[sf-lug] Suspicious email from LinuxMafia

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Jim Stockford (jim at well.com):

> I found your reply helpful, [...]

You're very welcome!  And thanks for saying that.

> As a note, I don't mind getting some spam, and I
> like helping out.

Well, I do.  ;->

I was a longtime denizen of NANAE, Usenet's news.admin.net-abuse.email.
NANAE was one of the foci of the first great spam wars, mostly because
it was where all Internet's antispam brain trust hung out in public.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News.admin.net-abuse.email

(NANAE is still there.  Usenet is out of fashion, so it's little
discussed in fashionable places, hence tends to be forgotten.)

Mention Usenet in this decade, and one very often sets off someone
firing off a tired old, not-very-accurate antiUsenet talking point.
(Let's see if it happens this time.)  The noise cycle then runs through,
derailing whatever the _first_ person was trying to say.  And this of
course is mainly how the Internet does things, these days, when there
are no cat videos.

NANAE is and was a very funny place.  Read the list of 'NAMAEisms' 
at the Wikipedia link, to get the flavour of it.

NANAE also produced some good public documentation, such as the alt.spam
FAQ (technically the FAQ of that different but related 'alt' newsgroup) and 
'The Rules of Spam' , http://www.pearlgates.net/nanae/rules_of_spam.shtml, 
one of those very amusing but also profoundly wise brief humour pieces
that were the food and drink of 1980s/1990s Internet life.

alt.spam FAQ is here:  http://gandalf.home.digital.net/spamfaq.html --
now frozen in time at its 2005 latest revision.  If you want to learn
about spamhunting the way we learned and taught it back in dinosaur
days, alt.spam FAQ is _still_ a pretty darned decent basic tutorial, so
I recommend it to you, Jim.

Thanks again.


(You'll note that my zinger 'Because spammers are lying liars who lie' 
is very much in the sprit of 'The Rules of Spam'.)