Fighting Spam.
There's an antispam organization out there that's fighting
for you and could use your help. CAUCE, the Coalition
Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail, is an all-volunteer
global entity that began as SPAM-LAW, a group brought
together for discussion only. They put all their efforts
into getting legislation passed that would help stop and
penalize spam.
CAUCE has no treasury and no offices. Completely virtual,
the organization exists on the Internet, in newsgroups, and
online discussion lists. Donations are not accepted because
the CAUCE founders and members believe that would
necessitate having to respond to numerous lobbying
regulations. CAUCE is now soliciting members, however. While
the grassroots of the organization began in the United
States - in San Francisco - there are chapters in other
parts of the world as well, such as CAUCE Canada, CAUCE
India, CAUBE.Au, which covers New Zealand, Australia and all
Pacific Rim countries; and Europe's EuroCAUCE. CAUCE can
boast more than 20,000 members in the U.S. alone, with all
states represented. Even American Samoa and Guam have
antispam proponents who have jumped on the CAUCE bandwagon.
Two upgraded versions of these antispam filtering products
are Bayesian and heuristic filters, which try to identify
offensive messages through recognition of phrases as
objectionable. SpamAssassin by Apache is probably the best
known example of heuristic filtering. What these filters are
doing that the more basic ones aren't is looking at the
message itself rather than the subject header. Both Bayesian
and heuristic filters have an Achilles heel in that they
depend for their filtering on frequency. Were a spammer to
send a short message it would get past.
To further complicate things by punishing the "good guys,"
major Internet service providers started simply considering
batch emailing as potential spam. What this did, however,
was to disrupt opt-in products such as e-zines and
newsletters. So that didn't work well. The spammers
themselves found a way around it anyway. As they sent out
their batch messages they inserted a program that produced a
variant in each heading. Perhaps a word that didn't even
make sense, but still individualized each message enough to
have the batching not appear as batching.
CAUCE has been gaining national and international
recognition as they battle for legislation to stop, curtail
and punish spammers. As long ago as 1998, CAUCE went to
congress to spur on antispam legislation, which did make it
to the floor but was never passed. The latest attempt, again
quashed, was a bill requiring spam tagging. This bill would
have forced convicted spammers to note on their messages
some clue in the subject line that would tell folks that the
message they received is from a convicted spammer. The law
didn't pass, nor was it supported by CAUCE. CAUSE and
legislators both agree that the law would have been
spineless, lacking enforceability. They agreed that those
who were already breaking the law by spamming were not
likely to comply with some new law that said they had to
notify people they were spammers. The CAUCE web site,
www.cauce.org, lists its hall of shame. Here you will find
sites that have been known to send or support, or at least
fail to block spammers. At this writing there are only six
sites listed.
Theodora Shirkey is the owner and operator of
Lib Antispam
which is an excellent place to find anti spam
links, resources and articles.
For more information go to:
http://www.libantispam.com/
|
|