A couple of things.
1) I sent the quote below to slug-chat rather than to slug
central (or whatever the name is). Matthew posted it here and
whilst I'm flattered that someone thought enough to do so,
Matthew, you may attract the attention of people who will tell
you not to darken their electronic doorstep and take it hence...
On Thu, Jul 18, 2002 at 07:04:24PM +1000, Matthew Palmer spake thusly:
=+- On Thu, 18 Jul 2002, Bill Bennett wrote:
=+-
=+- Two things. I'm writing as a novice (alright, an ultra novice),
=+- but I noticed what seemed to me to be a good filtering device
=+- in some E-mail recently received.
=+-
=+- You had to delete the animal in the reply.
=+-
=+- [address munging examples]
=+-
=+- the catch to all this is that it has to be done manually.
=+-
=+- Not necessarily. I'm sure someone has come up with some automatic means to
=+- randomly munge e-mail addresses.
=+-
=+- Or has technology proceeded to the stage where animals are
=+- recognized without difficulty?
=+-
=+- Most scrapeware (software which harvests e-mail addresses from Usenet or web
=+- pages) works well enough to remove common munging, such as false
=+- TLDs (top level domains) and the common additions (REMOVE, spamsucks, etc).
=+-
=+- The sort of random variation such as you describe will probably foil
=+- spammers who harvest your e-mail address, but these days a lot of spam gets
=+- sent to lists CDs which are comprised of better e-mail addresses. Also,
=+- you'll tend to annoy lots of people who don't notice or (as I tend to)
=+- forget to un-munge before replying.
=+-
2) To take the second point first, are you not dealing with a
scale of annoyance here? I'd be one who'd be annoyed because,
without doubt, I'd forget to unmunge the address. On the other
hand, I'm even *more* annoyed at the 567th offer of free Viagra
arriving uninvited.
Can't comment on the first point: don't know enough of the nuts
and bolts.
=+- In general, I feel it is better to go after the mongrels who send this crap,
=+- by shutting down their access accounts or, even better, get their websites
=+- shut down. Without their websites to advertise, they've got no reason to
=+- spam. Slowly we'll track 'em down, shut 'em down, and slow the flow of
=+- the crap.
3) I think you're after an unattainable ideal world. I remember
the parliamentary debate involving Senator Harradine, the Democrats
and pornography sites. The parties that voted for it did so
because 1) it made good publicity to be seen to be doing
something for the nation's kiddywinkies, but 2) they had been assured
by their technical people that voting for it would not make one
iota of difference to the status quo: the porn merchants would
find some not-too-ingenious way of circumventing the legislation.
Well, insert spam for porn in the above and the argument remains
unchanged.
I wonder also whether people appreciate the money side of this.
I remember the case of two American solicitors who spammed
something like 2 million addresses and reaped a cyclone of
complaints. They were unrepentant: they had received a 0.05%
response to the spam, they said, and it was well worth the
complaints, being reported to the Law Society and the public
condemnation.
Finally, writing as one who has taught some computer classes
at secondary school, I could name at least two students who
were technically quite able to tinker with the scrapeware you
described above to accommodate any changes or (more likely)
simply to write their own. Furthermore, they would not take any
notice of threats to track 'em down, close down their websites
etc., or examples of people who have been fined for spamming,
because (a) it happened to boring old cretins (= people over
25, and what can you expect) (b) it was history (and therefore
bunk) and (c) could not, could not, could not happen to alert,
knowledgable, computer-savvied persons (themselves).
This is not to say that we shouldn't try. Just don't get your
hopes up.
Regards,
Bill Bennett.
--
SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/
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