mail mail mail

Tuesday May 25th 2004 12:21 PM PST

the Volume of junk mail that i now get is unbelievable. BUT at the same time i have reconfigured all of my mailboxes and accounts so that i may deal with junk mail without any hassle at all. Like Jason, i had a shitload of mailboxes, but now have them all pointed to 2. One is my real account, and the other one is a spam receptacle. First line of defense is Spam Assassin, a great program running on the server itself. Right there most junk mail is routed to the spam mailbox and flagged. Second line of defense is my Apple Mail program running at home. It checks both boxes and will REcheck the spam box for marked emails and other junk i might really want (however unlikely). Anything that Spam Assassin misses, Mail usually will catch. So as a result i have 1 or 2 real messages in my inbox every hour and about 200 to 300 in my junk box.

Now here comes the funny part.

I never bounce mail.

Most people are vindictive and figure if somebody is spamming them.... WELL FUCK THEM, i'm gonna bounce this piece of shit mail back at them. Sorry, the bounce usually never gets where is really should go, and most often will hit a innocent box that's just being spoofed. SO... i don't bounce, and because i don't bounce, all email that comes to my domains appears to be have delivered successfully. People who sell mailing lists have become aware of this. In the last few weeks i've seen a HUGE increase in random names @iriggs.com. The people selling the lists are padding their lists with fake email addresses that never existed. And the people sending the spam are none the wiser. They're just getting a increasingly more shitty product for their money. AND the spammer who thinks they are contacting 100 or 1000 or even more people is just sending mail to ME. And i'm not listening.

I think this is the answer to spam. Make the numbers so astronomical that the spammer is only contacting 1 out of every trillion spams they send. This way their operating costs and time spent is no longer cost effective. Its illegal, but the option of selling HUGE lists of fake emails suddenly becomes the solution to the problem. Over saturate the spamming community with addresses so they can't distinguish between valid emails and non valid emails. And give them no feedback as to the delivery status of mail, thus keeping them from verifying ANYTHING.

just a thought.

Comments:

Actually the more i think about it... Most assholes out there use spiders to harvest email addresses off websites. The simple solution would be to make scripts that include bogus email addresses at the bottom of every page of your site. Well, not BOGUS. Emails that are on your domain that you can honestly use, and you know that are nothing but a black hole.

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