[Coco] [OT] unsolicited email

[John R. Hogerhuis]

On Thu, 2005-10-20 at 12:24 -0700, Kevin Diggs wrote:

> 	I don't know anything about spam filters. Is it possible to set up a 
> filter to reject mail based on WHERE (i.e. internet address) it is from? 
> Alot of the spam I get is from *.tpnet.pl. Also some of the spam I get 
> has '(may be forged)' along with the source. Can these be tossed? Is the 
> filter something you set up in Mozilla or at your ISP?
> 
> 	I have been running traceroute on the source address for most of it. Do 
> you think this has any effect (affect?)?


Most spams come from distributed networks of open relays or "botnets".
That is, armies of virus infected Windows machines that do the bidding
of spammers. Spam is bounced off of these to your inbox.  There are so
many of these machines that it will do you no good to try to track them
down yourself.

There are organizations that build lists of these zombies and publish
them for you to use personally or for ISPs to use. In my case, my
redirecting pobox.com email address is filtered through these lists.
When the sender's IP matches, the mail gets rejected on the same
connection. This works pretty good. The few spams that I do get are to
my unpublished "real" email accounts.

Otherwise I would get a lot of spams. The reason is that I use a lot of
mailing lists, and I choose to make my email address publicly available,
with no effort to hide it. An email address is a name, and it makes
little sense to make a name a secret.

-- John.