18.219 effects of junk mail from Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty <willard_at_mccarty.me.uk>) on 2004-09-16 (Humanist Archives Vol. 18 )

From: Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty ) <willard_at_mccarty.me.uk>
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 07:58:47 +0100

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 18, No. 219.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

[1] From: Philipp Reichmuth <reichmuth_at_web.de> (31)
Subject: Re: 18.216 effects of junk mail?

[2] From: Geoffrey Rockwell <georock_at_mcmaster.ca> (98)
Subject: Re: 18.216 effects of junk mail?

[3] From: "Dr. Donald J. Weinshank" <weinshan_at_cse.msu.edu> (50)
Subject: RE: 18.216 effects of junk mail?

[4] From: Vika Zafrin <amarena_at_gmail.com> (45)
Subject: Re: [humanist] 18.216 effects of junk mail?

--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 07:15:56 +0100
         From: Philipp Reichmuth <reichmuth_at_web.de>
         Subject: Re: 18.216 effects of junk mail?

Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty
<willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk>) schrieb:

As far as I can see, at my workplaces users are increasingly adopting to
the filtering problem you described. They do this in such a way that it is
no longer taken for granted that e-mail actually reaches the
addressee. Two or three years ago, had I remarked that I simply did not
receive a given message, I would have met with disbelief; as of now,
people just nod their head and blame it on the filter. Paradoxically, for
mission-critical work it is becoming increasingly common to walk over to
the other office with an USB stick instead of sending files by mail.

>Are techniques of spamming the spammers working?

No, they are not. As far as I can see, no proactive method of spam
protection is working at all, partly because a given piece of spam reveals
next to nothing about the identity of the spammer. The most practical
method of spam avoidance on media such as Usenet consists of
disposable-address services such as Spamgourmet
(http://www.spamgourmet.com). It does not work well with mailing lists,
though, or with any sort of medium that has a high throughput of mail messages.

Someone has put up a list of reasons by which to check why a given
anti-spam solution is usually not up to the task. It's quite
comprehensive: http://lawgeek.typepad.com/lawgeek/2004/02/spamsolution_re.html

Philipp

[NB: If you do not receive a reply within 24 hours please resend]
Dr Willard McCarty | Senior Lecturer | Centre for Computing in the
Humanities | King's College London | Strand | London WC2R 2LS || +44 (0)20
7848-2784 fax: -2980 || willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/

--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 07:18:35 +0100
         From: Geoffrey Rockwell <georock_at_mcmaster.ca>
         Subject: Re: 18.216 effects of junk mail?

Dear Willard,

I send this to you offline because Humanist lists the e-mail of people who
submit messages. Quoting me, rather than posting my message, is part of the
point.

Like you, I found myself overwhelmed with spam and unable to check the
various mailboxes where filters put spam. I therefore decided to change my
e-mail address, inform everyone I could, and then not put my new e-mail in
any place or form where it could be parsed by spam spiders. Humanist, I
note, now substitutes "@" with "_at_" in its archives, but I wonder if this
will be enough. When we depend on e-mail communication, can we risk a smart
spam hacker spending the extra 20 minutes to rewrite a spider to parse up
all the e-mail addresses in the Humanist archives. Perhaps I am paranoid,
but you might consider dropping the e-mail address in the "From:" line and
leaving it to members to choose whether to include their e-mail at the end.

This leads me to some further points:

1. We need to get into the habit of not including other people's e-mail in
messages that go to public lists or on web sites (and a number of
discussion lists archive to the web.)

2. I think there is a social principle here - the net of trust that we
experienced in the 80s and early 90s is over. The same things that made the
net so great, like the ability to cheaply distribute information from your
desk, make it vulnerable to spammers. Perhaps someone has written about this?

3. I personally don't think there will be a technical fix - I think the
problem is that the net is now a public space with all the advantages and
disadvantages of a public space. For every better filter I saw better
spammers. The ingenuity of those who play at spam should not be underestimated.

4. We may have to move to a model where we maintain multiple e-mail
addresses, including disposable ones which can be given out for single-use
purposes. Some of us do this by having an institutional address and lots of
hotmail and now gmail addresses. I would prefer to have a service that
allowed me to spawn new addresses and attach rules to them like, "only mail
with the subject 'Response to Humanist Post'" should get forwarded to your
real account." Do people know of such services?

5. For those of us who can't hack sendmail, changing address on a regular
basis does work. I don't get spam (yet). In writing everyone in my address
book to inform them of the change of address I reestablished contact with a
number of friends, something we should all have to do once and while.
Others have been unable to contact me (my apologies to you), and some have
found ingenious ways to contact me to get the new address.

6. Our institutions are the hardest to deal with if you try to hide your
address. My institution first did not want to let me have two accounts
simultaneously (so I could watch the old one for a month and send notes
about the address change). McMaster did relent when I explained the
situation. Now I am trying to see if they will let me leave my new address
off the directory (is it fair to just leave the old dead one there?).

7. Personally I would like to follow Donald Knuth, who is happy, ever since
he got rid of his e-mail address in 1990. See
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html .

Yours,

Geoffrey Rockwell
McMaster University
(905) 525-9140 x 24072

> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 18, No. 216.
> Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
> www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
> www.princeton.edu/humanist/
> Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu
>
>
>
> Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 07:36:49 +0100
> From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk>
> >
>Yesterday, according to the efficient offices of Eudora, yielded for me a
>particularly large crop of messages, 386 total, but on average I receive
>about 250/day, with 91% filtered as junk. Yesterday I noted for the first
>time that I was calling someone on the telephone to see if he had actually
>sent a reply to my e-mail. I suspect others have been doing this for some
>time. A few days ago a friend remarked in an offhand way that he always
>deleted all messages marked as junk without checking to see if any had been
>wrongly identified. Now that information no longer has to want to be free
>but has achieved total license, despite what by the boasts typical of
>computer science are arguably extremely good filtering mechanisms, e-mail
>would appear to be sinking into the mire of human nature.
>
>What do we know about all this? Is there any end in sight for the mass
>distribution of lists of addresses? Is there evidence that people in
>significant numbers are abandoning the medium or that any particular kind
>of use is declining, e.g. for "mission-critical" tasks? (The membership of
>Humanist is at an all-time high, at 1337 souls, but then Humanist could be
>viewed as recreational, almost never "mission-critical" except for odd
>sorts like me.) Are techniques of spamming the spammers working?
>
>Informed comment on the above would be useful.
>
>Yours,
>WM
>
>[NB: If you do not receive a reply within 24 hours please resend]
>Dr Willard McCarty | Senior Lecturer | Centre for Computing in the
>Humanities | King's College London | Strand | London WC2R 2LS || +44 (0)20
>7848-2784 fax: -2980 || willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk
>www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/

--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 07:19:49 +0100
         From: "Dr. Donald J. Weinshank" <weinshan_at_cse.msu.edu>
         Subject: RE: 18.216 effects of junk mail?

Comment on Willard's SPAM posting:

=======================

...snip...

Yesterday, according to the efficient offices of Eudora, yielded for me a
particularly large crop of messages, 386 total, but on average I receive
about 250/day, with 91% filtered as junk.

...snip...

=======================

Humanists: The problem which Willard raises is another example of the old
statistical Type I ("false positive") versus Type II ("false negative")
error problem.

I enjoy two-level SPAM filtering. My department uses SpamAssassin
(http://spamassassin.apache.org/) on UNIX boxes to analyze messages:
"SpamAssassin is a mail filter which attempts to identify spam using
(Bayesian) text analysis and several internet-based real-time blacklists."
It "learns" in the sense that I can flag SPAM which it misses so that the
program will identify it in the future. The Bayesian filtering is described
at http://spamassassin.sourceforge.net/doc/sa-learn.html.

On my local PC, I use iHateSpam from Sunbelt software
(http://www.sunbelt-software.com/product.cfm?id=930), a program well
reviewed by PCWORLD
(http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_description/0,fid,22343,00.asp), and
which the company updates constantly and for which it has provided
outstanding support with some thorny problems. The software allows the user
not only to tag mail as SPAM but to report such SPAM to the offending Open
Relay servers in the hope that the people managing abuse_at_name-of-relay will
be able to clamp down in some way.

HOWEVER....

I constantly struggle with this Type I / Type II problem. One political
listserv to which I subscribe sends me E-mail which is occasionally blocked
as SPAM at the first level, and I sometimes find messages from friends and
colleagues derailed in the same way. The same thing occurs from time to time
with iHateSpam on my PC. All the while, I still receive SPAM messages which
slip through both levels and promise to improve my finances, my medications
and my anatomy.

Therefore, I have to be eternally vigilant ("the price of liberty," as we
all recall) not to miss false positives.

Sigh. At moments like this, I flip open Genesis 8:21 "...the devisings of
man's mind are evil from his youth...(JPS translation)," and that was
written well before SPAMmers!

_________________________________________________
Dr. Don Weinshank Professor Emeritus Comp. Sci. & Eng.
1520 Sherwood Ave., East Lansing MI 48823-1885
Ph. 517.337.1545 FAX 517.337.2539
http://www.cse.msu.edu/~weinshan

--[4]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 07:20:20 +0100
         From: Vika Zafrin <amarena_at_gmail.com>
         Subject: Re: [humanist] 18.216 effects of junk mail?

Willard writes:

> What do we know about all this? Is there any end in sight for the mass
> distribution of lists of addresses? Is there evidence that people in
> significant numbers are abandoning the medium or that any particular kind
> of use is declining, e.g. for "mission-critical" tasks? (The membership of
> Humanist is at an all-time high, at 1337 souls, but then Humanist could be
> viewed as recreational, almost never "mission-critical" except for odd
> sorts like me.) Are techniques of spamming the spammers working?

Well, the amount of paper-based junk mail in my letterbox has not
diminished over the last decade. In addition, e-mail addresses are a
dime a thousand, so any one "from" address might be used only once and
then discarded by spammers, preventing them from being spammed back.
It doesn't seem that the amount of spam out there is likely to
diminish, even though it's a terrible waste of most resources
involved.

From what I've seen from talking at length about this with people who
tend to spend their lives on the internet, the two most popular ways
to cope with junk mail are:

- change your e-mail address periodically (and provide a reliable way
for people to find out what your address *is*, without resorting to a
phone; some will go so far as to post an image of their current
address to a predetermined web page) and

- get your own domain name, and host it with a provider that either
has spam filtering software you like, or will allow you to install
your own.

Sadly, these solutions might be too involved for those who don't
absolutely love tinkering with their setup. There's certainly a
learning curve, and a minimal amount of time that one would have to
spend researching and keeping up to date on spam-blocking software.
But ultimately, controlling my own has really made a difference in
terms of how powerless I feel (or don't) every time I get spam in my
inbox.

-Vika

--
Vika Zafrin
Director, Virtual Humanities Lab
http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/vhl/
Brown University Box 1942
Providence, RI 02912 USA
(401)863-3984
[NB: If you do not receive a reply within 24 hours please resend]
Dr Willard McCarty | Senior Lecturer | Centre for Computing in the
Humanities | King's College London | Strand | London WC2R 2LS || +44 (0)20
7848-2784 fax: -2980 || willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/

Received on Thu Sep 16 2004 - 03:10:16 EDT

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