Le 21.02.2004 17:57, Juhana Sadeharju a écrit :

Hello. I'm getting spam like this. Many times per day. Sven and Austin, say what, somebody is using your names; why don't you go and file these cases to police? In otherhand if you agree with the spammer by doing nothing, then you're part of the spamming.

Regards, Juhana

I'm Big Brother! Tell-me what you want I do for you ;-) Best way: install a spam filter and an antivirus and don't bother with 0.0001% more spam coming from (probably forged) address from this list..

--
- Jean-Luc

On 21 Feb 2004, at 18:57, Juhana Sadeharju wrote:

Hello. I'm getting spam like this. Many times per day. Sven and Austin, say what, somebody is using your names; why don't you go and file these cases to police? In otherhand if you agree with the spammer by doing nothing, then you're part of the spamming.

What is the crime?

Juhana, you are wrong.

I subscribe and post to multiple public lists, and as an unfortunate result get literally hundreds of spam emails like these per day, virtually all of them from faked email addresses. I wouldn't be at all surprised Sven and Jernej are in the same predicament given their frequent (and extremely helpful) postings to multiple lists. Occasionally I do take time out to report something particularly offensive, but 1) there is simply no way that I (or Sven or Jernej) can report all of these, 2) little if anything is presently done about most of these because the folks that investigate are overloaded, and 3) there isn't any reason to expect that the person whose email address is being used has to be the one to report the problem. If you think there is a problem that needs to be reported, then take time out to learn what it takes to adequately report these incidents, and do it yourself (you will find that the police are generally *not* the appropriate authority, especially not at first). The rest of us have too many other things to do than to spend our entire day attempting to report things like this every time they crop up. As for myself, I know that unfortunately my own email address has recently been used for some particularly offensive spam. Sadly, it is being generated from so many different sources (host systems and IP addresses) that there is no possible way that I could report all of them, even if I wanted to... Perhaps you have enough time in your own day to do nothing but this all day long, but most of us don't.

IMHO, the best potential way to fight spam is with automated tools, not just simply for deleting the junk out of your in basket, but also for forwarding the offending items to the appropriate authorities (ISPs, etc.), and for use at the ISPs themselves to assist in automatically shutting down offending accounts. Unfortunately, there are no tools that I am aware of that can be counted on to do this automatically without potentially making verying damaging mistakes, by mis-identifying spam and falsely impacting valid email users. In addition, there are many ISPs, particularly in some foreign countries, who actually solicit and thrive on the business of people who send out this garbage. These ISPs won't respond at all to any claims that you make against people sending mail through their systems. If you go high enough up the chain of ISPs, you can usually eventually reach someone who can get these operations shut down, but 1) you have to know how to track up the chain of providers, 2) it is *extremely* time consuming, 3) there is a *lot* of lag time involved giving each party adequate time to respond, and 4) the solution is only temporary as the offending parties in many cases will merely open a new account with a different ISP.

Finally, a lot of this spam is being sent as the result of virus infections on computers where the people from whom the email is being sent have no clue whatsoever that their machines are infected. Note that the email from these machine is *not* sent with the actual email addresses of those machines, but instead with the addresses of other folks on that system's contacts list. There are many thousands of such infected machines, with many thousands of perfectly valid non-spammer email addresses in their contact lists. It would take a *huge* effort to get all of these machines cleaned up. Certainly this is a valid cause that needs to be undertaken, but it is entirely unreasonable to ask Sven or Jernej or anyone else whose email address has been stolen to track down and report every separate virus infected machine that is sending out spam using their address. Most of us only have enough spare time to make a minor contribution to this effort. The spammers use automated tools to perform their dirty work, and once again IMHO the only practical way to attempt to solve this problem is to use automated tools to fight back. Therefore, this is something that ISPs and software companies are going to have to tackle, and not something where you can reasonably expect any individual user to have a significant chance of making a dent in the problem.

s/KAM

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