I was at work when I saw the article on Slashdot. I told my coworkers that in my opinion the only good spammer was a dead spammer. They were aghast. But then, they've never had to maintain mail servers or spam filters so they don't know the hell involved.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: No, and they probably never had the 'pleasure' of maintaining a Usenet newsgroup either; a newsgroup which started over twenty years ago with a dozen or two concise, very precise messages each day, unlike today where I get the same dozen or so decent messages daily but _several hundred_ spam/scam things mixed in with it. Nah, they would not know anything about all that. I have sat people down here at the computer and actually let them _look_ at the stuff, rolling out everywhere. Any more, I have gotten very thick skin from it all, and am completely immune to the thousands of mortgage offers, notices from 'PayPal Security' about my accounts have to be reconstructed (at their website, of course), the endless news of penis enlargements and ways to sexually please women or other men. I refuse to be as gross and filthy as much of the p*rn spam which rolls in here daily; I have just grown calluses on my eyes and ears, etc; I just keep zapping it and moving along.What gets me, however, are these uppity Usenetters who somehow think we are still living in the 1960's when there was peace and goodwill toward everyone, and they are *so shocked* at the idea of just crashing and destroying the 'web sites' of those fools. So many of them refuse to accept reality: passive filtering is _not_ doing anything to maintain our net. Some of them with their filtering stuff are actually bigger abusers than the spammers they claim to dislike so much. As we come close to the hundred percent spam saturation point, they go right on bravely with their passive filtering, their white lists, their black lists, bigger and more powerful CPUs and all that nonsense. They claim if we challenge or autorespond we are just causing more email garbage, as if there could possibly be any more than there is already. Or if we challenge, then some prissy Usenetter might get offended that he has to open his filter to receive a message asking for a one word reply.
Let someone find a reasonably effecient and effective (but admittedly imperfect) way to 'drill down' and locate an _actual offender_ and my oh my, don't they get pissed off royally, even threatening to cut us off who had the audacity to challenge instead of their beloved and useless filtering. He might sue us, don't you know! An innocent party might get trounced in the process, don't you know! And unspoken, yet a real concern, we might get our undewear in a knot, don't you know! They consider themselves the only real experts on how to deal with spam and that is by ignoring it and half-way filtering it. They are slowly becoming the minority on the net, thankfully, generally I think because so many users these days hold Vint Cerf and ICANN in such disdain. But right now they are quite vocal and will do anything to prevent the rest of us from escaping the hell hole as mail administrators and newsgroup moderators we are in. If they want to continue being sodomized, as seems to be the case, I have some old, defective condoms they can use for 'protection', just like their email filters, with leaks everywhere. (Hey, maybe a good idea for the spammers who tell me many times daily about how to make my 'bodily fluids' come out thicker and with more pressure, etc). I wish these so-called 'spam experts' would quit trying to save us from ourselves. PAT]