I'm not sure about c'punk relevance, but that doesn't seem to make much difference these days. Anyone interested in the previous message is likely interested in this. Here's (most) of a note I sent to Mark Frauenfelder. -------------------------------- snip -------------------------------- From: C Matthew Curtin <cmcurtin@research.megasoft.com> To: mark@wired.com Subject: MadSpams...SpamLibs... uh... yeah Date: Thu, 12 Jun 97 08:43:58 EDT *chuckle* ... that's pretty good. Some of my favorite activities with regard to spammers: * giving them a nice call on the telephone. Call collect, and then say that you've got something to sell them. Read them back their own spam if you can get that far. * calling their 800 number and reading them their own spam * calling them to ask if they have any idea what they're doing to the Internet. The answer is invariably "no." (Of course not, these are clueless parasites.) * signing up one spammer's autoresponder to another spammer's autoresponder. * collecting a list of technical and administrative contacts for zones that are notorious about originating spam, the people who sell and give out their spam software, etc. Then, every time spam comes in, simply bounce it to that alias, and the spammers all spam each other. * sending mail back that's politely insulting. My favorite one-liner: "You're not a very smart man, are you?" * My favorite for sex-related spam: hinting that I became aware of their spam after my 9 year old daughter with an email address asked me what "hardcore anal sex" is. Doing this over the phone is great, because I can yell hysterically. Through email is even better, since I can copy their ISP's contact, and that one... all the way to the backbone. * Sometimes my mail relay seems to choke on spam, and sends back a packet with a MSG_OOB bit sent to the host that originated the spam. Gee, dunno how that happened. Sometimes if the host stays up after that, it's followed by an oversized ping. Shucks, that's too bad when that happens. Maybe one day I'll track down that, uh, bug and ... fix it. Of course, I always complain about every spam that hits me. The administrative contact of the site that is as far back as I can trace the message, the administrative contact of the site's ISP, and that site's ISP, all the way up to a backbone provider, or a well-known, responsible organization. I have a form letter for doing this, and I've got another completely-ready-to-go letter that just needs me to slap in the To: addresses: wallace@cyberpromo.com, postmaster@cyberpromo.com, postmaster@agis.net You can guess what that one's for. In all seriousness, I'm working on a paper for filtering spam. I think I've found a way to almost completely eliminate it through a combination of router access control lists, spam-aware mail transfer agents (MTAs), and filtering local delivery agents. Individuals who wish to filter beyond that can also put on filters of their own with programs like Z-mail, Eudora, and procmail. I'm hoping that I'll be able to get enough people filtering the stuff out that it simply won't work. If it won't work, economics will dictate that the spammers go out of business and go back to assembling chilitos at Taco Bell. Maybe a good thing to do would be to provide a program to users for the spam that does slip through, sort of an automated spamlib, that parses the headers and knows where to send it... :-) ------------------------------- unsnip ------------------------------- -- Matt Curtin Chief Scientist Megasoft Online cmcurtin@research.megasoft.com http://www.research.megasoft.com/people/cmcurtin/ I speak only for myself Pull AGIS.NET's plug! Crack DES NOW! http://www.frii.com/~rcv/deschall.htm