Last Updated on December 4, 2019 by Christopher G Mendla
I just wanted to gripe about spam. My home system is set up with filters and rules so a lot of the spam gets moved into the spam folder on the client side.
I’ve been on the road for a couple of days and am processing my main account manually. What I’m seeing is that about 90% of my incoming mail is Spam. This is really getting annoying. The situation seems to be gettng worse all the time.
There are some server side things that can be done. The hosting for my main account doesn’t support RBLs (Realtime blacklists). I’m thinking about changing to a host that does support RBLS. That way, a lot of the spam will get killed at the server level.
One of the main reasons for the amount of spam is the number of home users and even businesses who are running machines that are buggier than a $5 a night hotel room. They are too ignorant and/or too cheap to have someone properly lock down their machines. Every machine that is open to spammers contributes to the mess.
I’m not sure what the answer is. Whitelists just won’t work when you are getting mail from clients who are not whitelisted yet. Client side rules and filters are just masking the problem. If you run something like Spamassassin and have it blackhole spam you run the risk of trashing emails that you really need (There was a law firm a little while ago that had a whole lot of problems resulting from their tightening up of email spam filters).
Until the majority of the machines out there are cleaned up and trojan free, then the spam problem will continue. There have been some prosecutions relating to spam. Putting a few heads on pikes might be a good thing overall…
PRISONER TO HIS NEW CELLMATE ” So waddare you in for”
SPAMMER ” Well, I sent Spam to people”
PRISONER TO SPAMMER “I’m in here cause I killed a coupla of my neighbors .. punk. And i hate them spam emails”
We can only wish……