Re: Helping Possible Spammers?

[IlyaM]

I've seen that post and frankly I don't see anything that clearly indicates it being posted by possible spammer. He may or may not implementing completely legimate mailing list. I find it somewhat annoying that last time on perlmonks nearly all questions related to mass email sending are suspected to be posted by spammers. You have to put "no, it is not for spam" in them or you risk your node get deleted by NodeReaper.

Besides there is very little difference if you answer on question posted by spammer or "good" guy. In both cases your answers are archived on perlmonks and later can be used by both spammers and "good" guys.

Update: I'm curious why this node gets some downvotes. Is it offtopic or offensive? Not that I care about my XP (I have enough to be saint) but I just dislike when people silently express their disagreement with downvotes instead of commenting.

--
Ilya Martynov, [e-mail]
CTO IPonWEB (UK) Ltd
Quality Perl Programming and Unix Support UK managed @ offshore prices - http://www.iponweb.net
Personal website - http://martynov.org

[chromatic]

I considered the node for reaping. From the logs he reported, it looked as if he were sending a great deal of mail through Yahoo!'s servers. That seemed dubious.

[IlyaM]

Does yahoo have open-relays? I doubt so. So it must be an email sent to yahoo's mailbox. Is sending emails to yahoo mailbox is a sign of spammer? I doubt it too. For example in one of my projects I've implemented mass sending of various notifications to web site members (non-spam) and very large portion of email addresses was from free mailbox providers like yahoo, hotmail, etc. In this case probability of having a line in mail server logs which mentions yahoo servers was very high.

--
Ilya Martynov, [e-mail]
CTO IPonWEB (UK) Ltd
Quality Perl Programming and Unix Support UK managed @ offshore prices - http://www.iponweb.net
Personal website - http://martynov.org

[Marza]

You can test them if you know their mail server IPs. ordb.org has a simple routine that checks for it.

I don't know if they "really" police it since a my users complain they get spammed a great deal in their yahoo mail. But some of that might be their own fault. The yahoo client now has a block option. So I don't know.

[mpeppler]

Well - you won't get a downvote from me. I agree with you - while I dislike spam as much as the next guy, I really think that giving people the benefit of the doubt is the right thing to do here. Especially if the question comes from a relative newcommer.

Michael

[Marza]

I didn't downvote you. I consider any question or opinion legitimate. I was not suggesting the example was a spammer, just that it was another mass emailing request.

I have mixed feelings about the spammer help. Somedays when the job annoys me and then dealing with the spam just adds to it, I am of the mind "delete it all" Most of the time I am of the thought that we help everybody because if we start defining who gets help, we will have lost what is special about this place.