| Stephen Gran on 16 Oct 2003 19:44:02 -0400 |
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On Thu, Oct 16, 2003 at 05:40:47PM -0400, gabriel rosenkoetter said: > On Thu, Oct 16, 2003 at 08:13:23AM -0400, Kevin Brosius wrote: > > One study suggested that munging cut ~80% of spam on new email > > addresses. I'll see if I can locate a reference. > > Please do, because I'd like to read it. It was probably the study in LWN - they put a couple of addresses up in one place, didn't link heavily to it, and left it go for only 6 months. All that being said, even if it was a well designed study, you can't prove a negative - being able to say "these addresses received no spam" is not the same as being able to say "the reason these addresses received no spam is because obfuscation works". All you have managed to do is get no result. What you can do is put up an obfuscated address, link heavily to it, and wait - if you get spam to that address, obfuscation does not work. See this page for a study of that type: http://www.keybuk.com/2003/06/26/obfuscation.html Note - this is the first link when googling for 'spam obfuscation' - clearly heavily linked. > For the record, I object to munging mostly on principal. Here are my > reasons, in order of importance (to me): <snip> Agreed. Changing an otherwise helpful forum because somebody wants to enlarge my penis several times an hour (how much more can the poor thing take?) helps no one, and potentially harms new members trying to get in touch with people who have had similar problems in the past. I have probably gotten between 30 and 50 emails over the years from strangers about problems that I had long since resolved and forgotten all about, and (if I could dredge up the memory of the problem and the fix) somebody else had an easier go of it than I did. I have done the same myself, and I don't want to see this made harder for people. > Blaming anyone but the spammers for sending you spam is migrating > blame unfairly. Blaming anyone but yourself (or your ISP, in the case > that you're doing IMAP or POP across a dialup) for actually receiving > that spam is also placing blame unfairly. Filter your email. It's > really just not that hard, and it's a reality we need to all just shut > the hell up and accept. The tools to deal with it yourself are all there, even if your ISP is unwilling - check out popsneaker for those on a dialup who can only access their email from a pop server, spamassassin for those who have a little bandwidth to waste, and server-level filtering for those who can. I will also be happy to give people an account that does nothing but receive spam - if you want to set up two subscriptions to PLUG, one of which receives mail, and use the other for sending mail only (disable recieving mail in the mailman interface), I will be happy to provide that account. I will just pipe anything sent to that address to /usr/bin/sa-learn --spam --no-rebuild --single :) I already have several of these alias accounts going, so it is no problem to add a few more if people see a pressing need for throw-away, post-only addresses. -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Stephen Gran | Many are called, few are chosen. Fewer | | steve@lobefin.net | still get to do the choosing. | | http://www.lobefin.net/~steve | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Attachment:
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