I’ve finally had enough with spam. I’ve spent the past couple hours updating all my contacts and Web services to my new primary email address — and it’s a hell of a lot of work. (If you’re in my address book, you should have received an email from me; if you didn’t, please let me know.)
After 5 years using the same email address, I decided that combatting spam just isn’t worth the effort any longer, especially after my Web server started having Perl-related Spamassassin problems. So I decided to re-route that energy to updating all the necessary parties and services with the new address. In a few days — after I make sure that I’ve updated everyone and everything — I’ll deactivate my old address and messages to it will bounce.
Hallelujah! Spam be gone.
2 responses so far ↓
1 mbi // Mar 24, 2003 at 1:18 pm
Do yourself and the world a favor and procmail-forward mail to your old address to spamcop. We should all actively fight back, don’t you think?
2 gabe // Mar 25, 2003 at 1:38 pm
good suggestion. the only thing that’s a pain about spamcop is that you can’t just report it and walk away. you have to verify each and every message after you forward it to your spam-reporting address. unless you know of an easier way to do it?
also, i’m a bit reluctant to use a system that can so easily be abused and may not be the best way to combat spam. i use fastmail.fm for secondary email and LOVE it – the folks who run it are email experts and wrote this report about why spamcop isn’t the best tool for fighting spam. here’s a snippet from it:
“That means that email providers using the SpamCop BL are blocking providers where for each one spam they are blocking, they are blocking 10,000 legitimate emails from reaching their own customers!”
the other problem with spamcop is that it doesn’t target the individual spammer; it targets and punishes anyone who happens to be using the same server as a spammer. this recently happened to me. i’m on a shared server with totalchoice hosting and a spammer recently got an account on the same server as me. now I’M the one who’s blacklisted by spamcop from sending email to certain domains (bit.ch included).
-gabe