Date: Sat, 5 Jan 2008 16:16:48 -0500 (EST)
From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at KeithLynch.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Addendum was Numbers
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

Mike Bartman wrote:
> Michael Walsh wrote:
>> Ahem, sorry about the brain death, the Yahoo link is:
>> <>

> Keith's software may be removing the link and your brain health may
> be acceptable. ;-)

Sorry about that.  Some ISPs, including Yahoo and Juno, attach small
ads to the end of every message sent by their users, without those
users' knowledge or consent.  Also, messages on the other list
apparently have many lines of ads and clutter attached, which people
quoting them on this list don't always bother to remove.  So I set up
the software of this list to detect and remove that clutter.  It's
never been my intention to remove anything anyone *wants* to say.
But sometimes it happens, if it closely resembles something in one
of those appends.

One way around it is to  s p a c e   i t   o u t   l i k e   t h i s.

This list has always been basically a small appendage to my spam
filters.  So far, not one spam has gotten through to this list, even
though my spam volume has continued to increase, and on a couple of
recent occasions has passed one million spams per day.

The list address has long since somehow gotten out to spammers, and
with the current volume it's likely that sooner or later one of the
spams addressed to the list will just happen to forge the name or
address of someone on my list of known past and present WSFA members.
If that spam happens to be in plain text rather than HTML, and doesn't
contain certain keywords that I have blacklisted since they almost
never occur except in spams, the spam will appear on this list.  It
will, of course, appear to come from some individual past or present
WSFA member, since if it didn't it would be blocked.  If this happens,
I hope everyone will recognize that that member didn't really send it.

(It won't appear to come from me, since my own name and address aren't
on on my whitelist.  It's only my Organization: line which allows me
to post at all -- and you don't see that, since it's stripped off.)

Fully half the spam I've gotten lately has touted  V P X L.  Put those
four letters without spaces between them in a message to this list,
and it *will* be discarded unread.  (Google on it if you want to know
more.)  Most of the spams have a subject line consisting of three words
without spaces between them.  One of them is a person's name, one is
a reference to a male organ, and one to a large size, and they're
combined randomly, giving thousands of possible combinations.  They
mention any of thousands of different websites with identical
contents, all of which are hosted in China.  (Mentioning the URL for
one of them is another good way to get your message blocked.  They're
all random strings that aren't likely to come up by chance.)  Over
ten million such spams have been blocked by my filters, and several
hundred have gotten through to me.  None have gotten through to this
list.

Why the  V P X L  people think that someone who doesn't respond to the
first million ads will be enticed by more is anyone's guess.  But it's
no stranger than Cox Cable, which sends me (paper) junk mail almost
every day, all of which I throw in the trash unopened.  Sometimes I
wonder if advertisers are all idiots, and if the world wouldn't be a
better place if all ads were banned.

As far as I know, the only reason any message from any WSFAn has
ever been blocked from this list is because it was in HTML or had an
attachment.  People continue to try to post HTML email, most recently
at 11:36 this morning.  That has never worked, and continues to not work.
Once again, I refer everyone to http://www.expita.com/nomime.html for
instructions on how to turn HTML off, and an explanation why doing so
for every recipient is a good idea.