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Spam Your Rights Online

Beating the Spam Merchants 202

Posted by timothy from the boilss-your-heart-cockles dept.
Crowbraid writes: "Well-written column by Margie Boule from the Portland Oregonian about an individual who got tired of getting spam, sued the company for $25 an email, and won." See also Bennett Haselton's anti-spam page, where he has details on "pursuing the anti-spam lawsuits on four separate fronts." (Those lawsuits were mentioned a few months back.)
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Beating the Spam Merchants More

Beating the Spam Merchants

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  • Or is it just a "boring news day"?

    Spam sucks, we all know. All this spam news is making me sleepy.

    • Re:Is it me? (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      All this spam news is making me sleepy.

      If this spam was real spam, that fatigue would be replaced by diahrehha.
      • I have to interject. I know it is trendy to bash spam (both types) but sonny, spam won us the second world war. Especially in the Pacific theater. Furthermore, growing up in Hawai'i Spam was one of the main staples. I think you can't really bash Spam until you have had it baked under a layer of pineapple. Mmmmmmmmmm.
    • No, it's just that no one has subscribed, so Taco sold Slashdot to the Python boys. Now it's nothing but spam, lovely spam.

      Soon, they'll be promoting the Spam Club! [pythonline.com]

    • Re:Is it me? (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yes, very slow....
      but since i have access to a time machine i can give you tomorrows stories today....

      SPAM.
      SPAM.
      SPAM.
      LINUX RULES
      SPAM.
      SPAM.
      Microsoft is bad.
      SPAM.
      SPAM.
    • As a programmer with Hormel's entrail engineering department, I've heard a lot about this within our company. There's been a lot of noise here in Porkopolis about buying advertisements and front page name association story endorsements on Slashdot. I don't agree with it and I'm putting my job on the line posting this, but this is why you are seeing (and will continue to see) a lot more news about spam, and even more spam about spam.

      Thank you. Have a good day, and don't forget to try our other canned meatstuffs.

  • $25 an e-mail?!? I'm rich! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Indras ( 515472 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @04:17PM (#3202689)
    Oh my god, I'd better call my lawyer... I may already be a millionaire!

  • Spam Stories (Score:2, Interesting)

    by kontos ( 560271 )
    There have been a large number of Spam stories in the media this week. What's the deal? Mayby the politicians will start to see that this is something that matters to John Q. Public.
    Of course, mayby pigs will fly someday.
  • why does spam gt by i mean why is it allowed and why is that senator able to go and say with a striaght face that he thinks it is a good idea and such

    • It probably has something to do with a little technicality called the First Amendment, but I'm not really sure. If you don't get it, I have a High School Diploma I'll sell you. Maybe some Herbal Viagra? Or would you just like to see me naked?

  • Wow (Score:3, Funny)

    by EricKrout.com ( 559698 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @04:27PM (#3202777) Homepage
    "I e-mailed back, saying 'Take me off your subscription list. I don't want this.' " And then Harold put a little bite in his request. "I wrote, 'I will charge you $25 per message as a reading fee,' " for every subsequent e-mail.

    Harold says the fee was not just a threat; it was a reasonable charge for time and equipment. "I have to download the message, to find out it's junk and delete it. If you're using my download time, you are in effect using my services. During that time I can't use my computer, which is essential in my business."

    OK, so apparently this dude thinks he's worth:
    ($25.00 / 2 seconds to download and identify a message) * (60 seconds / 1 minute) * (60 minutes / 1 hour) = $45,000.00 / hour.

    Hell, I'll even subtract $1.00 (I'm rounding up mind you) for bandwidth and computing costs to handle the huge 2KB spams.

    So, he thinks he's valued at $44,999.00 / hour. Much better.

    Must be a really smart guy ;-)

    m o n o l i n u x :: Worth Every Red Cent! [monolinux.com]
    • I dont liked to be mailed, but since i get pretty important mail when i get it it has to be read instant, i tell everyone not to send me jokes, pictures etc.. I am very bad at concetrating, i lose it very fast, but its very important when doing certain work, so when i get mail i read it when its spam it gets me not very relaxed cause i dislike spam then i try to think of a way to not get it again from the same person/company then i am not concentrated anymore, getting the concentration back can take a while. That time costs money.

      And i say 25$ isnt that much.
      But yes i could get a seperate mailbox for this stuff, but then why should i ? why do people send me spam, why cant i just use one mailbox for all my stuff, why o why. damn it =D

      Quazion.

      I consider bullshit mail spam also =P

    • Re:Wow (Score:3, Interesting)

      by SirSlud ( 67381 )
      Many of the spams I get regularly top 50k (HTML spams, with flash, gifs, etc, etc). On a slow modem (I dont have one, mind you), it take take abit longer than 2 seconds to download.

      Aside from that, its not about the money. It's about stopping the act of spamming. Unfortunately, the legal system tends to prioritize fiscal damages over inidivudual non-quantifiable damages, so it's probably wiser and faster to go the 'I'll sue to for time waster' route than the 'Spamming is unethical and against the law, and so I'll see if I can convince the police to lay charges' route.

      This is a more effective and faster route to go, and hits spammers where it hurts; their wallets. If they can't make any money from spamming, because the damages people file outweigh the commissions on the referrals and subscriptions they make, whats the point?
    • "So, he thinks he's valued at $44,999.00 / hour. "

      When the spammers decide that $44,999.00 is too much for his services, perhaps they will seek cheaper alternatives. I would value my time similarly. I don't expect anyone to cheerfully pay me -- I expect them to avoid paying my price by sending their garbage elsewhere!

    • Re:Wow (Score:2)

      by bluGill ( 862 )

      Well he is a lawyer, and they are known for high fees.

      though I know of very few professionals who do not have a minimum charge. If I call a plumber I have to pay him $80/hour, with a half hour minimum. It doesn't pay for a professional to bill for any less than that, and they have to make money.

    • Re:Wow (Score:2)

      by seebs ( 15766 )
      The lowest realistic estimate I've ever seen is $1/spam in raw cost, averaged out. (Some are vastly more expensive, some are less.) However, harassment and invasion of privacy are also big deals.

      $25 seems perfectly reasonable to me. After all, faxes are set at $500 by law.
  • The idea of charging spammers for their spam isn't entirely new. A few people I've spoken to people on USENET claim include a disclaimer in their signatures, charging $500USD for unsolicited mail.

    On a few occasions, they say they've even managed to successfully claim their fee.

    • I used to charge one soul for every piece of unsolicited email I received. Eventually, I built up a collection of 666 of them (yes, I'm serious...) before deciding not to bother any more. I gave one of my ex's ten and, iirc, my current girlfriend inherited one hundred. That still leaves me with 556 souls, not including my own (if I still own it after this).
    • The idea of charging spammers for their spam isn't entirely new. A few people I've spoken to people on USENET claim include a disclaimer in their signatures, charging $500USD for unsolicited mail

      Don't forget that many states have laws [spamlaws.com] that entitle spam recipients to this same amount. You still have to take them to small claims court though and possibly even go through a collection agency. (Heck, I live in a $500-a-pop state...with the amount of spam I get, I could easily afford to hire a full time staff to handle everything from going to court to contacting the collection agencies).

  • I love small claims court (Score:3, Informative)

    by bstrahm ( 241685 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @04:33PM (#3202829) Homepage
    It is the small persons equalizer for corprate greed. Basically you can force a large company to show up and spend money on their lawyers, while you just show up and tell the judge what happened.

    Used it twice, one time my bank was cashing my car payment checks, but not crediting my loan... Needless to say when they threatened to take my car away, I filled suit. Long story short, they paid up rather than spend the money on lawyers (which they would have lost anyway)

    The other time it was my wifes employer not doing the right things with her termination... Got the district manager and ourselves infront of a mediator and a deal was struck...

    You won't get rich with small claims court (I think it only covers up to 1,500 maybe 2,500) but it is very simple to file and win a reasonable case
    • I've been through the small claims court process before. As it was explained to me, lawyers aren't allowed except as representatives of corporations. If you name the CEO of the corporation on a small claims suit, the CEO has to appear or the court automatically finds in your favor (assuming your side of the case makes sense and the judge determines you're claiming reasonable restitution).

      This often works in your favor because many people would much rather pay their lawyers to show up in court for them.

      ::Colz Grigor
      • Disclaimer: IANAL. This rule varies by jurisdiction. Where I live (San Diego, California Superior Court District) a corporation may be represented by any corporate officer, or the corporation may file a request with the court to allow another employee to represent them. There are also some (albeit highly restricted - they have to work for free, and they can only appear a few times a year, they must be currently employed by the corporation on other business) loopholes that even allow lawyers to represent corporations here.

        I would definitely check into the rules if you want to file small claims. Additionally (at least in my district) you are limited to a certain number of claims per year, and your filing fees also increase after you file a certain number of claims.
      • In one of the cases discussed here, the spammer got really upset about being dragged into discovery about his spamming. But many ISPs keep SMTP forwarding logs. Can you use discovery subpoenas to get *them* to produce their log files for a small claims case? That would be an interesting way to go after the spammers who are their customers, if their abuse people aren't helpful enough.

  • Alter the economics ... (Score:3, Informative)

    by LL ( 20038 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @04:38PM (#3202866)
    The fundamental change that the Internet introduced was the economic fact that sending n pieces of email took the same effort as sending 1. The fact that this essentially puts the cost (storage, bandwidth, attention, etc) onto the recipient distorts the incentive for posting which consequently leads to spam. This is the old story of privatise the benefits and socialise the losses.

    The book EarthWeb (see http://www.baen.com/blurbs/067157809X.htm, http://www.the-earthweb.com/) had a good idea in that people could set a threshold ... if the email wasn't worth their time, then they would "charge" the sender a small amount. If the free market worked, then advertisers would figure out the cost of your attention (especially if they lumped their mistakes) and be more selective in their branding activities (as well as reduce visual pollution). However, because the consumer doesn't have any expectation of privacy, much less opinion as to their preferences, B2C cheerfully ignore these minor details in their belief that buying xxx will solve your worries.

    Marketing is a necessary evil but the economic costs should be bourne by the originators (whoch have control over quantity) rather than the public at large. How much do you value your attention (and thus time)?

    LL

  • Is this really a good idea? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by HughsOnFirst ( 174255 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @04:40PM (#3202892)
    This doesn't sound so good to me.
    Goliath then told the court, Harold says, "that when they get

    unsubscription messages, all their machine reads is the e-mail address. It
    can't read comments. Therefore they had never formed a contract with me,
    because they had never read my messages."

    Did this give Harold pause? "No. It made me angry. Who set up their
    machine, me or them? If they set up their machine to block
    communication, they are solely responsible for all communication that is
    blocked."

    I'm not sure I like the idea of being responsible for mail I don't read.
    • I'm not sure I like the idea of being responsible for mail I don't read.

      but they did read the messages he held them responsible for. they didn't read the whole message, but they did respond to it. that is communication, and if it wasn't intelligent communication on their part, well that's their problem.
    • Gee, I don't like that ideas, especially if it can apply to individuals. Now, imagine if some Goliath sending you spams or junk mails (which I toss to the shredder as soon as I don't, or don't want to, recognize the sender), stating that if you don't reply by a certain day, you are binding yourself to their contract.

      It won't be applicable, for sure, but when precendence is created, it can get hairy.
      • The difference is that Harold's messages were _responses_ to messages from Goliath. If you send me something unsolicited (even items of some value by parcel post), I'm under no obligation to keep track of it. If I send you a message and you answer, I ought to read the answer...
    • I'm not sure I like the idea of being responsible for mail I don't read.

      That's an oversimplification... like saying "Yes, I receieved that piece of paper, but I didn't read it, so I'm not responsible" when the "piece of paper" in question was a subpoena..

      (yes, I know there is a difference between a legal document and an email, but I'm trying to make a point - "goliath" was notified, he can prove they were notified, and they ignored it.)
  • I think the hardest part to catching spammers is finding out and proving who they are. They do damn near every trick in the book to hide thier identity.

    What might be more effective is to go after the people hiring them. Spam usually gives you a phone number (that's the only piece of reliable information) to call so you can get scammed. Don't buy anything from someone who won't tell you who they are. Call them up, find out as much information as possible, then rip them a new hole. Post the information on the internet, let the trolls troll the spammers.

  • I like the headline (Score:3, Funny)

    by quantaman ( 517394 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @04:45PM (#3202933)
    Beating the Spam Merchants

    Good, you find the Spam Merchants and I'll find my bat!!

  • I don't know about you... (Score:3, Funny)

    by llamalicious ( 448215 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @04:46PM (#3202937) Journal
    but all this Spam news is making me hungry.

    Spam Nachos [hormel.com] anyone??

  • Tennessee Spam Laws (Score:3, Interesting)

    by aardwolf64 ( 160070 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @04:46PM (#3202940) Homepage
    I did a little bit of research last week on Spam laws in my home state (Tennessee) According to Tennessee Spam laws, if a company based in Tennessee spams you after you have requested they remove your name, you can sue them for up to $5000 per day they continue to spam them. I found out about this law at SueSpammers.org [suespammers.org].

    Incidentally, I have a spamcop IMAP e-mail account that filters out potential spam. There was one guy from Canada that kept spamming me over and over. I noticed that the unsubscribe link (which I had tried twice) pointed to a top level domain. Using Internic's WHOIS, I got the jerk's home address, phone number, and e-mail address. Luckily in this case it wasn't forged. After personally contacting him (and threatening legal action), I have gotten no spam from his "company" in 1 week. (Funny thing is, Canada has no anti-spam laws... it was all BSing)
    • Just found that website and was baout to post when I found your post.

      I wonder how the courts in Knoxville are about this? BTW, from my layman, very breaf reading, of the TN statutes it looks irrelivant as to where the spammer is located. The relevant location seems to be where the recipient is.

      Since I live (domicile) in Knoxville, TN but work mostly in Northern VA, I looked up the VA law. Appears to be a max of $25,000/day in VA.

      Will definately be researching this more to see just what to do to sue the same spammer from 2 different States!
  • Go to JunkBusters [junkbusters.com] website for lots of information on how to beat the spam mailers, as well as other info on telemarketers, junk snail mail, and lots more. Fairly decent site...(no it's not my site)

  • Slippery as a snake (Score:3, Informative)

    by Eric Damron ( 553630 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @04:59PM (#3203040)
    I love stories like this where the individual triumphs over evil.

    In the State of Washington you can sue for up to $250.00 per spam. Spam is defined as unrequested commercial bulk email that has either a misleading subject line and/or invalid return address.

    The real problem with trying to collect is that most spammers make it VERY difficult to trace the email back. They may bounce it off of an open relay or use stolen accounts and they almost always use a false return address.

    You can usually find the domain that the email came from by looking at the header information but if they bounced it off of an open relay in China it may not do you any good.

    Really, the only ones that you should try to go after should be the ones that are stupid enough to provide you with real information in the body of the letter that will allow you to track them down.

    Most of the time the spammer wants one thing: Your money. So he may give an 800 number or a web page URL. If you can convince him that you need his real address to send him money the may provided it and you can send him a subpoena instead. ;-)

    Some spammers will try to get your credit card number. Once they have it you may find yourself the unwilling donator of a brand new laptop or some other piece of property that the spammer can sell on the black market.

    Never, never, never, give a spammer your credit card number.

  • Very cool (Score:4, Funny)

    by einTier ( 33752 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @05:01PM (#3203052)
    Now I've found out what to do while I'm unemployed. I'm currently sending a unsubscribe response to everyone that's currently spamming my three main email accounts, plus my two throwaway spam accounts. I'm including a link to this story and asking for a $25 reader's fee. I figure if any of them get past a few hundred dollars, I'll try legal action.


    Shouldn't take long.

  • suing spammer (Score:2, Interesting)

    by sheol ( 153979 )
    I am attempting to do the same. I recieved a spam a couple days ago that caought my attention. They had copied an image from my homepage and used that in the spam [pheed.org] they emailed me.

    I sent them back a letter [pheed.org] demanding $110 for my time wasted. $100 for 'legal fees' and $10 under colorado law [spamlaws.com] for each unsolicited commercial email.

    Hopefully if enough people do this, spammers will be more careful to who they send emails. Either that or spammers might start something like the RBL except it would be a list of spam-unfriendly recipients. That'll be the day...

    • If they copy a image from your homepage, then they are in violation of your copyright on that image, and you can sue them for far more than that.

    • Let me guess, they didn't respond at all.
      trafficmagnet.net does this all the time; I'm receiving the same piece of spam about once a month for virtually all domains I own as well as a couple of other domains I've never heard of, apparently because someone linked to my email address.

      I've tried contacting them and demanding $1000 according to my terms of service [bero.org], but they don't react, and neither does their uplink -- and since their whois information is fake, there's noone to sue. :/
  • You too can make easy money with just hours a day.

    First, this offer is only available to citizens of forward-thinking states like Washington, Oregon, and California that permit you to sue spammers an amount per email in small claims court.

    In Washington, it's $250 per spam. In Oregon, it's $25 per spam. I'm not sure of the amount in California.

    Now, set up a whole bunch of email accounts on some service - yahoo.com or some other free service. Make sure you enter your address and state in the registration - and for good luck, put it in the email address (e.g. WeLiveInOregon@yahoo.com would be an excellent email address).

    Now go and surf the net and post as you will. Make sure you let them read the email address you've created.

    Soon you'll be getting tons and tons of checks as the spams roll in!

    [patent pending]

    -
  • I've found the "I will bill you $X for each spam" quite an effective threat against spam companies, especially those that pose as "opt-in mailing list" providers. But of course it's useless to send this threat to any address provided by the spammer -- as the article points out, these are never read by humans. Instead you go to a whois server and look up all the contacts for the originating domain and for the company that owns the domain (spam companies often don't care to use their "official" domain to originate spam for obvious reasons). That will get you some action.

    Sadly, this does nothing about all the lame pyramid-scheme and enlarge-your-body-parts spam we all get. This originates from rather stupid individuals who've ben conned into joining high-tech versions of the old stuff-envelopes scam, and thus pop up faster than you can smack them down.

  • I'm not trying to troll here, but this whole discussion got me thinking, how effective are the current means of blocking spam, such as RBL, blocking out certain countries, etc., if so much spam is getting to people's inboxes? Whenever I read the mail-abuse.org website, they talk about how effective they are, but if so many people are using their product and other products like theirs, why is spam still a problem? Or is this just a case of the people who are not using these products complaining about the spam?

  • We're missing the bigger picture here... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PyroJimmy ( 548200 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @05:17PM (#3203199)

    ... which is the fact that spam cases need to eventually be taken through the court system, with a verdict being handed down by a judge or jury.

    This man doesn't qualify for hero status. He basically threatened the company with a lawsuit and accepted a little money to go away and not tell anyone about the company's practices (or at least without the company's name).

    When people settle cases, they may get some money and self-satisfaction, but it does very little good for anyone else. When a case is tried in court and a verdict is rendered, a legal precedent is set by which future actions are governed. This is the only truly effective way of fighting the onslaught of spam email in the long run.

    Even if you manage to get a huge settlement and put a company out of business, the way is still paved for 5 more companies to pop up and take its place. And in this case, it sounds like the company is absolutely free to continue its practices as it has in the past. Where's the good angle to this story?

  • I do know this is a standard clause in boilerplate agreements lawyers typically put together. But these things can be changed, and often do get changed during the course of negotiations. What is the dollar amount you would put on agreeing to hide the identity of someone who wronged you and is now finally agreeing to pay up for it, but won't pay as much (if any at all) if you don't agree to include that clause? And likewise, what is the dollar amount for agreeing not to submit it to slashdot/kuro5hin/etc?

    • A reply [slashdot.org] to one of my comments in the slashdot article about ORBZ Shuts Down [slashdot.org] has pointed to a new article [wired.com] which reveals the identity of the party who threatened ORBZ operator Ian Gulliver with jail.

      In that new article it is mentioned that Ian's lawyer advised him against releasing a copy of the search warrant. Why? Is it copyrighted?

  • Everyone trying to track down a spam-source probably allready had the same problem:

    How to tell the complaining enduser to forward you the spam-email with all email headers intact? "What are email-headers?" is the number one question you hear. After two minutes explanation the next question will probably be "Where do I have to click to do that?". And another five minutes explanation later you know that you will never get that spam-email intact because you hear a phone ringing or the boss asking "Is that report ready?" in the background.

    Why not adding one button to each mail-client labelled "This is SPAM"? So the user simply has to click this button, is asked a confirmation question like "Do you really want to send the messaged titled blah..blah to your anti-spam department and erase it?" and then whoosh the mail is send with all headers (as an attachment) and with the propper legal text in in "user thisandthat declared the attached email a being UCE blah..blah". And the configurable antispam-address defaults to - say - spam@users_main_email_domain where you or your script is ready to handle it.

    Then depending on your policy you can check it and report it to the spammers ISP, or have an automatic script behind it, which updates your block-lists (e.g. after a number of complaints about the same sender or depending on the trustworthyness of the enduser). You could even implement scripts, which automatically delete this email (or all emails from the same source) from the POP accounts of your server and send them back to where they came from - with the propper RFC-compliant messages. Or send them to spamcop or whatever your agreed-on anti-spam policy says.

    Perhaps you know a friend who is writing Email-Clients or Plugins for these beasts (or you yourself can you that).

    If it's time to fight back, let's use automatic weapons!
  • faster than cpu speed, and hard drive storage, doesn't it seem that spam will get worse as the technology provides more and more bandwidth at ever lower prices? It doesn't seem that the extreamly rare individual costing the spammers some pocket change is a significant pressure against the behavior. And since the bandwidth is going to probably be less and less of an issue, doesn't it seem likely that spam will just be something we'll have to just accept? At least until law makers provide some real teeth for little guy to rend soft pink spammer flesh. Unless ISP decide to throw their weight around for their customers, with the problem getting easier for them to ignore, it's just going to end up an accepted, and shitty part of life.

    It'd be interesting to see what spam cost the world in lost time, and lost network resources.
  • Repost of my message from previous spam story, sorry for repetition, but I think it might help people to see it: (no karma whoring, I'm already at max :)

    It's easy to stop spammers, but you need to have the ability to create an arbitrary number of email addresses. If you manage your own domain, or at least have the ability to create and destroy email addresses in your domain, you can virtually eliminate spam.

    Here's my recipe. I have no worries explaining this in public, because there's nothing the spammers can do to get around it. For every Internet service you use, every mailing list you subscribe to, every online retailer you buy from, you create a unique email address (for example, my PayPal email address is "paypal@mydomain.com"). In essence, you have a different "email channel" for every source which might potentially be used to send you email. As soon as you receive a single spam on any email address, you delete it. You'll never get spam for that address again, and if you really want you can create a new one for whatever site it was used for (e.g. if you get spammed on "paypal@mydomain.com" you can create a "paypal2@mydomain.com" and change your email address with PayPal; or you can just stop using PayPal). Simple so far.

    Where it gets trickier is your more "permanent" email addresses, but the problem is solvable. I have a main email address I've used for 10 years, and of course spammers have gotten a hold of that address many times over. I don't want to destroy that address, since all my friends and colleagues know it and expect it to exist. Notifying them all each time I cancelled it would become quite burdensome for all of us. To deal with this, I have created a tool which is executed by procmail that checks each incoming message to my permanent address to ensure that the sender is valid. I have a fairly small list of known valid senders which are allowed to send me email, and those go right through to my mailbox. Not only does the tool check the sender, but it optionally checks the "Received" header in the mail to ensure it's coming from the expected mail server (in case a spammer tries to pose as someone on my OK list - paranoid, true, but I like paranoia).

    This solves all problems except one - how do people I don't expect to send mail to me actually reach me? My tool also has a "disallow" list of mail servers, and any mail originating from one of those servers will be tossed in the trash. Mail from an unexpected sender whose server is not in the disallow list will get a response from my procmail tool with a special subject line in it. They are instructed to reply, and my mail tool will then accept their message on a one-time basis after scanning the subject line for the secret magic key. If I like the person, I'll add them to my "allowed" list so they never have to go through the two-step process again.

    What if a spammer figures out my scheme and makes a spam tool that auto-replies, you ask? For that to work, he would have had to use a real return address, which they never do. But if he did, I would then know who he was and be able to block further mail and pursue him, if desired. So far that's never happened. Even if it started to happen frequently, I have plans for an upgrade to my tool which would randomly vary the required method of reply in a way that was impossible to perform programmatically. No need for this so far.

    I realize that most of this can be done with procmail alone, but there are some aspects of it that are ugly or impossible to do with just procmail. It's integrated with sendmail to a small extent, as well, which requires a separate tool as well (future extensions for other mailers should be fairly easy).

    Maybe when this is all finished I'll make it publically available. Would anyone out there find it useful? (Or has it already been done, and am I wasting my time?)
  • I got unsolicited mail (post office mail) addressed to 'NanoGator Animation, Inc.'. I know where they got this info. When I registerred my domain, I sarcastially put that as the billing info. That is the only time I have ever used that name.

    I've come up with ideas ad nauseum about how to fight spam, but so far the solutions either require really limiting your capabilities, or threaten to force spam to come through other ways such as Instant Messaging. Maybe we're fighting the wrong battle. What are some other approaches to fighting spam?

    One approach to fighting spam would be to devalue it. Anybody know how we could do this? One idea I had was to generate a bunch of fake lists and actually sell those to would be mass-solicitors. Tainted addresses would increase suspicion of whether or not it'd be worth buying a list.

    Another one would be to generate so much spam that everybody is forced to take steps against it. I realize this would initially do more harm than good, but if our mailbox did get 1400 mail mesasges a day like mentioned in a previous article, then it would make unsolicited mail far less interesting. I'm willing to switch to IM (or a private email network) for a month or two to blow it out heh.

    Anybody else have ideas about how to devalue spam? If we brainstormed a few ideas, something really interesting might pop up.

    • ...NanoGator Animation, Inc.'. I know where they got this info. When I registerred my domain, I sarcastially put that as the billing info. That is the only time I have ever used that name.

      I did something similar. Unfortunately, if you ever want to sell or transfer your domain to someone else, you're going to have to have a legal officer of NanoGator Animation sign something on official NanoGator Animation letterhead. (At least that is the rules for NetSol...)

      Not impossible to get around, but still a PITA. :(

  • Sue on my behalf (Score:2, Interesting)

    by TimButterfield ( 16686 )
    I wonder if some of the services like SpamCop could handle something like this. For each spam that is reported, allow sending the "$25 will be owed for each subsequent spam" along with the spam report. On collecting a sufficient quantity of subsequent spam from the same company, sue on behalf of the many receipients and split the cash to cover their expenses. Even if they could not sue directly on behalf of the inviduals, it would be nice to consolidate the contact information for the companies and individuals that could be sued for the spam received.

  • My new strategy (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gregbaker ( 22648 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @06:21PM (#3203742) Homepage

    I've decided to adopt a new spam strategy. I'm going to try to buy the damn stuff.

    I've noticed a lot more spam with 1-800 numbers where you're supposed to listen to a recording about getting rich quick and then leave your address so they can send you stuff.

    And, I've started phoning. I don't know exactly how much receiving a toll free call costs, but it's already more than I paid to receive the spam, so good. Listen to the recording: more time that they're paying for. Leave your address: slur and garble as much as possible--with any luck, a real person will spend several minutes trying to decipher it. If they do, they can pay for the postage to send something to a non-existant address.

    I all goes well, I figure that costs them up towards 50 cents. If a small fraction of recipients do this, suddenly they're paying an equivalent of what they've cost the world in mail server load and download time. Plus, it's fun.

  • Maybe I'm just a clueless newb, but most of these spams are asking the recipient to click on a URL (with the person's referral code in the URL) or call a toll-free number. As long as the webserver and the toll-free number are located in the US of A, couldn't a person subpoena records from the web host or the phone company to find out the info on the spammer? I mean, these spammers aren't sending this stuff out for the heck of it. SOMEONE has to have their payee information.

    • Here's a fucker who sent me his shit. Please DO hog his 1-800 line, the number won't work from my country:

      Advertise anything you want IMMEDIATELY, for PENNIES!
      - 10 MILLION USA Email Addresses (.COM/.NET/.ORG)
      - 250k "Opportunity Seeker" Bonus Email Addresses
      - Extractor Pro! Free working version! THE BEST!
      - One (1) Month of "Ad Friendly" mail server usage!
      Your Total Cost $99.95
      1-800-242-0363 ext. 2012
  • we will have to say goodbye to things like this [spamradio.com]. That, however, may be a good thing.
  • Interesting timing then, seeing a more recent story here, that you can serve legal notice via e-mail [slashdot.org]. This could be a great way of making lawsuits against spammers easier. Hmm...
  • I have four email accounts. They are aged accounts. Yet, I only get one spam a week.

    Am I just lucky, or are the people getting all this spam leaving their email addresses all over p0rno chatrooms?

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