[filmscanners] Re: spam magnet
Thank you Tony for explaining why list member email addresses are available -- it does make some sense for those who are willing to put up with spam and its natural corollary, spam filters. I will take some exception to your comment If you don't want to take any action against spammers but rely on others doing stuff for you, you'd be best advised to stop using email because spam is inevitable. Your implication is that I am relying on others (including you) to do stuff for me to avoid spam, while in fact you are doing stuff that *exposes* me to spam. I am doing my bit by having multiple addresses and abandoning those that have been outed -- which happens about once every 18 months. Spam is *not* inevitable -- I have been spam-free for over a year until I posted on the filmscanners mail list. And with the exception of the address I use for filmscanners, I am still spam free. Just think, instead of clogging the Internet and my ISP with hundreds of messages that will be thrown away by a spam blocker, I am able to do my little bit to reduce spam by being invisible to spammers -- unless someone blows my cover. Last I read spam accounts for the bulk of all email -- if we each do our bit to reduce spam we can make email useful again and not tie up so much computing power trying to identify and avoid it. Spam is a scourge that impacts every part of the email chain, and from time to time ISP mail servers buckle under the load. Now that I know posting to the filmscanners list will expose my email address, I'll take care to never post. To everyone on the list, and especially Tony, thank you for the years of information and support. Tony said: snip v All I can do here is change the listmail headers so that only the orginator's name appears in the 'from' field, not their email address. This will of course make it impossible to send personal email to a list member unless you already know their address, which is why I haven't done it in the past. You lot can tell me which you'd prefer. ^ Most lists I am on (around 20) present the sender's email address for exactly this reason. Prodig is the only one I can think of that does not, and also bans email addresses from the message body. It's limiting and annoying if you want to take a discussion off list. Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
[filmscanners] Re: Trying to track down a problem
I go one step further to protect accounts, passwords, and sensitive personal info. I set up the computer that connects to the Internet with its hard drive in a drawer so I can easily *remove* the hard drive when I need a secure system. Say I've been reading email (with the hard drive connected) and need to make an online purchase or banking or whatever. I shut down the computer, disconnect the hard drive and reboot from a Ubuntu Linux LiveCD. At this point the computer is known clean and there's no way anything can be saved on the boot disk (it's a CD after all). After finishing my business all I need to do is log out of the bank's web site then press the computer's power button to shut it off -- I don't have to do a proper shutdown because there's no way I can corrupt the CD by not allowing the system to do a clean shutdown. That saves a few seconds. It *is* annoying to have to shut down and reboot, but the knowledge that the system really is clean makes it worth it. Even if you boot from a CD it *is* important to not have a hard drive in the computer because if there's a hard drive, the operating sysem will save stuff on it and use it on later boots -- precisely what I want to avoid. Oh yes, what about the stuff I want to save? Most of the time it's not needed, but for that which is there's always floppy disks or USB flash RAM. You can be sure I check them for lurking viri, trojans, or whatever before using them on another computer, then do a full erase when I have transferred the info. Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
[filmscanners] Re: Trying to track down a problem
I just checked the two registry entries on my system to make sure I didn't have either of the Srizbi trojan statements, and I don't. However, in reading from this link, the simple answer seems to be for people (and I assume, particularly men) to just stop buying on-line herbal masculine enhancement products which don't work anyway, since over 40% of the spam being generated was for these products. I wouldn't mind spam nearly as much if it provided some education, or useful hints. Did you remember to turn down the thermostat before going to sleep tonight? Naw, I guess even that would get annoying after a while... Art John Sykes wrote: Have a look at this site: http://www.marshal.com/trace/traceitem.asp?article=567 Then click through to read more about the Srizbi trojan. Scary. I downloaded Regscanner after reading this, and then check the registry for the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\RcpApi\(snip), as suggested: fortunately OK. John Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
[filmscanners] Re: spam magnet
Dieder Bylsma wrote: The scams are because we have a subscriber on our list that archives the list to a public forum... http://www.lexa.ru/FS/ note how all the most recent postings are on this list too ;) Thanks for uncovering that archive. It is highly likely that is where our addresses are harvested. No matter how you obfuscate your email address on the Web it can and will be harvested. Some people use scripts to display their addresses in HTML entities while others use more sophisticated techniques such as adding blank spaces, replacing the @ glyph, or combinations of Javascript and CSS. None of them work for long. My personal website doesn't contain my email address in any form. If people want to contact me there, they are directed to a server-side CGI page. The increase in spam around the world is directly proportional to the increase of gullibility and ignorance in the world. Spammers make money because there are so many suckers out there. Education and commonsense are the only effective defenses against it. -- Cary Enoch Reinstein... aka enochsvision, Enoch's Vision Inc. Photography, poetry http://www.enochsvision.com/ Blog http://enochsvision.wordpress.com/ Behind all these manifestations is the one radiance, which shines through all things. The function of art is to reveal this radiance through the created object. ~Joseph Campbell Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
[filmscanners] Re: spam magnet
I joined a list a while ago that had a quiz to insure I wasn't a robot. This swiping of mailing lists to create content is pretty common. They also harvest usenet. -Original Message- From: Dieder Bylsma [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2008 02:46:29 To:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [filmscanners] Re: spam magnet The scams are because we have a subscriber on our list that archives the list to a public forum... http://www.lexa.ru/FS/ note how all the most recent postings are on this list too ;) Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
[filmscanners] Re: spam magnet
On 02/04/2008 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Your implication is that I am relying on others (including you) to do stuff for me to avoid spam, while in fact you are doing stuff that *exposes* me to spam. I am doing my bit by having multiple addresses and abandoning those that have been outed -- which happens about once every 18 months. You were asking me to curtail the usefulness of this list to limit your exposure to spam, by suppressing sender addresses. There couldn't be any mailing lists unless they were publically exposed addresses. There couldn't be any support ditto. For some of us email is mission-critical and we can't avoid having a public address that stays constant. That means the common preferred solution is spam filtering. Email RFC's require a postmaster catch-all address for any domain. Whoever runs that account is going to receive spam. Domains cannot be invisible. That too means the common preferred solution is spam filtering. Your approach may work for you, but you're still having to take inonvenient evasive action against spammers and accept a reduction in the utility of email because of their predatory selfishness. I hope we can agree that spammers are the underlying problem here. Now that I know posting to the filmscanners list will expose my email address, I'll take care to never post. Yes, that should work, in the same way that never answering the telephone will completely avoid annoying sales calls. For those of us who have to expose email addresses to the world, spam *is* inevitable. The list itself receives on average 3 attempts a day to *distribute* spam to its 1,200 members, because the address is known to spammers. That is *filtered* out by multiple levels of email filtering and subscription control that also prevents viruses being distributed. If I didn't maintain filters you'd get that crap even if your email address was unpublished in list mails. There is nothing wrong with your approach but it can only work for a minority of people who can burn email accounts as they become unusable. -- Regards Tony Sleep http://tonysleep.co.uk Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
[filmscanners] Re: spam magnet
Tony, let me preface my remarks with one that I think is important: I greatly appreciate all you have done with this list to bring together such a wonderful resource. If I have caused you grief or upset I am truly sorry. On 02/04/2008 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Your implication is that I am relying on others (including you) to do stuff for me to avoid spam, while in fact you are doing stuff that *exposes* me to spam. I am doing my bit by having multiple addresses and abandoning those that have been outed -- which happens about once every 18 months. You were asking me to curtail the usefulness of this list to limit your exposure to spam, by suppressing sender addresses. I think we are having an unecessary argument -- Say the list itself did not expose the actual email addresses, but those people who are comfortable having their addresses exposed can include them in their postings. That way those who are comfortable in encouraging rising levels of spam while broadcasting their addresses to the world can do so, and those who are willing to accept the confines of only posting on the list have that opportunity as well. To the claim that it would be bothersome for each member to include his/her email address, I suspect that they would only do so when they have a question that they would prefer be answered off-list. There couldn't be any mailing lists unless they were publically exposed addresses. There couldn't be any support ditto. For some of us email is mission-critical and we can't avoid having a public address that stays constant. That means the common preferred solution is spam filtering. Funny, I belong to a number of lists, most of them professional (statistics and engineering). Yes, the email address of the lists themselves is exposed, but not of the participants. Email RFC's require a postmaster catch-all address for any domain. Whoever runs that account is going to receive spam. Domains cannot be invisible. That too means the common preferred solution is spam filtering. Of course you are right for that one address per domain, but that vastly reduces the number of addresses available to spammers, which in turn vastly reduces the number of spam messages flying about the Internet. Your approach may work for you, but you're still having to take inonvenient evasive action against spammers and accept a reduction in the utility of email because of their predatory selfishness. I hope we can agree that spammers are the underlying problem here. Of course spammers are the underlying problem! The issue is what evasive action we are to take to best deal with them. Spam filters are inconvenient as is flying under the spammer's radar. Each reduces the utility of email, but in different ways. The reason I choose to fly under the radar is that it serves the *common* good of reducing email traffic. Now that I know posting to the filmscanners list will expose my email address, I'll take care to never post. Yes, that should work, in the same way that never answering the telephone will completely avoid annoying sales calls. CallerID works fine for the phone, but you are correct that that is really a spam filter. As for other phone spam, I am on the national do not call list -- it works pretty well too. Unfortunately there is no workable do not spam list For those of us who have to expose email addresses to the world, spam *is* inevitable. The list itself receives on average 3 attempts a day to *distribute* spam to its 1,200 members, because the address is known to spammers. That is *filtered* out by multiple levels of email filtering and subscription control that also prevents viruses being distributed. If I didn't maintain filters you'd get that crap even if your email address was unpublished in list mails. And we are all very appreciative of your fine work. Thank you!! There is nothing wrong with your approach but it can only work for a minority of people who can burn email accounts as they become unusable. The assumption you are making is that a person has only one email address, so when it attracts spam they have to notify everyone of their new address. The alternative is to have multiple addresses, which vastly reduces the upset and inconvenience when one gets onto spammers' lists. The reason I could trace the problem to this board is that the halftone address is used *only* here. Now that it has been outed the only entity I need to inform of my new address is the filmscanners mail daemon. Most ISPs provide an account with multiple email addresses, so why not make good use of them? Thank you again for your help and general good humor while struggling with the beasts of operating systems, mailers, spammers, and the occasional snipey list participant, none of which are central to your life, work, family, or recreation. Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with
[filmscanners] Re: spam magnet
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] I think we are having an unecessary argument Agreed. Take it off list. David J. Littleboy [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tokyo, Japan Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
