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Aggressive Email Filtering Blocks Political Debate 443

Posted by CmdrTaco from the been-there-done-that dept.
Stephen writes "Many of us have spam blockers operating on our mail. But according to this BBC article, when British members of parliament starting having their emails filtered last month, it stopped them talking about genuine political business such as the Sexual Offences Bill, and prevented them receiving some constituents' emails." This problem has bit me on the bum a few times too. About 1 message in every 250 spam is a false hit. Course thats about once a day :(
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Aggressive Email Filtering Blocks Political Debate More

Aggressive Email Filtering Blocks Political Debate

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  • Maybe good (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jhouserizer ( 616566 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @12:30PM (#5223354) Homepage

    These types of incidents may be good in the long run - if it makes law makers "wake up" to the problem of spam.

    ...We can only hope... Perhaps we could even start bombarding law makers with spam ourselves? - that would raise their awareness!

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @01:22PM (#5223911)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:Maybe Wake Up Call for "Filters" (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Zeinfeld ( 263942 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @01:45PM (#5224123) Homepage
        As stated lower in this thread, if you have to manually check your spam folder for "false positives", the filter is utterly useless since you are still checking for spam

        I attended the conference on spam at MIT. The conference would have been more accurately labelled a 'solving spam with the hammer we know about' conference since no other solutions were accepted - although several people besides myself submitted authentication based papers.

        The big problem with the Bayes approach is false positives. Lots of great statistics were quoted but the claims were simply not credible. I don't believe that Spam is such a simple problem that the performance of naive Bayesian techniques is several orders of magnitude better on that problem than any other.

        So really the trick is to swing the problem arround. START from the problem of making sure that anyone with a legitimate reason to contact me can do so without interference from statistical filtering techniques. The proper place to apply those is on the mail I cannot authenticate in that way.

        I dislike the bounce-back loop as a filter for personal correspondence. I think it is great for the purpose of a lightweight authentication mechanism for mailing list subscriptions. I get very irritated when people use it to filter email, particularly since all my email is signed. People should not substitute their ad hoc authentication mechanisms without first supporting deployed standards.

        The other problem with call back loops is that if they are used widely they will become a bigger problem than the spam, this is why I have been urging Microsoft et. al. NOT to support them. The trick that the spammers have developed to get round the callback loop is to steal addresses off mailing list archives and send forged messages to the other members of the list. So work out the effect that deployment of the naive bounceback hack would have.

      • What a Sick Sales Plug!!! (Score:4, Interesting)

        by tacocat ( 527354 ) <tallison1&twmi,rr,com> on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @02:04PM (#5224282)

        I hate to do this because it's only partially complete. But I have a concept worked out on how to handle spam that works extremely well and removes the chance of false positives, especially from Real People.

        It's not a money-making scheme, but it is prior-art <grin>.

        The idea is a hybridization of SpamAssassin [spamassassin.org] and tmda (tagged message delivery agent) [tmda.org] wherein you accept all email into your inbox and the spam goes into a spam mailbox. Nothing New...

        The cool part comes in when you start automating the spam_mail similar, at least conceptually, to what I have on my website. Shameless plug here [tacocat.net]

        The idea is that you send out an email confirmation, similar to tmda, for only that email which is considered spam (by SpamAssassin). This means that most of your regular communications would go unhindered. But it would also make casual contact via email the easy and simple function that it is supposed to be.

        These notions of having an email list of only your known contacts is a pain in the arse and most times met with extreme hostility. This is especially true if you are attempting to contact someone privately from an email list, or from a solitication from their website.

        I have to warn you that if you use the code as described on my website you will probably break your server in the first day. I've rewritten it to scale much better (1,000 spams every 10 minutes). But I haven't had the chance to post the new code. But conceptually it rocks!

        I've processed something like 20,000 emails without taking a single false positive, unless the original sender vegged... but then he didn't really want to talk to me anyways now did he?

        The point is, it places the responsibility of delivering spammy mail to the sender. I do not have to receive it. However it allows the non-spammer to go about the internet unhindered.

  • Regulation (Score:5, Funny)

    by Marco_polo ( 160898 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @12:30PM (#5223359) Homepage
    I can just imagine the outrage if this happened to the bush administation.

    'what do you mean no one got my emails?'

    'It seems your.. uh... last name is causing some issues with spam filters sir'

    'That's it.. lets bomb the spammers'

    • Re:Regulation (Score:3, Funny)

      by Levine ( 22596 )
      That's it.. lets bomb the spammers
      No, no, you've got it all wrong. That's it.. let's bomb Iraq.
      • No, no, you've got it all wrong. That's it.. let's bomb Iraq.

        Colin Powell will present incontrovertible evidence Feb 8. linking Hussein with Sanford Wallace.

    • I can just imagine the outrage if this happened to the bush administation.
      'what do you mean no one got my emails?'
      'It seems your.. uh... last name is causing some issues with spam filters sir'
      'That's it.. lets bomb the spammers'

      A culmination devoutly to be wished, but I suspect the response would more likely be, "Let's bomb the spam filter authors." <wry grin> In the U.S., both the Republican and the Democratic national committees have spammed, and a number of lawmakers, including, recently, Sen. Joseph Lieberman. Most politicians define spam as, "unwanted email sent by somebody else." :/

      Spammers have made filtering necessary, of course. Further, to the best of my knowledge (and I do know something about spam filtering [spambouncer.org] ), mail filters always and inevitably result in a non-zero rate of false positives. The rate can be extremely low with good technology, but never zero.

      But I doubt very much that most people in Washington, or in London, or in Berlin, or in Beijing, or in Moscow, or... will realize this.

  • Maybe we Slashdot can buy this filter technology.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by gpinzone ( 531794 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @12:31PM (#5223363) Homepage Journal
    ...to eliminate all the dupe stories!

  • Remove all their filters (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 3vi1 ( 544505 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @12:31PM (#5223368) Homepage Journal
    I think polititians shouldn't have any filters on their e-mail.

    After about 2 weeks of what the average person goes through, we'd see stronger anti-spam legislation/penalties.

  • i still believe... (Score:2, Informative)

    by Mourgos ( 621534 )
    that the best anti spam method is to block certain IPs. No filtering based on content.
    Sometimes filtering CC entries works pretty good.

  • thats an easy one (Score:3, Funny)

    by xao gypsie ( 641755 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @12:33PM (#5223392)
    it stopped them talking about genuine political business
    thats because they no longer knew how to enlarge their penises and missed being notified that some russian woman wanted them so badly that it hurt.
    that would certainly stop our gov't, at least..

    xao
  • Do any spam filters work (as in NOT throwing out legit mails) other than ourselves?
    • Sure. I use a reasonable set of rules (by "reasonable", I mean that I don't blindly look for all possible words having to do with commerce or pornography) to ID a message as spam, then a whitelist to make sure no messages from anyone I know has accidentally gone into the trash bin.

      I still get perhaps a half dozen spam messages per day to manually delete, but out of over 100, and AFAIK I have no false positives.
    • Some of the stuff that's been reported on Slashdot on Bayesian filtering seems capable of eliminating false spam identification at a minimal cost of false legit identifications. The benefit is that you could establish a borderline (Bayesian filtering, and I'm just going off my limited knowledge from reading a few articles so the wiser may please expand and correct) assigns a value on a spam or not scale based on a statistically generated profile from real world examples of what makes spam "spammy." This eliminates the black and white tendencies of automatic filters (I say, delete everything that says "bigger penis," then miss the email where a friend complains that his girlfriend left him for someone because he...). You could also assign a borderline range so that you could review the few emails that may or may not be spam. If the service were well set up, you could even have a reply function to let whoever was running the filter know, yes, the questionable message was spam or no, it was legit, which would continue to make the filters more robust.


      The problem is, it would have to be adjusted continually to adapt to the evolution of spam, so this would ultimately need to be a paid service. Personally I would gladly cough up 5 bucks a month to eliminate spam.

  • False Positive (Score:5, Insightful)

    by propheci ( 113702 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @12:35PM (#5223420)
    the problem is that just by knowing there could be a false positive, you have to examine all your filtered spam, which makes the spam filter useless in the first place.

    • Re:False Positive (Score:3, Interesting)

      by troc ( 3606 )
      Kind of - I also find I end up reading, or at least checking, all teh stuff my mail app sends to the spam folder - and I guess I get one false positivie every 200 or so spams. However I find it much quicker browsing the spam in the spam folder, knowing it's probably spam than trying to weed out the spam in my inbox.

      So, the filtering perfomed by my mail app does save me some time but not as much as it could if the filtering were perfect.

      Troc

    • Re:False Positive (Score:3, Insightful)

      by antis0c ( 133550 )
      Not entirely. I have all my potential spam filtered into a SPAM folder. That's only potential spam, things like vbs worms are deleted by the mail server with procmail.

      I then just take a quick glance at my SPAM folder and all the subjects, I get around 400 spams a day, so it takes maybe a minute to scroll through real quick, anything that's potentially not spam, maybe 10 mail messages, I actually look at the body. If not, I just delete the entire contents of the folder immediately.

      It's not fool proof, but I have caught a number of emails that were from family that happened to have various spam-like features in the body, but the subject and from were obviously from my family. Doesn't seem so useles to me.

    • Re:False Positive (Score:5, Interesting)

      by lessthan0 ( 176618 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @12:55PM (#5223659)
      A better solution (the one I use) includes a summary report of spam filtered each day. The report lists the number of spams from each sender and I can usually spot valid mail in the list of "From"s without having to look at a single message.

      If I spot a false positive, then I dig into my spam archive for that day and check it out.

      I use the spastic filter:
      http://spastic.sourceforge.net

    • Re:False Positive (Score:4, Informative)

      by ajs ( 35943 ) <{ajs} {at} {ajs.com}> on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @02:09PM (#5224324) Homepage Journal
      Not at all, and you're thinking about far too simple a model.

      With SpamAssassin, I deal with spam in 3 ways:

      1. Mail that gets a score of 20 or more is sent to /dev/null. Mail would have to be carefully crafted to achieve a 20 unless it truly is spam. Such effort is not to be rewarded :-) Keep in mind that mail about laws on sexuality or other simple examples cited in this article would never get NEAR a 20.

      2. Mail that triggers both the Bayesian and Razor2 tests is sent to /dev/null. This is a very nice way to identify that a) there's a consensus that this very message is spam and b) my local mail patterns indicate that this is spam.

      3. Anything else with a score of 4 or more is marked in the subject line and I have a virtual mailbox in my mail client that I use to glance at the from addresses. If something looks plausible, I check it out.

      As of the development version of SpamAssassin that I'm using (about a week old out of CVS), I get a false positive rate of about 1:100-200 messages and during testing over the last couple of months, I copied the messages that would have gone to /dev/null to a mailbox that I scanned carefully. None of the messages that I would have thrown out were non-spam.

      I get a LOT of mail form lists, spammers, friends, random people on the net, machines spewing status, etc. I feel that I'm a reasonably good QAer for this sort of thing, and the new SpamAssassin will rock your world (and the spammers')!

    • Re:False Positive (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mph ( 7675 )
      which makes the spam filter useless in the first place.
      Well, not really, depending on your habits. Like a lot of people, some of the emails I get are about urgent work-related stuff. So if I'm working, and xbiff goes "beep!" I briefly stop what I'm doing to look at the email, and then go back to work.

      Spam filters stop literally dozens of such interruptions every day, and I can review the list of blocked spam in less than a minute, once a day.

      I also send copies of my email to my cell phone, so the spam filter means that I get fewer distractions while I'm away from work, and spend less time deleting mail from the phone (which is more cumbersome than on the computer).

  • The type of spam filtering? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mrs clear plastic ( 229108 ) <allyn@clearplastic.com> on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @12:35PM (#5223422) Homepage
    I can easily see why this may be happening. The types of filters that use keywords can easily fall into this.

    I understand that keywords and phrases such as
    'free money' 'zero percent financing' 'win
    million dollars' 'sex xxxxx pictures!' and so
    on can trigger many filters.

    I would like to think that the better designed
    filters would use a combination of key words as
    well as suspicious domain names and/or IP
    address blocks to do filtering.

    The spam filter that is used on my email account does not filter out, but it does add the word
    'SPAM?' into the subject line of the email message. I can then see right away if it is
    really spam or is something mistaken by the filter for spam. The message is not blocked, though.

    Mark

  • Filtering just doesn't work (Score:3, Interesting)

    by OpenSourced ( 323149 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @12:35PM (#5223424) Journal
    The only longterm solution to spam (that I can think of, of course ;) is to create a "new" e-mail community, where servers would only accept e-mail from a list of "trusted" servers. Any server discovered spamming would be kicked off the list in no time. We would end up with a smaller, nicer, cozier e-mail system.

    • The only problem with this is... the servers who maintain the lists of trusted servers could start charging for a "email registration" type service. (Kinda like TLD's and the name registrar's out there)... Then eventually you'd start loosing the trust and we'd be back into the same steamy pile of pooh we're in now..
    • Correct, which is why the MIT spam conference was so disappointing to me.
      The filter that works for me will not work for you, the porn star, the priest, or the city counsel member.
      A system of trusted email servers is the only workable solution, either that, or the whole email system colpases under the weight of spam.

  • That's a real problem with a democracy (Score:5, Funny)

    by Hairy_Potter ( 219096 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @12:36PM (#5223433) Homepage
    how to balance open access to constituents without being overwhelmed.

    Perhaps Parliament could consider some of the steps that the American Congress has taken. The American Congress has a de facto filter built in to prevent Joe Random crazy from flooding their representatives with spurious requests. Most Congressional requests, letters, phone calls, faxes and emails are tossed out unless they come from certain designated people known as lobbyists. These lobbyists have worked hard to cultivate contacts in the Congress, and can get better results from one office visit than 1,000 letters from voters. In a way, they're professional access voters.

    So, maybe the UK could restrict access to just professional lobbyists, it works very well in the US.
    • You people are so dumb you think this is a real post? Sorry, if this story was remotly related to microsoft and you people had your thinking caps on you'd be fooled by this troll and scream "But the average Linux-Loving dirty GNU Hippie such as myself doesn't have lobbiest! My bullshit about how we should repeal copyright acts should be heard! Test nuclear devices in Redmond!".
    • So, maybe the UK could restrict access to just professional lobbyists, it works very well in the US.

      No, it doesn't. It only works well for those who can afford to pay for professional lobbyists & for those who pay to set up 'special interest groups' claiming to represent the vast public when they don't.

      When I lived in the US, I can remember the 'Prop. nnn' ads on TV, paid for by 'Concerned Citizens Against Blah' written in small print at the bottom. It always turned out that 'citizens' were actually some big business (often the tobacco industry).

    • No, That's a real problem with a democracy (Score:4, Insightful)

      by intermodal ( 534361 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @12:55PM (#5223653) Homepage Journal
      So, maybe the UK could restrict access to just professional lobbyists, it works very well in the US.

      Works well for who? I don't see how it helps the average joe citizen who wants to get his point across unless he donates money somewhere. Corporations have tons of cash to throw at it. So if Jimmy Lobbyist has more access than Joe Sixpack, thats a problem. repetition and filtering be damned. It is the duty of a representative democracy to represent those they are representative of, and if they aren't willing to take into account every email and letter and fax and phone call they get in their decisions, then it's a stone's throw away from not having elections at all, especially when you consider that when voting the only two candidates who generally have a chance is a lesser of two evils situation.
    • Currently the way it stands in the UK the British electorate has a legal right to contact their local MPs, there would be uproar if Tony Blair even suggested that this could be done. Which is a good thing, people don't trust politians as it is, without making them even more accountable. As for how well it works in the US, I would disagree it just means that bodies with the most money have a disproportional say in how the country works. In any case some of the problems with the filtering seems to have been with internal emails as well as external ones.

  • Webmail and "spamlets" (Score:5, Informative)

    by germinatoras ( 465782 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @12:36PM (#5223435) Homepage

    A similar problem happens with free Webmail or adversiting-supported e-mail accounts. The small advertisements attached to the bottom (I call them "spamlets") will sometimes trigger mail filters.

    Watch out for this if you're sending a message from e.g. Yahoo! to Hotmail, who both attach spamlets and both filter incomming mail. They also will not send rejection notices to the sender, so you may never know if you message got through.

    • Then honestly those are shitty mail filters. Hotmail and Yahoo are like the #2 and #4 email providers. If your mail filter is blocking hotmail and yahoo and their attached adds (which are usually for themselves from what I've seen), then you need to find a new filter.

  • Pgp... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by NivenHuH ( 579871 )
    Perhaps they should start using pgp encrypted/signed stuff and filter out all non-encrypted/signed emails?

    *shrug* That's what I do.. I hate getting email from somebody I don't know...
  • One thing is sure, aggressive editor filtering isn't blocking dupes on /. ...

  • Poor filtering rules (Score:2, Informative)

    by EvlOvrLrd ( 559820 )
    Sounds like a filtering implementation was not done correctly with such thoughts in mind.

    Such as setting the rules to allow specific domains/addresses. Regardless of the content.

    Then setting the content killer rule.

    But I am more suprised that political figures are using unsecured means of communication. Specially if it is communicated over the Internet.

    Unless of course, they are filtering internal network mail as well!

  • Public email? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by briancnorton ( 586947 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @12:40PM (#5223482) Homepage
    It's truly amazing that anybody could make an attempt to use their public email for official business. In general, three accounts is all that you need to never have to read spam again.

    Specifically for the parliment, I dont see why they dont just whitelist all other parliment members.

    • In general, three accounts is all that you need to never have to read spam again.

      One account and whitelist-based filter is enough. Even MS Outlook can handle that.

      Specifically for the parliment, I dont see why they dont just whitelist all other parliment members.

      It must be mandatory for candidate to pass some "IT certified user" exam with tests on how to use email (whitelist filter tuning, never don't open any executable/sriptable email attachment) in addition to other IT (and IQ?) tests. That should help to have less (by both amount and level) idiots representing the country internationally and publicly.

    • Because regardless of race, nation, or creed, legislation and intelligence are mutually exclusive.

  • filtering is good.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by morgajel ( 568462 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @12:40PM (#5223485)
    ...but not perfect.
    Ok, here's the situation as I see it.
    We have a problem: Spam

    We need a solution.
    So far filtering has been working good and is slowly getting better, but there's always gonna be the chance for false positives.
    so how do we stop this?
    I have no clue.
    We should probably start cracking down on open relays, even use governmental pressure if needed (on spammers in our countries and on the governments of other countries). They serve no real purpose other than facilitaing spam.
    What else can we do? Go after spammers legally. We need to make them pay. I bet if 1000 people sued ralsky for $500 a piece he'd start to take notice, but he still wouldn't learn. Some states, like washington, are doing that, and it seems to be working, or at least getting the spam recievers a little extra cash. If I lived there, I know I'd try it at least once. Hell, I might even pay for my braodband connection with the money I got from spammers:)

    I've heard people recommend opt-out lists like they use for telemarketers- that's not gonna work because spammers are much more slimy- they'll use the opt-out list as a verified list.

    We're not left with many choices, besides educating people to simply delete spam and DON'T buy from it. make it cost spammers money. if they sell even one thing, they they're winning.

    I took a slightly fun approach. I'm building a list of 'legit' companies that sell your email address to spammers. What I did was bought a domain, and whenever I signed up for something, I used the companies name@ the domain, and had it all forward to one account. so when I get spam to musiccity@mydomain.com, I know that musiccity sold my email address (which they did).

    Does anyone else have any Ideas how to stop spam? if so, save the redundant mods and reply.
    • no, really. If people want to send you e-mail, make them send it pgp. If a message is sent non-pgp, have them re-send it pgp.

      That, or have your mailserver put e-mail from unrecognized e-mail addresses into a waiting pool and have it bounce an e-mail back to the sending address as confirmation that there is a live human being at the other end of the address. If you're expecting e-mails from addresses with machines on the other end, look in the spam cesspool for them or add the originating e-mail address to your mailserver's "ok" list.
    • Most of these spammers want to drag you into some sleazy website.

      If anyone started making a hobby out of the following procedure (could even be automated) one could push spammers to the brink of profitability and insanity:

      1) You receive spam
      2) you cut'n'paste the URL to their site into list file
      3) you start wegt'ing their websites recursively and repeatedly (say, 50megs on each occasion)
      4) you rejoice at the spammer getting a gigantic volume cost

      If only 1000 people did this a few times on each spam-advertised website (and on their unmetered flatrate accounts) things would weed out pretty quickly, I guess.
  • Without spam, how else would I be able to sit home every day and make $1,000 a week watching TV while playing with my 12 inch penis?

  • Pity the MP (Score:2, Funny)

    by caek ( 571864 )
    from Scunthorpe.

  • False positives are a fact of life (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sludg-o ( 120354 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @12:42PM (#5223503)
    We offer SpamAssassin at the college where I work. I always tell new users that any spam blocking system, no matter how good, will eventually block something that was legitimate. That's why I don't write procmail recipies that redirect mail flagged as spam to /dev/null. You gotta put it in a seperate folder and you are asking to get burned if you don't skim the subjects and senders every couple days. Also, they should be whitelisting messages from addresses in their domain.

    I don't see how this is news. It's just an example of bad system administration.
    • Agreed, though SpamAssassin has one feature that is real usefull for this: the score is embedded in the email header in a row of '*'. This can be used to reduce the amount of skimming you have to do: I find I never get a false positive that rates above 13, so I /dev/null (or uce@ftc.gov) everything above that, and skim the rest. This gets rid of the worst spam without my intervention, and reduces the amount I need to skim to 10-20 messages a day.

  • Many Issues (Score:3, Funny)

    by CleverNickedName ( 644160 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @12:42PM (#5223508) Journal
    I'm sure the filters caused many problems with the "Hot, horny housewife" bill and the new "Extra six inches" tax debate.

  • Hit-and-miss filters (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Xesdeeni ( 308293 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @12:42PM (#5223509)
    By definition filters are hit-and-miss and non-deterministic. I get almost exclusively SPAM with spoofed return addresses. How about this solution:

    1. Sending mail server generates a tx content key based on the contents of an e-mail being sent.
    2. Sending mail server uses the tx content key with a private key to create a confirmation key.
    3. Sending mail server sends the e-mail, along with the confirmation key to the receiving server.
    4. Receiving mail server generates a rx content key from the e-mail contents.
    5. Receiving mail server sends the rx content key and the confirmation key back to the sending mail server.
    6. Sending mail server uses its private key plus the rx content key to re-generate the confirmation key.
    7. Sending mail server compares the confirmation keys.
    8. If the keys match, the receiving mail server allows the mail to enter the recipient's mailbox.
    9. If the keys don't match, the mail is bounced.

    The keys are in place to keep the SPAMmer from tagging along on a valid return address with mail that address didn't send. This technique also keeps the second transaction to a minimum exchange of keys. The keys add traffic, but the eliminated SPAM traffic more than makes up for the penalty. As more and more mail servers are updated with this feature, spoofing is all but eliminated. The remaining "spoofable" domains can be explicitly severed from the net or blocked.

    Xesdeeni

  • true story (Score:5, Interesting)

    by circletimessquare ( 444983 ) <circletimessquar ... m minus language> on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @12:43PM (#5223521) Homepage Journal
    i got in a fight with an ex-girlfriend and we ceased speaking for awhile

    i became further incensed because she never contacted me after the fight

    we didn't talk for 2 months

    finally, i contacted her and said "why didn't you get back to me??!!"

    she said, "you didn't get my email?"

    i looked, and there it was, 2 months back, in my spam folder (yes, i keep all of my spam, the folder is gigantic)

    although you could make a joke about emails from girlfriends being called spam, in this particular case, considering the chance at reconciliation that was lost and the feelings involved, it was definitely not funny at all ;-(

    so i can say, with certainty, that my personal life has been greatly and adversely affected by spam.

    you can hate spam for all sorts of reasons, but for me, it's personal.

    • Re:true story (Score:3, Interesting)

      by anonymous loser ( 58627 )
      so i can say, with certainty, that my personal life has been greatly and adversely affected by spam

      Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that your life has been adversely affected by spam filtering? I mean, if you didn't have the filter on, you would have received her email (along with hundreds of crappy emails), right?

  • If this were to hapen in the US, they would say "spam isn't really an issue these days" and no spam laws...

    Boy would that be bad. Slow progress, is better than "no problem at all".

    Lets push for a "no spam filter for Congress until Congress passes a no-spam law"

    Then again, wouldn't be needed if enforced.

  • They didn't even warn the MPs? (Score:4, Informative)

    by sebi ( 152185 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @12:44PM (#5223536)

    According to the article the system was implemented without prior warning. What they should do is educated the users on how to implement spam filtering on their machines and not stop messages from going through at all.

    In my e-mail client spam is marked in a different color, and by now the success rate seems pretty good, but I still don't trust it enough to auto-delete them. Spam sucks, but false positives not getting through might be worse than boobie mail getting blocked. In this case members of a governing body are affected. They should be working on legislation against spam, instead of having their hands held by the IT department.

  • This problem has bit me on the bum a few times too. About 1 message in every 250 spam is a false hit. Course thats about once a day :(

    I know it's a pain but sometimes you have to bite the bullet and get another email address. You would soon gain the time spent migrating back through having less time spent sifting through SPAM.

    Anyone getting the idea that I'm sick of seeing the complaints too?

    --------
    interested in wallpapers, coverings, interior decorating [wallpaperscoverings.com] in Australia?

  • ...I thought the Right Honourable member for Scunthorpe was just being rude.

    Seriously though, I used:

    FaxYourMP.com [faxyourmp.com]

    when I wanted to complain about the entitlement/ID cards scheme. I got a reply from my MP (a copy of a letter sent to our Incompetent Home Secretary), on House of Commons headed notepaper in the post 3 days later. For once I feel slightly included in the political process...

  • Symbian Evolotion and Spam (and British Relations) (Score:3, Informative)

    by RobotRunAmok ( 595286 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @12:48PM (#5223570)
    bit me on the bum

    Taco, ol' Sod, I see you're hard at work addressing those complaints from our brothers overseas about the persistent American slant of SlashDot.

    Good On Ya, Mate!

    That said, and out of fear of being mod'd OT, let me add that I have had success training Evolution's filter system to recognize spam not based on the subject but on the domain name. Without ever bothering with public blacklists, I've just patiently built out my own Enemies List over the years. The "keywords," if you will, in so many of the spammers' domains are remarkably similar -- "email" "deals" "free" etc. Combine that with whitelisting based upon my address list, and I think I've had maybe 2 false plucks for as long as I can remember (receiving on the order of 150 spams daily)
  • Why not have a function built in to the spam rejector, that sends a message back to the originator with a message id, saying "your message has been blocked because it is believed to be spam, if this has been done in error, please resend your message"

    Then when the person sees this and resends the message, it will get through correctly. How many spammers are going to bother resending their message?

    simple, and cheap.
    • How many spammers are going to bother resending their message?

      Most of them, if the function is in wide use, and the response can be automated.

      • Dunno 'bout that; if the function is in wide use, I don't think the spammers will have the bandwidth to handle all the responses, automated or not. A lot of the cost-effectiveness of spamming is based on the ability to hijack other people's resources to send out all those e-mails.
  • when British members of parliament starting having their emails filtered last month, it stopped them talking about genuine political business such as the Sexual Offences Bill, and prevented them receiving some constituents' emails
    Of course, the slow realisation on the part of these pillocks^E^E^E^Ears of the community that their email was actually being filtered has nothing to do with the decline in usage.


  • Why can't their Admins just code a secret word into the spam filter that allows their internal communications (any message containing the secret) through? The constituents' messages would still be a problem, but I haven't figured that out yet.
  • Can't you set up an always accept list so, regardless of the spam filtering, the emails from known people can get through?
  • The problem with email filtering is definately the false positives [slashdot.org]. Say you get 100 mails a day and 90 are spam. One day it misses one of them so you end up with 10 legit emails and 1 spam. Big deal, you arent wasting but a second deleting it. The next day it hits a false positive so you end up with 9 legit mails in your inbox and 1 in your pile of spam. Not acceptable.

  • Okay.. this is ridiculous. Have they never heard of a whitelist?? It seems to me that if they're discussing political topics amongst each other, a whitelist is the obvious answer. Even if it's not, what about browsing through their filtered email? What moron set this system up for them without showing them how to use these critical features?
  • I made the mistake in my younger days of accidentally signing up for a Jack-in-the-Box mailing list. (I think it was one of those "win a car!" promotions.) So I went ahead and listed the email address "jack@jackinthebox.com" or something similar to my Outlook filter (yes I was doubly dumb in that I used my work e-mail- what was I thinking?). Well sure enough, from that point on, any email address that started with the letter "J" was thrown into my recycle folder!

    Its amazing how stupidy finds a way to punish you.

  • Why was/is there no whitelist of all the Parliament members addresses? Or all of the British gov't official email addresses?
  • I know this doesn't apply to everyone, but as a professor, I whitelist all of the domains in the subject line. Most of my important email comes from .edu, so I whitelist those.

    As almost no spam comes from these domains, it helps decrease false positives in spamassassin.

  • SpamAssassin!!! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Biff98 ( 633281 )
    It is by far the best spam blocker I've found. I of course keep all my spam and go through it very quickly about every two weeks. I have it set so that I have yet to get a false positive, if anything it lets a spam slip by every now and again.

    These legitimite mails that get filtered to spam trash cans are simply cases of software misconfiguration, or bad software ;-)

    www.spamassassin.org
  • Anyone think about having an email system that accepts emails from a trusted list of senders. If the email comes from someone not on that list they get a message sent back to them that they have to post a $.50 spam deposit if they want to send you email. If they post the deposit the email ends up on your inbox. You then have to grade it as spam, not spam one time accept, not spam always accept. If it is spam they loose the deposit, if it is not spam one time accept they get the deposit back but have to post it next time they send. If it is not spam always accept then they can send to you anytime they want.

  • When messages are badly filtered, nobody knows. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DeadSea ( 69598 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @01:04PM (#5223757) Homepage Journal
    The problem is that the person who sent you an email that gets wrongly filtered as spam does not know this and has no recourse. You should send an autoresponse to every filtered peice of spam saying that it was filtered as such. Ideally, you should provide an alternate way of contact if the sender was not a spammer.

    I have my own domain and use a different email address when I sign up for almost anything. When I start getting spam I disable the email address and send an autoreply. I've even had to do this with my personal email address that I give to friends and family because it got leaked to spammers. I try to keep important people up to date on my current email address, but in case I miss anybody, there is a form on my website. Every message I get that I don't look at gets an autoreply with a link to this form.

    Because I couln't find a CGI to email gateway that didn't give away my email address if you look at the HTML source, I had to write my own [ostermiller.org]. I now include contact form links on my web site rather than email addresses which has reduced the number of spammers that get my addresses in the first place significantly.

    You would have to be careful with bayesian or keyword filters when you send autoreply so that spammers wouldn't alter their messages and send them again to get around your filters. However, with my address disabling this is not an option. If spammers figure out how to automatically send info through my form I can always block IP addresses or add questions that need to be answered corretcly to the form. So far, the form itself has been spam free. Just a few jokers that send me stoopid messages that appear to be from nobody@nowhere.none.

    I get almost no spam now. When I do get spam, I just change my address which is no longer a big deal. I know that long lost friends who contact me at my old address will be able to get through if they have to.

    • You should send an autoresponse to every filtered peice of spam saying that it was filtered as such.

      Send an autoresponse to whom? I'd love to know how this psychic program works! :^) (Hint: spammers forge the From, Return-Path and Reply-To.) I suppose you will send a notification to legit false-positives, but you will also be sending out an incorrect email, possibly to some innocent person, for each actual spam.

  • Anecdotal evidence, for what it's worth: I get approx. ~10-15 spam mails per day on my main email account (cos I stupidly had it displayed here a few years ago...). Mozilla's new Bayesian spam filter hasn't had a false positive yet; I've been using it for a couple of months now and have nearly 900 stashed away for checking. Pretty soon I'm going to trust it enough to automatically delete the crap automatically.

  • Another true story right out of the UK (Score:3, Informative)

    by Isofarro ( 193427 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @03:53PM (#5225409) Homepage
    A few weeks ago the Scunthorpe town council decided to implement a nasty words filter on all email received, just to reduce the volume of abusive email they were receiving.

    The email filter worked out very well indeed - well, too well. Absolutely no mail was delivered. It took a while for them to realise that their own town name contained one particular rude word, and considering that their town name was part of their email address, all email had to have a certain word in it.

  • My Spam Haiku (Score:3, Funny)

    by lildogie ( 54998 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @03:56PM (#5225447)
    Your message was here?
    Perhaps, with a flood of spam,
    I deleted it.

  • One solution... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Natalie's Hot Grits ( 241348 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @05:38PM (#5226367) Homepage
    and one that is in use today, is to not accept any public email at all.

    The US Senate and House of Representatives have their member's websites with a contact page utilizing a web form to submit letters. Since this email address is hidden by the web server, the only spam that could possibly get to senators is someone specifically writing a program to submit information for that specific web form.

    Since no spammer would need to spam senators (unless someone tries to mail bomb them, but that is an other issue all together), nobody would spam them.

    This also solves the problem with the post office mail and anthrax problems that happened just after 9/11. The quickest way to contact your senator is by fax, but even this web form is higher priority than snail mail.

  • A good thing! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by CaptainPhong ( 83963 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @05:42PM (#5226407) Homepage
    If governments find spam unacceptable, and resort to spam filtering, and then find that unacceptable because of false positives, the next recourse is spam legislation. Therefore, false positives are good.

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