waider

In the spam bucket just now:

Dear Sir, I am Chris Parker, a senior manager (protocol) with an American oil services company, HALIBURTON, based in the oil rich niger delta. As you might have read in the international media last year, Haliburton was involved in a bribery scandal running into hundreds of million US dollars here in Nigeria.[...]

In today's mail:

Hello Kid Mun,
Not sure if you are the Kid Mun that I knew from Monash University who lived in Mulgrave about about 10 years ago. If so, please reply to an old friend.

Regards,
Thiam Wee

I don't quite get this, either.

I've gotten a number of these lately:

"I've been using your product for 4 months now. I've increased my length from 2" to nearly 6" . Your product has saved my sex life." -Matt, FL

I mean, really. The average length cited in common literature is 6". This spam is telling me that after 4 months of $unspecified_product, Short Matt (as the ladies on South Beach call him) is finally almost on a par with the rest of us average guys. I mean, sure, he's managed a 4" gain, or a TRIPLING IN LENGTH, but either of those statements would be a far more eyeball-grabbing line for what I assume is the sufficiently gullible target market[1]. It's hardly enticing as it, er, stands. HEY MATT! GET A FRICKIN' TRANSPLANT ALREADY!

[1] to quote a comedian I saw on TV last night:

people think guys are only interested in large breasts, because guys are always like, "I like... laaaaarge breasts."

*pause*

"huhuhu. let's go and pee on something."

So, ah. Orkut. Right. It's been pretty much as I expected; I've not mysteriously connected with any long-lost people, I've not acquired new and interesting friends; essentially I've pretty much established an identical network to my livejournal friends group which in turn is largely based on links that were forged when talk.bizarre was a slightly more viable venue for discourse (or abuse). And that's the positive stuff. I've had a variety of uninteresting and crappy FOAF messages, including one this morning from some idiot trying to drum up interest in his stupid vanity site. Orkut, where people you don't know can send you spam because someone you know knows them. Great selling point, that. I can't even find a button on the mailbox that says "block all messages from this person" nor one that says, "don't bother sending me FOAF messages"; there may well be one, but it's not in any obvious place and I'm not quite enthralled enough by Orkut to go digging for it. The forums I've looked at are nigh-on useless; most of them have topics that make MetaFilter's front page seem like a hotbed of opinionated discussion, and I discovered this morning that I can't delete a post I made. I can replace all the text, I guess, with the word "deleted" or better still, replace it with "deleted by Orkut staff" and set off a rumourmill of conspiracy theories, but see previous about lack of enthrallment.

Now, someone has said to me that you get out of this sort of thing as much as you put into it, and frankly that's pants. I've gotten less out of this than I've put into it. I don't count FOAF spam as a threefold return. Of course, I'll leave my account there. For now, anyway. Just in case, you know?

Hmm, maybe I need to give up reading c|net again: Is charging for email such a bad idea?. Well, yes, it is here, because you're not offering a solution to the biggest problem with the idea, which is "How Do You Charge For Email?" It's all well and good to tell me that if a spammer is charged 25¢ per email his business model goes out the window, but how does the spammer pay that money? With a stolen credit card? By hijacking, as is increasingly frequent, someone else's connection, so that the hijackee pays instead? How does this solve spam any better than faulty laws?

How about going after the money? Prosecute companies who knowingly use spammers to advertise, lower merchant credit limits on companies caught advertising with spam, cancel credit-card payments to spammers - I know AmEx can take up to three months to settle with the merchant, which is plenty time to investigate spam complaints. It's not that hard; sure, the spammer's hidden away in a cave in Florida, but the company name is right there on the spam. The charge usually levelled at this tactic is that, well, my competitor sends spam with my name on it, and I take the rap; I can't see how this stands up to even basic scrutiny, since if I've paid for a spamming run, there will be a paper trail pointing at me. If I haven't, sure, the competitor and the spammer both get away with it, but hey. It's at least worth a try.

A Wired article on SPF suggests that Bayesian filters work better for us developer types because we don't receive the wide diversity of email that "ordinary users" receive.

nomination for Failed Lists of 2003: HeadMap Announce.

I generally don't complain about spam these days as it's a mug's game. Every so often, though, I feed one through the wringer. Which I did today. I just received this:

From: Some Admin
To: Me
Subject: Unsolicitied E-mail
Date: 04 Nov 2003 08:25:16 -0700

Hi Ronan,

I'm sorry about the unwanted email. Your email address will be removed
from future mailings. Should you continue to receive unwanted email
from my client, please let me know.

Kind Regards,

-Joshua

Yay!

I run a mailing list for a sourceforge project for which I'm nominally the lead developer - I say "nominally" since I tend to not do a whole lot other than acting as gatekeeper for user patches these days, modulo the occasional outbreak of actual development. The list is run on SourceForge's list server, which means it's a mailman-2.09-plus-unspecified-hacks list.

That's the first thing that irritates me. There are more recent versions of mailman with built-in spam-filtering, but alas I'm stuck with having the list set to members-only posting and that means that spam tends to end up in the admin box for me to deal with. I've written a mailman admin script to deal with this; it downloads messages, feeds them to SpamAssassin to check if they're spam or not, and nukes them if they are. Still, though, it's a pain in the ass that I have to do this in the first place.

Item the second is people who post regularly to the list without having subscribed, or post from an unsubscribed address, or in some other way force me to manually approve their posts. If you're on a member-posting-only list, and you post from different addresses, SUBSCRIBE THEM ALL. You can set all of them except one to not receive any mail, so you don't get multiple copies.

Item the third is back to spam again. Someone recently posted suggesting I should do random stuff in order to prevent them from getting spam from someone who's harvesting mail addresses off the list through the simple expedient of having subscribed to it. Aside from the fact that the random stuff in question is outside my control (since I can't modify the software that runs the list, nor the software that archives it), I simply don't care. 60% of the mail that hits my mailbox on a daily basis is spam, but I don't notice - aside from via the statistics - because I run spamfiltering software. There's no excuse not to. Sure, if you choose poorly you end up downloading all that crap anyway, but it's not my fault if you chose to use crap software, and the other people who use the list - or might want to use it in the future - shouldn't suffer because of your choices. I only switched the list to members-only posting under duress, as that alone raises the barrier to entry for new users to ask questions and leads to the other annoying thing mentioned above, people who keep posting from unsubbed addresses.

It's 2003. You will get spam. You can do two things: talk to your local political representative about anti-spam legislation, and use filtering software. The only way that spam will go away is if it becomes too expensive to support. And the only way that will happen is if (a) noone ever sees the spam, so the spammer gets zero advertising benefit and (b) there is legal recourse to prosecute spammers and prosecute them HARD. So quit whining and get to it already.

Oh, item the fourth is that I scratched the paintwork on the hood of my car while trying to extricate it from the office parking lot due to incautious placement of cars and a rubbish skip. BAH.

Mailbox:

your mailman.pl script for discarding spam to mailman lists is currently
making the rounds of the IETF, to great rejoicing.