Re: Spamming in VN - Seconded!

Forwarded from David Marr <dgm405@coombs.anu.edu.au>:
------------------------------------------------------

From: "John Spragens" <jspragens@igc.org>
To: David Marr <dgm405@coombs.anu.edu.au>
Date: Tue, 9 Apr 2002 20:31:10 -0700
Subject: Re: Fwd: [vnit] Re: Spamming in VN - Seconded!

Puts spam in an interesting perspective. Here, with a high-speed connection
it's just an irritant. Most of what I get is from scammers, not legitimate
businesses
trying to solicit me.

In the email from real businesses, I don't get people attaching sales
brochures. They're much more likely to send a short message with a Web link
for more
information. Also, in most cases, they're sending me email only if I've
said it's OK.

Legitimate businesses can probably be educated if enough customers blast
them for abusing email. The scammers are another story. I've been trying to
reduce
the aggravation by using a program called SpamKiller (www.spamkiller.com). But
it works by downloading and filtering email before your email programs
does, which would make it of limited use for people on slow connections.
One thing that's helpful for those with a phone link: For really big
messages, it just grabs the header, not the whole big attachment. So you
can decide whether or not to kill the message without having to download it
first.