On Saturday 14 September 2002 00:59, Professional Software Engineering wrote:
and I just got my first spam from GT Toner Supplies.
Your first spam is special and should be cherished - the hundreds of
thousands which will follow it only cheapen the experience, so hold onto
that one with all you've got.
This isn't a Kodak moment, it's a Hormel moment. Dine on a can of SPAM
tonight in honour of your first spam. Savor the greasy porky flavour.
If I do this for the first spam for every email address, SPAM would be my
only diet. No thanks. Imagine doing that for every message sent to all your
@spamgourmet.com accounts.. yuk.
It seems the procmail list has been harvested.
The procmail list is archived to multiple locations on the web, so that's
no surprise. It isn't as if the email addresses are obfuscated in the
online archives, so any spambot crawling the web will find the addresses
there and readily extract them into a database.
I figured it was the archive that got harvested. It would be too tedious and
slow to subscribe and extract addresses that way.
Why aren't the addresses in the archives masked? This is more damaging than
useful. People reading the archives for help are most likely not going to
need to write the author. It is the spam harvesters who are most likely to
write to the author.
Why not make the addresses in the archives private, such that a subscriber
would have to enter their subscribed email address to access it? This way a
spammer would be forced to subscribe and unsubscribe to get that information,
which is at least enough to keep a bot from getting it.
It seems like we can really take advantage of this, because they were
stupid enough to include their toll-free number. I was also able to get
their
[snip]
How's about we don't turn the procmail list into a spam action group? This
list is about procmail and how to use it - which, if you focused on that,
you might not have received the spam in your inbox in the first
place. Please check the archives for a variety of useful techniques.
If you don't want to participate in the spam action group, you don't have to.
In fact, you could write a recipe to dump all spam action group messages.
I see no reason to exclude the issue from this list, as it is procmail list
related, because it is procmail list members who are being attacked.
People who want to take an action against GT Toner Supplies- email me.
The problem with using procmail to filter spam is that as soon as your
scripts are good enough to block all spam, it also blocks mail you don't want
blocked. And even if did that correctly, routing the spam to /dev/nul does
not provide an incentive for the spammer to stop. Lawsuits and actions
against ISPs who allow it will accomplish this.
I'm rather bitter on the whole procmail approach because I wasn't able to get
the damn .forward file to work. The archives and the listers here were
unable to resolve my problem, so I'm pretty much forced to take the lawsuit
approach.
If I ever do get procmail working, I'm not going to have spam simply sent to
/dev/nul. It's lazy and doesn't counter the attack. I'd rather write a
script that takes the spam, determines the SMTP server that was compromized,
from that, determines the "abuse(_at_)domain" email address, and forwards the
spam
to that address explaining the problem, and cc's UCE(_at_)ftc(_dot_)gov(_dot_)
Has anyone
here developed a script good enough to do this?
I trust that nobody here is stupid enough to actually call their TF number
from their home or business, since they'll get YOUR number as a
result. Most of those TF numbers are voicemail boxes anyway, so even if
this spam resulted in a human, the next TF number you get may not.
A human does answer at GT Toner Supplies.
Interesting thing about TF numbers.. many hotlines for blowing the whistle on
crimes, or giving support for some bad situation will guarantee anonymity.
So unfortunately people call these numbers thinking they're anonymous.
I actually didn't bother running out to a payphone to call GT Toner
Supplies. Why? Because I don't care if they have my number. They would be
fools to telemarket me long distance knowing that I'm resistant to their
spam. Also, if I do end up in court suing them, there's a record that I
called them to be removed.
_______________________________________________
procmail mailing list
procmail(_at_)lists(_dot_)RWTH-Aachen(_dot_)DE
http://MailMan.RWTH-Aachen.DE/mailman/listinfo/procmail