Tap, tap, tap, is this working???

[Peter Coghlan]

Allison wrote:
> 
> It may be that my address got into the local address book of a contaminated
> system but stopping this net for several weeks brought
> the spam and trash mail from 25-80 a day to zero near instantly (less than
> 12 hours.).    I've bailed from the list in the past for periods
> for the same reason.  I cannot filter the spam due to multiple reasons.
>  
> Its not bizarre as people do want valid addresses for scams and
> legit offers for crap I do not want.
> 

What is bizarre is that one email address that posts to the list is getting
lots of spam and another email address that also posts to the list is not.

What is also bizarre is that your spam stops when you unsubscribe from the
list (if that is what you mean by "stopping this net" and "bailed from the
list" above).  In my experience, once a spammer finds an email address,
they don't bother to check whether the address is still active any time
they want to send spam to it.  They just keep on sending irregardless.

>
> It is my belief that we have a user that is farming the list and getting
> though spam filters.
>

I think you are jumping to conclusions here.  In my experience, spammers
are very lazy people and they are just not willing to put in that sort of
effort.  Unless the spams you are getting are very specifically designed
for you, I would discount this theory.

>
> If you do not. then great.  I've been active here for a very long time
> (since I was on WSTD.COM).
>

I'm a mere blow in that hasn't been here more than 25 years.  I worked for
an email provider for 15 years and for the first 5 years of that, email
spam didn't really exist (unless you count the "call for papers" type of
academic spam).  After that, I put a lot of work into understanding spam
and preventing it from getting to or from our customers.

>
> It has been a persistent problem that always starts small and grows quickly
> and then I start filtering
> till I'm killing good mail.
>

It is really really difficult to come up with a useful filtering system that
can recognise and stop spam without stopping good mail too.  The only ones
I use are DNS based lists of ip addresses which are known sources of spam,
such as those operated by Spamhaus.  I also use my own homegrown ip lists.
This approach works for me because I have my own mail server.  If you are
stuck with using a commercial email provider, you are stuck with what they
are using.  Many commercial providers won't even reveal what they are using.
As for the free email providers, forget it.

The ip address based filtering I use stopped just one spam going to my
cctalk mailbox since April 2019 (there was a spate of it in April).  Filtering
is never a complete solution.  The best way to avoid spam is to avoid having
email addresses harvested but this is not always possible when people we
correspond with unwittingly get their machines compromised.

Another thing I believe makes a difference is to complain about every single
spam received to the ip provider of the spammer or the compromised machine
used to send the spam.  Nobody else I know is willing to put the effort into
doing this though.  However, nobody else I know has as good a legitimate mail
to spam mail ratio as I do either.  (Obviously this approach can not help
when already getting too much spam to cope with.)

Regards,
Peter Coghlan.