Re: anti-spam strategies

mark@unicorn.com
Fri, 2 Oct 1998 07:59:42 -0700 (PDT)

Michael Lorrey [retroman@together.net] wrote:
>The problem with juno is that they have no mechanism in
>their system which permanently banns people based on either their forwarding
>email server, their name, billing address, or credit card numbers or social
>security numbers.

Which is a good thing, because the only way around it would be to force people to submit some kind of 'True Name' when they set up a Juno account, and ban anonymity. You may dislike spam, but how would you feel if some spammer signed up with your social security number and got you blacklisted all over the Net?

Remember, various people on this list (including me) wrote, write, run or ran anonymous remailers; anyone can use those for spamming unless you shut them all down. So I don't think that these kind of arguments are going to work too well.

>The way to end exploitation of this mail list is to a) wipe the archive, b)
>hunt down and kill every owner of databases mined from the archives, or c)
>go after the accomplices. I think that going after the accomplices is the
>more productive and extropic strategy.

I have a much simpler, and IMHO more extropian solution; I only post to the Net from my unicorn.com or pseudonymous accounts, and the unicorn.com account has a hulking spam-filter sitting in front of it. It's stopped about 7MB of spam in the last year or so, and I don't remember the last time a spam message actually got through.

Why use the armed might of the State to try to do what technology can do right now? Filters work, government-enforced 'True Names' suck.

Mark