OT Re: [Nottingham] Re: Tux Games mail is still unread

[Martin]

Simon Huggins wrote:
> On Tue, May 25, 2004 at 05:13:31PM +0100, Mike Cardwell wrote:
>>On Tue, 25 May 2004, Simon Huggins wrote:
>>
>>>But it doesn't solve spam.  It just means spammers have to spam with
>>>addresses on your whitelist.  So say anyone's address on this list could
>>>be used to spam Michael.
>>>
>>>Challenge Response doesn't really solve /anything/ as far as I can see.
>>
>>But the chance of a random spam message to him having been spoofed with
>>one of the email addresses on his whitelist is incredibly small...
> 
> Until they catch up.  They'll start harvesting groups of addresses.

For a CR user, the majority of spam is thrown out.

For example, I have a few hundred addresses for those I regularly email. 
Those few hundred is vastly less than the many millions of email 
addresses spamsters harvest or randomly generate.

If one of my friends gets hit by a virus and their address book is 
raided, then I'll just get the spam from them or from other's forging 
that source address. Very easy to narrow down and fix.

The penalty of CR is one or two automated responses to each spam 
message. Email is low bandwidth and so low overhead (& probably why 
spammers are tolerated by ISPs).

At the moment though, CR is an easy fix until the mail protocols get 
tightened up or the spamster scammers get 'nailed'...


Regards,
Martin

-- 
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Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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