30 Mar
2002
30 Mar
'02
1:43 a.m.
If enough folks simply block all emails from the Yahoo.com domain, a lot of
SPAM will go away. It's the same for mindspring, Hotmail, MSN, AOL, etc. It
isn't convenient if you occasionally communicate with folks at these domains,
but it's the fact that they give away free webmail services for the asking
that makes them attractive origins for SPAM, since one cannot do any good by
blocking a single email address, thanks to the fact that spammers can get a
new email address for the asking, the only option is to isolate the commercial
domains that support SPAM in this way.
Sooner or later the forces of economics, thanks to the ridiculous consumption
of unpaid bandwidth by spammers, we're going to have to pay for our use of the
'net. The choice is between whether we pay for our own use or whether we pay
for the SPAM too. What's going to have to be sacrificed in the interest of
paying only for the traffic one generates rather than what one receives, is
the anonymity. If people who, ultimately, will be asked to pay for their use
of the infrastructure, insist that they are to be required to pay only for
what they transmit, as they do with the USPS-provided junk mail, for example,
they must insist that the genuine originator name and physical address, etc.
of the sender be incorportated in the email that's sent. Right now, the
SPAMmer spoofs a sender address. writes a single message with 6.23*10**23
destination addresses, and sends the thing, letting the intermediate routers
deal with the problem of distributing the message to each destination. This
costs him nothing, yet consumes a huge proportion of the bandwidth. If the
cost per bit were severely skewed, so that the guy sending 10 MB/month got his
service free, while the guy sending 10 MB/hour had to pay $100K per bit,
starting with the first bit, the use of that bandwidth would change. Now
that's extreme, but you get the picture.
Until senders (1) are prevented from sending a single message to multiple
destinations, and (2) are required to pay, say, 2**n! bucks per bit per month
for their bandwidth, we're all running the risk of having to pay for what we
receive as well as what we generate.
Think about it!
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: "Clint Wolff (VAX collector)" <vaxman(a)earthlink.net>
To: "Classic Computers" <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Saturday, March 30, 2002 7:54 AM
Subject: Re: FYI: Yahoo Mail Account info Alert. (fwd)
Hehehehehe...
Most of the spam I get nowadays comes from yahoo.uk... Why shouldn't
yahoo join in the fun... Just get them added to the global no-spam
list :)
clint
On Sat, 30 Mar 2002, Doc Shipley wrote:
I know a lot of y'all use Yahoo Mail....
FYI to those who use Yahoo Mail.
March 29 - Tired of spam you're getting at your free Yahoo! e-mail
account? Get ready for more. Tucked inside a privacy policy change
the company made this week was notice that more Yahoo! e-mail
marketing offers were coming "even if users had formerly indicated
they were unwanted. YAHOO! GRANTED ITSELF PERMISSION to spam by
creating a new "marketing preferences" page that lets users
pick "yes or no" to specific categories of marketing pitches. The
problem is, Yahoo! set every users' option to "yes" - even if long
ago, they indicated they never wanted any Yahoo! spam.
Users who don't want marketing offers from Yahoo have 60
days to do the following: Visit the user profile preferences page at
http://edit.my.yahoo.com/config/eval_profile select "Edit your
marketing preferences" from within the Member Information section;
and individually change selections in a series of marketing
categories from "yes" to "no."
In e-mail marketing lingo, the process is known as "opt-out."
But even performing that slightly cumbersome operation is no
guarantee that Yahoo! marketing offers won't come, since the firm
reserves the right to add marketing categories at any time.
"I'd suggest re-checking periodically," writes another
mailing list poster.