Re: Phisher tricks other phishers into doing the dirty work for him...

Dorothy J Heydt <djheydt@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Keith F. Lynch <kfl@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> You're letting the spammers cut us off from each other.  Their
>> intention may not be to shut down email between people who don't
>> already know each other, but it's the most obvious bad effect of
>> their actions.

> They're not cutting me off from anybody I want to hear from.  If
> I recognize the sender and/or the subject line, I read the mail.

You never want to hear from anyone you don't already know?

Last month someone I had never heard of sent me HTML email with a
subject line of, "Can I ask this question?"  Both HTML email and such
a generic subject line are typical of spams.  Fortunately, I had just
added his email address to my whitelist the previous day, because his
email address was one of several listed in a recent fanzine in which I
was mentioned.  So I got his email, and we've had a very interesting
conversation.

> I glance at the list of names/subjects every time I log in, and I
> can tell in a second or two that nothing on it deserves reading, and
> I apply the dreaded D STAR.

You obviously get a lot less spam than I do.  I usually get a few
hundred thousand each day.  Sometimes over a million.  (I only got
62,742 yesterday, perhaps because of some international cables having
been cut.)  Of course nearly all of them are blocked by my filters.

> In effect with your whitelist you're blacklisting the entire human
> race except the people on your whitelist -- many of whom have never
> sent you mail and probably never will.

True, except that anyone not in certain spammy countries can email me
on my current disposable address, which can be found at the URL that's
at the bottom of all my Usenet postings, websites, etc.

I hate doing it, but I have no alternative, except to blacklist
*everyone* by giving up email.

>> I understand that bayesian filtering works well for people who get
>> not more than a few thousand spams per day.  You might look into
>> that.

> /googles bayesian filtering

> Oh good grief, now you want me to study higher mathematics.

You don't need to understand Bayes' theorem to run such software any
more than you need to understand Maxwell's equations to listen to a
radio, or the Navier-Stokes equations to ride in an airplane.
-- 
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html
before emailing me.