Russ writes: > So does trying to find the legitimate mail among > a pile of spam. The difference is that, in the first case, legitimate e-mail is lost, whereas in the second case, legitimate e-mail is preserved. > It's reality-check time. We're not going to get that, > and the problem is continuing to get worse. Now what? Stop replying to spam. Somebody is _buying_ the penis enlargement kits, and the mortgage refinancing, and the pallet-loads of Viagra, somewhere, otherwise spam wouldn't be worth the trouble. I have an idea that is kind of odd, and I don't know if it would work. I really wouldn't mind signing up for a service that sends me filtered advertising, in domains that I find _specifically_ interesting. I'd be happy to read about products and services that directly address my needs and interests, and if such a service existed, I'd be tempted to sign up. So what if such services did exist on a widespread basis, and everyone signed up for them? Would there still be a need for spam? Wouldn't it be cheaper, in that case, for the spammers to send targeted e-mail to people who have already expressed an interest in their products? Not only that, such a service could insert a unique character string in the subject line of each e-mail, unique for each subscriber. Then the subscriber could filter on this string, routing interesting commercial e-mail to a special folder. Since it would be unique by subscriber, non-participating merchants couldn't fake it. I don't know if that would work or not. But it's a thought. > How many people who are active and have been active > for some time on the Internet are still putting e-mail > addresses on web pages and then reading them with no > spam filtering whatsoever, just looking through the > inbox and deleting what isn't wanted? My e-mail address is on my Web site. People need a way to contact me. I read all incoming e-mail, except e-mail from domains that bounce my mail (e.g., AOL, which I bounce right back with a nasty message intended to scare subscribers). I check all messages and delete the spam. Right now freebsd.org is spamming me pretty actively, but I don't see that in my inbox because there on my bounce list for the same reason as AOL. > How many of you have accidentally discarded the > wrong message because it got caught in a purge of > spam from your inbox? It happens once in a while. I try to be careful. > Personally, I can still cope with the onslaught > with no filtering other than a few simple personal > rules based on observation of my incoming spam > and the types of messages I personally receive, > but those rules are utterly draconian from certain > perspectives and still vulnerable to false positives > (for example, I don't speak any Asian language, so > anything I receive in that character set goes straight > into the spam pile ... I do the same thing. Any large messages get set aside, since 99% of them are spam. Anything in HTML is set aside, too, since almost no legitimate e-mail is ever in HTML. That already eliminates an awful lot. Another filter I've been thinking of is one that sets aside anything containing character strings that aren't in a dictionary of English words, but I have no easy way of implementing that.