RegularX/Spam Response

The Automatic Spam Response from inkless @ inkless.com

This email address has succumbed to spammers. Thanks to email which was unsolicited, often deceitful, frequently pornographic and utterly wasteful arriving at times in the excess of 100 an hour, I have had to abandon (and pay out of pocket for a new email address) a mode of contact that people I've known for nearly a decade have gotten used to.

For the real humans who want to get a hold of me, you can use this form: http://inkless.com/about/contact.php ... I can't place my new email address for fear of it being harvested by the spam industry again.

And for all you soulless, greedy, parasitic leeches who are fundamental plague of the internet as a form of free and efficient communication, for those who clearly lack any kind of real skill or intelligence to produce anything of value for electronic commerce and instead erode the dollars, time and precious messages of honest, working people - for everyone in the spam industry, I say to you:

Kiram too roohet

Don't know Persian? You can google it.

I wouldn't suggest actually googling that, btw – Reg

Radiosity: I know exactly how you feel, Reg. I've just had to delete one of my email addresses because it somehow got published on the net, and I ended up receiving about 2500 spam messages totalling more than 5mb each week. Creators of spam and viruses should be shot.

Tarquin: My beyondunreal mailbox gets tons and TONS of spam. I suggest people use their Wiki personal page as a contact point.

Mychaeel: On a more positive note, I assure you that current anti-spam software along with a few custom filtering rules (to sort out bounces and auto-responses) does a great job keeping a spam-ridden account clean on user side.

I've been using one of my email addresses – michael.buschbeck@physik.tu-muenchen.de – for more than six years now, actively spreading it in Usenet newsgroups and in the web, and it gets tons of spam, worms, and misguided bounces and auto-responses (I'm counting 5010 pieces of unsoliticed email so far since 2004-06-01); yet I see about one piece of spam per week actually coming through.

Actually, from a look into my (slightly mis-named) "Spam" folder which receives all filtered email I see that the number of actual spam and worms is in fact dwarfed by the amount of misguided delivery status notifications, virus scanner bounces, auto-responses and (of late) confirmation requests along the lines of "If the email you sent me is not spam, please confirm."

The senders of spam and the creators of worms are scum (and stupid scum at that) – we've known that for a while, and there are ways to deal with it. However, people who set up their virus scanners and email accounts to send auto-responses and confirmation requests to the unvalidated "From" addresses of email they receive are only worsening the problem because the fact that I'm getting tons of auto-responses and bounces which were never meant for me has made me set up blanket filters for those message types.

So, if I sent an email to inkless@inkless.com, I'd never read RegularX's auto-response. I can deal with spam and worms because they're comparatively easy to discern and filter, but the fact that I have to filter email sent to me by normal people in (assumedly) good faith is really troubling me – that is what's really interfering with proper operation of email.

Mychaeel: By the way: I suggest you remove the reference to inkless@inkless.com from your contact page since it only redirects back to the contact page anyway... :-)

Plouj Why don't you use a yahoo account? Its free, it gives you 100MB of space, it FILTERS your spam, it scans virus, it does NOT include spam in the 100MB of space, and it lets you send/receive up to 10MB mails.

Mychaeel: Me? I'm very happy with my current account, as detailed above. I'm running my own mail server, so there's little I cannot do. Yahoo cannot solve the problem I outlined above either – it's not related to anything I or anybody else could do, except for those sending auto-responses, virus warnings and bounces. (And whoever sends 10 MB emails needs to be shot anyway.)

RegularX: Think he meant me - Plouj was an unfortunate recipient of the anti-spam curse. Again, apologies Plouj - though something sent inkless an email from your account - though it may very, very well not have been you. I think I've gotten 20 different emails from eXor I'm sure he doesn't know about...

As for yahoo - there are two reasons I don't. 1) Yahoo accounts get more spam than almost any other account out there, they just hide it better. 2) Yahoo accounts are the cause of a good deal of spam, and I don't want to go near that. This might sound a bit more theoretical than practical, but once someone had gotten to the levels of spam I had - theory is good practice. I'm using hush now - which has the main strength of securing all of it's communications, which eliminates some of the man in the middle exploits spammers use. Plus they have the best "tear off" accounts I've seen to date, meaning I can abandon email addresses I give to mailing lists or stores easily.

I think I tried every form of anti-spam software out there, aside from being able to administer my own mail server - which will indeed slow down the progress. But, in short review:

Filters: Worked great for about two months. Spammers, like the virus nature they emulate, alter their configuration constantly. Filters simply aren't up to the task to keep up, and I ended up still hand filtering out new spam. Naturally if you make your filter too broad, you end up with the danger of filtering out good email - and I ended up deleting more than a few of those. This, to me, is the biggest crime of spamming. I lost lots of normal communication due to my efforts to clean out my own inbox.
Blacklists: Basically an ultra-filter. Nearly impossible to get above 90% accuracy, which is one thing when you get 100 pieces of spam weekly, but hourly it gets a bit nuts.
Whitelists: Worked perfectly longer than any other method. However, as time went on it took people longer and longer to get the challenge-response email and I was losing out on correspondance. And finally, spammers get human leeches to respond to the challenge and then they get through to your inbox.

For worsening the problem - I don't really have a choice but to put up an auto-responder. I've had this email for almost a decade. People I've known since I first got onto the internet (and I'm one of those 'used Mosaic' types) know this account. It's simply not possible for me notify everyone. The first week I put up the auto responder I got five emails through the contact form, and I've gotten them on and off since. I could try to get to the "validated" email address, but it would take a much more complicated responder, obviously. I think I'd rather update it so that people who get the message might know someone is sending emails in their name (which should really be a crime as well). Perhaps some month I'll abandon it completely - but I also somewhat like cursing the spam industry. It's about the only recourse that email addy has left. And yeah, there are few more references to inkless@inkless.com I need to remove.

I will admit - the "pay out of pocket" is a bit misleading... I could get a free email easily - but I mention it to simply question an untrue fact about spam - that it costs the reciever nothing. It cost me in bandwidth, in storage, in time, and in loss of contact with business relations. Spam cost me plenty. I'd love to sue someone - but there's nobody to sue. I chose to spend a bit as an investment to avoid it in the future.

There's no doubt in my mind that all these people should go to jail. How would the IRS feel if I neglected to file my returns because I accidentally tossed out my tax records with the 1,000 "Better Rates!!" offers I got in the mail that day? Or how would a store owner feel if I walked around handing out pictures of nude girls to everyone in his store, regardless of age? It's ludicrous, but until either lawmakers wake up to the amount of damage it's really doing or the internet gets a tech upgrade, it's what it is.

Plouj: Hahahah, forward crap to spaminklessnow@yahoo.com

El Muerte: here's a very usefull hint, most virii and email spiders filter email adresses that contain the word spam. So create an email address like spam@yourdomain.com, and always write it as SPAM@yourdomain.com (yes, this address is correct). An other hint is to convert everybody you know to drop Outlook, and learn them how to use a thing called e-mail: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1855.html

Here's an other interesting thing, I have quite some email addresses, some are over 7 years old others I don't use. But the interesting thing is, I have the email address michiel@... and elmuerte@..., the later is an alias of the first (so it's transparent), I always use the emuerte@... address. But I only receive spam on michiel@... and hardly any on elmuerte@.... I do receive quite some virrii on the elmuerte address.

Also note that using an email address like mydowmain@mydomain.com is just asking for spam, one of my addresses is like that and I never ever used it but I do receive spam. I started receiving spam about 1 month after I registered that domain, it didn't even have a website or anything.

Radiosity: I know all about that domain @ domain.com one. My secondary domain (which thankfully expires in October) has a default address that I can't delete. Can you guess how much spam it receives in an average week? Getting on for 15mb. I have to log into my ftp and delete the inbox file more or less daily to keep my space free for stuff I actually want.

RegularX: well inkless @ inkless.com was created back in the innocent days on the net when people used email to communicate. And actually the username came before the domain ( I used my ISP's domain for a couple months before getting inkless.com ). And while spam is annoying, virii actually caused the most damage - because they get compounded with Outlook, and that gets me with all these address lists I'm apparently on, and then I would get like 20 10MB attachments in a half hour. The net really has turned into a sewer if you wander out too far. I'm hoping using NYM addresses publically and keeping the hush account mostly silent to avoid any real spam leaking in for at least a couple of years. If that fails, I'll probably just turn into some net recluse that only responds to people who hack into a secure IRC server...

LegalAssassin: Does anyone actually buy ANYTHING of what's "advertised" (that word should be used for the honorable leeches infesting TV, radio and newspapers only) in spam mails? Really, how often does anyone pay for "herb medecin", "super viagra", porn sites and other random crap. There's obviously a market, otherwise spammers wouldn't keep at it.

I suggest you shoot anyone you know even might consider buying spam offers or anyone actually spamming. That way there's no market, no spamming, and the rest of us can live without the scum infestation.

RegularX: The problem is that is costs a spammer roughly the same to send 1,000,000 emails as it does to send 100 - which means if only 1% of their "audience" (that word is usually meant as in voluntary though) responds, it's easy to ramp up the numbers to make it more profitable. And then spammers use that as excuse - well, clearly people want the herbal viagra, four people out of 3 million bought a bottle last week. Naturally, it's inversely costly for the receiver, which is where it should be easy to make it illegal, if our lawmakers weren't stuck in the era of fax machines to realize it (laws exist to block fax ads for just that reason).

Foxpaw: There's actually an interesting reason behind why lawyers and politicians use fax machines instead of computers. A faxed signed document is considered legally valid, while one scanned, e-mailed, and then printed is not.

RegularX: Sure, sure - but I bet the more common reason is that they don't need their secretaries to log into the fax machine for them.

El Muerte: a fax isn't legal at all, but they do accept it as legally valid. You can consider anything legal if both parties agree on that (unless ofcourse it's prohibited by law), and both sign a document stating they accept the method (otherwise there's no record that both parties agree). Some people even acknowldge EULA's as legally valid.

Foxpaw: Hmm, it was my understanding that a faxed document was as valid as the original. Perhaps it varies with country, though.