On Thu, 25 Oct 2001, Samuel W. Heywood wrote: > On Thu, 25 Oct 2001 19:36:49 -0400 (EDT), Steve <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > I complain to the ISP. Usually it does some good. > > If not, I have procmail send 'em to /dev/null. > > Spamcop sends spam reports directly to the ISP. The advantage > of using the spamcop service is that they will look up the ISP > automatically and they will find the spam-reporting address > where the complaints should be sent. > You say that many ISPs just ignore complaints from spamcop.
I've never used spamcop, so this is just hearsay from people active in the stop-spam "movement" ... which is that spamcop quite often sends the complaint to the wrong ISP. After an ISP gets several complaints which should have been sent elsewhere, you might imagine why they start simply ignoring them. > Why should they be any more concerned about complaints sent > directly by the spammer's victims? Because the "victims" generally take the time to insure they're sending the complaint to the right address. > In the case of all the spams > I get that originate from various servers located in Argentina > I can't do anything about it no matter what I do, despite the > fact that none of these spams are being sent over open relays. Yes, it happens occasionally that an ISP is totally unresponsive, which is (as I mentioned) when I pipe e-mails from those domains to /dev/null. > I wish there were some way I could have all email messages > sent to me from Argentinian ISPs to get bounced before they ever > get sent to my POP3 server. Do you have a shell account? If so, you can take advantage of useful tools like procmail and the /dev/null directory to do exactly that. In case you're not familiar with /dev/null, it's the device/directory on 'nix machines which is the cyber black hole. Anything sent there is simply gone. It's not as if you "delete" a file, since a "file" never existed. The mail is parsed as it comes in. If certain content exists in that mail, it is simply dropped into /dev/null without a trace, though you *can* log the passing of such messages if you wish... >From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fri Oct 26 18:55:40 2001 Subject: Re: http://www.aromamedical.demon.co.uk shows no links in Arachne Folder: /dev/null The procmail at twovoyagers.com is where I put the egregious offenders, and I don't bother logging there. Rules for less "absolute" offenders are handled by the procmail on my own machine, where (as you can see above) I do log the messages that are dropped into the blackhole. This has got me to thinking about an a-z web page about what to do with spam... Yes, I think the next thing I'll have to say on this subject will be a link. ;-) - Steve
