[SC-Help] Re: Giving them my email

[Mike Easter]

Don Wannit wrote:
> I signed up for a free Hotmail account, and it appears that Hotmail
> does have several settings of interest to pledged spam fighters.

I'm glad for this education, I'll probably have more questions.

> Email goes either into your inbox or into your junk email folder,
> depending on your settings.

That's rather strange and it is similar to a statement Erin made about
her mom looking in her Junkmail for her mail.  There's something strange
about that.  The purpose of a filter is to eliminate [almost] all spam
from your Inbox.  If there's a junkmail folder with your goodmail in
there and a lot of spam, then that filter hasn't functioned properly.

You haven't described yet the discriminatory features of the hotmail
filter;  but that may be a bit much for posting and something that one
would have to actually look at to fully appreciate.

> You can also create other folders and
> various filtering rules (very simple ones) to automatically sort
> incoming messages into your various folders.  Not fancy, but not
> bad for the price :-)

I have a feeling about the typical simplistic filters;  something like
gmail's or EL's.

> There is an "exclusive" setting for spam filtering, which is a
> whitelisting feature.  It allows only messages from your "contacts"
> into your inbox, others go to your junk mail folder.

There's a lot to be said for a filter which provides the power of
whitelisting only.  I wouldn't be at all surprised if Erin's mom may not
be an excellent candidate for whitelisted only mail and delete if
possible everything which isn't whitelisted so she won't be trying to
get into that junkmail and read it.

> Other settings for automatic spam filtering are "low" (you're
> on your own), and "enhanced", which diverts suspected spam to the
> junk folder based on Hotmail's rules.  Not much information on
> them, but they claim that by confirming (they call it "reporting")
> a suspected spam message as spam, users can help improve the spam
> filtering.  Might be a large collective ham/spam database, but there
> is not much information I could find in a quick look.

Yeah yeah 'they' are always saying reporting helps.  I suppose people
should do that if it is easy enough.  At gmail, it is easy enough to
move an item and call it spam without further 'reporting' and I do that.
I do nothing for EL's reporting.

> Another setting to be very sure to select, and which is not selected
> by default, is to "Automatically suppress Internet content in
> messages".  This one is found in the Options>Mail>Mail Display
> Settings page.  If you don't select this, Hotmail will render images
> and
> all that web-bug nastiness that lets the spam "phone home" to let
> Sammy the Spammer know that your email address is a live one.

That kind of situation is exactly what I'm talking about when I'm
'lecturing' neophytes about not opening spam.  If I can get 'everyone'
to not open spam somehow, then I don't have to figure out every possible
insecurity in the world, whether it is a mailuser agent or a web
interface or whatever the next thing might be for how to securely handle
something.

The business of 'how can I open my spam securely' is a nightmare that
I'm totally against.  How about if we all just figure out how to not
open spam at all, instead of trying to figure out how to open spam for
some kind of purpose that I have to dissect as well.  Spam openers are a
big pain.  I have to be able to read their mind/attitude/pledgedness.  I
have to be able to figure out their security competency.  I have to
figure out a myriad of different kinds of interfaces.

My rule about not opening spam is a lot simpler;  just a little
difficult to implement sometimes.

> Off to explore the wonderful world of Hotmail some more...

-- 
Mike Easter
kibitzer, not SC admin