[SpamCop-List] Re: App to remove shareware from your computer?

[Mike Easter]

Mike Easter wrote:
> My choice of 'erring' about unknowns is to treat them as malware/
> spam/ virus/ unsoliciteds/ for which they are cast into the
> suspicious/junk status and they are examined from their message
> properties *first* -- so that I'm never 'opening' an unknown mail
> without already knowing what is inside.

Maybe I should elaborate on that;  perhaps it is at the 'heart' of my
philosophy about not opening spam.

I don't believe there should be any spam in my Inbox.

Inbox mail is a different thing than spam.  Inbox mail has some kind of
reliable from.  Spam and virms and such don't belong in the Inbox
because of the element of From bogosity.  If there were no other
bogosity involved in the headers of something, bogus From is a
'sacrilege' and should be immediately purged from the Inbox.  It doesn't
belong there.

So, if you look at your Inbox and it contains anything that doesn't
represent 'your' Inbox mail -- it should not be in there.

That is a different kind of problem for different kinds of people.  For
some people it is very very very simple.  They could whitelist their
friends and mailing lists and all of their spam would disappear and they
would lose no wanted mail.

For others, it is a little more complicated, because they have necessity
to receive some kind of unknown wanted mail.

Because of that, every mail recipient's 'problems' about spam have to be
handled uniquely or individually -- but it isn't really all that hard.
It is harder for some than others, to be sure.  But it is highly likely
that the vast majority of spam is going to have headers consistent with
spam, and a tiny minority of spam would need to be evaluated by a filter
on the basis of its body composition.

If people are looking at spam subjects and froms to figure out if
something is spam, and then being confused by the information they see,
then they are doing something wrong about their spam filtering.

-- 
Mike Easter
kibitzer, not SC admin