On Thu, May 27, 2004 at 02:02:23PM +0200, Alex van den Bogaerdt
(alex(_at_)ergens(_dot_)op(_dot_)het(_dot_)net) wrote:
Why don't they just send their spam to mailboxes that _do_ allow it; in
stead of going through several hoops to _also_ deliver it to me?
Probably because the vast majority of mailboxes on the net are not
controlled by geeks like us who like to deal with this sort of stuff.
Consider a big company like Big Company, Inc. There might be 100,000
users at bigco.com, all protected by one anti-spam system. If the
spammer can get past bigco.com's filters, he's got 100,000 deliveries
that make it thorugh. If he only gets 0.001% response, that's still one
hit, and it's worth his while.
It is ALL about numbers. That's why content-based spam filtering is
a dead-end path: It is trivial to jack up the types and variations of
spam to get past the content detectors.
We, as the anti-spam leaders, must remember that we are not the targets
of the spam. It's not Alex van den Bogaerdt who is the target, but the
N,000,000 folks at AOL, and the X,000,000 at Compuserve, and the 100,000
at bigco.com.
I think the smart spammers would make a point of finding out who the
anti-spam folks are and dropping them from the lists. Why bother
pestering the bull? What if all geeks everywhere just stopped getting
spam? Maybe the anti-spam activity would slow down!
xoxo,
Andy
--
Andy Lester => andy(_at_)petdance(_dot_)com => www.petdance.com => AIM:petdance