All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Annoying People

gav on 2004-03-28T00:46:56

This morning's cost of having a website and an email address:

  • Delete a comment on my site which was added by a spammer
  • Download a hundred or so emails, with 95% being marked as spam
  • Delete half a dozen spams that got through because they came from my email address, then tweak Spamassassin to unwhitelist that address
  • Edit a couple of pages on my wiki that somebody found through Google and helpfully added "should I be able to edit this?"

I fear that we are close approaching a point where the annoyance of being on the internet gets to a point where it is unbearable. There was an item on /. about Gopher which reminded me that the internet used to have a higher signal to noise ratio and a lot less annoying people. Perhaps the technology was just not mature enough to annoy large numbers of people with ease.

On the other hand, a chance visit made me remember that I haven't seen Glengarry Glen Ross for a while and thanks to Neflix I am going to settle down on the sofa with a white russian and enjoy it.

Know what you mean

KM on 2004-03-29T14:21:26

SPAM on my journal has taken a break, but will surely wind up again. I started looking at the sites being advertised and calling them up. I'd berate the people on the other end, or berate their answering machines about being, or using, spammers to do this. Casey has a SA to kill blog spam script (if you use a DB), but I liked David's idea of just renaming mt-comments.cgi so the spambots look in the wrong place.

The whole joe-job emails also annoy the crap out of me (215 bounces this morning were waiting for me). I need to come up with, or find, a good procmail recipe to delete things from postmaster/mailer-daemon which have not been sent to any of my sending addresses. My procmail-fu comes and goes :-)

But, I do agree with you. I remember when the internet was fun, and it was more time looking for info and people than looking for a way to get rid of, block, delete or otherwise remove things in your face.

What was the white Russians name? Svetlona? Was she mail order?

Re:Know what you mean

pudge on 2004-03-31T17:18:06

I don't get journal spam, as I require posts to have accounts. I average more than a thousand spams/viruses *per day*, but Eudora's Bayesian filters catch almost all of it. The only really bad parts are the every-once-in-awhile skimming through the Junk folder for false positives, and the bandwidth/time to download email.

Re:Know what you mean

gav on 2004-04-04T23:40:49

I don't even know how many spams/viruses I get sent. I send way more stuff to /dev/null than I'd like. Anything that's a virus, anything that's not sent to a "proper" address, anything that's sent from certain addresses (mainly domains that have a stupid virus scanners or get continually joe-jobbed), anything that looks like a virus warning, a lot of bounces from postmaster, etc, etc.

I only actually download 200-300 spams a day. I'm very impressed that Spamassassin marks over 99% for me. I do worry that I block the odd piece of legitimate email, but that's just as likely if I was wading though an inbox full of crap.