A Day In The Life Of A Spammer 313
kaip writes "Internetnews.com has a story of a spammer. The individual sends 60 million spam emails for four days worth of work and claims that one in 19 of AOL users clicks the links in his mortgage spam (this number should however be taken with a grain of salt, see rules 1 and 2). Maybe not
everybody has heard of the Boulder
Pledge... The article also tells how the CAN-SPAM Act,
which legalises spamming, is turning the US into the spam haven of the world. Currently, 86 percent of the total spam volume is coming from the States."
Our love-hate relationship with business-scum (Score:5, Insightful)
Big corporations are what they are. They sell us cool stuff with one hand and tighten the screws on our freedoms with the other. We hate them every morning and love them every afternoon, and vice versa. This is part of living in the modern world: you take your yin with your yang and try to figure out how to do what's right the best you can. If you think it has to be all one way or the other, that's cool, share your opinions, but don't expect everyone else to think the same.
In short, there are some advertiser communications that we don't welcome into our lives and call "spam", while there are other advertiser communications that we invite into our lives when we go through the Sunday Newspaper looking for the ad circular from our favorite store so we can see what's on sale without having to go there.
Wording a rule set so that spam gets shut down but ads we want to see still get through is quite a tough task to do on a one-viewer basis. It becomes even more difficult to do that on a comminity basis. Some of us want to know what's on sale this week at Best Buy, others couldn't care less.
I just don't see a solution that pleases everybody being possible in this area. It'll always be a game of new regulations constantly going up, but only being effective until somebody finds a way to work around them. We can hate spammers as scum, but that seems like the worst we can do to them at times.
Re:Our love-hate relationship with business-scum (Score:5, Insightful)
That 'looking for' is the key. If I don't want to, I don't have to read the ad section.
Plus, everybody knows how fradulent these spam schemes are. Atleast, with the newspaper, if the frauds start creeping up, the newspaper company has to step up and tighten the noose.
Re:Our love-hate relationship with business-scum (Score:5, Insightful)
Equally important, the companies advertising in the newspaper at least put in enough effort to write copy, do the graphics art, the layouts, and get the ad into the media.
Spammers can't spell, have no business history, have no reputation, and just keep intruding on my life, my business, and my bills (increased costs to my ISPs.)
Sorry, but "If I nag 5,000,000 people, someone will buy" is not a marketing plan or strategy, it's begging. It's disingenuous fraud, hoping that someone will be stupid enough to waste their money on a con. It's hoping users don't notice that "cheap software" is pirated, or that the "herbal viagra" is available for $10.95 at their local health food store instead of $49.95 through some spammer.
Spammers are not legitimite businesses, no matter how they bleat and plead about their "rights". You have no right to harass people on the street pushing your wares -- you'd be arrested for being a public nuisance at best. You have no right to barge into my home to tell me about your products without invitation -- that will have you arrested on trespassing or B&E.
Spam is not about "business", it is not about "rights", it is about a bunch of scum sucking vermin who twist the courts and ISP contracts to swindle and scam the public, hoping to make their cash and escape quickly.
In the past 7-10 years, I have not seen one legitimite or viable product advertised by spam. Not one.
Shut them down and arrest them as the frauds they are, and to hell with yet another US government sellout to "corporate" interests via CAN-SPAM. I don't know anyone who calls the info broadcasts from respected corps "spam" because they ask if you want it, not shove it down the throats of strangers.
Re:Our love-hate relationship with business-scum (Score:3, Insightful)
I have. Lots of times. Less often lately, but that's because I long since quit trying to read and report every message... but when I did I found naive or simply callous businesses advertising all kinds of real products, many of them local businesses I know.
UBE, regardless of content, regardless of whether it's obviously commercial or religious or political, simply can't be tolerated. If you sign up, or
Newspaper ads REDUCE the cost, spam INCREASES (Score:3, Insightful)
Well actually I don't get spam but that is because I use a very paranoid email strategy.
Re:Our love-hate relationship with business-scum (Score:3, Insightful)
And I really don't need special offers on "Imitrex, Vioxx and Zoloft from Canada CHEAP!" - especially as I am not in the USA.
Opt in lists (Score:4, Informative)
That's a bit draconian. I would like to be notified when Blizzard is releasing a new game or the new Glen Cook book is being released. To get this info from the web sites, I would have to poll (check regularly) the web sites. I would rather receive a notification.
The key to this is opt in only lists. One way to do this is to make a server with your email provider that allows you to register an email as requested (bulk mail whitelist). Those can go through. Other bulk mail is prevented. There are other methods as well; that is just one example to handle both.
The real key is no *unsolicited* email advertising. If I request it, I want to be able to see it. Frankly, if a newspaper (to get back to that example) drops off their product unrequested, I would like to be able to prosecute them for littering. Further, a newspaper includes other things besides advertising. Spam does not.
Re:Opt in lists (Score:2)
Re:Our love-hate relationship with business-scum (Score:5, Insightful)
Secondly, the scale of this is a massive problem. I get approximately 400 e-mails/day to my work account. About 250 of those are from two high-volume mailing lists, which get auto-sorted into folders, and I scan-read the subjects before deleting most of them.
About 5-10 of those are from people who are contacting me directly, and have a valid reason to do so...
The remaining 140 or so are spam. No, I'm not exageratting the numbers, I've got 6 more while I typed this, mostly trying to sell me Viagra, but with a couple for OEM software.
Marking what my spam filter (Thunderbird's built in one) misses is a significant effort. Then having to go through the spam folder and make sure all of these e-mails isn't actually from work is even more effort. Especially the ones that say "Meeting at 14:00 on thursday" or something.
Probably what gets to me most of that almost none of these apply to me. I don't want (or need) Viagra, I can't afford a house here, and the mortgage offers are for the USA only, I already have a university degree, I have reputable sources for OEM software, etc. etc. etc.
What's even worse is what doesn't get to me. I've had to two e-mail sacrifice accounts because they were getting too much spam (at around 200/day extra, each, for rarely used accounts). Of course, spammers will keep e-mailing those accounts - it's not like the bounces will ever get to them.
Another spam just arrived. Something about being 19 again.
One of those accounts was only ever given out to people on a face to face basis - but it was of the form @. The only way spammers could have found it would be by pouring thousands of e-mails into my work's domain, hoping that one of them would find a matching e-mail address. While I may not receive that e-mail, it's still pouring into work's servers. clogging them up and occupying our bandwidth.
Many other forms of advertising mean I get something for free (several TV channels here) or cheaper (magagzines/newspapers), and never cost me more, anyway (billboards, etc.).
In comparison, spam costs me money, and time, and adds a significant risk of e-mail loss. That is why I don't like spam.
Re:Our love-hate relationship with business-scum (Score:2)
A lot of small email domains are set up incorrectly and will allow spammers to collect lists of valid usernames (from which email addresses can be derived). Are you sure that your work email server does not do this?
Re:Our love-hate relationship with business-scum (Score:2)
But, what were they doing before? They were broadcasting messages to every name you could think of at our domain. Literally tens of thousands of them per hour. The sheer number of bounces that our server was trying to deliver was dragging our server to its knees.
Now the server utilisation is back to something sensible; the spammers know our address
Re:Our love-hate relationship with business-scum (Score:2)
Helping Thunderbird shut up about spam (Score:3, Interesting)
My ISP is helping me a bit with this one. They add a custom header to mark things that have been RBLed so I now have set one of the labels (purple in my case) as "known spammer". I then added a message rule that reads essentially if "X-Warning RBL" = "Listed" then label message "known spammer", mark as read, and move to "Junk" folder.
This way when spam comes in that Thunderbird does not detect on its own, but my
Re:Our love-hate relationship with business-scum (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe 20 a day is not enough.
Re:Our love-hate relationship with business-scum (Score:5, Informative)
You need K9.
http://keir.net/k9.html
RM
Re:Our love-hate relationship with business-scum (Score:3, Informative)
I use POPFile. http://popfile.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
My current stats:
Messages classified: 9,144
Classification errors: 67
Accuracy: 99.26%
80% of the classification errors were in the first 2 weeks of training - and classification errors are almost always on the "let spam through" rather than "good message marked as spam", so it's not at all dangerous.
It's easy to set up, and includes instructions for popular email clients. Spammers just can't do much to beat something l
Re:Our love-hate relationship with business-scum (Score:3, Interesting)
I subscribe to a few sites newsletter, Apple and Amazon.comn being just two examples. Both occasionaly send me information about specials I might be interested in. In the case of Amazon.com, they
Re:Our love-hate relationship with business-scum (Score:2)
To provide contact info for complaints. A domain name is governed by similar rules to a business. If you want to operate (the domain) in public, you need to make public your contact info.
For that matter, phone numbers are the same way. By default, your number, name, and address are public info. One must pay extra to get an unlisted number.
I disagree, it should NOT be public information (Score:3, Interesting)
That's just silly though. I would be MORE offended by someone calling me directly to complain about content on my web site than anyone could possibly be offended by what's on all of my web sites (and trust me, there is some very offensive material there, no, not porn). MAYBE a p
Re:Our love-hate relationship with business-scum (Score:3, Interesting)
I at least have the pleasure of thinking that I have annoyed some spammer at least
Re:Our love-hate relationship with business-scum (Score:5, Insightful)
Most reputable businesses choose advertising channels where the advertiser bears the majority of the cost of the advertisement. These advertisements tend to have at least SOME downward pressure on the total number of advertisements a person will be forced to see. These advertisers are on the whole a little more truthful, because the money trail back to them is larger and clearer.
Less reputable businesses may choose advertising channels where the advertiser bears a very low percentage of the cost of their advertisement. Because they pay very little, and the overhead costs are small, it's easier to employ random and changing small-time "advertisers" and it's easier to generally obscure the money trail, allowing for less truthful advertisements. Because the cost of each ad impression is very very low, there's virtually no downward pressure on the number of ads a person may be forced to see. Because these "advertisers" are in the game for a quick buck, and their reputations won't suffer from any ill will, they don't care if they decrease the value of the targetted communications channel to nearly zero, to the point where people start considering abandoning it.
Mod parent way up! (Score:2)
Why do we have to allow ANY unsolicitated commercial email?
And don't anyone go into "free speech" on this. You can say anything you want. But you can not use up my bandwidth.
The economics of email ads means that there is NOTHING preventing spammers from flooding your ENTIRE pipeline with ads.
Re:Our love-hate relationship with business-scum (Score:3, Insightful)
The advertisers in the Sunday newspape are subsidising my purchase. Spammers are costing my ISP money, and eventually I'm going to pay for that.
Wording a rule set so that spam gets shut down but ads we want to see is quite a tough task
Trivial. Don't send any ads unless solicited/opt-ed in. Some fine aof a few dollars a mesage to make it stick, and give enforcemt authorities an income.
Re:Our love-hate relationship with business-scum (Score:2)
There's a big difference between Push media and Pull media.
Spam is (mostly) push. Google is (mostly) pull.
Finnaly (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Kill them? (Score:5, Interesting)
It is the same sort of rage that you feel at someone who cuts you off in traffic, or listens to their voice mail with the volume cranked up. Hatred is a common reaction to extreme rudeness and spam is rudeness taken to the nth degree.
The gut reaction of hatred caused by spam has very nothing to do with logic. When I think about spammers logically I think they should be fined to the point at which their business case is destroyed and in extreme cases (fraud, illegal merchandise) they should go to jail. When I waste 30 minutes filtering mail or miss an important mail because of spam then, just for a second, I'd like to bloody the nose of the assholes responsible for it.
*sigh* (Score:5, Interesting)
Legislation won't help. Technology hasn't been able to help that much yet. Basically, advertising is here to stay, and you can do one of two things, make yourself invisible so you can't be advertised to, or accept it.
Companies want you to be a consumer, so that they can keep being producers. There's too many companies, so they are going to fight hand over foot to get their product into your mind in whatever method they can.
-Eric
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:*sigh* (Score:5, Insightful)
SPAM will continue as long as spammers percieve that spam is profitable.
I have never read an article where a spammer actually gave solid documentation of how much money he or she made. I've always read that "for a successful campaign, I get between this much and that much on a sales rate of this much or that much on a click through rate of about this on a distribution of about that."
Sending spam is a get-rich-quick scheme, and the people participating lie about how much money they make, just like every other stooge in every other get-rich-quick scheme. Spam will continue to exist as long as shitheads who live in trailers with high-interest credit cards will agree to "spend money to make money" by buying scam email proxy servers and scam bulk email software.
Re:*sigh* (Score:4, Insightful)
That's unnecessarily defeatist. Spam will always exist as long as it's profitable, as you say. Laws and tech can both raise the cost of spam or, equivalently, decrease its effectiveness. Imagine if all email programs came with a default-on advanced spam filter, and you had to go through hoops and hurdles to turn it off. How many people would choose to receive spam, even among those who (in my opinion, assininely) click through on the spam they receive?
Re:*sigh* (Score:2)
That's why it is a really bad[TM] idea to order viagra, software and other spamvertised things for non-existant addresses or other spammers, using fake credit card informations. Soon after the campaign the spammer will get lots of retoured (undeliverable or rejected) packages and pay a lot of money for nothing.
Bullet-proof hosting is expensive, too, so think about the spammer's budget if you /.^H^H"visit" a spammer's site. ;-)
Re:*sigh* (Score:2, Funny)
spam has nothing to do with profitability. and everything to do with being easy and dirt fucking cheap.
face it. spammers are lazy fucking scum, and if it were made expensive/difficult to s
Re:*sigh* (Score:3, Insightful)
SMTP is far too trusting and allows far too much to be specified by the sender.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Legislation is an effective tool. (Score:2)
I'll let Hanover Fiste speak to this: (Score:5, Funny)
I Hate Email (Score:2)
Con means anti-Pro, Congress is the anti-Progress (Score:4, Insightful)
We shout out that we have the First Amendment rights anytime somebody tries to tell us not to speak, but then we strugle to find a way to make other people we don't want to hear shut up. The fact is, anywhere you create an unregulated communication medium, the smut, scum, and scam people will definitely show up to play. It's just the way things work.
Re:Con means anti-Pro, Congress is the anti-Progre (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Con means anti-Pro, Congress is the anti-Progre (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me repeat myself:
Free speech does not guarantee you the right to force yourself to be heard if I do not wish to.
Re:Con means anti-Pro, Congress is the anti-Progre (Score:2)
Your last sentence sounds like an argument for a completely unregulated medium being a bad thing, which is probably not what you had in mind but given the Net today is starting to make sense.
Re:Con means anti-Pro, Congress is the anti-Progre (Score:5, Insightful)
It should be noted, before I say anything else, that corperate speech does not fall under free speech. General unsolicited email might be covered under the first amendment, but spam advertizing something business related isn't.
Additionally, sometimes what people consider free speech crosses over into things which are illegal. You can tell something, but if you follow them around and continue telling them, that could be considered harassment. You can put up a protest, but if you threaten people or indimidate others or keep people from getting to work or cause a large disturbance or many other things, you're protest has crossed the line of what is legal.
The point is that you can say whatever you want when it doesn't affect anybody else, but we don't live in a vacum and your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.
The actions of spammers are destructive and cost people time and money, even if you ignore fraudulent spam. To say that it should be legal by first amendment is to ignore much of the issue.
Re:Con means anti-Pro, Congress is the anti-Progre (Score:2)
Re:Con means anti-Pro, Congress is the anti-Progre (Score:2)
Isn't this the argument Ashcroft, and Meese before him, use to limit porn? Porn is free speach, BUT... How about the flag burning hurrah a few years ago? Flag burning is free speach, BUT... Drop the but's, either you are in favor of free speach, with all it's benefits and hassles, or you're not.
Make unsolicited e-mail cost... (Score:3, Informative)
It's either that or get into the murky waters of concrete identity, and of the two the former is the least opressive regime.
Re:Make unsolicited e-mail cost... (Score:2)
This is a good idea ... sort of ...
... charging more than (or the same amount as) it would cost to send out a flyer via the postal ser
As long as sending SPAM is cheaper than sending junk snail mail, there will be SPAM. This is where this idea starts getting interesting
Re:Make unsolicited e-mail cost... (Score:3, Insightful)
Cheaper per sale. Spam has always been less effective than junk mail, but it didn't matter since it was much cheaper (i.e. a million spams to make one sale only costs a few dollars to send, where the ten junk mails that could have been sent for the same price won't net a single sale on average). If spam gets up to even a penny per email, it will probably be more economical to only use targetted snail mail lists or other
Re:Make unsolicited e-mail cost... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Make unsolicited e-mail cost... (Score:2)
As for the micropayments, I'm not sure that it is a show stopper. Remember we already have transactions taking place as part of regular mail delivery. This is just one more....
The provider of the mail account becomes your means of credit, and it's for them to resolve remuneration with you their client. When you send an e-mail to somebody, if it's unsol
Re:Make unsolicited e-mail cost... (Score:3, Interesting)
That's backwards. Build the sign-up into the waiver process instead, "Click here to waive all Penny Black costs and send a subscribe message to the new sender." Thus, the opt-in management server will manage the subscription as well. Security is much easier in that direction. Further, the server that bears the burden if security fails is the one responsible for se
Re:Make unsolicited e-mail cost... (Score:2)
I think MS might have been onto something with Penny Black...
You'd be wrong. I mean, 90% of the spam I'm seeing comes from spam zombies (i.e., exploited Windows boxes turned into mass mailers). Do you think Microsoft of all companies is actually going to push for something that further dings people who buy their crap OS? Nothing would get people off MS faster than the threat of a bill for $10,000 because some asshat can take your machine over and go joy-riding over inboxes across the Internet.
Re:Make unsolicited e-mail cost... (Score:2)
And I refuse to pay money to send e-mail to those people. Either I pay to send them e-mail, or I pay by spending my time deleting all their viruses. No fucking way.
Next proposal, please.
p
SPAM has killed email for me (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, one of my accounts only gets one or two spams a day, but my main business address gets 1000 - 3000 a day now (after spamassassin, however I need to enable some blacklists, sod the customers that get accidentally blocked) - earlier this year it was 100 - 300, and last year 10 - 50. So in my experience, volumes of bandwidth wasting time wasting productivity wasting SPAM has gone up ONE HUNDRED TIMES in a year or so. Where will it be
CAN-SPAM (Score:5, Insightful)
Blech. Shoot 'em all.
Re:CAN-SPAM (Score:2)
No, no, no. The act is surprisingly honestly named. Now, you CAN spam (in the sense of, are able to), and it's protected.
I don't get CAN-SPAM (Score:5, Interesting)
But spammers? They're not particularly organized, as far as I know. It's not as if the Viagra-and-penis-extension lobby is a major campaign contributor. So what gives? Are Congresscritters really so consistently stupid right across the board, AND their staff, AND all the IT and telecoms industry lobbyists who must have had something to say?
Or were they worried about the effect of (useful) legislation on political direct-email campaigns? Maybe. But I can't see how that would benefit one party more than the other, so why care?
Re:I don't get CAN-SPAM (Score:3, Informative)
I would guess it's mainly the direct marketing association [the-dma.org] that lobbies for weaker spam regulation. They are opposing a national do-not-spam list [washingtonpost.com], and they're the main reason why the do-not-call list has no power.
Now, they're not that big, but there's not really anyone lobbying against them. At least, not in the ways it counts, through money and people actually in congress talking with congressmen day in day out.
Re:I don't get CAN-SPAM (Score:2)
It doesn't? It's worked darn well for me.
The only telemarketing calls I've gotten have been for two magazines I stopped subscribing to. One call for each, and that was the end of it, and if I'd forgotten to renew my subscription the calls would actually have been useful.
I wouldn't complain at *all* about a do-not-spam list with the same "no power."
Re:I don't get CAN-SPAM (Score:3, Interesting)
More wasted bandwidth = more bandwidth needed.
More bandwidth needed = more profits for bandwidth providers.
As for direct email campaigns, I believe they'd help Kerry more than Bush. Why? Because the incumbent (whether loved, hated, or somewhere in between) is well known, as are his positions. If a Democrat was in office, the Republicans would benefit more from direct email.
Double standards? (Score:5, Insightful)
On page one of the article:
And on page two:
If he ain't scared, why hide behind a false name?
My spamproofing (Score:5, Informative)
Re:My spamproofing (Score:5, Insightful)
p
Re:My spamproofing (Score:2, Informative)
Most false positives have come from weird mail clients that don't put me on to "To:" line. It's typically some friend doing a "mass mailing" to all his buddies. I don't recommend the ^To:" filter if you're worried about false positives.
The ipcheck/spamhaus stuff, however, blocks delivery completely which is indeed a different problem. But here it gets interesting.
Spammers
It's the mail you don't get that matters (Score:4, Insightful)
If businesses did what you did, most of them would go out-of-business.
False positives - a business tradeoff (Score:3, Interesting)
I host a mail server for 2 (small) businesses, both rely on their web site to win customers. Both sell products which require communication with the customer (usually through email).
The mail server gets about 6000+ emails per day. As of now:
- Spamhaus SBL blocked 1084 (16%)
- Spamhaus XBL blocked 2014 (30%)
- Spamassassin caught 2067 (31%)
- The virus scanner caught 105 (2%)
only 1337 (h
Re:My spamproofing (Score:2)
Re:My spamproofing (Score:2)
The same reason why Al-Qaida watches CNN and Fox News.
Saying CAN-SPAM causes spam seems like a stretch.. (Score:4, Interesting)
The article also tells how the CAN-SPAM Act, which legalises spamming, is turning the US into the spam haven of the world.
I think CANSPAM is an awful law. It overrides much better and stricter state laws, and it doesn't really do anything to reduce SPAM.
However, it seems like a stretch to say that CANSPAM is turing the U.S. into a SPAM haven. I think most spam recieved in the U.S. is tied to U.S. businesses, even if it's sent or bounced through servers abroad. Just because spam from US servers have increased doesn't mean CANSPAM is the cause - you can use logic like that to "prove" that pr0n is good for kids [techcentralstation.com].
I wouldn't be surprised if part of the reason for the increase is that there are more virus-laden compromised computers in the U.S. to relay spam off of.
Re:Saying CAN-SPAM causes spam seems like a stretc (Score:2)
CAN-SPAM seems, quite simply, to have been ineffective. It was a bad idea, just like everyone who had been involved in the spam problem for some time said.
Come to think of it, I haven't seen a spam that looked to be CAN-SPAM compliant. I suppose they are easy to filter and that I reject t
Re:Saying CAN-SPAM causes spam seems like a stretc (Score:2)
Banks are the benefactors of mortage spams (Score:4, Interesting)
They're driven to make money. (Score:2)
Which is the case with ALL spam. As long as the price of sending the spam is lower than the profit of selling the "product", we will have spam.
Re:They're driven to make money. (Score:2)
That is a sensitive response, but as far as I am concerned it would just take too much money, time and effort to educate every looser out there.
I'd rather the they-sent-me-unsolicited-information, i'll-send-them-unsolicited-information approach. This basically consists on poisoning their data base, with bogus realistic looking data! Try feeling in the
Re:They're driven to make money. (Score:2)
1.2.3. Profit (Score:3, Insightful)
"As long as it makes me money, I'll continue to do it."
That's the key issue here. As long as spam is profitable people will continue doing it no matter how illegal it is. When 1 in 19 AOL users stop clicking on spam, Mr Cunningham and his friends will go away for good. Personally I haven't received any spam whatsoever since I moved away from Hotmail a few years ago. My university email is as clean as a baby's but and my yahoo.se is very clean (1-2 a week). Most likely because my univeristy has a very competent IT staff.
The further development of filters and smarter users are, imo, the things that will make spam go away... in a few hundred years or so...
A day in the life of a spammer (Score:5, Funny)
8:35 AM: Morning stretches and exercise.
8:55 AM: Pray for forgiveness for being a subhuman piece of filth, hoping to save already-rotten soul from the deepest pits of Hell.
9:00 AM: Shower.
...etc.
Re:A day in the life of a spanner? (Score:3, Funny)
9.00AM: Get pulled out and made to remove some nuts from a 1950's Chevvy.
10.00AM: Get pulled out again and made to tighten same nuts.
10.30AM: Get put back in the toolbox along with all my cousins, as Ozzie has his coffee-break.
11.00AM: Get pullled out and made to remove the differential from an off-roader which went off-terrain.
12.00PM: Made to put differential back on off-roader, and used as a paper-weight as Ozzie goes for his lunch
Holy crap... (Score:4, Informative)
And they're sponsored by [specialham.com] our old friends, The Bulk Club [slashdot.org]. Can't we spread a rumour that Osama is actively funding spammers or something?
What really gets me... (Score:5, Funny)
1. I don't want a degree from a prestigious non-accredited university.
2. My sex life is well beyond being helped by Viagra, or anything else in pill form.
3. Outsourcing means I can't afford a mortgage (okay, actually I'm employed, but work with my joke).
Just quarantine the US. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Just quarantine the US. (Score:2)
Yeah. I can see the headlines
"Mass sacking of IT admins across Europe and Asia follows email havoc..."
As I always do when a spam story pops up... (Score:5, Interesting)
The second page I'd like to point you to is here [hillscapital.com]. It's a 'Lad Vampire' antispam page that also targets spamvertised websites, but in a different way. The page links to individual images on the sites and constantly reloads them without caching, thereby burning up the spammers' bandwidth and driving them out of business (or at least costing them some money and forcing them to sell their children on the black market). Be forewarned that the page has no help, no documentation, and *only* works in IE, so don't yell at me about that. The source code is available for that as well, so here's hoping someone can make it more usable in Moz, Opera, ThunderFireBunnyChicken, or whatever browser is your fave.
WeThe Spammer's Email Address (Score:2, Funny)
"Richard Cunningham" more than likely isn't his real name; he won't say one way or another. But that's the name that appears on the WHOIS record for Spamsoft.biz, a domain he owns.
Here is the WHOIS record [whois.net]
Email: ProMan@animail.net
Web: www.spamsoft.biz
Quickly! Slashdot his website! Send all your viagra, big tit/dick and Nigerian money to his email account!
Spam: born in the USA. Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
From an interesting article with some insights about the reason why most spam is US based:
http://www.compliancepipeline.com/28700163
"The United States is the origin of choice for spammers, said Alperovitch, because of the plentiful supply of cheap high-speed bandwidth. "Spammers need big pipes, and they don't want to pay much for it," he said.
That explains the low percentage of spam messages originating from overseas' IP addresses. The lack of cheap bandwidth outside the United States is stymieing spammers' attempts to scale up the volume of their mailings to U.S. sizes."
I'm working on some hostile spam filtering (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm currently working on a new filtering solution. The first step is SPF record checking. If the sender forged the address of a site that publishes an SPF record, I reject the mail. The second step is all mail now goes through postgrey. Postgrey is a greylist that tells the sender to try again in a while. That actually seems to work pretty well, though it does delay my mail by about an hour. The third step, which I'm still working on, performs two checks. It checks to see if the sender's on a whitelist and if he is, it lets him through. If he's not, it checks to see if the mail's encrypted to my personal GPG key. If it's not, the mail gets rejected (At the MTA, so I don't have to send a bounce message.) I can always eliminate the second step if the spammers ever figure out how to deal with that. I'll be changing the GPG key on a regular basis to keep the target moving.
It's a pretty extreme solution, but all of about 3 people in the world send me legitimate E-Mail and I was getting 200K+ of spam a day. With that S/N ratio, I may as well just turn my E-Mail server off. This is the next best thing.
Disposable E-mail addresses (Score:2, Informative)
Then, DON'T ever use your real e-mail address. Make a new DEA for every e-mail address you have to give out, and turn it off if it starts getting spam, or when you're done with it.
Also, use some common sense about where you place an e-mail address.I have to use a
Single Purpose Addresses (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.tla.org/papers/spa-ndss03.pdf [tla.org]
I use to hate spammers but not as much anymore (Score:3, Interesting)
After having been a victim of the jacked up job market, How is a man to survive? I can see why some of em do what they gotta do.
The original idea of cable TV was to be commerical free. We pay for cable TV just like we do for our internet connection. I consider TV commericals SPAM. I did not ask for it, but likewise they advertisers always go, "We have to make profit." Why is it that people put with cable commericals but not spam? Then there is the movie theaters. It use to be that if you went there, the previews start a few minutes before the movie time, and the movie starts on time. But today? commericals come first at the time the movie is suppose to start, then the previews, then the movie.
Spam is here to stay. It is NEVER going away. The day SPAM can be completed eliminated from the net, well, I certainly wouldn't be on it, cuz it must not be a free net. One of the pain of freedom is that those you do not like are also free to do the things you do not like for them to do.
We should battle SPAM the right way, not by banning it or attempting to. Suing the company for wrong advertisment (if they did.) Ordering from the company then returning the product. Credit card charge backs are in the average range of $20 per charge back for internet companies. Imagine if 1,000 people ordered then cancelled their orders. $20,000 in extra fees for the company selling the junk.
Re:I use to hate spammers but not as much anymore (Score:2)
And it doesn't stop there. The movies have product placements as well. When I saw "I, Robot" a while back, in the first 3 minutes of the movie, there were 3 product placements, FedEx and Nike being two I remember. And they were worked into the dialog, not just some part of the background.
I'd be interested to know how far back this practice goes, because I remember "Back to the Future" had a pretty blata
How to deal with this man. (Score:3, Interesting)
It amazes me just how ineffective our government can really be at times.
If everyone greylisted spam would die (Score:3, Interesting)
Now if everyone greylisted the spammers would be out of business. But people here, which should be technologically knowledgable, seem to just complain about spam. Implement greylisting on your servers along with spamassassin! You will not regret it.
Since doing this I have actually been able to get back to real work instead of worrying about spam.
Network traffic!! (Score:2, Informative)
Take snailmail junk mail - even though you throw it away anyway, the post office still charges for the postman to deliver it (and pay him) - if he didn't, then he, you and the post office would be a lot better off!
a mortgage is serious (Score:3, Insightful)
No thanks, I'll pass on that m0Rt~ga'gE offer, you shithead.
Who to block ? (Score:2)
maybe I should change my settings on my mailservers and block US address-space and open it up for china ?
maybe not
putting legitimate bulk mailers out of business? (Score:2)
What anti-spammers are trying to put legitimate bulk mailers out of business? Maybe some small time antis are doing that. The major anti-spam groups and lists are not. But some do try to put spammer harboring ISPs out of business, which can affect their other customers, so ma
Re:TDMA (Score:3, Informative)
And when the TDMA user doesn't use SPF or something to block forged envelopes, they spam the world with their "did you send me some email" replies. And the reply template is customizable - so every TDMA spammer is unique. Also, while using a temporary envelope address for their
Re:repeat? (Score:2)
What the hell kind of an attitude is that. You probably also say "I don't care who terrorists blow up, as long as it isn't ME."
The problem is -- it DOES affect you. In terms of lost business, lost communications, increased prices for internet services, loss of freedom. You're simply too short sighted and selfish to see it.
Re:repeat? (Score:2)
Oh no! Now we're getting spammed with news stories about spam!
Yet another content filter - move along (Score:3, Informative)
This is yet another content filter. The real solution to spam will prevent my servers and bandwidth from being overloaded by spam, rather than use even more of it to to accomplish keeping it out of my mailbox. The ultimate solution is to have spammers disconnected from the internet by their ISPs, or disconnect their ISPs if the ISP continue to help spammers steal and waste the resources I pay for. You say you don't have a mail server and don't need to be worried? How much is your ISP charging you? How