Spam is there and it will probably never go away, since anyone can get an internet account and mass-mail to lists of email addresses they can buy or gather.
Evans
httpL//home.hiwaay.net/~criswell/theatre/
I get about a dozen messages a day now, which is really bad. So far, I've really been using only two filtering rules with procmail and I've been able to junk about 10% of my incoming spam automatically, while rarely junking anything legitimate. The first filter checks to ensure that the Message-ID header is syntactically valid; invalid Message-ID headers are generally created only by horribly broken mail clients and some types of spam software. The other filter looks for the existence of an "Apparently-To" header which is inserted by Sendmail when it receives a message without a To: or BCC: header (at least one of which is required by RFC822). Again, this sort of thing would only be created by horribly broken mail clients and spam software (though apparently our "good friends" [yeah, right] at Network Solutions have a horribly broken cgi script that sends malformed email messages which get filtered by my second rule; they haven't responded to my phone calls about this.)
Anyway, I forward all of it to abuse@yahoo.com. They've nailed 2 so far, but all others were fake headers.
I hate spam. If anybody reading this is the cause of this, I hate you, and hope your hard-drive crashes and burns. A good lightning strike in the right place? Hmmm......
Earthlink is pretty good with spam. They have some kind of port blocking thing going on so they don't send e-mail from outside sources.
I use a mailcity account as a spam-bucket. The account name has NOTHING to do with my real name so they can't do the "johnsmith@xyz.com" thing. Second when I go to a site that asks for my name and e-mail address, I always misspell something that gives me a clue where it came from.
In my experiences, posting to USENET groups has gotten me onto SPAM lists more than anything else. I have one account that I use for USENET posting and that account gets way more spam than any other. However, putting your email address in any publicly accessible place on the net is likely to get you on spammers' lists. It is simple to write a Perl script to scan WWW sites and follow links to extract email addresses from the text of pages. If someone sees doing that as a simple way to blast a bunch of people with ads, they'll do it. I don't feel strongly enough about the spam to stop using public forums or to stop posting to USENET, because I've had many useful exchanges of information and have learned a lot by using such forums and groups. I accept the fact that using such groups will get me some spam email. I use a mailer that allows me to easily delete messages without reading them, so the spammers waste very little of my time.
Speaking of misspelling things: If you're curious about where junk post office mail is coming from, when you subscribe to magazines, change your middle initial and use a different middle initial each time you subscribe to something. When junk mail comes in, check to see which initial was used.
Evans
Some sights it's okay but others, especially ones that use "Doubleclick" go really crazy. I set up my browser with "security zones". Ones that I trust get lower settings. (Like Film-Tech) All the other ones get higher settings. That helps a little bit.
Then one night while surfing the net late, I got an "instant message" from a 22yr old college student in Clarksville, TN. She did a "search" through "AOL member's profile pages" and found that my profile stated that I was 30'ish single white guy in Nashville who liked to go out dancing. She wanted to know if I'd like to meet her at a local club in Nashville. After I explained to her that I was happily married - she said - "Your profile said you were single".
Once I changed my AOL member profile from "single" to "married" - I've never gotten another piece of Porno Spam.
Weird huh?