Blathering About Email Spam
Jan. 1st, 2007 12:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nerwengreenSo tonight I went to check my former boss's email for him. I do this whenever he goes abroad, which happens once every couple months or so. At this point it's the only 'work' I still do for him, and I don't mind doing it because normally it only takes a few minutes if I look every day. He gets his important emails forwarded to him, and I get to read the occasional faculty-only message and find out things before the rest of the institute does.
There was one time several months ago where he figured out how to check his mail from abroad, and didn't need me to do it for him.
The very next trip, he was back to ask me again. Let me guess, I thought. I save him a ton of time by filtering out all the spam so that he never has to see it, let alone gets it forwarded to his colleague.
A few months later, I made a spam filter. He gets email from three different addresses. Two of those are obsolete, and we're supposed to be telling everyone the new ones so the IT dept can eventually turn off the old ones, thereby permanently ending a chronic spam inflow. Well, he wasn't doing the greatest job with telling everyone, but all of the people with an older address were using the one that got less spam, so I sent the other address directly to trash. Things got a lot easier to check after that.
Well, what with the holiday festivities, tonight was the first time I looked in over a week. I went in to water all the plants in my end of the building, check my own email, and check his. I got 66 pieces of spam in the past eight days and 0 real messages.
As for him, he had 320 new messages in the inbox. (Keeping in mind that a larger chunk is already auto-trashed by my filter.) Out of those, I ended up keeping 11 of them, and suspect 3 of those are also spam, but I'm letting him decide that when he gets back. I forwarded 3.
That's a 96.6% spam rate to the inbox. And the problem is, because it isn't my email, I actually have to look at a lot more of them than if it were mine. I don't know who all of his correspondents are, and there have been a few times where I've almost deleted something that turned out to be important. So I err on the side of caution. (Fortunately for my sanity, the vast majority that I saw were either about stocks or pharmaceuticals. The porn spams suck out my soul. Especially the ones with explicit pictures. o.O)
The really fun part is the spams in languages I don't know. He's been getting a lot of Russian and Chinese spam recently. I've seen German and Italian spam too, I think, but because he actually speaks German and has correspondents that write to him in German and from Italy (I'm not actually sure if he knows any Italian), I can't delete any suspected spam. I might've even forwarded them to him before, not knowing what they were.
I read recently that overall in the rest of the world, 91% of all email is now spam. Ain't that grand? Ten years ago I was one of those morally outraged people who wanted legislation against spam. I posted actively in places on Usenet like news.admin.net-abuse.email/usenet/sightings and joined CAUCE and signed petitions. Fat lot of good all that did, huh.
Then there's the other email addresses I keep around. One is basically overrun, but I keep it as the address I give out to everyone who might want to send me something. I never check it unless I know there's something coming. I also have a Yahoo email address which is showing signs that it will be overrun pretty soon; the junk used to end up neatly deposited in my Bulk folder, but in the past month there has been a steady increase in spam that makes it to the inbox. And there's my gmail account which I haven't started using much yet.
The key problem is that, as long as I keep having to start new email addresses and cede the old ones, I'm never really going to win. What I want is one single permanent email address that I never have to change.
And so we come to the point of all this blather. (Yes, there really is one.) Namely, I'd like to see whitelist emails.
A blacklist is where you allow everything to enter, trusting that they're good and honorable until they prove themselves otherwise. Then you add them to a blacklist that blocks them from coming in ever again.
A whitelist is the opposite. Everyone is blocked except for people on a list that is allowed to come in. As I find people I want to talk to, I give them my address and add them to the whitelist. They can do whatever they want with my email address - pass it to spammers or whatnot - but since the spammers aren't on my whitelist, they can't get in anyway. Would it be a lot more of a hassle to have to manually add each individual person/organization/business? Maybe. Would it be more than the hassle of having to clear out spam? I don't think so. Not at this point.
This would of course not work for email addresses intended for general public use, where you have to allow total strangers a means of initializing contact. For smaller-scale uses, I suppose you could run both a public and whitelist address; as people make initial contact via the public address, you tell them the whitelist one and add them.
So there you have it. An idea to solve a whole lot of the email problems I've seen since email spam started back in the mid-90s, not for everyone perhaps, but for a fairly sizable number of people. I'm not a programmer. Anyone want to make the software that can do this for me?
There was one time several months ago where he figured out how to check his mail from abroad, and didn't need me to do it for him.
The very next trip, he was back to ask me again. Let me guess, I thought. I save him a ton of time by filtering out all the spam so that he never has to see it, let alone gets it forwarded to his colleague.
A few months later, I made a spam filter. He gets email from three different addresses. Two of those are obsolete, and we're supposed to be telling everyone the new ones so the IT dept can eventually turn off the old ones, thereby permanently ending a chronic spam inflow. Well, he wasn't doing the greatest job with telling everyone, but all of the people with an older address were using the one that got less spam, so I sent the other address directly to trash. Things got a lot easier to check after that.
Well, what with the holiday festivities, tonight was the first time I looked in over a week. I went in to water all the plants in my end of the building, check my own email, and check his. I got 66 pieces of spam in the past eight days and 0 real messages.
As for him, he had 320 new messages in the inbox. (Keeping in mind that a larger chunk is already auto-trashed by my filter.) Out of those, I ended up keeping 11 of them, and suspect 3 of those are also spam, but I'm letting him decide that when he gets back. I forwarded 3.
That's a 96.6% spam rate to the inbox. And the problem is, because it isn't my email, I actually have to look at a lot more of them than if it were mine. I don't know who all of his correspondents are, and there have been a few times where I've almost deleted something that turned out to be important. So I err on the side of caution. (Fortunately for my sanity, the vast majority that I saw were either about stocks or pharmaceuticals. The porn spams suck out my soul. Especially the ones with explicit pictures. o.O)
The really fun part is the spams in languages I don't know. He's been getting a lot of Russian and Chinese spam recently. I've seen German and Italian spam too, I think, but because he actually speaks German and has correspondents that write to him in German and from Italy (I'm not actually sure if he knows any Italian), I can't delete any suspected spam. I might've even forwarded them to him before, not knowing what they were.
I read recently that overall in the rest of the world, 91% of all email is now spam. Ain't that grand? Ten years ago I was one of those morally outraged people who wanted legislation against spam. I posted actively in places on Usenet like news.admin.net-abuse.email/usenet/sightings and joined CAUCE and signed petitions. Fat lot of good all that did, huh.
Then there's the other email addresses I keep around. One is basically overrun, but I keep it as the address I give out to everyone who might want to send me something. I never check it unless I know there's something coming. I also have a Yahoo email address which is showing signs that it will be overrun pretty soon; the junk used to end up neatly deposited in my Bulk folder, but in the past month there has been a steady increase in spam that makes it to the inbox. And there's my gmail account which I haven't started using much yet.
The key problem is that, as long as I keep having to start new email addresses and cede the old ones, I'm never really going to win. What I want is one single permanent email address that I never have to change.
And so we come to the point of all this blather. (Yes, there really is one.) Namely, I'd like to see whitelist emails.
A blacklist is where you allow everything to enter, trusting that they're good and honorable until they prove themselves otherwise. Then you add them to a blacklist that blocks them from coming in ever again.
A whitelist is the opposite. Everyone is blocked except for people on a list that is allowed to come in. As I find people I want to talk to, I give them my address and add them to the whitelist. They can do whatever they want with my email address - pass it to spammers or whatnot - but since the spammers aren't on my whitelist, they can't get in anyway. Would it be a lot more of a hassle to have to manually add each individual person/organization/business? Maybe. Would it be more than the hassle of having to clear out spam? I don't think so. Not at this point.
This would of course not work for email addresses intended for general public use, where you have to allow total strangers a means of initializing contact. For smaller-scale uses, I suppose you could run both a public and whitelist address; as people make initial contact via the public address, you tell them the whitelist one and add them.
So there you have it. An idea to solve a whole lot of the email problems I've seen since email spam started back in the mid-90s, not for everyone perhaps, but for a fairly sizable number of people. I'm not a programmer. Anyone want to make the software that can do this for me?
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no subject
Date: 2007-01-01 05:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-01 06:23 am (UTC)Where I work, spam is a major problem. If it was as simple as "well just redirect it to a special folder" - which we're already doing, by the way - we wouldn't have to keep making new addresses. In fact, one of our chronic problems is an internal mailing list that spammers have gotten their hands on, so we have to keep making a new version of it amongst ourselves.
I've looked at GMAIL. They have filter options. There is nothing in it that allows you to say, simply, "delete everything that's not from someone on the contact list." It's set up to behave like a blacklist, not a whitelist. I suppose what I could do is have a pair of addresses, one that I give to people and one that is supersecret that I forward everything to. And then have to remember to use the first address to reply.
Similarly, I'm using Mozilla for my workmail. It has a very nice filter interface. It's set up to make blacklists, not whitelists. It won't do what I want it to do, unless I want to make a separate filter for each individual address and direct it to a "real-inbox" folder.
I guess in short, yes, it can be done with blacklists. With great difficulty. A whitelist would be a lot better.
You've seen the gaim contact options, haven't you? There's "allow all users to contact", "allow users on friends list only", "block people on the list", "allow only people on the list." That last option is the whitelist option.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-01 08:22 am (UTC)It's possible.. very easy actually. It's not a complete fix, as there's still a "Spam" folder, but mail in the spam folder is not counted towards you "new email" count, and you can have it autodelete after a certain time interval.
Hotmail was one of the first implementations of this feature. You set your junk mail setting to "Exclusive". Then only people in your contacts or on your "safe" list can get into your actual Inbox. The Junk email folder autodeleted after a certain time, and if you ran out of room, the junk would get deleted before it bounced a message.
I dont use Yahoo, I can look into it for you, and Im pretty sure Gmail has a similar setting. I know you can set outlook up the sameway using a mail rule, and im pretty sure eudora and thunderbird have followed suit.
Ruling out password resets, 75% of the calls I handle deal with spam.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-01 08:36 am (UTC)Using Outlook Express:
Tools - > Message Rules - > Mail
Conditions - > From line contains people
Actions - > Delete it
Then, click on the link "contains people"
-Add everyone you want to be whitelisted (you can pick from your address book to make it go faster)
-Then, click options, and select the radio button "If the message does NOT contain the people below"
Hit ok three times.
Congrats ;-)
no subject
Date: 2007-01-01 10:18 am (UTC)I don't use Outlook, but I poked around some more, discovered that Yahoo is no better than gmail (plus I'm a bit disgruntled with a lot of other things about them anyway), and then went to look at Comcast. Those would be the people I'm actually paying every month to give me email boxes that thus far I've not really been using.
And lo! A whitelist option! On the web even!
It's not very configurable at the moment. You can't use asterisks to specify big blocks of email addresses (such as, for example, most business places tend to have a gazillion cryptic email addresses - one for the autoresponder, one for the info that doesn't accept replies, two or three for different aspects of billing, etc. etc.). You have to enter every single variant separately. But it's certainly a start toward what I had in mind!
Soon I'll be setting up a new box as a whitelist option and start adding people to it, once I figure out what name I want to use. The one that the vast majority of you already have will stay public, I think. Meanwhile, if you want to be added to the whitelist box, send me an email to the public one with a list of everything you're ever likely to send me emails from. ;)
no subject
Date: 2007-01-01 11:14 am (UTC)however it's still possible to do the white list with the blacklist ^_^
Anywho, GMAIL doesn't want you to delete anything (it takes you a few different clicks to delete even one email) and even blocked email addies only go to a "blocked folder" (so far as I can tell).
But it seems that the closest that you'll get is a blacklist that you tailor to be a white list... so why not do it?
That's what that option does (behind the scenes) in GAIM... it sends the messages to a "yo, don't tell him about these" place
It's all a matter of perspective ^_^ (god I feel chipper)
no subject
Date: 2007-01-01 11:20 am (UTC)Granted, that wouldn't work for something like a work email unless you added the auto-reply everythings... (which is assuming you know all of them already... which is a silly thing to assume!)
no subject
Date: 2007-01-01 11:20 am (UTC)