At 06:47 PM 11/19/95 -0500, you wrote:
Is anyone else getting lots of junk e-mail lately? I'm getting all kinds of direct marketing crap to both of my main accounts and I haven't posted to usenet in months.
On a related note, Compuserve had a note on their system last week from the sysop. Their customers are receiving unwanted e-mail advertisements from the Internet. Compuserve sysops are attempting to block the spaming but are finding it difficult because the advertiser is coming in via different routes. They are also attempting to stop them using the court system.
The advertiser, according to the Compuserve sysop, threatened a mail-bombing if Compuserve tried to block them!!! This would be a just cause to call in the CSOF (Cypherpunk Soldier of Fortune) for a "measured response".
Yes, I've noticed these as well. One troubling thing I noted with one such spam-handed "attack" was the use of a group of internal email addresses (in the sense that we don't advertise these addresses) as addressees for a message that had an analog sent to www-buyinfo and some other web related addresses. This seems to indicate a way of organizing lists into sets based on location/topic, but doesn't include all other potential addressees in the same domain or organization. I guess it was only a matter of time before someone wrote sophisticated spamming servers that somehow capture/analyze log files, or is this just some idiot front end that lets ad-happy fools spam with a smaller apparent footprint? By the way... One reply I got from an ISP re: one of these drive by spammings indicated that they were charging the idiot for disobeying policy. I've started suggesting to ISPs that they dis-user and charge the offender (in case they haven't thought of this yet). If non-spam policies were more widely used, and these idiots loose their email/access and a few hundred dollars in charges for wasting ISP admin time, perhaps this trend won't continue. -- Dave Dittrich Client Services, Computing & Communications dittrich@cac.washington.edu University of Washington <a href="http://www.washington.edu/People/dad/"> Dave Dittrich / dittrich@cac.washington.edu</a>