[plug] SPAM - howto queries

[Bret Busby]

I read in the weekend West Australian, that Jeremy was involved in two 
issues relating to spam and to spammers being blacklisted (two separate 
articles).

How does a person notify agencies, such as CAUBE, etc, of a spam or 
email abuse complaint, so that action can be taken against the spammers?

As an example, I have unwittingly and unwillingly, been subscribed to a 
german yahoo mailing list, and the german yahoos have refused to 
unsubscribe me. I can't remember whether yahoo responds to abuse 
complaints.

Also, with the increasing level of SPAM, apart from the only recent 
messages on the LinuxAus list, being SPAM, it would be good to be able 
to forward the messages to an international agency, that lists the 
spammers for ISP's to block.

I do not know whether ISP's can filter spam on the basis of string 
patterns within the messages, such as URL's, which, if possible, would 
be a good way of the international agencies disrupting spam, by listing 
the URL's within the spam messages, which the ISP's could use for spam 
filtering. I assume that the ISP's that provide spam filtering, do use 
message content for filtering, by searching for strings within messages? 
Or, is that regarded as an invasion of privacy of the recipients, on the 
basis that the ISP is perusing the recipients' messages?

The filtering of spam is becoming increasingly time consuming, as the 
filters that I use on the subject, are requiring more and more work, as 
the spammers are breaking up the strings with special characters, such 
as quotation marks, carets, hyphens, and underscores, and PINE appears 
to not have a way of filtering, using special characters as the filter 
values. I believe that PINE similarly, cannot filter using the dot that 
is used as the field separator in URL's.

I am aware of software being available for dealing with spam, but, as 
the LinuxAus list has been unable to use SpamAssassin to effectively 
stop spam on that list, I doubt the effectiveness of anti-spam software, 
when people more knowledgeable than me, are unable to use it 
effectively.

-- 
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
..............

"So once you do know what the question actually is,
 you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
  Chapter 28 of 
  "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
  A Trilogy In Four Parts",
  written by Douglas Adams, 
  published by Pan Books, 1992 
....................................................

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