Enough Is Enough
November 19th, 2002 | by Tony Steidler-Dennison |The following is the text of a message now being sent from my machine to spammers who invade my electronic privacy:
All details of your unsolicited email have been logged, including date and time of receipt, sender email address, domain information, domain administrative and technical contacts, Internet service provider, and all upstream Internet access providers.
You are hereby notified that any further unsolicited email received from your company, email address or domain will result in a) notification to all Internet service providers and upstream Internet access providers of your activites, and b) electronic countermeasures against all involved parties, designed to protect the privacy and integrity of the electronic property stored on this machine. Further efforts to send such unsolicited email to this email address or to thwart such countermeasures will be considered trespassing and will be prosecuted accordingly.
If procmail finds the sender address in a list of known spammers I’ve been compiling for the last year, this is the message they’ll receive. I’m not sure how much the message alone will slow it down, but I’ve had enough.
8 Responses to “Enough Is Enough”
By Dean on Nov 20, 2002 | Reply
Do you even think that these reply emails will go anywhere? My experience is that the reply and sender addresses are spoofed and useless.
By Tony on Nov 20, 2002 | Reply
Probably not. It was as much a quick venting as anything else. Like
everyone else, I’m just flat flooded with spam. For those few who do
actually receive a message, even a moment of concern would be worth the
effort.
In the meantime, I installed SpamAssassin last night. Seems to work pretty
well for a canned solution.
By Kreg Steppe on Nov 22, 2002 | Reply
I have been using Spamassassin, and it works well… but I am now in the process of training bogofilter.
I must say that It is catching only spam, and out of 100+ message I had only a hand full (like 5~8 spam) in my inbox, and about 68 in my spam box correctly identified, and no false positives yet. (That is only after about 3 days of training, it will get better with a little more time.)
By nita on Nov 23, 2002 | Reply
Please, you could end sending a message to me. My SMTP server, etc. are secure, but someone has decided to use tattlatale.net as their retun-path and reply-to.
I hate it, yes.
By Sean on Nov 24, 2002 | Reply
I set up Spam Assassin a while back, and it has made a huge difference. I get the odd false negative, but false positives are a rarity (once I whitelist some of the newsletters I subscribe to)
Plus, the configurability is wonderful. A certain website has a habit of sending out ads from the same address that they send out all their content. I was able to easily write a rule that overrode the whitelist I had for it, and I don’t see the ads anymore.
Sean
By MasterRa on Nov 25, 2002 | Reply
I had to quit using my hotmail account a few months ago. It was a sad day. I’d had that accrount for something like 3 years. But if i didn’t log in and clear out the spam every 12 hours, it would overflow the 2 meg limit and hotmail would get mad. I literally got over a hundred an hour, if not more.
I just wonder who buys from these guys?
By Max Bowsher on Nov 28, 2002 | Reply
I just got a rather ironic spam. It said:
“I have visited http://www.steidler.net and noticed that your website is not listed on some search engines.”
Yep, thats right, it must have plucked my email address from a comment on this blog.
By digitalmouse on Nov 29, 2002 | Reply
“I have visited http://www.steidler.net and noticed that your website is not listed on some search engines.”
Ha - I was getting those for two of my sites (digitalmouse.org and digitalBYOND.org) about twice a month. The funny thing is that both sites *are* listed in Google and several of the other top search engines. This proves to me that it’s an email bot of some sort.
After responding ‘professionally’ with several ‘no thanks’ emails, I finally sent them a pointedly aggressive message similar to Tony’s above, and they stopped pretty quickly!