Re: Spam

From: Sebastian Leske (sleske@enterprise.mathematik.uni-essen.de)
Date: Sat Dec 01 2001 - 00:25:49 CET


Hallo,

> > Why? Did someone noticed similar traffic's explosion on
>
> its mailbox?
>
> A few spam, but several unwanted porno stuff (whose
> senders are now marked as undesirable in my emailer)
> which is another form of spam.

Yeah, I received that, too. At my workplace, one employee even spread
an (Outlook)-virus accidentally. It was one which sends an attachment
with a MIME-type of audio/wav and an extension of .DOC.pif (the virus
executable). Outlook, braindead as it is, disregards the MIME-type and
runs the program, and the MIME-type somehow makes it open it even if
you only preview the message... I don't think my knowledge of English
swear words is rich enough to express my opinion about that :-(.

The person who opened it actually has a Master degree in computer
science, so there's little excuse. At least the mistake was quickly
realized, when half an hour later, a dozen people had contacted him to
tell him about the virus he was inadvertently spreading. Luckily, most
people actually use Linux on the desktop here (we're a research
institution), and while an Outlook virus looks cute in raw text, it's
rather helpless under Linux :-).

Anyway, one thing I'd like to mention: in the past, there was quite a
bit of spam sent via the list. Quite practical for spammers, send one
mail and get it delivered dozens of times.
Most mailing lists therefore have a simple filter: they only accept
messages from subscribed users (or let unsubscribed users confirm their
mails, GNU mailman at least does that). Spammers usually don't bother
to subscribe (that's work, and that is what they are trying to avoid),
so it's quite effective without disrupting the list (like filtering by
content would).
How about that? Would that be possible, Michele?

Greetings,

Sebastian

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