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June 11, 2005

Personal issues, Sat., June 11, 2005, 8:25 AM

Personal circumstances have delayed my return to Toronto, now scheduled for later today. I will try to publish the Week #23 in Review tomorrow.

Given the large number of lawyers who read my chronicles, I'd like to know why more is not being done to stop well organized spam perpetrators. In order for me to clear the spam, and publish the few words above, it will take me 55 minutes because my system was jammed by the five names listed below, and being outside the city, I have just a slow-speed Internet access.

I am not happy. These spam people are known, they attacked me, and there were damages. They do the same organized attacks on hundreds of thousands of other bloggers as well. Why does the law do so little about this?

I venture to say 95 pct comes from the U.S., where there are RICO laws. Why are the federal prosecutors not on top of this?

Names of criminals:
money-4me.com
firstfriends.us
drugs-order.com
epraha.info
hbsnwa.org

There is a cost to the readers too when a miscreant like drugs-order.com unleashes hundreds of unwanted links to this web site, within minutes. Thousands of you have to wait extra time for my home page to load because the system has been smothered in unsolicited and unwanted links by these spam artists. Moreover, I cannot get efficient access to my own system to be able to communicate to you.

Enough is enough.

Posted by Posted by Bill Cara on June 11, 2005 08:26:06 AM | Category: Cara re: Cara

Discourse

Bill,
I understand well your frustration with spam, but you will generally find the technical community neither welcomes nor wants new laws in addition to what have already been passed (CAN-SPAM Act 2003, didn't you notice the difference it made in spam? No neither did anyone else - apart from an increase of legal spam alongside the illegal!). New laws will neither work nor are they necessary here. This is a 100% technical problem. The 5 addresses you mentioned have been listed on more than one spam blackmailing list, and would not be received by anyone running decent email software like Thunderbird (http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/ ) that can automatically track, update and check against these lists (http://www.nidelven-it.no/articles/introduction_to_thunderbird_5 ).

Here is a simple 2 minute guide to chopping out 99% of your spam, without changing email addresses, installing new software or lifting more than a finger:
1) Open a gmail.google.com account, use any old name you like as nobody will see it. In gmail options under "Forwarding and POP" turn on the POP access.
2) Now set your ISP/Email provider email option to "holiday forward"/"forward" all email received to the Gmail account you just created. This is the hardest step as it varies from ISP to ISP.
3) In your email program (MS outlook, Thunderbird,eudora,whatever..) set the POP options to get your email directly from the gmail account. Full instructions how with pictures linked in the Gmail Options page (http://gmail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ctx=gmail&hl=en&answer=12103)

Your done. Goodbye spam. Even better, when your on the road you can login to gmail to see your email in any internet cafe.

If your still upset by the 1% of spam you may still recieve, Gmail adapts and learns new messages from user collective efforts of marking new spam in its interface. In addition decent email clients like Thunderbird have built in "baysian" self learning spam filters. I have 20 publically available email addresses. I see maybe 1 spam every two days or so.

But more importantly than any of this, be carful what you wish for! Along with welcoming in the brand new anti-spam law to save us all (not), you will also have some nice "enhancments". Say, bloggers must register themselves as mass media and subject themselves to new controls (whether they recieve advertising dollars or not), for "spam preventing reasons". No thanks.

Say no thanks to spam email laws. You will not recieve what your wishing for, and the internet will be worse off for it.
http://netsecurity.about.com/cs/emailsecurity/a/aa051604.htm
http://blogs.salon.com/0003364/stories/2005/02/01/aBlankCheckForMicrosoft.html

Cheers,
Keith.

(P.S. If you check your email through a web portal and not an excellent program like thunderbird on your local machine, simply set the gmail option to forward your email to that email address instead).

Posted by: Keith Nelson at June 11, 2005 9:35 AM [link]

P.P.S If you use the Gmail method, be sure to check the spam box on gmail for the first two weeks or so. Gmail is too smart at learning what is spam, and at some point if your spam problem is that bad, it will arrive at the conclusion that all email to "Bill Cara" must be spam ;-). As soon as you tell it a couple of times that "This email is not spam", it learns not to make that assumption. If you don't like the idea of going via gmail spam filters, get Thunderbird, its free.

Posted by: Keith Nelson at June 11, 2005 9:42 AM [link]

I agree Bill. Even though my spam blocker catches most of these (that idiot at the 3rd url you listed got through last night) it still taxes my server. My site was taken down by my hosting firm for over an hour yesterday b/c of the load the spam blocker was putting on the server.

Something really needs to be done about these b@st@rds!

Posted by: Michael [TypeKey Profile Page] at June 11, 2005 11:45 AM [link]