Spam

[Ken Brown]

Owen Lewis wrote:

> > I've received a Nigerian spam from 'a Private Investigator based in
> > Europe'. An attachment contained a list of addresses which look like
> > the list of contributors to this list.
> 
> Yes. However, if you have only received one, you are lucky. I receive about
> one a week, plus a slack handful of trojans, worms, and spam code to drag my
> terminal to a variety of usually nasty sites.
> 
> For a complex of reasons, I too am satisfied that I am targeted as a result
> of membership of this list. Of course this does not mean that other list
> memberships are not similarly targeted - I wouldn't know since this is the
> only list to which I subscribe.

Only one a week!  I've had two today & two yesterday & that isn't at all
unusual.

There /are/ lists which act as spam magnets but this isn't one of them. 
Try cypherpunks. They can get 200 spam messages a day. The rate of spam
you are talking about is probably less than average. I wouldn't worry
until you start seeing 20 or 30 a day. If anyone actually had a grudge
against you you would be seeing thousands, and what's worse, large
numbers of other people would be getting spam that on the face of it
came from you.

The real problem with spam is forged "from:" headers. More or less daily
we get complaints from legitimate users of our system that other people
have been sent pornography that seems to be from them.  Of course what
happens is that spammers send to lists of people and set the from: &
reply-to: & so on headers to addresses belonging to an arbitrary victim.
I get fed up explaining to people that anyone can set "from" to anything
on email.

I suppose what we need to do is intercept mail coming in from outside
that has a header that seems to be from within our system and append a
"this message appears to be forged" disclaimer to it.  I wonder if spam
assassin can do that?  I suppose I could write it myself but the chance
of embarrassing failure is large.

Ken