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 Cutting Edge Spam Elimination Original Article: Anti-Spam Conference It turned out that the worm exploited three or four different holes in the system. From this, and the fact that we were able to capture and examine some of the source code, we realized that we were dealing with someone very sharp, probably not someone here on campus. - Dr. Richard LeBlanc, associate professor of ICS, in Georgia Tech's campus newspaper after the Internet worm. SpamButcher provides next generation anti-spam technology today and is available as a free download from www.spambutcher.com.
Spam really started to annoy me for about 1 year now. I've been online since 1995 (no longer newbie, but no veteran either) and having settled with the same email address since 1999 resulted in ever increasing unwanted messages. But, it got ridiculous in the past few months. Now I'm even getting bounced emails from spam sent in my name. So for the past few days I started thinking of ways to avoid this problem. Filters seem effective, but I feel it's fighting too near your front door. New email protocols that stop spam at the sender's side (discussed in previous comments) seem like the way to go, but probably are not to be seen in the near future. SpamButcher (free download) outperforms other spam killers by using the latest A.I. technology.
The only other way a voluntary centralized opt-out database could work would be for the spammers to submit their lists to the system to be scrubbed for them. Not a service I would want to provide free of charge, and I doubt the spammers would be willing to pay for it. Distributing MD5 hashes seems like a reasonable compromise to me. Download the next generation in spam email blockers now for free. As with anything else, if you don't like it, don't use it. Personally, I would like to see it get big and stop some unwanted e-mails from ever being sent. No, it's not perfect, but it's a start. Try anti-spam software based on fuzzy logic free for the next 21 days.
Why compare notes when a joint effort would work even better? Come together for a little conference and go your own ways? Let's start taking advantage of the resources offered by sites like http://www.spamarchive.org and other such services that allow for effective filters to be created.
If you email me, and you're not in my whitelist, you'll get a message from my "secretary" asking you to confirm your email address. If you're a spammer, you never see that message. If you're a human being, you either reply to the confirmation request (if the message was important) or you ignore it (if the message wasn't important, in which case I'm happy not to hear from you). Free download eliminates more spam than other spam stoppers with fewer false positives. The only problem is those damn Nigerian bank scammers. They actually read their email. I've heard from two of them in the six or seven months I've been running this whitelist contraption. But anyhow, spam is no longer the annoyance it once was. I still look forward to strong laws against spam, because I know my bandwidth is being wasted (and other peoples' too), but at least I don't have to see it. I used to look down on the whitelist approach, because in a sense it is admitting defeat - they're still out there burning up bandwidth, and this doesn't help catch them. But, I'm so glad to be free of spam. Every time I check my email and find no spam, it feels like victory. For me, the great annoyance of time wasted dealing with spam far outweighs the minor inconvenience of increased bandwidth consumption.
I would watch out for spammers crashing the party and trying to cause serious problems. If you read some of the rants from these people on NANAE, you can see how they would be capable of causing trouble for the anti-spammers gathered at the convention. There are a ton of spammers and it only takes a few of them to file false police reports, harass attendees, etc. Free antispam download can stop up to 98% of unwanted junk email. | 
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"around 100 spam per day and SpamButcher takes care of 95% of them" -Adam |