Re: Spam wars (was test)

>>> My e-mail has gone up from 100 per day to 600 per day in a matter
>>> of a couple of months. All the extra is pure spam.

About 1000 spams/day here: genuine email is about 1% of the total.


>> You're not alone Jacey. My spam has also increased by approx the same
>> amount in that time.  I think all the newsgroups are being harvested
>> repeatedly.
> I don't think it's the newsgroups.

For me, it is.  Because I use SMTP delivery, I see all the spam aimed
at this site without downloading it; most of it is for addresses that
have only ever been used a few times on Usenet, never anywhere else.

What happens is that the harvesters pass on *any* address they find
and put them on those "66 million email addresses" CDs.  These are
then recycled indefinitely.  Bugs in the harvesting process also
create addresses that have never been valid or used for anything; for
example one harvester passed on the message ID of one of my Usenet
postings, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, and that message about the history
of cod fishing now gets about 50 spams a day.  From the traffic I see,
it looks like Usenet is the single largest source, but "mailto:"; URLs
are also asking for it.  After a few years recycling predominates over
the original source by a long way; I doubt if any Usenet harvester has
suggested "3158" as an address for a very long time, but you can't put
the toothpaste back in the tube.


> I don't filter that way. I have been using SpamPal which uses blacklists
> to do my filtering. The way I have it set, it tags anything suspect with
> [Spam] and I use the OE filtering to move this stuff into its own folder
> where I give it a quick review once in a while in case something genuine
> has got there in error before doing a block delete.

That isn't scalable.  My own setup is bad enough.  All my mail transfer
agent looks at is the SMTP envelope (no filtering beyond "does the
recipient exist?") and in particular I never even see the headers of
suspected spams.  But over the last month the spam load has got to the
point where most of the traffic between this machine and my ISP is used
in rejecting spams; with this rate of increase, unless Demon can make
the damn things disappear from their server without me ever seeing them
at all (a service they refuse to implement) I'll have to abandon them
as a mail provider sooner rather than later.  Your setup seems to be
downloading either headers or complete messages before deciding whether
or not they're worth reading, which means you're wasting 20-40 times
the machine resources on each item of spam than I am and you're heading
for meltdown.

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