Date: Mon, 10 May 1999 07:17:21 +1000 From: Sue Blake <sue@welearn.com.au> To: Pete Vanderburgh <peterv@verio.net> Cc: freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Religious Propoganda. Message-ID: <19990510071721.40898@welearn.com.au> In-Reply-To: <3735D019.B72B0277@verio.net>; from Pete Vanderburgh on Sun, May 09, 1999 at 02:12:41PM -0400 References: <3735D019.B72B0277@verio.net>
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On Sun, May 09, 1999 at 02:12:41PM -0400, Pete Vanderburgh wrote:
> Hello all. I recently received an obvious spam. The header and
> reply-to were obviously forged (it's listed as
> ImportantFor@YourLife.com, and there was no path posted in the message
> to hint from where it was sent. However, it did have the tell-tale tag
> re: "to unsubscribe from freebsd-newbies send mail to majordomo..."
If you can get your mailer to display "all headers", the first line
usually tells you which list it's come from, as well as the Sender:
header. For lists that don't have footers, this is one quick way to
tell that the email came through a list and not direct to you.
> So, I ask: What happened here? Did others receive the same message?
Yes, they did. Here's what happened.
While the really popular FreeBSD lists have over 1,000 subscribers,
FreeBSD-Newbies is small, say 200 subscribers. Now, get your
calculators out.
The spammer sent the mail via the list, one little message for the
spammer, but copies of it were distributed to TWO HUNDRED people all
over the globe! Imagine what the total cost must be for transmitting
and downloading all those emails, not to mention people's time reading
it and deciding whether to react to it or just delete it.
Your response also went to the same two hundred people, and generated
a thread of ten responses to your post, each going to two hundred
people, a total of TWO THOUSAND emails. As the rest of the list joins
in, it is likely to escalate until the original spam is a negligible
portion of the total problem.
It's 7AM here now. I wake up, and the first thing I have to do is check
the FreeBSD-Newbies list to make sure everyone's doing the right thing.
I see that someone has generated two hundred off topic posts, and I
see that someone else has generated two thousand off topic posts.
And I ask myself, who is it that I should pull into line? :-)
Then I chuckle and crawl back into bed.
> And if not, it still brings up a good point, I suppose. Is there a way
> to trace a message like this?
The best thing I can suggest is to go to Yahoo! and do a search on
"spam" which will bring up dozens of helpful sites that explain how
to read mail headers and what you can do. It's also OK to discuss it a
bit here, but do remember never to talk about these things, or respond
to spam in any way, when it occurs on any other FreeBSD list. You'll
be given a worse time than the spammer, for the reasons calculated
above.
> (I guess it's obvious that I have issues with people using the
> internet to push their religious doctrine may way!!) All comments are
> welcome.
Being neither a Jew nor a Christian, I found the post mildly amusing,
less offensive than those who spam their religion through goody-goody
better-than-you mail signatures. But I expect that anyone from the
mentioned religions would have been quite upset, just as upset as I am
when I am forced to pay to receive spam offers of pornography and get
rich quick deals that I can't even purchase here in Australia.
The best thing you can do when you encounter spam on a list, or
trolling, or any inappropriate behaviour, is just do nothing. Do
absolutely nothing. Any response, to the list or to the spammer, is
only going to make it worse. In other lists, you could find yourself as
much the target of attacks as the spammer, for generating a tenfold
mail volume on the spam topic.
In the case of this spammer, he has already been dealt with, quite a
while before your response came through, swiftly and silently, out of
the public eye, and without any further impact on the cost in Internet
fees for subscribers (some of whom are not in the USA and pay for each
byte of email they get).
Of course you wouldn't know that these spams are monitored and their
senders are swiftly and silently banned from the lists, unless you'd
been around the FreeBSD (or other well run) lists quite a while. That's
one of the reasons why we have FreeBSD-Newbies, so you can explore
these little traps without being harshly judged by non-newbies when you
fall into them, and so you can discuss anything like this that would be
off topic in any other list.
--
Regards,
-*Sue*-
(`
()
'` <-- a +3 uncursed budgerigar named Einstein
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