> Does anyone know if spam rates are stable, declining or on the
> rise? The amount of spam I receive seems to be about the same as
> it was several years ago. The mix of obscuring techniques seems
> about the same as well.
I have so many filters on my in-house accounts that I can't tell, but
on an account I have on a local ISP spam which I very seldom send e-mail
or post to USENET from the spam is increasing.
As to Chuq's concerns, I implemented a 3 day waiting period some years
ago and more recently went to manual approval of the first few posts.
(Actually, manual approval is in effect until I authorize posting.)
Yet another technique that I use for another list is to hide the true
posting address. In other words, posts to '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' get
rejected, posters must know to send to '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'.
And the '-secret' part is stripped out with a sed filter before the post
is handed over to the list software. I suppose it would be possible to
use a different 'secret' extension for each authorized poster, though this
would become unmanageable with large lists. This also makes replying to
posts more of a bother, though.
Long term, the best solution may be to use public key encryption keys for
authorized posters. But I don't know of any mail programs or mailing list
management software that currently support this. It would still require
manual authorization of new members, though it would probably be possible
to set up an alias to handle the authentication negotiations.
--
Mike Nolan
