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SPAM There
is a real user led initiative to find a way to limit or even eliminate spam
called SpamNet from Cloudmark. I don’t
have to tell you how much time we all waste dealing with spam or when you lose
important e-mails in the sheer volume of spam messages in your inbox. The
same techniques used in the music sharing service, Napster, are behind the
service that SpamNet provides. Napster co-founder Jordan Ritter is also one of
the leaders on this project. http://www.cloudmark.com/products/spamnet/download/ My thoughts on Spam: Spam senders are the worst. It truly might be the thing that gets me to become a politician, so that I can finally abridge someone's "First Amendment Rights". Sending volumes of e-mail should be legislated the same way that legislation exists to discourage fax machine spamming and junk mail. If spam senders would just stick with one e-mail address and not try any tricks like randomly generated names, I could filter them easily and there would be no trouble. Every e-mail address that you filter becomes obsolete immediately because of these random addresses. I blame Yahoo and Hotmail as much for allowing nonsense names in the first place. I am currently using SpamNet to reduce the volume of spam I get. Until spammer's figure out how to get around that, it seems to work pretty well. I was using SpamKiller from McAfee until I found SpamNet. SpamKiller is a good program except that it makes me work too hard. I like the Outlook plug-in approach much better. It is less of a burden. I believe any successful spam filter has to be simple to be popular. I believe that the key to the popularity of any software is simplicity. I feel that Microsoft is just as guilty as the other spammer's. When they would send me a newsletter, it would have something slightly changed in each message that would automatically go into my in-box no matter how many times I set a rule to move it elsewhere. I wasn't even throwing it away. It's their e-mail program, and they exploit the weaknesses of the filters. Obviously they are not out to help stop the others from using e-mail tricks either. The spam industry lobbies congress to keep them from passing any meaningful legislation to stop e-mail spam. I assume, as bribery is among the tricks of the lobbying industry, that that happens as well. I have tried to get rid of porno e-mails by opting out using the links provided in their messages. Since I did that about ten times, my porno spam e-mail has doubled. There is no doubt that the opt-out option is a spam scam. If you attempt to opt-out of any of this, you're making a big mistake. That confirms your existence and if they sent your e-mail to no specific address, when you reply, that's when they get your address. Most opt-out addresses are phony anyway. They just bounce back most of the time saying no such address found. I used to like porno before this. 2002 August 31 |
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