🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <E10GMH.L3n@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
    david@djwhome.demon.co.uk (David Woolley) writes:

> As the sender is reasonably proficient in forging them, it is likely that
> any significant filtering on envelope address will simply cause a change
> to random addresses or to addresses that you can't safely refuse, or
> which he has a grievance against.

[...]

> This is largely a human factors problem.  You have to convince the
> spammer that spamming is unprofitable and you have to convince all the
> ISPs between him and the virtual backbone that they should not do
> business with spammers and the people who service them.

Actually, I am no longer convinced that is a good idea.  The net interprets
censorship and routes around it - there will *always* be somebody willing
to sell a spammer an account.  And, if not, they can always use the old
AOL trial account with an invented credit card number (the algorithm for
the check digit is known, so it is possible to invent valid card numbers).

Perhaps it would be a better idea to *not* hound them into moving around,
because then you don't have to keep updating your killfile.  Even better
would be for internic to set up a .spam top-level domain and encourage
all spammers to use it so that we can kill on *.spam. :-)

OK, I'll admit that before my MTA got killfile facilities I would have
been entirely on your side (even adding that we should kill their children
lest the evil persist).  But, which is going to work in the long run?
Updating MTAs to add killfile facilities or hounding these buggers off
the net?  The net *does* interpret censorship as damage and the bastards
*do* get new accounts.  At least if they weren't forced to change providers
I'd have a longer respite before they realized that everyone was killfiling
them so they changed address for that reason.

--Paul