Re: Stopping Spam

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Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2005 14:51:03 -0700

On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 13:04:37 +0000 (UTC), david20@alpha2.mdx.ac.uk
wrote:
>In article <nnin011e10t5u3lqdd7i93lglpb77chjcv@4ax.com>, David MacQuigg <dmq at gain.com> writes:
>
>>"Spam is a completely solvable problem. And it does not take finding
>>every <spammer> to do it ..." AOL Postmaster Carl Hutzler, as quoted
>>by John Levine in http://www.circleid.com/article/917_0_1_0_C/
>
>See some of the comments posted about that article (at the same URL).

This was an awful lot of reading, and I see lots of vague or anecdotal
complaints from people who may not know what they are talking about.
There is big difference between anecdotal evidence (which tends to
indict large companies) and a careful analysis of complaints vs total
volume.

One of the posters, Suresh Ramasubramanian, tried to pin down another
who had complained that "allot of the spam/UCE I get is from AOL,
Yahoo, Hotmail and a number of ccTLD based ISP's".

Was the spam really from these large ISPs, or just some spammer
forging their name? What percent of AOL's outgoing mail is spam? If
that % is low, I'm much more likely to accept email from aol.com's
authorized server, even though the absolute numbers are higher than
some dinky little domain in Russia.

Here are some excerpts from the exchange:
"""
By Suresh Ramasubramanian | Posted on Jan 26, 2005 @ 2:12 AM PST
To Jeffrey Williams -
<<"Be precise in the use of words and expect precision from others" -
Pierre Abelard>>
Now, I'll ask a rather precise question. "A lot of the spam you get is
from AOL, Yahoo etc". Is that "from yahoo / AOL's servers, and/or from
accounts that actually exist on yahoo / aol" or "email from an address
that has some random string @yahoo.com forged into the from"?

By Jeffrey A. Williams | Posted on Jan 26, 2005 @ 11:43 PM PST
To: Suresh Ramasubramanian
Yes you were percise enough, thank you...
To anawer your question to me, Suresh, yes almost all were legitimate
AOL/YAHOO/ Hotmail Email addresses...
BTW I am very accomplised in reading Email headers and spamcop does
what it can but is not all that impressive.
"""

Do you see the problem with this answer?

What I would really like to see is a list that gives for each domain a
ratio of spam to legitimate email. I list like that could really
drive reform in this industry.

-- Dave

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