At 01:22 AM 10/31/2013 -0700, Phil Karn karn@ka9q.net wrote:

A significant fraction of the spam I get on my primary email account comes by way of the amsat.org email reflector; by my count, 18 of the 76 spam emails I've received in the last day.

But I don't want to just shut it off; sometimes people I do want to hear from make contact that way. And I've used it to contact others whose email addresses I don't know, but who I know to be AMSAT members.

I wonder if it would be possible to set up some sort of auto-responder on amsat.org so that instead of just forwarding email, returns a message to the sender with a non-machine-readable image of the user's actual email address, possibly accompanied with a sound file with the same information for anyone with impaired vision. Spammers couldn't handle it, especially since most don't even use valid return addresses. But any real human could resend his email directly to its destination.

What do people think of this idea? How much of a problem is spam for everyone else here?

Phil

Maybe I should clarify my last statement. When I was reading Phil's concern, I was thinking spam through Amsat-bb. I might only see about one a week that makes it onto the bulletin board.

I have an amsat.org alias, like we all have, but I never use it as a reply-to address. If someone knows my call, they can tack on amsat.org and send me an email.

Mindspring/Earthlink my provider, is very pro-active in stopping spam and viruses. I've never had to setup a kill-filter on my client. I have a yahoo email account, just to have for yahoo groups. Never ever used it and it always gets spam in it.

KB7ADL