[lug] ISP for antispam recommendations?

[D. Stimits]

I'm a bit slow in replying to some of my mail lately.

Daniel Webb wrote:
> 
> Any place that gives you a shell account with a dialup is going to have
> procmail (I would hope).  Procmail is your friend.  A nice procmail spam
> filter is SpamBouncer:
> http://www.spambouncer.org
> 
> One problem I have had with it is that it is sometimes too strict, sending
> one or two good messages in the the "block" folder.  If you have important
> contacts you don't want to even be delayed until you get around to
> scanning the blocks folder, you can use procmail to send those to the
> inbox before any other scanning takes place.  Spambouncer is a nice way to
> get into procmail with a less steep learning curve.  It is very easy to
> set up, and you don't need to know procmail to get it going.  It looks
> from the web site that the work on it isn't as active as it used to be.
> Maybe that's because it's "good enough" now.
> 
> Also, you said in one of your other emails that it took a very long time
> to delete 200 spams.  What mail program are you using?  Hotmail?  If you
> are sending complaints to the upstream provider on each one, I can
> understand it.  I just hope you're not using a Windows mail program :)

I have filters to different folders. I use Netscape on RH 7.1 I have not
used windows for any email in a couple of years.

> 
> Are you a regular newgroup poster?  Why are you getting so much spam?

I post on BLUG a lot. Not often, but sometimes on
comp.os.linux.whatever. These spams are in Korean, Mandarin Chinese, and
a few other foreign languages that I do not speak. I have never posted
or visited public forums of non-English language, I don't speak any
language other than English. About half of the spams use character sets
my email can't even display. The question of why I am getting so much
spam is often related to public posts, but for the life of me, I cannot
figure out how or why non-English lists are targeting me. My biggest
conclusion here is that I go after spammers, and English speaking
spammers in USA or countries with rules can be dealt with, whereas there
is absoutely nothing to stop this massive wildfire in non-English
speaking countries that don't give a *#$@ what Americans think and have
no inclination to help. The funny thing is that the European countries
are *very* responsive and quite courteous, perhaps even more so than
American ISP's. I believe Korean and Chinese and Taiwan businesses have
a completely different concept of how to market and run business,
promoting the spam abuse as a way of life, not thinking of it as "a bad
thing" or as abuse, so they just keep on doing it.

D. Stimits, stimits at idcomm.com

> 
> On Tue, 26 Mar 2002, D. Stimits wrote:
> 
> > I'm wondering if anyone here has an ISP in the Boulder/Longmont area
> > that offers customized front-ends so that I could set up a personal
> > blacklist of domains or senders to reject? I want it at the ISP level
> > because I don't want to spend the bandwidth to download the 200 or so
> > spams I get per day. Even if I don't read them and I delete as fast as I
> > can, each morning I would have to spend at least half an hour repeatedly
> > hitting the delete button. Lately I've reported them all to spamcop, my
> > ISP claims that use blackhole lists, but they unfortunately seem to
> > override it in the worst cases. I'm thinking it might be time to dump my
> > ISP for someone that actually helps. In my location only 56k is
> > available, there are no lines capable of DSL here, and so far cable
> > modem service is non-existent. I consider the wireless solutions
> > inferior due to the desire to have consistent low-latency connections
> > (and last time I checked, less than a year ago, I was at the edge of
> > normal range anyway).
> >
> > D. Stimits, stimits at idcomm.com