anywhere near my system (sometimes one of the referenced web sites
has somewhere.com in a comment on the web page--it can be pretty
obscure). The only reason I realized it wasn't one of those cases
was that I got the message twice--at two completely different email
addresses.
> Message asking me to attend a conference. (You've probably seen these.)
Indeed. They struck me as instantly spamous because of the lack of any
plausible reason they'd invite me. (I may be famous, but I'm not THAT
Odder things have happened :-).
I can certainly imagine situations where spam could masquerade as
individual messages well enough to fool some people, but I don't see that
as a big problem. So long as most of the recipients can figure out that
it's spam, any negative feedback scheme we invent will still work.
You are *way* over-rating the ability of the public to detect a
spoof. In the past year I've received over 50,000 messages sent to
wormalert(_at_)somewhere(_dot_)com (on the basis of a hoax). A third of those
messages are people forwarding other hoaxes. The average user simply
doesn't have the skill to tell real from fake. The only saving grace
is that up to now most spammers have been below average themselves.
--
Kee Hinckley
http://www.messagefire.com/ Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/ Writings on Technology and Society
I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
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