I have two points on this. On spammers not having rights: That's a fairly militant view, but there's nothing wrong with that specifically... the trouble comes in when there is confusion about the definition of a spammer. A good example might be the spam candidate we received the other day that was a Staples news letter. Unlike a get-rich-quick-with-your-own-porn-site-sign-here advertisement, this one could easily be legitimate... so the line does get pretty gray. This is why it is critical to allow the system administrator and potentially the user adjust any filtering mechanisms according to their own policies. There is no debate on whether an individual has the right to refuse content for themselves or accept a policy which refuses content on their behalf... the debate is on refusing content without the consent or knowledge of the recipient because that crosses the line into censorship.
On spammers monitoring forums: You're absolutely right there. This is an arms race. We have very tight securities on our Message Sniffer system precisely so that spammers cannot easily reverse engineer the rule base... and, by the way, they are constantly taking steps to fool filtering rules by subtly altering their content... One of the nastiest trends these days is the crypto-spam... (We have notified the home security office about this threat because the technology could be used to deliver mutating mail worms.) In the past 9 months we've seen this technology advance to the point where not only the message is encrypted, but the script that decodes it has randomized function names, and the latest advance even randomizes the structure of the decrypting program... Luckily mail clients are getting wise to embedded scripts in email so there is some downward pressure on this threat. No question about it though... professional spamming is big business with big resources. _M www.sortmonster.com | -----Original Message----- | From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Michael E. | Middleton | Sent: Saturday, February 09, 2002 10:07 AM | To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Subject: RE: [IMail Forum] rules.ima | | | > I believe this was mentioned in the distant past. I think the issue was | > raised about possible repercussions from the owners of blocked | domains. I | > think a general fear of having a lawsuit killed the idea. | | Huh? I don't have to let any other network touch or interact with my | network. That's my choice. I don't have to accept E-mail from anyone | anywhere. Spammers are theives of bandwidth, CPU cycles, and | time. They have | no rights as far as I'm concerned. I ain't scared of no lawsuit. My only | concern is that spammers can look at our rules and adjust their | stuff to get | around them... and if y'all don't think spammers monitor these | forums, wake | up. | | Mike | | | Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html | to be removed from this list. | | An Archive of this list is available at: | http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ | | Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html to be removed from this list. An Archive of this list is available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/
