Archive for the 'Email' category

When a good idea appears in the Internet space, it attracts people, a lot of idle people and a lot of marketing people. Of course, with marketing comes its shameful brother: SPAM.

This is exactly what is happening right now on MySpace, the virtual social network where teens have been spreading and sharing for months now (nearly 50 million users in this end of 2006). An example that borders on caricature is the appearance of pseudo user Red Passion (not only a user with a pseudo!). Here is how she present herself:

What I adore… Strong and skillful people, tolerance and freedom, the ambiguous side of life, testing… in every sense, excitement and thrill, sharing, seeing and being seen. What I hate… Strictness, simple-minded people, stupidity and foolishness, fear and shame, prejudice, meanness… in every sense and, more than everything, the lack of imagination. This is me, female, from a place you’ll never know. Explore my world…

With such an invitation, on a dating web site (even more than on a social network site), the first contact is virtually automatic. Red Passion is not a real woman (after all, who could blame her for that since false identities are plentiful on those sites - or at least identities that are fantastically more generous than the mere reality), but - more importantly - she is a real advertisment.

Yes! This is an online ad for Campari (the Italian alcohol drink) and HotelCampari.com the accompanying web site.

Some feeble-minded observers would think that this would not stand for long, but no. SPAM - here as everywhere else - uses the proven theories of advertising to extend them to their worst extreme. Isn’t abuse too big? Alcohol beverages advertised in a virtual location obviously crowded with teens.

Yes! It has already been 10 years since the inception of SpamAnti.net. It started on Compuserve then migrated to various hosting solutions. The name changed several times (from Spam Anti to Spam.Anti to SpamAnti! to SpamAnti.net), but I kept the same will to find easy practical solutions to the permanent flooding of our mail boxes and some adequate information/news.

Original image by Josef Stuefer

Happy Birthday SpamAnti.net!

The marketing company e360insight sued SpamHaus for wrongly listing it as a spammer. But we just heard that SpamHaus lost and will have to pay a record 12 million dollars fine.

As you probably already knw, I am also the adminstrator of a web site fighting against SPAM (SpamAnti.net). On this site, I have been promoting actively the use of a statistical mail filtering tool to sort SPAM out of your mailbox: K9 from Robin Keir.

But, a lot of us who tested some of the available tools (some of them are sold at very high prices) quickly observed that their efficiency is often quite poor. Sometimes surprisingly bad. So, how’s K9 going? Very well.

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For the roumazeilles.net domain, I published an SPF-compliant declaration (in the DNS Bind zone file).

roumazeilles.net. IN TXT “v=spf1 ip4:81.57.246.28 a mx ptr include:free.fr include:magic.fr -all”

Back from my Summer vacations, a little surprise was waiting for me with more than 20,000 messages stored in the verious mailboxes I use daily. First, I thought that I had been receiving a mere flood of SPAM (I get easily 300 SPAMs a day, so in a period of 10 days it could have been some surge of the common plague). But the reality appears to be even sicker: Some not-so-nice spammer decided to inform his victims that my domain (roumazeilles.net) was the origin of his ugly SPAM work.

So, I received thousands of error messages from all over the world. They told me about people having left for holidays (and their return date), overflowing mail boxes, ISP sentries able to recognize and reject the messages as SPAM (and returning them to me. Thanks a million!)

After a few more hours, I finally could read my email. Again, I congratulates myself for using two excellent email tools:

• Pegasus mail: A VERY powerful mail reader. It has been free for years and tends to favor security and efficiency rather than pure user confort (quite the opposite of the Microsoft Outlook family). There are extensions to have it speaking various other languages (French and German immediately come to my mind).
• K9: an automated statistical SPAM-detection filter that seats between the mail reader and the POP3 mail server. It merely marks the SPAM messages for the mail reader to delete or sort them out.

Out of 20,000 messages, K9 only missed 2 SPAMs I had to remove manually. It also misfired on a message I sent myself from my vacation location (but it was so abtruse and specific that the filter could not fail to think it was SPAM).