On Thursday, December 12, 2002, at 05:43 AM, J.Paul Robinson wrote: > > Colleagues: I am sending out a copy of a message I have just sent to > RNWAY laboratories of South Korea and all 20 worldwide distributors of > RNWAY products most of whom are highly reputable companies. I am only > sending it to you because I am going to propose to create a small > "SCIENTISTS against EMAIL ABUSE" type of revolutionary action......... > Paul, Sounds like you're advocating fighting disease by eradicating the antigen instead of boosting the immune response. You can organize all you want on eliminating the pest, but until they put a stamp tax on email, a better approach is to let the messages be out there, but have them filtered to oblivion before you ever see them. In your case, the postmaster at Purdue is probably already filtering millions of messages a day that come to the thousands of email users on campus. They are probably capable of shutting down any RNWAY mail, and spreading the word to other postmasters that they also should filter those messages. So if you can get the IT people at the university to tighten their sieve, that's best. Otherwise you have to switch to an email program that has good junk filters. I think I get 500+ messages a day, and only 10 to 20 make it past the junk filter. Until last summer I was using Outlook Express and spam was a huge problem. Since then I switched to the free Mail program in OS X, which just added special features for spam detection and removal. Its probably 97% effective, and I haven't found any false positives. So, of course, the best answer is to get a Mac :) I'm sure the PC mail clients are addressing this issue as well. I believe there are central databases of offenders so programs can learn from others which messages to delete. I would imagine this is the most important feature in any email program sold these days, so I bet Eudora or other third party mail programs have this solved. There's a lot of information on the subject at: http://spam.abuse.net/ Whether you fight the problem on the server or the client, it definitely is worth getting it cleaned up. I found it screwed up my whole communications process because every time I wanted check email, I had to wade through dozens or hundreds of useless ads. Adam --------------------------------------------------- Adam Treister adam@treestar.com www.flowjo.com 800-366-6045 ---------------------------------------------------
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