Re: [SM-DEVEL] Re: slashdot article on spam filter

[WJCarpenter <bil...@ca...>]

> Well, about 2-3-4 weeks ago, I started actually, with great effort,
> following the "unsubscribe" options found on most of the spam I get.
>
> Well, I have been astounded to find out that it actually seems to be
> working! The number of spam I get has been INCREDIBLY diminishing. Here

I think a lot of what passes for spam is more likely carelessness, either
on the part of email senders or email recipients.  (I'm not saying this is
the case for you.  I'm just saying in general.  Definitely true for me.)

Beats me what percentage, but some amount of unwanted crap is sent by
legit sources who really did get your email address from some marketing
partner with a privacy policy that said they could do exactly that.  (The
trouble is, of course, that there are enough dot-com name changes along
with outright lies in spam, including patently false "you asked us to send
you this", that you can't tell the difference.)  There's also a fair
amount of "I wish I wouldn't get this recurring email that I used to like,
but I don't want to figure out how to unsubscribe because everybody says
not to unsubscribe from spam".

At a server I used to run, we had a lot of former employees.  After a
grace period, we toasted their accounts and all email to them bounced with
"no such address".  One day, during a reconfiguration, email for a lot of
those accounts started coming to the catch-all mailbox.  It astounded me
that some of it was legitimate email newsletters that had obviously been
bouncing for over 2 years.  Sheesh.
-- 
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