Russ writes:
So does trying to find the legitimate mail among
a pile of spam.
The difference is that, in the first case, legitimate e-mail is lost,
whereas in the second case, legitimate e-mail is preserved.
It's reality-check time. We're not going to get that,
and the problem is continuing to get worse. Now what?
Stop replying to spam. Somebody is _buying_ the penis enlargement kits, and
the mortgage refinancing, and the pallet-loads of Viagra, somewhere,
otherwise spam wouldn't be worth the trouble.
I have an idea that is kind of odd, and I don't know if it would work. I
really wouldn't mind signing up for a service that sends me filtered
advertising, in domains that I find _specifically_ interesting. I'd be
happy to read about products and services that directly address my needs and
interests, and if such a service existed, I'd be tempted to sign up. So
what if such services did exist on a widespread basis, and everyone signed
up for them? Would there still be a need for spam? Wouldn't it be cheaper,
in that case, for the spammers to send targeted e-mail to people who have
already expressed an interest in their products?
Not only that, such a service could insert a unique character string in the
subject line of each e-mail, unique for each subscriber. Then the
subscriber could filter on this string, routing interesting commercial
e-mail to a special folder. Since it would be unique by subscriber,
non-participating merchants couldn't fake it.
I don't know if that would work or not. But it's a thought.
How many people who are active and have been active
for some time on the Internet are still putting e-mail
addresses on web pages and then reading them with no
spam filtering whatsoever, just looking through the
inbox and deleting what isn't wanted?
My e-mail address is on my Web site. People need a way to contact me. I
read all incoming e-mail, except e-mail from domains that bounce my mail
(e.g., AOL, which I bounce right back with a nasty message intended to scare
subscribers). I check all messages and delete the spam. Right now
freebsd.org is spamming me pretty actively, but I don't see that in my inbox
because there on my bounce list for the same reason as AOL.
How many of you have accidentally discarded the
wrong message because it got caught in a purge of
spam from your inbox?
It happens once in a while. I try to be careful.
Personally, I can still cope with the onslaught
with no filtering other than a few simple personal
rules based on observation of my incoming spam
and the types of messages I personally receive,
but those rules are utterly draconian from certain
perspectives and still vulnerable to false positives
(for example, I don't speak any Asian language, so
anything I receive in that character set goes straight
into the spam pile ...
I do the same thing. Any large messages get set aside, since 99% of them
are spam. Anything in HTML is set aside, too, since almost no legitimate
e-mail is ever in HTML. That already eliminates an awful lot.
Another filter I've been thinking of is one that sets aside anything
containing character strings that aren't in a dictionary of English words,
but I have no easy way of implementing that.