[muglo] Re: High Speed Internet

> >Mary has a good point Barry. I've been using Uniserve, nee imgainet, for
> >some years now and the spam has gone beyond belief. I now get up to 10 to 
>15
> >emails a day and all but one or two is spam, most of it pornographic. 
>It's
> >driving me nuts. jim
>
>Yeah, Spam volume on the net has increased sharply, even in the last
>three months. And, as legislation making it illegal is being passed
>in various jurisdictions, the Spammers are getting more difficult to
>track down.
>
>The point that I was making to Barry was specifically about the Spam
>problem from the perspective of the ISP. Sympatico has recently said
>that over 50% of their email traffic is Spam, and that is typical for
>a large ISP.

At the risk of repeating something many of you may have seen before...

Quite often (not _always_ but more often than not) the reason for the 
increased spam is the behaviour of the holder of the e-mail address.

I have a variety of e-mail address which I use for different purposes and I 
can predict with excellent accuracy how much spam each will get (mac.com is 
an exception since .mac has a very agressive spam filter).

This one (hideme666) is essentially a junk address and I use it to sign up 
to web sites or public mailing lists - it gets a mid-level of spam. I have 
two junk yahoo.com and one real yahoo.com address. One of the junk addresses 
gets *over* 80 spam a day. I'm contemplating abandoning it since I don't 
really use it for anything anymore, but yahoo.com has a *stunning* spam 
blocker that catches the vast majority of spam (>80%) that it is still 
usable for junk sign ups.

I have a few *real* addresses with real ISPs and they are by-and-large spam 
free. The only spam I get on one (botany.utoronto.ca) are _not_ of my own 
doing. The department lists its grad students' e-mail addresses on a 
publicly accessible web site and that is where the spammers have harvested 
e-mail addys (they've made minor modifications after I agitated for e-mail 
addy removal but they're still on there). The other real addys I have are 
spam _free_ and I've had one of them for over *four* years. It's not that 
they're large or small ISPs (that does help) but I *never* post one of those 
e-mail addys for public consumption -- they are _purely_ for professional, 
secure commercial (e.g. bank, PayPal) or friend-friend communication.

Rule #1 (which many of the MUGLO and LowEndMac listers break): NEVER, NEVER 
use your "real" e-mail address to sign up for a list. This means, do not use 
your @uwo.ca, @wlu.ca, @cibc.com, etc. address (unless you don't care about 
spam on those addresses).

#2 Likewise, NEVER sign up to a website with a real address. The only 
exception to this is websites which are crucial in financial transactions 
with strong privacy protection policies (like PayPal).

#3 Only, ONLY give your "real" e-mail address to friends and professional 
contacts. If you need to have a catch-all address for 
business/professional/friend reasons, it may be worth setting up a decoy 
address with one of your "real" ISPs (since many of us have our home ISP and 
also have a work/university/alumni ISP) which you can change if spam ever 
becomes an issue.

#4 NEVER enter an e-mail address into the "Some says you are their 
sweetheart. Enter their e-mail address to find out if they're the one.". 
Also, make sure your friends know _not_ to add your e-mail address to 
internet lists.

#5 NEVER EVER NEVER EVER click on an unsubscribe link or reply to spam 
UNLESS you are confident that the company is sincere about respecting your 
wishes (usually if the unsubscribe link is on a web site that is not related 
to the subject of the spam you can be certain that clicking on the 
unsubscribe link either is a decoy or else confirms your e-mail address as 
being real and available for spamming (they sell e-mail addys by # live, not 
response rate)).

#6 Let me repeat, NEVER EVER respond to a spam's unsubscribe link. This is a 
sure-fire way of *increasing* your spam volume.

Anyway, if you get a new "real" address this is a fairly good way to avoid 
spam (unless someone before you had the e-mail address and solicited spam).

L8r, Eric.

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