Re: O.T. Spam

On Tue, 01 Jan 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.security.firewalls, in article
<bCqej.25464$KC3.791@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Jim Ford wrote:

I thought I'd got my Thunderbird set up to mark as 'read' the paranoid
idiot who spams on all NGs about MI5 persecution!

He's now starting to obfuscate the headers with spaces, single quotes
and commas - and they're slipping through.

1. Scream at your ISP/News_provider - most of them with clue managed
to figure out their customers may leave if they don't filter. See
also the moderated group 'news.admin.net-abuse.policy'
2. Get a real news reader, not some toy oversexed web browser
3. Learn regular expressions

The best solution is to have your ISP handle the problem. If they
won't do so, and you absolutely must stay with them, change to a
less incompetent news provider, like individual.net.

Filtering - I'm seeing posts in other newsgroups that the nutcase
is using multiple newsgroups in a single post. A decent news reader
or spooling tool can filter on the eight headers your news provider
supplies in answer to the 'XOVER' command: (From:, Subject:,
References:, Date:, Bytes:, Lines:, Message-ID: and Xref:). Thus
filtering for articles cross-posted to 4 or more newsgroups should
do the trick. Regular expressions will also defeat the obfuscated
headers, whether 'M.*I.*5.*P' or what-ever - look it up.

I've used Spamassain in the past which worked well with Mutt on Linux,

Isn't needed if you are using a real news reader

but as I use Photoshop on this machine I'm stuck with XP.

Don't like the free alternative called GIMP? What-ever.

In the end, I may have to subscribe to news.individual.net, which I've
used in the past (when it was free!). Does anyone know if this server
is on top of the MI5 spammer?

Many providers are handling it well.

Old guy
.

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