Subject:      Re: A Day In The Life Of An Abuse Guy, Part I
From:         aburner@erols.com (Afterburner)
Date:         1998/02/05
Message-ID:   <34d9a84e.73091152@news.erols.com>
Newsgroups:   news.admin.net-abuse.email,news.admin.net-abuse.usenet

djohnson@mailcity.com (Dave Johnson--see sig) sez:

>I'm a spam hater user--It seems like the best compromise between wasting
>my time because of spammers, and letting them get away without
>complaint.  I've got my own text for the form letters, relatively short,
>polite and non-demanding.    How do admins in charge of abuse complaints
>feel about spam hater and similar programs?   

	From my perspective, Spam-Hater is an understandable evil.
Most folks don't have the time nor the inclination to learn how to
track headers, and certainly not to the extent many of us in this
group have done.  They just (A) get spam; and (B) don't want it.
Spam-Hater takes all of the guesswork out of it (at least from their
point of view).

	My problem with Spam-Hater is two-fold:

	1)  I *hate* the "Offense of USC 47 Sec 227" form message.
You know, the one that has the line "If you confirm to me that this
has been taken care of, I will not take the issue any further this
time."  My filters automatically route those form letters to
/dev/null.  It's better for my blood pressure, since reading that form
letter produces in me a nigh-irresistable urge to flame...

	2)  I get multiple copies of the same complaint from the
Erol's users that are using the program.  Spam-Hater parses the
"Received" headers.  Naturally, "erols.com" appears multiple times in
the "Recieved" headers.  And Spam-Hater treats those as possible
sources or relays of the spam.  So every day I'm deluged with
auto-bitch messages from Erol's customers using Spam-Hater.  And since
there isn't any one thing that is common to all these messages, I have
no way of simply filtering them out.

	But, despite the above, I prefer Spam-Hater to the Unisyn Spam
Exterminator.  If/When alt.religion.afterburner is ever started (and
it's gotta be moderated, so don't just go and create it), the Unisyn
Spam Exterminator will be officially made an enemy of the Church.

	1)  It operates on a blacklist principle, and *ALL* mail from
domains in the blacklist are treated as spam.  And erols.com is in the
blacklist.  This is especially amusing when Erol's customers use the
program.  I've had customers report my responses to their complaints
as spam, I've had customers report our MAILER-DAEMON for spam after
getting a bounce, and I've had customers report *themselves* for spam
after sending themselves a test message.

	2)  It's broken.  After talking with the folks at Unisyn, I
was let in on a little secret: the Spam Exterminator doesn't forward
the message being reported.  It was *supposed* to, you understand.
And for a while I thought it was forwarding it with the initial,
no-colon "From " (note intentional space) line intact, which can often
be interpreted as a separate message in some older mailers.  But, no,
it just doesn't forward the message *at all*.  And this is what
Ziff-Davis lauded as the PREMIERE anti-spam program on the Net...

	Needless to say, *ALL* "spam" reports from the Unisyn Spam
Exterminator go directly to my trash folder.

	For good examples of auto-bitch programs, I'd have to go with
Ad-Complain (which is for Unix, I believe) and RidUCE for the Mac.
But this could just be because we have comparatively few Unix and Mac
users on Erol's, so I'm not getting multiple copies of spam reports
from our own customers...  :)

	Also, I *really* like what I've seen of Steve Atkins' Sam
Spade program, but I haven't played with it enough to know if it has
auto-bitch capability.

	My $0.02

	Afterburner
	Erol's Abuse Guy