[107975] in Cypherpunks
Re: Idea to eliminate most spam on mailing lists
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael Hohensee)
Sat Jan 30 16:49:58 1999
Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 21:49:55 +0000
From: Michael Hohensee <michael@sparta.mainstream.net>
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Reply-To: Michael Hohensee <michael@sparta.mainstream.net>
"Stephen Gutknecht (vw)" wrote:
>
> 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.
That's not the same as requiring a passphrase, and we don't want a
member's only list, for reasons explained below.
> 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.
Actually, I don't think they care one way or another. Since they send
their spam to such a wide audience, there's still an excellent chance
that at least one technical person will be on that list who will chase
them down. My experience with spammers is that they don't much care if
they get one of their accounts at their ISP shut down, since they can
always open another one elsewhere (or at the same location). Thus it
makes no difference to them whether they hit a list or not --indeed,
some spammers actively target some lists (cypherpunks has gotten a few
of these, I believe).
> 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...
Nod, but if they can squeeze a few million extra email addrs into their
pot by collecting the emails of mailing lists, they get that many more
viewers. :)
> 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.
Which isn't entirely bad, as it helps mess up hostile traffic analysis.
:) Cypherpunks is set up as an easily accessible, mostly unkillable
mailing list. If we place restrictions on its use, we're defeating our
purpose. Furthermore, the current arrangement allows us to use
anonymous remailers, which wouldn't work so well if membership were
required.
