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Hi David. We are working on the problem of spam constantly and it
would be fair to say that this problem has taken the majority of our
technical time and resources over the past three or four years at the
expense of all else including completing the wireless project that
Chebucto Community Net's continued existence depends upon.
If you look at the graph online here:
http://chebucto.ca/news
you can get some idea of the rapidly growing magnitude of the problem.
Our daily volume of incoming mail these days is in excess of 1.3 million
messages and the amount of legitimate messages is around 5,000 or so.
Spammers are dealing with the problem of filters by simply flooding mail
servers with double and triple the amount of spam every few months. Any
filter of any type will let some small percentage of what it is filtering
through and the spammers are using this fact to make that small percentage
add up to more spam delivered to users' inboxes.
As if this problem were not enough, of late something called
backscatter spam has been rapidly increasing as well. Spam is sent to a
mail server but cannot be delivered for some reason. The mail server
bounces the spam back to the address on the spam, which is always fake and
belongs to an innocent third party such as yourself. It takes a special
kind of stupid mail administrator to be bouncing spam to the fake reply
address since this has been a common spammer practice for the past seven
years.
We are working on improving our mail filters to catch more of this
sort of junk mail and we are working on major improvements to our mail
system to deal with this issue as well. This is taking time because we
have one technical person and he is charged with keeping all the Chebucto
services online and functioning, with mail being just one of these
services, as well as research and development of the new services that are
essential to our continued existence. To be blunt, we are under attack
from all sides, we are receiving no help from any quarter and we are
fighting to keep Chebucto online with fewer resources than we had last
year or the year before or the year before that.
We appreciate that you are irritated by service disruptions and by
getting spam and for what it is worth, we are doing our very best to
resolve this and all other issues around Chebucto.
In the meantime, it would not be unfair of me to point out some of
the things we are not doing. We are not reading your mail or passing it on
to any third parties. We are not sharing your personal information with
anyone else. We are not putting ads into your email. We are not mining
your email for personal or commercial marketing information and selling
the results to others. We are exactly what we say we are and your mail is
hosted on machines in the same building in Halifax where our office is,
which we maintain ourselves, and all of your information is protected
under Canadian privacy laws. As well, your membership fees are being used
to help provide services to other people and community groups in addition
to providing you with services.
I don't mean to lecture, but sometimes people don't see the
forest, just some trees.
We filter spam using a number of different techniques and these
are updated several times a day. Our mail system improvements, which
involve a major overhaul of all aspects of how we handle incoming mail,
are in progress and while I cannot give you an exact date for their
completion, they should be ready to be tested in the near future. In the
meantime please be patient, we are aware of the problem spam causes our
users and we want to fix it even more than you do.
On Tue, 10 Jun 2008, David Patrick Lyons wrote:
> Are you working on this ? I still getting 10-12 pages a day of junk.
>
>
>
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