On Sun, Oct 30, 2011 at 07:27:29AM -0700, Kevin wrote:
>
> Best answer to spam is strong passwords on your mail accounts.
I'm afraid that passwords have nothing to do with spam. You can have as
many passwords as you like, and people will still be able to flood you
with spam.
> Reporting all
> spam you receive to the feds, and filter your mail with a good client like
> Thunderbird, where you can set up the rules it filters by, and not using IE to
> read your mail in the browser because IE has way to many holes in it to be
> safe.
I receive over 1000 emails per day, of which 950+ are spam. "Reporting it
to the feds" would be a rather ridiculous waste of time, don't you
think?
In addition, reporting it may console you into thinking that you're
doing something; in reality, it bears no relation to the amount of spam
you're getting or will continue to get.
> The tool most spammers use is someone elses e-mail account.
That's also incorrect. Spammers don't care about "someone elses e-mail
account"; all they need is a list of addresses and a mail server
connected to the network. While some spammers use a distributed SMTP
network - i.e., taking over a large group of computers, installing mail
servers on them (regardless of any "e-mail accounts" that user may be
signed up for), and using them to broadcast email - most established
ones use large, powerful servers of their own. "E-mail accounts" play no
role in any of this.
> Fighting this is as
> easy as strong passwords on your accounts.
[sigh] You've said that before. Repeating doesn't make it any more
accurate.
> Phishing for your password is
> reduced using an OS like Mac OSX or Linux
Please look up the entry on "phishing" in Wikipedia. The term does not
mean what you think it means.
> That Keystroke recorders are only
> installed if you intensionally install one, rather than giving a virus the
> chance to install one for you.
Keystroke loggers ("recorders") also have nothing to do with spam.
They're a different attack vector for an entirely different purpose.
> The canspam act is why you want to report spam
> to the fed.
I quote (Wikipedia):
As of late 2008, CAN-SPAM has been all but ignored by spammers. A
review of spam levels in October 2006 estimated that 75% of all email
messages were spam, and the number of spam emails complying with the
requirements of the law were estimated to be 0.27% of all spam
emails.
By mid 2010, about 90% of email were spam.
> All other methods only keep people busy thinking they are stopping the problem.
The methods you've suggested above are based in misinformation - and
stating it in the above forceful and authoritative-sounding manner does
not improve their effectiveness.
At this point, fighting spam manually and personally is beyond the
ability of most individuals - unless they're quite expert in the
ins-and-outs of SMTP, mail protocols, filtering algorithms, etc. The
best option is to sign up for an email account with a professional email
service (about $2/month) and forget about having to deal with it,
period.
--
Ben Okopnik
-=-=-=-=-=-
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