Re: Cowboys herding cats

In article <gut1v5$7n$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, kfl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx says...
netcat <netcat@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
If they aren't, the spambots will simply skip over them and not
waste much time at all, if they contain their own smtp engine that
does MX lookups, or if they don't, they will unload this task on
someone else and thus, again, you have contributed to the problem.

I doubt that spammers bother to check for validity. Why bother, when
it's much easier to send to an address than to test the address?
get millions (!) of spams in Chinese and Korean, even though it would
be easy to check and see that my address is not in China or Korea.

I did not mean that level of checking. I was talking about MX lookups.
That have to be performed before sending mail anywhere because
otherwise, you wouldn't know where to send it.

As to why a spambot might contain its own SMTP engine, I'da thunk it
obvious: it may be stuck in a system where it can find no smtp server
willing to accept it's traffic - or even where none exist. There was a
period where it was more in vogue to look for the local provider's
server, but these days the other way seems to be a more popular default.
Of course the more versatile bots try both methods.

You do know that almost all the spam comes from automatic bots running
on trojaned end-user machines, don't you? There aren't many evil
spammers these days sitting out there and earning their daily bread
hammering in those messages and pushing buttons manually, much less
doing it from their own servers and networks.

Have you looked at the globally collected stats? Do you know what
percentage that shows for graphical vs non-graphical browsers?

All I can tell is the IP address they're coming from.

As much as I recall from Apache manuals about logging directives, they
used to be very Lynx-friendly. Recommend you read them.

Sorry, didn't man to condescend. I don't know much about Estonia,
other than that it suffered greatly under the German and Russian
occupations and as the site of battles between the two.

I grant you that is much more than an average person cares to know.

If shell accounts are more primitive, then it's presumably good to skip over
that stage and go directly to the more advanced stuff.

The "more advanced stuff" when I started college mostly ran on donated
foreign aid, such as 386s running win3.1 with 4 megs of memory and
swapping like crazy. It got better every year, but when I started out
Lynx was indeed a joy to use compared to graphic browsers. I've never
gotten over Pine, or the habit of running it directly on the server the
mail arrives on. It isn't perfect, but I like it better than anything
else I've tried (and I test-drove lots of MUAs when I did tech support)

I'm probably lucky that I started college early enough. I severely doubt
these days every student is handed out shell accounts and expected to
want to use them, if they aren't in CS or something like that. Maybe in
most places, not even then.

My first Internet access was, like yours, over direct dialin to a
shell, even though I've never owned a modem as slow as yours is.

My modem goes to 28,800 bps, though I use it at 9600 bps.

Okay, a correction then. For a brief period of time I used one that was
14,000 bps to call into my university's server. I thought back then it
was too slow to use irc with.

rgds,
netcat
.

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