On Tue, Feb 02, 1999 at 05:22:47AM -0500, Cris Daniluk wrote:
> And what's to stop someone from buying a
> static IP from their ISP with its own lovely domain and spamming the world
> freely?
The economics of static IP discourage it. ISPs in the U.S. often
charge $200-300 in setup fees for static IP addresses, and typically
an additional $100 per month. The spammer would have to be pretty
sure that they would gross at least $400 per spam run in order to make
it worthwhile, and I would guess that most spammers don't see anything
close to that.
> Or relaying off of some server 2 thousand miles away that doesn't
> block relays? Some mail servers cant (for example sites like yahoo.com who
> have mail gateways... by the way, about 50-60% of spam I receive comes from
> "trusted" mail servers on mail gateways like this). More and more spammers are
> putting "ADV:" in their topics as is required by law and more and more are
> also sending "To be removed" messages. While the to be removed messages don't
> really work half the time, I think it is safe to say that a well constructed
> message filter could be made to block these out, if not on the MUA level, on
> the mail server level.
In fact, our system-wide procmail filters include almost 200 recipes
for blocking spam based on patterns in the message body. These
include the Murkowski disclaimer, text like "hit reply to remove,"
"we are sorry if you have received this in error," "we are a
responsible bulk emailer," "this is only an opt-in list," and other
spammers' weasel words. We have a great deal of experience trying to
block spam using full-text filters.
The truth of the matter is that you can indeed stop a fairly high
proportion of spam this way, but not enough to make it worthwhile to
analyze the spam text and write new filters. Even 40% of a flood is
still a deluge.
--
Regards,
Tim Pierce
RootsWeb Genealogical Data Cooperative
system obfuscator and hack-of-all-trades
