On Sun, 29 Oct 2000, Samuel W. Heywood wrote:
> If you just send the message back to the sender, then you are letting
> the spammer know that your email address is a viable and confirmed
> target and that he got through to you and scored. Don't you have a
> problem with that?
Actually, not at all. It's fairly simple and straightforward,
but sounds involved to explain it all. I'll summarize here by
saying that using this approach, spammers take me off their lists.
I sort of have 4 pop mail accounts. I qualify that because
one is at my hosted domain, where I have unlimited aliasing.
Mail me at [EMAIL PROTECTED] and it'll get there,
though one address is reserved for my wife.
The other "qualified" pop account is my own machine,
wizard.dyndns.org (when the dns info is updated) which means that
any user I create on my machine has an e-mail address.
Mail is retrieved from external accounts using a fetchmail daemon,
which then feeds it to procmail which checks for spam. If it IS
spam, it's tagged with some X-procmail headers, and the spam is
appended to my auto reply:
--
Automated response:
My system's procmail filter has determined that the included
e-mail was likely unsolicited, bulk, commercial, or from a
mailing list which failed to comply with an unsubscribe request.
Further e-mail of this type will be bounced as well, so you might
as well remove me from the list you're using.
If you don't understand why your e-mail was bounced,
(i.e., procmail accidentally tagged a legitimate message)
please contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] to work it out.
--
(postmaster doesn't have the same filters as everyone else)
Whatever gets by the spam filter is sorted into appropriate mail
directories. For instance, Arachne list mail goes into a PINE
folder named "arachne". Other mail for me goes to the Netscape 3.x
mail file, and any mail picked up from my wife's yahoo pop account
and her twovoyagers account is put into her wizard pop account.
(She can then get her mail even if I'm offline, or if the phones
are dead, or the ISP is down... which happens a lot here. If
anyone would like to see where "here" is,
http://www6.50megs.com/stackman/)
All outgoing mail is sent by wizard's SMTP, which is a mail server
24/7, but it's only wizard.dyndns.org when the dns info is updated, so
it's accessible by the outside world only when I want it to be.
> Furthermore, another problem with sending the spam back to the sender
> is that doing so will annoy the spammer and he can easily retaliate by
> sending you even more spam. He knows his missiles will hit you because
> by sending the message back you have confirmed for him your email address.
Actually if the spam was addressed to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and
the mail is returned by [EMAIL PROTECTED], all he knows
is that both those addresses are "bad" in that the mail won't reach
them. If you send spam out and get a computer-generated reply,
would you get annoyed? Of course not! For one thing, you already
know you're in the wrong, and for another, what good does it do to
get annoyed at a machine?
> Spammers use a tactic known as "recon by fire" in order to hunt for
> targets. When they fire on a location from which they receive return fire
> then they have a fix on the hapless victim's position. Then they can
> bring their big guns on line and key in the target's coordinates and
> deliver a heavy barrage to blow the target away.
But I have an SDI shield which bounces it all back. Why would they
continually waste ammo on a rubber target? Their mail can't
get through, and they know it.
> For this reason I have
> a problem with shooting back from a position that I intend to continue to
> occupy when the enemy is just conducting a recon by fire tactic. When you
> shoot back you expose your position.
I should mention here that procmail doesn't *require* an auto
response. If you want, you can simply send all filtered mail
to "spamfolder" or to "dev/null" or even to one of those spam
fighting sites.
> In order to successfully attack a
> spammer you need to first pinpoint his position and then periodically shell
> his location by using a roving gun which you can shift about from place to
> place taking care never to fire from the same position more than once and
> never to fire from a position which you plan to strategically occupy for
> any more time than whatever is needed to complete your fire mission.
Hmmm... perhaps, grasshoppa, you should think about why you want
to "attack" the spammer directly. Would it not be wiser to
complain to his ISP and get his account revoked?
> Here is another potential problem that you can encounter by setting up
> your machine to auto-respond to a spammer by sending the spam back:
>
> The spammer can set up his program to recognize an auto-response and
> send back an auto-responded reply.
The X-procmail tags I mentioned earlier prevent that. If your
own mail is bounced back, no auto-response is sent.
> In addition to attacking individual spammers by using a roving gun, it
> might also be a good strategy to attack ISPs that harbor spammers.
Another option is to have your auto-response go to the
spammer's ISP rather than to the spammer himself. Or have one go to
both spammer and ISP. You can configure it to do whatever you want.
Procmail is an extremely versatile tool, and if it's available
on your ISP with shell account, you can configure it to recognize
and handle spam any way you want.
--
Steve Ackman [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Glass Host, Arts & Crafts http://www.delphi.com/crafts
Metamorphosis Glassworks Page http://twovoyagers.com/metamorphosis
