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

[crufta cat]

I use hosts blacklisting , but its up to some huge number of addresses.

When I say bailed its an unsub.  I suspect its not majordomo or listserve
directly.
The easy way is subscribe and copy the mail and scrape the addresses.
People are starting to see that level of activity on groups.IO.
Compromised machines makes the list activity visible as well.

I wonder of all the subscriber how many have posted something or anything
in
the last 6 month, year, ever?  I suspect the never cases.

Short term solution is use Gmail then run for a while and then kill it or
leave it to
as a bit bucket and replace with new Gmail.

Allison

On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 9:02 AM Peter Coghlan via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> 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.
>