Re: Spam fights
On Fri, 11 Jun 2004 21:38, Dale Amon <amon@vnl.com> wrote:
> That said, those who can afford it will hire human
> operators to act as email gatekeepers; those who can't
> will use whatever a salesman can convince them is
> affordable and works. Whether we like it or not will
> not figure into the decision.
Some of the anti-spam people are very enthusiastic about their work. I
wouldn't be surprised if someone writes a bot to deal with CR systems.
It should not be technically difficult to publish some email addresses, wait
for challenge messages to come in response to virus messages, and then have
it automatically send an appropriate response to the challenge followed by a
series of flames.
> As to the "type in this random code from a jpeg",
> I use that on samizdata (a major blog for which I'm
> one of the editors). It stopped the problem of blog-spam
> cold; the human entry is stopped cold by having
> a team of writers who delete on sight.
One -> many communication is different. If you want to get a letter to the
editor published in a newspaper you have to confirm your identity and contact
details before it will be considered. This can involve a journalist phoning
you to confirm your identity and permission for publication. If you want to
send mail to most mailing lists you have to subscribe first. Blogs are in
the same category so I agree with what you are doing there.
> At the end of the day, dealing with spam is an
> employment opportunity, not something that will be
> solved technically. Human problems require human
> solutions.
Sometimes human solutions involve humans writing and installing programs to
implement them. Totally stopping spam in an automatic manner is not
possible. Reducing it by a factor of 100 so that humans can manually deal
with the residue is possible.
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