http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2005Apr8.html


http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-d...765-2005Apr08L

WooHoo!! Hopefully more to come!!!!

Oh wow!

I'm pleased that this matter has been tested in the judicial system. I'm pleased that it has been clearly demonstrated that it's a seriously considered thing. And I'm damn pleased that his lawyer has successfully argued that the fella should NOT actually spend any time in prison!

Sure, if he proves to be a serial 'pest', prison time might eventually prove warranted. But if not, then it's definitely NOT warranted.

Seriously, email spam is a pain in the ****. But hell, even for a person such as myself, for whom the workplace exists online and for whom Outlook is basically the 'front-end' to their business, it's just not that much of an impact to spend several minutes or so each day deleting a bit of crap! Certainly not enough of an impact to warrant the idea of someone spending 10 years in prison. I'm able to spend a good deal of my income-earning time online at very little cost. If part of that cost is being bombarded with advertising in various forms (and it IS), then sobeit! Not much of a price to pay, in my view.

Seriously, if people think it IS such a big thing that it warrants someone spending nearly a decade in prison, then I'd suggest you turn off that machine, go outside, and get a life! You take yourself and your inbox far too seriously!

With the amount of spam i recieve i spend about an hour a day cleaning out my inbox. I have a friend who gets more than 3000 emails of spam each day. You might not get a lot, but there are people that get so much it takes them 3 or more hours a day to clean out their inbox. I for one want to see more spammers get in trouble. Spam is unwanted no matter how you look at it!

Looks like we may need a tutorial here at Daniweb about how to avoid having spam reach your Inbox. That's an extraordinary amount of spam to be deleting on a regular basis, and with the adoption of some unobtrusive measures, I'm sure most of that time wasted could be reclaimed

Its not the email filters. Its how people are getting smart and changing the words so they encoded so the email filter will miss that word.

I have 5 different email filters, but spam still gets by them because people are doing new stuff everyday that makes the email not get marked as spam.

Okay, fair enough. but consider this approach:

If your email addy is stuffed beyond redemption, accept the fact. If you need to start off with a new one, do so.

If your needs are complex, maintain mutiple email accounts, and multiple contacts lists for them. Your public email addys are far more vulnerable than your private ones. Do NOT mix 'n' match.

Apply the relevent spam filters. For such as gets through the net, make regular and diligent use of the 'Block sender' function. Your addy will NOT remain on most lists when messages sent to it are constantly rejected!

For support reasons (I own a business and sells eGoods) I can not change my password. I have sold probably around 1000 copies of a software and if I where to change my main support email address then my customers would probably not be very happy.

I do change my personal email address probably once or twice in a few years. But changing a business support email address can not be done for obvious reasons.

It's so easy to say one should just get a new email address but that's often not an option.

I've had my domain and email address since 1998. Reaching everyone who needs to be reached to send them a new address is impractical at best, impossible at worst.

If you have a business it gets worse still, you're going to loose (potential) customers and will have to spend a LOT of money on new stationary, businesscards, brochures, etc. etc.

I've done some testing here. I run my own server so can create new addresses at will.
After I added a new address it took just minutes before it received spam, despite never having been used! That's how massive the load has become.

My main address currently receives about 30 pieces of spam and virus emails an hour, that's one every other minute 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
At the peak during 2002 the server received over a thousand virus emails an hour for a 2 week period. It got so bad I had to shut down the mailserver and run a periodic deletion program on the upstream server in order to delete all the suspect messages so they wouldn't bog down my connection.

There are companies that have had to install multiple layers of spam filtering proxies in front of their mailservers just to keep them from overloading.

THAT's how bad spam has become.

While at current my server and client based filters can cope with the load, it's costing me in bandwidth and I've a small but significant number of false positives because I've had to install an extremely agressive blacklist to make the load on the client side filters managable.

See jwenting knows what im talking about. And spam just isnt in email anymore... its gone to MSN, ICQ, AIM, and YIM!

WARNING: Dont join a yahoo chatroom or you will be spammed on YIM!! :eek: