Counter-spam: Change the subject

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, 11 Dec 2007 06:23:43 -0800, Paul McGuire wrote:

> On Dec 11, 5:59 am, dfg <sofiya... at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Breakthrough - How To Turn Your Dull Website into Money Making Website
> <snip>
> 
> I was surprised at how effectively the spam posting the other day,
> "Jesus in the Quran" was masked and defused by a reply titled "J in the
> Q".  It seems this might be a simple tool for cleaning up some of the
> spam posting clutter, just by "changing the subject" (double entendre
> not intentional, it just happened).  Instead of these breathless,
> shouting subjects full of '#' signs and capital letters, we just
> acronymify them to "H T T Y D W into M M W" by posting a reply and
> editing the subject.
> 
> Could this work?  It seems too simple.


I don't get it. I simply don't understand -- why do you want to reply to 
the spam in the first place, with or without the same subject???

My ISP does a good job at filtering the spam from this newsgroup. If 
yours does not, I feel your pain, but rather than replying to the spam 
and changing the subject, how about if you just don't reply at all?



-- 
Steven.