Subject: [Asrg] 0. General - Summary of spam filtering effectiveness on slashdot

From: "Peter Kay" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2003 15:18:05 -1000

Gentlemen, this the slashdot quote below is suitable for framing.  And
if you can read it without getting offended, you can only appreciate the
clarity and truth of what is being said.  

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=76224&cid=6801992

Recopied below for your convenience:

As a professional sender of UCE, I just want to tell you slashdotters to
keep on playing with your spam filters. As long as you use spam filters
on your e-mail, I can continue to reach my real intended targets, those
non-slashdotters who do not know better and will buy my products or
click through to my client's websites. Your filters really help cut down
on the complaints to the Internet service providers I do business with,
and as long as not too many complaints come in their marketing people
assure me we can do business. Of course, I still waste your bandwidth
and mailbox capacity, but you no longer complain to [email-masked], my
access providers, or anyone else who might cause me problems. My yahoo
and hotmail and other accounts for replies are lasting much longer
before getting shut down because someone complained to these service
providers. And my clients are even reporting that they can start mailing
out 800 numbers like 1-800-901-3719 again and they will not have you
damn geeks set up your modems to keep autodialing them, since you spend
your own time and effort to filter the e-mail and only clueless users
who might actually call will see the numbers. 
Please don't bother your Congressmen or Senators proposing legislation
that might not work 100%. Just keep on filtering the spam I send you, I
know you would have never bought from me anyway. That you can filter
legitimizes my business and my waste of your bandwidth. 
P.S. To be sure of not getting a false positive, be sure to send all
filtered mail to a special folder. Waste your storage space storing the
mail until you manually go through every piece to be sure you didn't
accidentally filter something important. Of course, this will take
exactly as much effort as it would have to just check the e-mail when it
first came in, not to mention the extra effort spent in setting up the
filters and the extra space for storing your incoming spam folder, but
what the heck. If you think that you can scan e-mail for false positives
faster this way you are just fooling yourselves, if you are scanning
faster e-mail that you expect to be all spam, you will miss the very
false positives that you think you are looking for. And any fales
positives that you do catch will have been delayed, perhaps days or
more. You geeks enjoy wasting time this way, and I certainly appreciate
it. It makes the work of all us spammers much easier. After all,
slashdotters like Moderation abuser [slashdot.org] tell you that
Bandwidth is cheap, disk is cheap, CPU is cheap , which is good, because
at the rate spammers like me waste it the costs still adds up. I am gald
I never pay for it, and I would just as well that everyone else takes
the additude that all of the resources I waste are cheap than band
together and pass laws against us. No one should care about spam because
Bandwidth is cheap, disk is cheap, CPU is cheap and it is your job to
filter it. 
Think you've seen this before? Don't complain. Just go through lots more
work to set up special filers on your computer so that you will not see
it again. You should have to do that. It's the true geek solution, and I
would really like it if you did. 

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---

From: Pete McNeil <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 30 Aug 2003 09:49:48 -0400

>Recopied below for your convenience:

There's nothing new here - Same old arguments in a different form. For now, 
filtering is an interim solution that is better than the alternatives... 
and it will never go away but it will get better. (_any_ mechanism that 
allows someone to chose which messages will be sent/received and which will 
not is inherently a filter) As the technology of the Internet evolves, 
eventually filtering will be on a par with search engines = a device to 
select the data you need/want from an unending sea of available data.

As far as legislation goes, we don't need more than we have and most 
current proposals for it are "a cure worse than the disease". What we do 
need are security mechanisms in place on the 'net that prevent and respond 
to the abuse that is now rampant. That done, the laws that make it illegal 
to break into a computer system will suffice for prosecution (because they 
will become enforceable), and the network itself will be a deterrent to 
malware & spam by automatically forcing the disconnection of the abusers no 
matter where they enter the 'net. This should be our goal, with a sound 
consent management mechanism to act as the steering wheel.

Sure, not everybody will implement secure technologies and practices - at 
first almost nobody will, but in the end, not to sound heartless, those 
that do not will deserve the abuse they signed up for... sadly we can't 
stop that.

_M