Readers' Comments

Reader Comments on Aardvark Daily 4 March 2003
Note: the comments below are the unabridged submissions of readers and do
not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher.
From: Lindsay Williams
For : The Editor (for publication)
Subj: Email Porn

You are so damn right. I am thoroughly sick of the
wretched stuff I keep on getting. I think of the people I
encourage to "get connected" and then I think of the porn
emails and I am mightily discouraged. Let alone the
children, as you point out. How can you stop this stuff? I
have so many filters set and yet they keep coming (if you
will excuse the pun!). I must be on several CD's - I get
multiples of the same spam and porn emails. Often, 6 out
of 8 of my emails are crap.

Keep up the good fight!




From: Michael
For : The Editor (for publication)
Subj: Short term solution: white lists

There is an immediate solution you can apply to shield
your children from pornospam: white list filtering of their
e-mail.

Maintain a list of addresses from which the child may
receive  e-mail. Any message not on the list gets bounced to
you for review first. If suitable, you add the 'from'
address to the
white list.

There are two main problems with this: Computer geeks can set
this up, but most parents cannot. (An opportunity perhaps for
a new software product?). It also does not in itself protect
from e-mail worms, which have in the past been used to
advertise pornography. (A third issue is the child's privacy
of communication - but it would be unusual for the first
e-mail from a new address to be private.)




From: Richard
For : The Editor (for publication)
Subj: Speaking of spam...

Seen just this minute on Slashdot

"UK Spam Controlled by UK's Advertising Standards Agency"
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/04/138226&mode=nested&tid=158

The full article is on the BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2816971.stm


I've been working with the net for quite a while (I
remember Gopher and Netscape 1.0.)  I used to think we were
in a constant war of attrition with the spammers, they'd do
soemthing, we (admins & geeks worldwide) would come up with
a countermeasure ans thus the war would continue...

Now I keep seeing new and ever more innovative ways to
combat spam: open-relay blacklists, "mailto" replacements,
spam-bait/magnet addresses, statistical analysis,
checksums, header analysis, better codes of practice (AOL &
Hotmail - about flaming time!) and now (finally) new laws
and regualtions are beginning to fall into place.

Maybe, one day, we might just beat spam.

(Or is that just deluded fantasy on my part? ;-)




From: Richard
For : The Editor (for publication)
Subj: Webmail spam-blocking

If your child needs a webmail account I would reccomend
Eudoramail (http://www.eudoramail.com/) as you can very
easily set up one of 3 levels of spam filtering (before it
even reaches your inbox), blacklist certain addresses (or
whole domains - my apologies to Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL
users, I blocked 'em all :-) and you can also set up a
whitelist (Eudoramail refers to it as a "Protected" list).
The best thing about this is that you can set it to accept
mail only from people on the whitelist and block every other
email.

Last time I checked my account before I set these things up,
I had 63 out of 64 emails that were spam - now I might see
one or two (if I'm unlucky.)

If you're in the lucky position of running your own
mailserver (or have a very friendly sysadmin)  I would
reccomend Vipul's Razor (http://razor.sourceforge.net/) to
take care of most spam before it reaches you inbox.

The most annoying spam?  That'd be the ones that aren't even
in *my language*.  Idetest spammers at the best of times,
but the ones who send me spam in Spanish, Cantonese or
Russian really need a good kicking.

Can we have a yearly cull? Pleeeese??
:-)
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