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Grex > Oldcoop > #376: The problems with Grex, e-mail and spam | |
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| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 480 responses total. |
ball
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response 10 of 480:
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Nov 11 04:05 UTC 2006 |
That was my suspicion. MS Windows has a lot to answer for.
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mary
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response 11 of 480:
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Nov 11 13:15 UTC 2006 |
I suspect it's time we do what M-Net did and go to local mail only.
There are loads of free email providers out there. The problems
with email have exploded over the past five years or so. Trying
to solve them here will put a strain on our staff resources and
I don't think mail should be the priority.
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nharmon
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response 12 of 480:
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Nov 11 15:39 UTC 2006 |
I don't think M-Net has even local mail, does it? I think they shut down
mail completely.
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keesan
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response 13 of 480:
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Nov 11 16:08 UTC 2006 |
I use grex email because I can turn on my computer, boot into DOS, dial grex
directly, and be into mail in about 30 seconds. I can't do that if I have
to ssh from grex to my other account at freeshell - it doubles the time that
it takes to check mail. And freeshell does not have spamassassin. Obviously
a lot of other people also use their mail here, or there would be no
discussion.
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cyklone
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response 14 of 480:
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Nov 11 16:24 UTC 2006 |
So ssh'ing to another email provider doubles your time to 60 seconds
instead of 30? That hardly sounds like an inconvenience.
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keesan
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response 15 of 480:
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Nov 11 22:20 UTC 2006 |
It is an inconvenience. And grex has better spam filtering available.
Freeshell offers a 'filter' that throws out all mail with html in it.
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cyklone
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response 16 of 480:
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Nov 12 00:19 UTC 2006 |
But you want staff to devote hours of time to save you 30 seconds of login
time. That hardly seems rational or justifiable to me.
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keesan
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response 17 of 480:
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Nov 12 01:21 UTC 2006 |
No, I want staff to do something so everyone can use grex mail, maybe even
new users eventually. Obviously a lot of us still want to use it.
And you continue to ignore my comments on the lack of a spam filter at
freeshell.
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ball
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response 18 of 480:
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Nov 12 04:56 UTC 2006 |
Ideally I would like Grex to have mail working both locally
and for the Internet. I understand that given the nature of
the problem and the limited resources that Grex has, that
may not be practical. If Internet email were disabled, I
hope that local email could continue to work because I find
it a useful way to keep in touch with other Grexers. If it
ever came down to a choice between no email (of either kind)
and no Grex, I would be grateful for the years that we had
email and thankful that Grex were still around. My 2p worth.
Are there any inexpensive dial-up Internet services that
adhere to the appropriate standards, so that people could
dial in using DOS, BSD or Linux? Earthlink works, but it's
almost as expensive as DSL.
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keesan
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response 19 of 480:
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Nov 12 05:10 UTC 2006 |
VTISP - 5 hours/day, no phone support, no email, no webspace, $40/year, and
it is working for a friend in a rural area of Kentucky. They have phone
coverage for most of the country. For $5/month you can probably find
something with no time limit. Search on 'cheap ISP'.
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ball
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response 20 of 480:
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Nov 12 05:48 UTC 2006 |
My DSL service probably comes with email and Internet news
if their registration system were not Windows-only. :-/
Never mind, at least it gets me on the net.
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cyklone
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response 21 of 480:
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Nov 12 06:19 UTC 2006 |
Re #17: Your freeshell account is kind of irrelevant to the overall
decision-making process of grex.
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gull
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response 22 of 480:
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Nov 13 04:08 UTC 2006 |
I would hate to see Grex eliminate email. I don't read email here
anymore, but my cyberspace.org address is convenient because I can
forward it to whatever ISP I'm currently using.
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denise
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response 23 of 480:
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Nov 13 04:27 UTC 2006 |
Has anyone else been getting tons of spam from 'debora-something/variant'?
I've probably gotten 150-200 of them just this week! Every time I log in, I
have probably 10-20 or more of them.
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keesan
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response 24 of 480:
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Nov 13 04:46 UTC 2006 |
Yes, lots of Deborahs. Why don't you set up a filter to get rid of them,
using procmail. Just dump anything From Deborah. Spamassassin gets most
of my Debora mail. I set up a sample procmailrc.sample and procmailrc.simple
(not as many additional filters). Copy to your home directory as .procmailrc
and also copy .forward and you will see 90% less spam. I can explain how to
eliminate anything from Deborah if you can't figure it out.
I forget what Deborah is selling - viagra or stocks?
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keesan
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response 25 of 480:
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Nov 13 04:51 UTC 2006 |
My procmail log shows 27 Deborahs since midnight, some Hi Keesan and then they
switched to just a random name. This would come to about 200 per week so your
estimate might even be low. Even a crazy spammer would not be sending out
this many spams so maybe it has infected other machines?
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denise
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response 26 of 480:
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Nov 13 23:58 UTC 2006 |
I haven't set up any spam filters; I'm not that computer literate! Besides
a few very basic things here-everything else is mysterious to me.
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tsty
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response 27 of 480:
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Nov 14 02:16 UTC 2006 |
This response has been erased.
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keesan
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response 28 of 480:
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Nov 14 05:42 UTC 2006 |
But I just explained how to copy over a working filter to keep all the
Deborahs out of your mailbox. cp /a/k/e/keesan/procmailrc.simple .procmailrc
then pico .procmailrc and change keesan to denise, then cp
/a/k/e/keesan/.forward .forward. This copies my two files and changes one
of them to work for you. Do you know how to use pico to edit? I presume you
use it in your mail (with pine). This should take you a minute or two. Then
when using pine you type L to get a choice of seeing what is in your Inbox
or what is in your Spam folder. And you get a list of what went where:
less ~/mail/from shows you the list and you can delete 'from' every day.
The sample filter only dumps anything with 5 spam points and the rest goes
into the spam folder. I use 3 points, which works better, and you can change
it to that.
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denise
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response 29 of 480:
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Nov 14 11:23 UTC 2006 |
Sindi, I don't know how to use pico or any other editing program and though
I've heard the term 'pine', I have no idea what that is [besides a type of
tree]. Maybe that's partly why I rarely use mail here on grex; I am more
comfortable with the mail I use on my non-grex account. But I get much more
spam here, probably because of the spam filters they use...
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mary
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response 30 of 480:
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Nov 14 13:51 UTC 2006 |
I think it's amazingly wonderful that despite the fact Denise doesn't
edit, her responses are clear, typo and spelling error-free. I
use an editor and wish I could pull that off.
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nharmon
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response 31 of 480:
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Nov 14 13:58 UTC 2006 |
People who grew up with pen and paper tend to write slowly and
purposefully. Kids like me grew up with word processors, and often we
type faster than we think. *smile*
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mary
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response 32 of 480:
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Nov 14 14:01 UTC 2006 |
And TS, please realize that when you repost something like #27
you are simply acting as selfish as the original poster. Worse,
actually, as you should know better.
Don't make me filter you again.
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nharmon
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response 33 of 480:
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Nov 14 14:05 UTC 2006 |
Threatening to filter people is childish, IMO.
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slynne
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response 34 of 480:
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Nov 14 14:28 UTC 2006 |
Is it? I mean, if someone threatened *me* with filtering, most likely
it wouldnt alter my behavior. But I might appreciate being told that I
was being filtered.
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