Porn spam at Parliament

Ruth Berry in the NZ Herald reports on the case of the poor ACT receptionist who was getting around 1,000 pornographic spam e-mails a week.

I have considerable sympathy for her. My old parliament e-mail address would get deluged in spam. It didn't help that back in 1996 I actually posted from it to some Internet newsgroups including news.admin.network.abuse.email which is where people used to co-ordinate against spammers, and as a result you get added to every spam list for sale, for all time.

And that preview function of Outlook is very embarrasing, especially when a female MP is in your office, and a spam comes in, with a very explicit close-up photo of body parts which only one gender has. A very quick explanation of what spam is, followed.

Parliament has been slow to put spam filters in. The issue has been that one can not block legitimate mail to , so even a 0.1% false positive rate is too high. But most solutions will allow the receipient to decide whether they want e-mails marked as spam deleted without viewing, or diverted to a spam folder that they can check through every so often. then allows individual MPs and staff to decide if they want to risk false positives.

Personally I got so sick of the spam, that I iinstalled my own anti-spam filters and programs. However very few users can install software on their PCs, as they normally even block access to the Drive. Luckily there are ways around that 🙂