I have been contacting the companies that are being advertised for and threatening to block their domains from all of the WAN/LANs I manage, thus costing them a lot of potential customers. Most of them seem to respond to that threat. My spam level and spyware (they rapidly provide me with an optout method) levels are dropping precipitously since I began this tactic. I chose this method as opposed to a filter because I wish them to know how angry and dissatisfied I am with them and their tactics. I suspect there is and internal "Leave this guy alone" list for the spam as well as the optout option for spyware. I then push the optout down to my users. A pain in the rear, but at least the people with the money to loose know it is costing them to use these tactics and it does seem to limit the massive amounts pretty well. I began this after I mentioned a few weeks back that I seem to get them from membership in YAHOO groups. The response I got when I mentioned it here was from someone who said they do not have the problem and are in several YAHOO groups. The person who responded seemed to think I was implicating YAHOO in my complaint. This is not what I meant. What I was getting at was, that I believe other MEMBERS of the group were actually harvesting names from the group messages to spam to. I still believe this. I also agree that some groups are probably more targeted than others. I am in perhaps a hundred of them at any given time. I tend to sign onto all of them on a particular topic that have over 30 users ...say PERL or Hypnosis and weed out the useless, spam filled, off topic groups after receiving a few daily digests. I know I could search the archives of the group to decide if they were profitable before joining, but this seems easier. I also suspect that the hypnosis groups are more likely to be harvested than say the PERL groups. I say this as the PERL groups are mostly on target where as many of the hypnosis groups are themselves spam filled. Well just my 2 cents worth. Mark ----- Original Message ----- From: Brian Clewer To: Sent: Wednesday, November 26, 2003 5:33 AM Subject: Re: [OT]: If Finally happened! > Why do people do this anyway? They must know it annoys people and brings > down the reputation of their company. Would you buy from someone who > constantly spammed your inbox? Unless they are service providers charging > by the packet :-) > > Brian. > > -----Original Message----- > From: pic microcontroller discussion list > [mailto:PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU]On Behalf Of Sean Alcorn - PIC Stuff > Sent: 25 November 2003 22:03 > To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU > Subject: [OT]: If Finally happened! > > > Just a heads up for everybody; > > I have an email address that I use EXCLUSIVELY for the PIC List. It has > not been given to a single other person (except for the 2000+ on this > list) and has not been posted anywhere (except of course in the > archives). > > Until today, it has been sacred. The odd virus scare here and there - > but that can't be helped. Then today - it happened. This inbox was full > of SPAM > > Just wanted to let everybody know that your addresses are perhaps more > exposed than we might have thought. I do hope that someone has not > subscribed simply for access to our addresses. > > For me I'll just delete that account and setup a new one. > > Cheers, > > Sean > > -- > http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different > ways. See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details. > > -- > http://www.piclist.com#nomail Going offline? Don't AutoReply us! > email listserv@mitvma.mit.edu with SET PICList DIGEST in the body -- http://www.piclist.com#nomail Going offline? Don't AutoReply us! email listserv@mitvma.mit.edu with SET PICList DIGEST in the body