Proliferation of junkmail to the Internet: What to do?

[ Article reposted from news.admin.net-abuse.usenet,news.admin.net-abuse.email,news.admin.net-abuse.misc ]
[ Author was Timo Salmi ]
[ Posted on 13 Jul 1997 08:53:54 +0300 ]

An extract from

 112853 Jul 12 1997 ftp://garbo.uwasa.fi/pc/ts/tsfaqn46.zip
 tsfaqn46.zip Questions from Usenet and Timo's answers

11. *****
 Q: How should I react to abusive email or postings?

(snip)

 A3: The worst current annoyance if you write a lot to the news is
junk email advertising. This is different in the sense that it is
not meant as personal abuse of single individuals, but it is
nevertheless highly annoying and unwelcome. Some services gather
posters' email addresses from the news for bulk advertising mailing
lists. They even sometimes tell that the receiver has to unsubscribe
from their forced mailing list if the receiver wishes not to get any
more email sent from that source.
   Fortunately there is a very effective method to get rid of such
unsolicited junk email, but it requires some programming skills and
a fair understanding of the email system to avoid e.g. infinite
email loops. What I have done is set up an email filter on my Unix
host (see "man filter") to let through email only from users whom I
have listed in my database as privileged. All other email to me gets
summarily discarded with an automatic response requesting the sender
to resend his/her email including a certain password in the subject
header. This method has been virtually foolproof since the bulk
spammers do not have the time to handle such individualized
precautions. The downside is the unsocial nature of this approach,
but with the current situation users like yours truly have no more a
choice.

   All the best, Timo

....................................................................
Prof. Timo Salmi   Co-moderator of news:comp.archives.msdos.announce
Moderating at ftp:// & http://garbo.uwasa.fi archives  193.166.120.5
Department of Accounting and Business Finance  ; University of Vaasa
mailto:t...@uwasa.fi  <http://www.uwasa.fi/~ts>  ; FIN-65101,  Finland