Security Warning

in message <[email hidden]>, Cliff

(') said:

A word of warning.

My disguised reply address has been appearing in Spam e-mail address
lines and this is the only place I use it.

I suspect it has been collected by Harvester Software.

Anyone is using there proper address for replies on this newsgroup, I
would expect you are getting a load of Spam e-mails selling medicines,
computer software, phoney degrees and male enhancing drugs.

My advice would be to disguise your address

Oh, please, no. The 'but they behaved badly first' excuse is no excuse.
You are /required/ to provide a valid from address for Usenet postings.
Yes, your address will get harvested by the spammer scum; and, frankly,
for me, even worse than that they will send you junk, they will send
junk (and worse) purportedly coming form you. But the answer to the
incoming UCE problem is a decent filter such as spamassassin. Don't mung
your email address, that just makes life harder for everyone.

Seriously, I've been using my real address to post to Usenet for twenty
years. I use spamassassin. I don't have a problem.

--
[email hidden] (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/

Tony Blair's epitaph, #1: Tony Blair lies here.
Tony Blair's epitaph, #2: Trust me.

"Simon Brooke" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

in message <[email hidden]>, Cliff

(') said:

A word of warning.

My disguised reply address has been appearing in Spam e-mail address
lines and this is the only place I use it.

I suspect it has been collected by Harvester Software.

Anyone is using there proper address for replies on this newsgroup, I
would expect you are getting a load of Spam e-mails selling medicines,
computer software, phoney degrees and male enhancing drugs.

My advice would be to disguise your address

Oh, please, no. The 'but they behaved badly first' excuse is no excuse.
You are /required/ to provide a valid from address for Usenet postings.
Yes, your address will get harvested by the spammer scum; and, frankly,
for me, even worse than that they will send you junk, they will send
junk (and worse) purportedly coming form you. But the answer to the
incoming UCE problem is a decent filter such as spamassassin. Don't mung
your email address, that just makes life harder for everyone.

Seriously, I've been using my real address to post to Usenet for twenty
years. I use spamassassin. I don't have a problem.

It may not be fashionable to praise NTL, but they recently started spam
killing on my mail server. the volume of daily spam has gone from a hundred
to a handful. It's actually feels quite spooky to check your mail and find
there's nothing in the last hour.

--

Duncan Gray

The Mountaineering Council of Scotland
www.mountaineering-scotland.org.uk

"Duncan Gray" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

It may not be fashionable to praise NTL, but they recently started spam
killing on my mail server. the volume of daily spam has gone from a

hundred

Quoted message said:

to a handful. It's actually feels quite spooky to check your mail and find
there's nothing in the last hour.

Likewise BT-Yahoo. I get 2 or 3 spams per week to my inbox and many hundreds
to my junk mail box.
Occasionally a bona-fide mail will end up in the spam trap but it's no big
deal.
--
Pete
http:[email hidden]/P

Simon Brooke said:

in message <[email hidden]>, Cliff

(') said:

A word of warning.

My disguised reply address has been appearing in Spam e-mail address
lines and this is the only place I use it.

I suspect it has been collected by Harvester Software.

Anyone is using there proper address for replies on this newsgroup, I
would expect you are getting a load of Spam e-mails selling medicines,
computer software, phoney degrees and male enhancing drugs.

My advice would be to disguise your address

Oh, please, no. The 'but they behaved badly first' excuse is no excuse.
You are /required/ to provide a valid from address for Usenet postings.
Yes, your address will get harvested by the spammer scum; and, frankly,
for me, even worse than that they will send you junk, they will send
junk (and worse) purportedly coming form you. But the answer to the
incoming UCE problem is a decent filter such as spamassassin. Don't mung
your email address, that just makes life harder for everyone.

Seriously, I've been using my real address to post to Usenet for twenty
years. I use spamassassin. I don't have a problem.

I use a totally fictional nom de net, and a totally fictional reply
address.

Apart from a tiny trickle of spam from Amazon and a tiny trickle of
spam from Expedia, both of whom I have used on occasion, my inbox is a
spam free zone without the need for filters.

If anyone wants to email me they can ask for my address.

Simon Brooke said:

in message <[email hidden]>, Cliff
([email hidden]'😉 wrote:

<snipped>

Quoted message said:

Seriously, I've been using my real address to post to Usenet for twenty
years. I use spamassassin. I don't have a problem.

That's great, but why should you have to download the stuff to pass it
through spamassassin? Much better to blow the spam away on the mail server
with a server side delete.

Cliff said:

Anyone is using there proper address for replies on this newsgroup, I would
expect you are getting a load of Spam e-mails selling medicines, computer
software, phoney degrees and male enhancing drugs.

A few weeks ago, after reading a post by Simon Brooke claiming not to
have a spam problem despite posting to usenet using a genuine reply
address, I decided to try an experiment.

I set up my news account to provide a genuine reply address, one that I
have never given to anyone for any other reason. According to Google,
I've posted about 40 messages to 2 groups (urc and rec.sport.unicycling)
using this address. Surprisingly (to me), the account has so far
remained spam free.

--
Danny Colyer (my reply address is valid but checked infrequently)
<URL:http://www.colyer.plus.com/danny/>
"He who dares not offend cannot be honest." - Thomas Paine

Danny Colyer said:

I set up my news account to provide a genuine reply address, one that I
have never given to anyone for any other reason. According to Google,
I've posted about 40 messages to 2 groups (urc and rec.sport.unicycling)
using this address. Surprisingly (to me), the account has so far
remained spam free.

It is mostly, 99% of the time, the From: address that is harvested
from Usenet (as it tends to be in the XOVER results). The Reply-To:
address does not, generally, get harvested (as it is not in the XOVER
results).

Hence, my From: address gets a 550 whilst the Reply-To: is valid and
is used by all working software for valid, human generated, replies.

The later only got onto spam lists due to historic use and a couple of
misconfigurations when it appeared in the From: header :-( Even so,
the vast majority of the spam I get is to the From: address - looking
at all the 550's in the MTA logs is nice ;-)
--
------------------------------------------------------------------
- Stuart Millington ALL HTML e-mail rejected -
- [email hidden] http://w3.z-add.co.uk/ -

Simon Brooke said:

You are /required/ to provide a valid from address for Usenet postings.

There is /zero/ problem with a From: address that gives 550 when used
with a working Reply-To: address - as long as the From: address is
syntactically valid and you have permission to use it.
--
------------------------------------------------------------------
- Stuart Millington ALL HTML e-mail rejected -
- [email hidden] http://w3.z-add.co.uk/ -

Bertie Wiggins said:

I use a totally fictional nom de net, and a totally fictional reply
address.

http://www.uk.clara.net/support/aup.php
"11) The customer must not send email or post articles with headers
modified in such a way as to disguise the true source of such mail or
article. It is the customer's responsibilty to ensure that a real
email address is present and obvious to a human. "

How likely they are to enforce it is another matter...
--
------------------------------------------------------------------
- Stuart Millington ALL HTML e-mail rejected -
- [email hidden] http://w3.z-add.co.uk/ -

Scrumpy Joe said:

That's great, but why should you have to download the stuff to pass it
through spamassassin? Much better to blow the spam away on the mail server
with a server side delete.

SpamAssassin /is/ server-side ;-) (I run it on my Exim MTA.)
--
------------------------------------------------------------------
- Stuart Millington ALL HTML e-mail rejected -
- [email hidden] http://w3.z-add.co.uk/ -

Simon Brooke said:

in message <[email hidden]>, Cliff

(') said:

A word of warning.

My disguised reply address has been appearing in Spam e-mail address
lines and this is the only place I use it.

I suspect it has been collected by Harvester Software.

Anyone is using there proper address for replies on this newsgroup, I
would expect you are getting a load of Spam e-mails selling medicines,
computer software, phoney degrees and male enhancing drugs.

My advice would be to disguise your address

Oh, please, no. The 'but they behaved badly first' excuse is no excuse.
You are /required/ to provide a valid from address for Usenet postings.
Yes, your address will get harvested by the spammer scum; and, frankly,
for me, even worse than that they will send you junk, they will send
junk (and worse) purportedly coming form you. But the answer to the
incoming UCE problem is a decent filter such as spamassassin. Don't mung
your email address, that just makes life harder for everyone.

Seriously, I've been using my real address to post to Usenet for twenty
years. I use spamassassin. I don't have a problem.

And you and me and everybody else is paying more so that the ISP's
can buy enough servers and bandwidth to cope with the spam traffic
that finally gets dropped only on your very desk.

You can enjoy your righteous sense of doing the right thing by
some standard or RFC that's two or more decades out of date if you
want but personally, I'd prefer not to add to the problem.

Stuart Millington said:

Scrumpy Joe said:

That's great, but why should you have to download the stuff to pass it
through spamassassin? Much better to blow the spam away on the mail
server with a server side delete.

SpamAssassin /is/ server-side ;-) (I run it on my Exim MTA.)

I sit corrected then. I had had a brief play around with it under kmail and
the setup left me with the impression that it was downloading the emails
and then tagging them as spam.

Stuart Millington said:

"11) The customer must not send email or post articles with headers
modified in such a way as to disguise the true source of such mail or
article. It is the customer's responsibilty to ensure that a real
email address is present and obvious to a human. "

To comply with the TOS I have set up a genuine Yahoo! email address
which I will not monitor. The address is obvious to a human by
looking at the reply address.

Scrumpy Joe said:

Quoted message said:

SpamAssassin /is/ server-side ;-) (I run it on my Exim MTA.)

I sit corrected then. I had had a brief play around with it under kmail and
the setup left me with the impression that it was downloading the emails
and then tagging them as spam.

It probably was. It can run at any point in the chain - the
earlier the better.

Latest news: you can use Apache to receive mail, and hook spamassassin
right in to the server. Not that I'd recommend it quite yet for a
production system - just running locally on a test machine here.

--
Nick Kew

On Wed, 05 Oct 2005 19:58:09 +0100,

Bertie Wiggins said:

Stuart Millington said:

"11) The customer must not send email or post articles with headers
modified in such a way as to disguise the true source of such mail or
article. It is the customer's responsibilty to ensure that a real
email address is present and obvious to a human. "

To comply with the TOS I have set up a genuine Yahoo! email address
which I will not monitor. The address is obvious to a human by
looking at the reply address.

But unfortunately it isn't a real email address.

--
Andy Leighton => [email hidden]
"The Lord is my shepherd, but we still lost the sheep dog trials"
- Robert Rankin, _They Came And Ate Us_

Bertie Wiggins said:

Stuart Millington said:

"11) The customer must not send email or post articles with headers
modified in such a way as to disguise the true source of such mail or
article. It is the customer's responsibilty to ensure that a real
email address is present and obvious to a human. "

To comply with the TOS I have set up a genuine Yahoo! email address
which I will not monitor. The address is obvious to a human by
looking at the reply address.

<AOL>

Hotmail in my case. I'm very proud of mine (see header) and even go and
have a look at what it has caught every 30 days to keep it open.

</AOL>

Julesh

Bertie Wiggins said:

Stuart Millington said:

"11) The customer must not send email or post articles with headers
modified in such a way as to disguise the true source of such mail or
article. It is the customer's responsibilty to ensure that a real
email address is present and obvious to a human. "

To comply with the TOS I have set up a genuine Yahoo! email address
which I will not monitor. The address is obvious to a human by
looking at the reply address.

The "please ask" does not, IMO, comply with Clara's AUP. (However,
this thread does seem to have gone OTT based on some dodgy advice in
certain articles.)

Your From: address in particular is bad as it is invalid in precisely
the wrong way :-(

If you really want to block the From: address either use an address at
a domain that you own or something like "[email hidden]".

The Reply-To: must work, subject to a human's ability to remove the
"remove this" bits, per Clara's AUP. But, as long as you are not
forging someone else's domain - or a made up one that you don't have
specific permission to use - they are unlikely to revoke your account
unless you send spam, etc.
--
------------------------------------------------------------------
- Stuart Millington ALL HTML e-mail rejected -
- [email hidden] http://w3.z-add.co.uk/ -

Scrumpy Joe said:

Stuart Millington wrote:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

SpamAssassin /is/ server-side ;-) (I run it on my Exim MTA.)

I sit corrected then. I had had a brief play around with it under kmail and
the setup left me with the impression that it was downloading the emails
and then tagging them as spam.

AIUI there are client-side programmes that use SpamAssasin
(http://spamassassin.apache.org/), but the original version is/was
designed for server-side processing. I used [1] it as part of Exim's
primary accept/reject filtering.

[1] Used, until the HD died on my MTA recently :-(
--
------------------------------------------------------------------
- Stuart Millington ALL HTML e-mail rejected -
- [email hidden] http://w3.z-add.co.uk/ -

On Wed, 05 Oct 2005 19:28:08 +0100, [email hidden]

Quoted message said:

And you and me and everybody else is paying more so that the ISP's
can buy enough servers and bandwidth to cope with the spam traffic
that finally gets dropped only on your very desk.

This is going way OTT, but it appears that you are just sending your
spam to Yahoo and getting them to pay for the bandwidth of e-mail sent
to, possibly, invalid addresses... That would be hypocritical, unless
I'm wrong and that address - including the ".cutitout" bit - is valid
and read by you?
--
------------------------------------------------------------------
- Stuart Millington ALL HTML e-mail rejected -
- [email hidden] http://w3.z-add.co.uk/ -