[107972] in Cypherpunks
RE: Idea to eliminate most spam on mailing lists
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Stephen Gutknecht (vw))
Sat Jan 30 14:47:08 1999
From: "Stephen Gutknecht (vw)" <VW@i405.com>
To: "'Rabid Wombat'" <wombat@mcfeely.bsfs.org>,
Jay Holovacs
<holovacs@idt.net>
Cc: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 11:25:38 -0800
Reply-To: "Stephen Gutknecht (vw)" <VW@i405.com>
Yes, I don't think anyone would believe this is a perfect solution.
However, this solution is aimed at mailing lists that don't require
membership to post. CPunks is the worst of the ones I've seen, as CPunk
members do their own bit to make it worse. CPunks tend to use our list
address as a means of anonymity when they use web sites that require e-mail
registration ( http://support.microsoft.com/support/ being a good example ).
And the great thing is that if they use your email to send you your password
it goes to a public list that isn't associated with you.
So we don't just get spam, we get newsletters and "product announcements"
that a normal registered member of these web sites would get.
== the traditional solution ===
Most lists require membership to post. I think study will show that
"require membership to list for post" is pretty effective at blocking
current spammers. I'm on dozens of other lists that require membership and
they don't get any spam. And that isn't a new technology... and the
spammers have ignored putting this into their applications.
It is my assertion that spammers are primarily after individuals. I bet
they would rather NOT hit mailing lists. They piss off the wrong kind when
they hit a mailing list. Hitting a mailing list means you are hitting a
technical person (mailing list admin) and they are likely to chase down the
spammer. At least compared to the typical net-user who doesn't care about
the technology. Yet their mail scanner programs looking for
anything@anynetplace.com -- their software doesn't care if it is a list or a
person. They just want to have 11,000,000 vs the other program's 9,000,000
e-mail addresses that they can spam. List addresses are on news and on web
pages, so they go into the pile...
I'm sure we all like that we can post to this list without membership, it
favors the anonymous posts that go with some sensitive topics (and stupid
juvenile swipes at times). Yet we have opened ourselves up to more noise
than signal.
Stephen Gutknecht
-----Original Message-----
From: Rabid Wombat [mailto:wombat@mcfeely.bsfs.org]
Sent: Saturday, January 30, 1999 10:40 AM
To: Jay Holovacs
Cc: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Subject: Re: Idea to eliminate most spam on mailing lists
If most mailing lists adopted this approach, the end result would be that
the spammers would start buying "passphrase enabled" spam kits from
enterprising authors.
When the gold rush is already on, you don't make money panning for gold.
You make money selling shovels to the other dumb bastards who are panning
for gold.
In the long run, we'd all be going through additional effort to use our
lists, simply to create a market for a new "spam kit" product.
