Back in 1998 I did some work to use some experimental sendmail rule sets to block spam, and wrote up a page on how to use them and how to test that they worked. I even gave a talk about it to the local Linux and Sun user groups. It’s all terribly obsolete these days, because sendmail has changed, spam has changed, and the tools available have changed. A few years ago I found a better page, and put a header on my page to tell people they should read this other page instead. But people still kept finding this page, and it was getting more and more obsolete. Last year I wrote another header briefly mentioning what I use now (postfix, rbls, spamassassin, bogofilter). But the page is totally worthless and if it didn’t get dozens of hits a day I’d just take it down.
Today I got an email from somebody who wants to pay me $35 to put an ad on that page. No, he didn’t tell me what the ad would say, no mention of a time scale, just $35 to put an ad for “a site that provides businesses with email hosting”. I have no idea if this person is advertising a spam-friendly or spam-unfriendly email hosting site, and frankly I don’t care. I find the whole idea of putting an ad on a page that shouldn’t even be there just too creepy to consider.
Very strange.