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Strategies & Market Trends : The Final Frontier - Online Remote Trading
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To: TraderAlan who wrote (8363)8/3/2000 2:30:21 AM
From: Jon Tara  Read Replies (1) of 12617
 
I have a three-pronged defense against spam...

My e-mail goes to a "shell" account at my ISP. (Becoming a rarity, I'm afraid - Earthlink just discontinued shell accounts.)

There, my mail is processed through Procmail, where I am able to filter and auto-reply to certain messages.

ProcMail then hands the mail to a program called SpamBouncer. (http://www.spambouncer.org) SpamBouncer has a list of known spammers (identified by an identifiable "signature", not just the return address), and also has some more general filtering that is very good, and "scores" each e-mail for various tell-tale signs of spam.

It then tags the mail with special headers.

Mail that is identified as "spam" (it appeared on the list of known spammers) goes to /dev/null sight-unseen. I've checked it in the past, and am sure that I am not throwing away anything important.

And this is where the "bounce" part comes in: SpamBouncer automatically generates a message to the appropriate ISP contact (NOT to the return address) to complain about the spam.

Mail that is identified on the basis of the scoring procedure is marked with a special header. When I download my mail with Eudora, a Eudora filter puts it in a separate folder.

Finally, I use a program called SpamBeGone (a University research project, and unfortunately no longer available) that uses AI techniques to classify mail as spam or not spam. SpamBeGone is a Eudora plugin. Almost anything that gets through SpamBouncer is caught be SpamBeGone.

Anything that gets through all of this filtering (perhaps 1-2 spams per day) gets my personal attention. I usually write the responsible ISP, and usually get the account shut off.

Without these measures, I'm sure I would be seeing 100+ spams a day.

BTW, SpamBouncer cc's enforcement@sec.gov for all financial-related spam.
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