Resist junk e-mail

In that case, SOP is to use a Magic 8 ball.

Gee... and I thought Everyone knew that!

Re your Spam article

To get rid of spam and much of the amateur hacking plaguing the Internet would be reasonably straightforward in my opinion - the problem is that it would probably require new internationally agreed legislation.

If it were mandatory for all Internet addresses to be traceable (as phone numbers are) - ie allocation of IP addresses by ISPs were fully accountable, and email "From" addresses were verified, then it would be easy to identify and prosecute offenders, and shut down uncooperative ISPs.

This would possibly make public sources of Internet access (libraries, cafes, colleges) liable for traffic originating from their systems, necessitating greater control over workstations etc, but is this a bad thing?

Some "civil liberties" groups would be upset - but just as the "freedom" to identify the guy who knocks you over in the street is important (ie numberplates on cars), I prefer the "freedom" to choose (based on sound identification) who is communicating with me over the "freedom" to use the Internet anonymously.

Finally, an easy thing which could be done NOW without new laws would be a new voluntary DNS record (call it "MR" for example), identifying the OUTBOUND mail relays for any email domain. If a mail coming from a domain doesn't originate from one of the designated hosts, it's junk! The voluntary adoption of this scheme would cost almost nothing and the benefits would be huge! We could then refuse to accept mails where the "MR" recorddoes not match - it's up to you whether you want to accept mails from people not using the scheme...

Here's an e-mail that we received from one of our readers:

Even though many people do not support the Idea of Blanclisting, and RBL Checking, I think is the ONLY way to get rid of UCE.

ISPs and big companies where spammers launch their garbagefrom, are afraid of being blacklisted and listen to you when you complaint and send their user?s spam to ORDBs.

In our case, we have reduced UCE by 85%. I personally have received ONLY one UCE of my hundreds of e-mail I get every day in recent weeks (t was an intentional worm that got filtered by our Proxy Server Software), just by having our company e-mail server do RBL checking in every incoming message. The results are:

- RBL Checking (82%)

- Context Filtering and REGEX (3%)

Wedo understand we might not be getting all the good mail that should arrive because their addresses are blacklisted by means of another persons fault, but as the technique spreads into a common way of filtering, more UCE will get out of the net.

According to another one of our readers:

We do have anti-spam software in place to monitor UCE and Junk e-mail. It works only moderately well because if you attempt to tighten down on the controls you invariably block real e-mail. We continue to refine our keyword and address triggers and simply accept it as the cost of doing business in the new millennium.

Two months ago we implemented Symantec for Gateways 3.0 and purchased RBL+ service through mail-abuse.org. The reporting feature of this product indicates that a little over 50% of e-mail sent to our network is UCE. Above and beyond that, some of my users still receive up to 10 UCEs a day. The disciplined users forward all UCEs to me. This has proven to be quite effective. So far, I have compiled my own database of junk subject lines (1000+) and junk senders (600+).

I estimate that 90% of UCE is blocked at our gateway. If you purchase Symantec's product along with RBL+, realize that RBL+ is not going to solve all your problems. Currently it only blocks about 15% of our UCEs. I do the rest.