Juhana, you are wrong.
I subscribe and post to multiple public lists, and as an unfortunate result
get literally hundreds of spam emails like these per day, virtually all of
them from faked email addresses. I wouldn't be at all surprised Sven and
Jernej are in the same predicament given their frequent (and extremely
helpful) postings to multiple lists. Occasionally I do take time out to
report something particularly offensive, but 1) there is simply no way that
I (or Sven or Jernej) can report all of these, 2) little if anything is
presently done about most of these because the folks that investigate are
overloaded, and 3) there isn't any reason to expect that the person whose
email address is being used has to be the one to report the problem. If you
think there is a problem that needs to be reported, then take time out to
learn what it takes to adequately report these incidents, and do it yourself
(you will find that the police are generally *not* the appropriate
authority, especially not at first). The rest of us have too many other
things to do than to spend our entire day attempting to report things like
this every time they crop up. As for myself, I know that unfortunately my
own email address has recently been used for some particularly offensive
spam. Sadly, it is being generated from so many different sources (host
systems and IP addresses) that there is no possible way that I could report
all of them, even if I wanted to... Perhaps you have enough time in your
own day to do nothing but this all day long, but most of us don't.
IMHO, the best potential way to fight spam is with automated tools, not just
simply for deleting the junk out of your in basket, but also for forwarding
the offending items to the appropriate authorities (ISPs, etc.), and for use
at the ISPs themselves to assist in automatically shutting down offending
accounts. Unfortunately, there are no tools that I am aware of that can be
counted on to do this automatically without potentially making verying
damaging mistakes, by mis-identifying spam and falsely impacting valid email
users. In addition, there are many ISPs, particularly in some foreign
countries, who actually solicit and thrive on the business of people who
send out this garbage. These ISPs won't respond at all to any claims that
you make against people sending mail through their systems. If you go high
enough up the chain of ISPs, you can usually eventually reach someone who
can get these operations shut down, but 1) you have to know how to track up
the chain of providers, 2) it is *extremely* time consuming, 3) there is a
*lot* of lag time involved giving each party adequate time to respond, and
4) the solution is only temporary as the offending parties in many cases
will merely open a new account with a different ISP.
Finally, a lot of this spam is being sent as the result of virus infections
on computers where the people from whom the email is being sent have no clue
whatsoever that their machines are infected. Note that the email from these
machine is *not* sent with the actual email addresses of those machines, but
instead with the addresses of other folks on that system's contacts list.
There are many thousands of such infected machines, with many thousands of
perfectly valid non-spammer email addresses in their contact lists. It
would take a *huge* effort to get all of these machines cleaned up.
Certainly this is a valid cause that needs to be undertaken, but it is
entirely unreasonable to ask Sven or Jernej or anyone else whose email
address has been stolen to track down and report every separate virus
infected machine that is sending out spam using their address. Most of us
only have enough spare time to make a minor contribution to this effort.
The spammers use automated tools to perform their dirty work, and once again
IMHO the only practical way to attempt to solve this problem is to use
automated tools to fight back. Therefore, this is something that ISPs and
software companies are going to have to tackle, and not something where you
can reasonably expect any individual user to have a significant chance of
making a dent in the problem.
s/KAM
- Original Message -
From: "Juhana Sadeharju" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Saturday, February 21, 2004 10:57 AM
Subject: [Gimp-developer] Re: Gimp-developer Digest, Vol 17, Issue 39
> Hello. I'm getting spam like this. Many times per day.
> Sven and Austin, say what, somebody is using your names;
> why don't you go and file these cases to police?
> In otherhand if you agree with the spammer by doing
> nothing, then you're part of the spamming.
>
> Regards,
> Juhana
>
> Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2004 16:57:40 +0100
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: [Gimp-developer] hello
> Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> _
