Reader Comments on Aardvark Daily 26 September 2002
Note: the comments below are the unabridged
submissions of readers and do
not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher.
From: Tom V For : The Editor (for publication) Subj: TDMA I have been with IHUG (for years), and am on Ultra and pretty happy with it, but if any ISP implimented TDMA in NZ, I would be very very likely to go to the hassle of changing ISPs for it. Well in excess of 80% of the email I receive is spam. While I could filter it more, I prefer to forward it to spamcop, but if TDMA took off, I wouldn't have to. Question for those more technically minded than me though. Could a server be set up to autoconfirm TDMA responses? If so, are there any technical reasons why spammers couldn't use such a setup to circumvent the confirmations? From: Brendan For : The Editor (for publication) Subj: Spam Filtering Software I have recently come across some excellent spam filtering software, that is both free & new zealand made, called mailwasher (http://www.mailwasher.net/). It works by downloading the mail headers from your mailbox, before you use your ordinary mail program. It remembers email addresses that you whitelist (friends) and blacklist, and can automatically set all blacklisted emails to be both deleted from your mail server, and bounced (to make your email address invalid). For emails that made it through that, it does analysis of the header to determine what ip address it came from and compares that against external blacklists such as ORDB, Spam Cop, VISI. I've compared quite a spam filtering software packages, and this seems to be one of the easiest, quickest, and the price was right. (However i will probably be making a donation). Support New Zealand made software! Brendan ps. Maybe other readers can write reviews of the spam filtering software they use. From: Bahu For : The Editor (for publication) Subj: Spam filter Nice idea, and should work, for a while. Once the spam has been made difficult don't you think they will become less sophisticated? I get normal junk mail through the post that is hand addressed using my listing from the phone book. Less sophisticated spamming to circumvent white/black lists would have the same plods sending out email offers and verifing the TMDA response manually for peanuts an hour. Don't laugh, there are people who will work for peanuts and hour. Once their account has been ISP banned as spammers they'd just get a new one. If you don't want spam don't give out your email address willy nilly, easy as that. From: Barry For : The Editor (for publication) Subj: An NZ ISP does provide Spam Filtering! There is an NZ ISP that provides a spam filter similar to that mentioned. Quik Internet (http://www.quik.co.nz) runs a service called Quik Cop. An extract from the Quik Cop pages: "The Quik E-mail Cop polices your incoming e-mail. Only your friends and acquaintances are allowed to send you e-mail. If someone else tries to send you e-mail, he will be asked to visit a QuikCop web-page and enter his e-mail address. This makes him one of your friends & acquainteances, so he can send you e-mail. Spammers usually won't go to this much trouble." The system consists of a whitelist known as the "Friends & Acquaintances list", a blacklist known as the "spammers list" and a "Mailing List" for messages you want to receive but not addressed specifically to you. Messages that fail the whitelist and are not on the blacklist are sent to "Jail". You can review those messages recently jailed and have some of them delivered to you, as well as automatically add the senders to your friends & acquaintances list. Quik Cop also keeps a log of recent e-mail messages sent to you, and whether each message was delivered or sent to jail by Quik Cop. From: paul For : The Editor (for publication) Subj: Spam Filters The big problem I discovered with ISP type spam filter this week was when bigfoot.com gave all it's users a free 14 day spam filter tryout. The problem was it blocked all Yahoo groups deliveries. The deathly silence from them when I complained about it. Who knows what will get blocked if it gets out of your control.. From: TomV For : The Editor (for publication) Subj: always requires review I haven't got around to trialling mailwasher yet, but all methods share the common flaw of requiring some sort of review of rejected mail Also I sort of regard spamcop as something of a duty to make life as difficult for spammers as possible. What interests me about TMDA is that if it got into general use it would actually reverse the trend of increasing levels of spam. It's all very well to work out some personal system, but it always requires continual monitoring, and does nothing to discourage spammers from operating. From: Martin Dougiamas For : The Editor (for publication) Subj: Your variant? Don't be a wanker and posture about how "your variant" is better than TMDA without even actually mentioning how your idea is different or better. Given that you only discovered it a day ago perhaps you should try it out for a while to see how it works in practice (IMO, brilliantly). And if you DO have a better idea, share it with the TMDA community so it has a chance of being implemented. That is what open source is about and how TMDA exists in the first place. From: Philip S For : The Editor (for publication) Subj: Personally I don't think it would work very well.... Ok from what I got of what it is is the following: You have a list of people who you can add to of people you will accept messages from any others will be put on a 'pending' list, and they will get an email back asking them to reply and confirm. Ok, first off, McAfee Spamkiller has pretty much exactly that - a white list, a black list, an automatic grabber (grabs different words) Now then, say Joe Bloggs has a company, I send an email to Joe, Joe doesn't know me thus his spam program chucks me in the pending list and sends me an email asking me to confirm. I confirm and the email goes through to Joe. Now say I am trying to send him spam (which like everyone else I shall point out I'd shoot myself if I was going to), I create a program to automatically reply to confirmation emails etc. Thus straight off it just means that spam programs immediatly get a reply from you for a confirmation, thus now they know your address is real and they make sure they keep sending... The only thing I have found that works is McAfee Spamkiller which has the option to 'Send error' which makes out it sending an error message from your email saying the address does not exist, thus the spammers think that your email is dead and stop. This works wonders until another party gets the list with your email in it and starts to email you and you have to kill that off as well. The problem comes about by free email services, fix these so that people cannot get multiple addresses and the problem would be gone. That and jail all spammers would be a nice extra :) From: Sam For : The Editor (for publication) Subj: spam filter Hmmm...at a quick glance these options seem little different to the way I stopped junk turning up in my hotmail account ages ago: use the 'Exclusive' option i.e. mail is only accepted from certain addresses that you've specified. One minor problem I found with this though is that if you ever give your own email address for someone to send you mail, you'd better not forget to quickly add them to the whitelist... :-)Hit Reload For Latest Comments
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