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Spam

Spam-Free Email-How Much Would that Be Worth to You? 45

Posted by Cliff from the paying-to-remove-the-crap dept.
Elias Israel asks: "Being a believer in free-market solutions, wherever possible, I am puzzled by the relative lack of technical/business solutions to the problem of SPAM. Given that dealing with SPAM wastes so much of our lives these days, and given that the famed 'time = money' equation has not yet been repealed, I'm at a loss to understand why I can't find more commercial solutions to this problem. Having heard long ago that whenever the question is 'why' the answer is always about money, I'm asking for Slashdot readers' help: Can it really be that there's no money to be made in cleaning up spam? So, if you could virtually eliminate spam from your inbox, how much would you be willing to pay to make that happen? Given that filtering spam is an ongoing and evolving hassle, would you be willing to pay an annual or monthly fee, and if so how much? Maybe if we can figure this out, the economics of a solution will emerge." Given that now SPAM includes e-mail viruses from your favorite Washington-state based company, the rules of the game are now MUCH more different than they were. Still, would some of you out there be interested in paying to remove SPAM from your inbox?
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Spam-Free Email-How Much Would that Be Worth to You? More

Spam-Free Email-How Much Would that Be Worth to You?

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  • You're kidding right? (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Who is going to read your email for you to verify if email is spam or not? Either you do some sort of content filtering or you block restricted email addresses/domains or you only allow known addresses.

    None of those things requires money.
    • You have a good point. The only sure way to filter out ALL SPAM is to have someone else read it. Of course there are preventive measures that can be taken to make sure that you never get SPAM to begin with -- or at least minimal SPAM.

      1. Sign up for a free email account that you don't plan on using for your main email address. It's much easier to let go of an email account (if you have to) when you aren't shelling out money for it. You should have two... A main email address and a dummy email address.

      2. Use the dummy email address to sign up for any sites where the email address might be stored or displayed on a page. That's usually where spammers will get your email address by using harvesting software.

      3. The main address can be given out to family and friends, but NEVER post it on a message board. That's pretty much asking for it. This way, only legitimate email will come to your inbox.

      4. Check the dummy act about once a week for legitimate email that may have found its way there by mistake, and if need be, send a reply email with the main email address. Delete the SPAM.

      5. Accept the fact that sometimes SPAM is sent out to random email addresses, and you may still get one or two a week.

      6. DO NOT EVER reply to SPAM, and don't ever follow instructions to be removed from the "mailing list." This just lets the spammer know that someone is actually reading the email, and you will get even more.

      7. DON'T BUY ANYTHING. If people never bought anything from someone who sent them spam, do you honestly think that they would continue to go through the trouble of sending it?

      Maybe not a complete solution, but I can almost guarantee that it will make a fairly large dent in the ammount of spam you get.
  • I think this would be great! If I found a service that didn't cost to much (under $300/month?), could be used on our mail server, and would promise to eliminate 95% or more of the spam our users and I get, I would definately get the company to pay for it. We may be a small ISP, but paying $300/month to rid our users and us of SPAM would definately be worth it

    On the other hand, when we put a similar product on our servers that filtered out about 25-50% of spam (real time black listing), we actually had a user call up and complain that he _wasn't_ getting his porn advertisments anymore! You just can't win! heh.

  • This isn't difficult to figure out, folks. Just check out this tidbit from my exim.conf. Four lines block about 98% of incoming spam looking at the logs.

    rbl_domains = relays.ordb.org:orbz.gst-group.co.uk:inputs.orbz.o rg:outputs.orbz.org:orbs.dorkslayers.com:relays.os irusoft.com:spews.relays.osirusoft.com:dialups.mai l-abuse.org
    rbl_reject_recipients = true
    rbl_warn_header = false
    recipients_reject_except = postmaster@ursine.dyndns.org
    • Good man, you use exim! There are some other DNSBL lists that you might want to lookin to. They are listed here [declude.com]. BTW, what kind of false positive (legil mail getting dropped) rate do you get?
    • Interesting. Couple things:

      1. This eliminates the original connection from the spammer's box itself, right? So there is very little bandwidth used in even an ATTEMPTED spam?

      2. Is it easy to port to Postfix? (I just run Postfix, am not a guru...)
      • Yes, it denies it as user unknown for any user other than postmaster, and gives a brief explaination why so a human can figure out what went wrong.

        As for porting to postfix, I'm not sure. I can't imagine anything's easier to do this in than exim.

  • A former coworker of mine is involved with a new company that is doing just this. Essentially, it's a mail filtering/forwarding system.

    Not surprisingly, they're at www.monstermail.com [monstermail.com].
  • As that is what I am paying for my dialup.

    Question: Isn't it MY email address? Like my phone number?

    While we all probably get junk mail in our 'snail' mailboxes, it takes no time on our part to sort through it. I usually know what is junk in about two minutes or less and just chuck it in the recucle bin. With spam it can take longer to sort through because it takes MY time to download the mail. I have gotton sometimes over 30 spam emails a day. While my email filters filter out much of it into a special folder, some places are now getting my real email address and spaming that. This ends up in my inbox. Do you know how long it takes to download some of this email? Especially if there is a slow connection. Or if they decide that they are going to send HTML with graphics. Yes I can turn off the html, but aside from setting up 'do not download email that is larger that xxx bytes' how do you stop images?

    What I'd like to see is some company come up with server side email filters, like I have in my email app. Where I as a user can set up email filters that say any mail that does not meet this criteria just reject. So I do not have to ever download the email. It would cut my span down by about 50 to 70 percent. Just my solution. The isp can reject the email or just send it to /dev/null for all I care..

    • What I'd like to see is some company come up with server side email filters, like I have in my email app
      Procmail, my friend, procmail. If you are running a linux/unix box for a mailserver, use procmail.
      • Unfortunately while I am running a Linux box, my ISP wont allow me to connect an SMTP aget to its system. I used to be able to but recently when I tried it came up with a message that dialup users are not allowed to do so. This also defaeats the purpose of server side filters as then my workstation becomes a mailserver. I'd like to see it adopted by the ISP's and them have a way of configuring server side filters for each user.

    • While we all probably get junk mail in our 'snail' mailboxes, it takes no time on our part to sort through it.

      Nope, I only get junk mail from a few wierd companies (AT&T), and when the mailman just gets lazy and shoves the general stack of daily junk into my box instead of the apartment next to mine.

      To really reduce the junk mail you get (in the U.S.A., anyways), follow the instructions at junkbusters.com [junkbusters.com]-- costs some money to send all the letters out ($5 in postage?), but the amount of general crap I receive in the mail went down dramatically after doing so.

      On the email side of things, yes, procmail is nifty, though a better place for such filters is in the MTA (currently done with heavy-handed arbitrary blackhole lists), so that mail can be rejected as spam before even coming near the local delivery agent. You can do this in a proper user-specified fashion with PerlMX [activestate.com], however, that's $$$...

      • "On the email side of things, yes, procmail is nifty,"

        Now convince my ISP to use that and allow me to set up filters for my own email account and we'd be all set.

    • What I'd like to see is some company come up with server side email filters, like I have in my email app. Where I as a user can set up email filters that say any mail that does not meet this criteria just reject.

      This exists, it's called Sieve, a *generic* server-side mail filtering package, that allows for remote uploading of scripts.

      Now, getting ISPs to widely support it might be a problem, but free solutions do exist. (I also saw procmail mentioned).
  • Basically, anything like that comes down to one of two basical approaches; either you have someone read all your mail, or you try to automate things. The first is impractical, expensive, and I think a lot of ppl would have trouble with giving up that sort of privacy. As far as the latter goes, there are a lot of different things you can try, but basically they all have the chance of false positives, and spam sneaking through. I can't see anyone paying money for a solution that will 1) still result in spam, while simultaneously 2) deleting real mail. Now, maybe the best you could do would be to get the best filters available and some sort of guarantee that every rejected mail is personally reviewed to make sure it's really spam, but I don't see that being cost effective. Personally, I get on average of 10 spams a day, and it's nowhere near worthwhile for me to do anything other than delete them manually (well, I have suspicious mail filtered to a mailbox I check less, but that's another matter).

  • Spamcop.net (Score:3, Informative)

    by scotpurl ( 28825 ) on Friday November 09, 2001 @06:08PM (#2546108)
    Offers both FREE reporting, and advanced "you pay for it" filtering (which I think is based upon volume -- but still very cheap).

    Works great for me. And it digs through the mail headers to see who really sent the emails.

    http://spamcop.net

    • Re:Spamcop.net (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Mike1024 ( 184871 )
      Hey,

      Offers both FREE reporting, and advanced "you pay for it" filtering (which I think is based upon volume -- but still very cheap).

      From the SpamCop FAQ [spamcop.net]:

      The price is $.50 per megabyte of email processed. This charge is asessed when a) the email is received at your SpamCop account or b) when you paste email into SpamCop's reporting form and hit "parse."

      Most e-mail is checked by some filters, then forwarded to your 'real' e-mail account. Also, on the members' page [spamcop.net], there's information on a new system that's planned:

      This system is currently beta, but we will be moving to full availability quickly. We are currently soliciting beta testers. Probably the most significant change is that the new system will have unlimited use for $3/month ($36/year). People who use SpamCop only for reporting spam will not notice a change.

      And from the information page [spamcop.net]:

      The new system has been totally redesigned to be easier to use and more reliable than ever. Received email is delivered into one of two folders, either your Inbox or your Held Mail folder. A full webmail system is available to view these folders, as well as others you create. With an addressbook, filters, and email sending capability, the webmail sysetm is all you need to do email. If you prefer, though, you can use your existing email program and read your mail using IMAP or POP protocols, just like most mail servers.

      The main benefit of an '@spamcop.net' e-mail address is, however, that most e-mail addresses with 'spam' in thier names are filtered by spammers, assuming they are munged.

      This means I can give out my e-mail (michaeltandy@spamcop.net [mailto]) in web forums and such places, and nobody sends me any spam.

      I think it's worth the cost, which is very reasonable.

      Michael

      Link you can click [spamcop.net]
  • for some reason, no one else has mentioned sneakemail.com, and it's free and simple, they even have a perl client to add new addresses easily, sneakemail works by creating a new email for everything you sign up for, if it starts sending you spam, you have an easy to trace source for it and you can always kill the address if you're done with it
  • ..... in the same way that i pay for not being robbed, killed, raped, etc. Which is basically to support a political party and/or a politician who happen to take the problem seriously. Paying someone to filter your mail is only trying to get rid of the symptom, not the disease.
  • You can buy a SpamCop [spamcop.net] email address relatively cheaply. SpamCop filters most if not all spam out for you.
  • I think spam is one of those things that everyone loves to complain about but that no one is willing to do anything about. Hence the lack of a market for a product to remove spam. Just look at junk snail-mail - you can tell the Post Office not to deliver it (by telling them you think it's pornographic - they can't refuse), but rarely does anyone bother. For anyone who wants to bother to educate themselves, it's relatively easy to keep most spammers at bay. So the market shrinks to people who don't have a clue, which is going to make keeping the spam scalpel out of the muscle pretty difficult.
  • I cannot see that it would be worth more than about an hour of my time. I can set up a good filtering system at home (my Linux box does email server duties) in that time. Many people could do it in much less time, but I like to tinker.

    This has the advantage that _I_ control it totally. I don't have to switch email addresses, something I'm not willing to do. And as I filter at the server level, I can continue to use any email client I want (and I use three on a regular basis).
    So let us pretend that I make $50 000 a year. One hour of my time is therefore worth about $25. So I'd pay about $25 for a filter that eliminates spam _permanently_ and meets the above criteria.

    Of course, I haven't done either. I guard my email address and only get a few pieces of spam each day. I can just delete those messages without reading them, most of the time. This probably means that I'm not willing to pay that much, though I still think the urge may hit me one day to play with procmail or something.
  • I have been pleased with the spam filtering from Bigfoot [bigfoot.com], and it says that it is now available to all members again (they tried for a while making it a $19.95 Premium Service).
  • By 'filtering' - are we referring to a third-party site that checks over your email, filters it, and sends everything but SPAM to your "real" address?

    Problem: I think spammers run a loop of every possible email address, at the major ISP's.

    Example: My wife has never, ever posted to Usenet, a web site, etc etc. even under an alias. Completely unknown to the outside world.

    But she gets 5x the spam that I do. Why? Her email address is short - only 3 letters before the @. Occasionally one slips through that has the victims listed in 'cc' instead of 'bcc' - and many start with the same letter.

    (How else could she have gotten on these lists?)
  • Check out Brightmail. [brightmail.com]

    Brightmail provides advanced message management solutions that enable ISPs, ASPs, wireless service providers, Internet portals and enterprises to protect the integrity, efficiency, security and usability of their email systems. Through Mailwall(TM) protection, the Brightmail Solution Suite pairs server-based filtering and around-the-clock support and analysis to prevent email-borne threats.
  • If I'm going to spend my hard-earned money making sure I get no spam, you can bet your ass it's not going to be by having the messages deleted as they arrive. That still leaves my ISP paying for bandwidth, and lowers the total available world bandwidth (even if by a small percentage). It's going to be by suing spammers out of business, making campaign contributions to someone who will outlaw it, or something to that effect.
  • Just try out http://www.spambouncer.org/ [spambouncer.org] and you will have little to no spam problems. I've used it for 2 months now and it's succesfully filtered 700+ pieces of spam, only once flagging some mail from a friend (who used all BCC receipients), and only twice letting spam through.
    1. hire some unskilled labor, preferably in a 3rd world country.
    2. give them your mail password.
    3. instruct them check your inbox every half hour, and delete any spam.
    4. pray they don't sell your password for money/use your email for some sort of fraud.

    ok fine, I guess you'd have to get them a computer and internet connection too... this is a great way to offload that old Pentium 90 gathering dust in the corner!

  • As you can see, I don't mask my e-mail address on these posts. I am a registered user of spamcop.net [spamcop.net], and now I get maybe 1 spam a month.

    When asked for an e-mail address on a survey, a website, or to fill in anywhere, I provide my spamcop address [mailto]. Also, when giving e-mail addys out to friends/family, I provide the spamcop address.

    When you send a message to my account, you automatically get a bounce reply. You can reply to this message, and your message will be sent as normal. From then on, you never have to worry about it. Alternatly, I can authorize you from their simple web admin system. Also, I can deny whole domains, specific users, anything, just by filling out a couple forms.

    If I don't like what I see on there (I check it about once a week), I can simply report it as spam to their ISPs, delete it, or allow it, with a few simple clicks.

    They also filter out all attachments (you can turn this off if you want). My family is a group of computer neophytes, they are constantly getting viruses. I'm notified that there was an attachment, but it never gets to my box. I can safely tell them they're infected, and I never see it again.

    The price is extremely good. I paid $25 for 50MB of e-mail almost a year ago. I've still got some 40MB left (most mailings are no more than 10k, usually much less).

    I know I sound like a commercial, but I feel it's important to point out the great business when I find 'em.

    • "When you send a message to my account, you automatically get a bounce reply. You can reply to this message, and your message will be sent as normal. From then on, you never have to worry about it."
      I found that this was too confusing for the majority of people who email me. That is to say that I deal with more one-off type emails, including many possible job prospects, than I do with a known group of friends. Also, I trialed it around the time that Sircam was sending large attachements to everyone and it drained my Spamcop funds pretty damn quickly.

      I just wish that Yahoo would truly black-hole anything it would otherwise put in the "Bulk Mail" folder. Since it wont automatically delete bulk mail it just means I have to download it an let my Eudora filters sort it out (Yahoo adds a specific header to bulk mail). Some days that means it takes quite a while to download my real email first thing in the morning.

  • How about a spamtrap? Set up an email address, or addresses, and do whatever it takes to make sure they get on absolutely every spam based mailing list in existance. Then compare every message that goes to those addresses with messages that appear in your inbox. If any of them match, its spam.

    that would probably catch 99% of them... if implemented correctly. Probably have to account for randomizing of headers and personalizing the messages, but otherwise it should get pretty close.

    -Restil
  • NEVER give out your "real" e-mail address. Use a free one for sites on which you must supply one, and only check that when you have to reply to a confirmation. In addition, if someone randomly guesses your e-mail address (which does happen occasionally), manually send a rejection. They will think that the address is invalid and, you will not be added to their list. It is also a good idea either to turn off HTML or to set your mail client not to process images unless told to(this keeps the shady people who use an image to see if you got the e-mail.) I hope this helps (and by the way, the address above is not my real address). I also immediately send a copy of the spam and a note to the origination ISP and server administrator (not using my normal address). It really works well, I have only gotten 3 pieces of spam in the last 2 years (and I receive upwards of 20 e-mails a day.)
  • ...but I still prefer the old-fashioned method of hunting them down and shooting them with an M-16.
  • Brightmail [brightmail.com] has such a commercial service. They have "sensors" out on the net at large, which are used to identify spam in realtime. Once they've id'd a spam message, they roll it out to filtering relays at the customers site, they do this as often as every 5 minutes. It's extremely effective from what I hear. It's also extremely expensive-I checked into it for my company and it was something like $20k/year IIRC. Way too rich for my blood. Probably works well for folks like Apple and IBM, who can afford to drop that kind of cash.

    What would be interesting is if an opensource/community project took on the same approach; seems like it could be done, the basic idea is fairly simple really.
  • Check them out at http://www.postini.com/ [postini.com].

    My ISP (the one that I use, I certainly don't own it) is beta testing Postini's service. Basicly all mail is sent to Postini, they filter it based on content huristics and send the "good" stuff on. There is a web based area (which can be tailored to give more or less options to the user) where preferences can be set, and "tagged" email can be checked.

    While I was participating in the beta, I was really "promiscuous" with my email address. Now that the test is over, I'm sorry. Pricing is really quite resonable. I've been told that the cost per user per year (for an ISP of about 150k) is around $10.
  • I'd pay $100 a month not to have spam free e-mail, but to have a spammer beheaded in public each month right here in my hometown.
  • > So, if you could virtually eliminate spam from your inbox, how much would you be willing to pay to make that happen?

    Suppose Congress passed a law extending "open season" on spammers to 24-7, 365 days a year, and allowed for the payment of a bounty for every spammer hide turned in.

    I'd chip in a few bucks a month, probably along with every other user in the country. That'd be several million bucks a month. I dunno, what's a spammer worth? $50 for the bullets and maintenance of the weapons, plus disposal costs?

    Only problem is where we'd dispose of all the spammer carcasses. The EPA would be all over our ass. Spammers smell bad enough when they're alive.

    But if we're just talking about some sort of filtering to get rid of the spam in the mailboxes, not a red cent. Spam is a problem that can only be stopped at the source -- stop the spammers, whether through legalized culling, jail time, or just plain beefing up ISP abuse desks (umm, and Broadwing and Genuity going bankrupt ;-) and the spam goes away.

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