On Wed, Aug 14, 2002 at 04:56:35PM -0700, Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote: > At 2:52 PM -0400 8/14/02, Theodore Ts'o wrote: > >If our Japanese, > >Chinese, and Koreans colleages don't like that, then maybe they ought > >to pass laws which prohibit SPAM from being originated in their > >countries..... > > And until the US does the same, should we suggest to folks in those > countries that they should use filters that throw away most mail from > the US? If that rule is effective for them, then maybe they should try it. Unfortunately, they might find that the rule might have too high of a false positive rate. The reality is right now, the vast majority of the mail with non-ASCII charsets, and the vast majority of mail that is HTML only, is SPAM. So this is an effective filter for me, at least when combined with a bit of human intelligence. This may be that many of my correspondents don't use Microsoft MUA's that have a tendency to declare charsets and instead use MUA's that send plain-text e-mail messages. But at least for me, I haven't had a significant false-positive problem by keying of the charset field. Over time, I may find that I start getting more false positives, and I'll stop using that hueristic. But at least for now, it's about as reliable as automatically trashing messages that begin "This isn't spam..." or "You have requested this message as part of AdSmart's marketing program" or "MAKE MONEY FAST". (Although I don't see much of that last one, as of late; spammers have figured out it's a bad phrase to use. :-) - Ted