Spam Archive opening FTP service December 4 209
Saint Aardvark writes "The FTP archives for spamarchive.org will be opening on December 4, according to this Wired article. But there already appear to be some archives available." I tried saving my spam for awhile just for giggles, but seeing that file grow to 100+ megs made me so angry I had to delete it. Currently getting ~200 spam every day, and now often they attach images so they are 100k+. Yay Internet!
I wonder (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I wonder (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I wonder (Score:2)
I have a filter that finds the spam, and replies to it (using a trash basket return email address) with the body saying something like "go away, no one wants this nor read this".
If the reply address is a bogus email address, then the ISP response of no valid email address is deleted. If I get one to the trash basket it is deleted.
Ok, sure it increases TCP traffic, but it sends it back to the source. If we ALL did this, then the senders of spam would get, well, spammed.
just wondering (Score:2, Insightful)
I get about 3 per day (3 too many!)
You always hear about these poor suckers getting 200 or so a day, but how many of us actrually have to put up with that much stuff? If I got that much, I'd just switch email accounts, cos I just wouldn't put up with it.
I'm not defending spam here, but I'm just kinda curious how much people actually do get on average.
Re:just wondering (Score:3, Informative)
No one should have to abandon an e-mail address because of unsolicited e-mail, especially (as in my case) if they've had their account for five years, and all of their friends and relatives know it...
Re:just wondering (Score:4, Insightful)
People with public e-mail addresses do. Try writing a few usenet articles and have your e-mail address on a web site and wait for the spam to emerge.
Thank God for SpamAssassin
Re:just wondering (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:just wondering (Score:2)
Still, I think I'm gonna set up ORBS and/or SPEWS on my server in the not-too-distant future, and maybe some firewall rules. I don't even want to admit those evil packets to the server.
Re:just wondering (Score:2, Informative)
Re:just wondering (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, it's nice that you don't need to. But, there are quite a few of us that do business on the 'net, who need to post an email address for potential customers to use to contact us. Yes, I could use a web form instead, but frankly, that's just a good way to cut down on your customer base. I *hate* it when that's the only way I can contact someone to ask a question. I figure I can't be the only one.
I use three RBLs, which average 150 blocks per day (high for the month was 326 in a single day). Spamassassin knocks out maybe 20 spam a day more. Two more per day make it through the filters to my inbox. Unfortunately, I can't just
Since I started composing this reply, spamassassin trapped two more spam messages, and one slimed it's way into my inbox.
Re:just wondering (Score:5, Insightful)
who actually gets loads of spam every day? I get about 3 per day (3 too many!). You always hear about these poor suckers getting 200 or so a day, but how many of us actrually have to put up with that much stuff?
According to my filter logs I'm currently getting between 100 and 150 spam messages a day, I'm currently using RBL and SpamAssassin to filter my inbox so I usually only see 2 or 3 a week out of this total. Its still annoying though,
Just because you don't get any spam, doesn't mean everybody else isn't geting any...
If I got that much, I'd just switch email accounts, cos I just wouldn't put up with it.
Some people just don't have that option, you can't change your work email address, I know I certainly can't change mine...
Al.Re:just wondering (Score:5, Informative)
Re:just wondering (Score:3, Insightful)
I typically get 20-30 per day. Often more than the useful email I get.
I am a firm beliver that if people really want to contact me I should not make it hard for them. I have had a few people who I did not know contact me that really should have contacted me. It doesn't happen often.
I'm also looking for a job, posting my resume with contact information uped the number of spams I get. At least the porn is outnumbered by other types of messages now, but that isn't saying much.
Re:just wondering (Verio=spam) (Score:3, Insightful)
I do. Let's check. This morning I have:
30 spams that are not directly addressed to me,
130 spams that are directly addressed to my Verio email address,
5 spams addressed directly to my personal address.
Hmmm so I think I know what the problem is.
Verio sold my email address to every spam-merchant in the world.
Re:just wondering (Verio=spam) (Score:2, Informative)
Re:just wondering (Score:2)
I can't say I've ever bothered to count, but I probably get 10 or so a day. I have a dozen or so domains that give my email address as the contact, my various email addresses are plastered over several longstanding websites, I've posted a few things on usenet and all my friends have had viruses that have emailed my address to every other computer on the planet, so I would expect to be a prime target for spam.
On the other hand, the addresses are hosted on our own (leased) machines, so I would be surprised (and liable to sue) if my ISP was selling my addresses to anyone.
I have noticed that customers using webmail, especially Hotmail, get huge quantities of spam, but this seems inevitable to me.
I'd say deleting spams takes me 30 seconds a day, top whack.
Re:just wondering (Score:2)
I went with the "assume Bogofilter is right" configuration. When a new email is determined to be spam, it is indexed by Bogofilter and dumped in the spam folder. If not, it indexes the msg as "non-spam" and dumps it in my inbox. I have to save the spam that got through to a new "isspam" folder and occasionally force Bogofilter to re-index messages in that folder as spam.
Re:just wondering (Score:3, Interesting)
Luckily my job is detecting spam (I'm a SpamAssassin developer too), so I'm actually quite happy to get my address harvested loads of times
But yes, I get lots of spam. About 100 a day. Not including mailing list subscriptions I get about 5 to 10 regular pieces of email a day. That's a hell of a ratio.
Re:just wondering (Score:2)
who actually gets loads of spam every day?
I got 34 so far today. All filtered, though, into my spam folder.
Re:just wondering (Score:2)
When SpamAssassin 2.5X arrives with it's baynesien filter I'll shove them through it. Hopefully it'll push the sucess rate high enough so that when I'm getting 200/day I won't be getting 20 missed a week
Re:just wondering (Score:2)
These days I no longer get any mails from open relays. From time to time I do see a spam mail, it mostly comes from someone abusing a proxy/cache server via the CONNECT method.
Who gets spam (Score:2, Insightful)
But in my case--and many people's--the main problem is that I am a public personality. I do things where there is good reason to disclose my email address to strangers (in my case, because I am a writer). A lot of those strangers write me for very legitimate reasons, but obviously once an email is made public you cannot keep it to only the good guys.
It doesn't apply so much to me personally, but a similar situation is where email addresses are listed in directories--company, organizations, and so on. In those cases also, you need to publish your email to let legitimate correspondence contact you.
I've always been a little puzzled by the (somewhat naive) folks who think to answer the spam problem by hiding their email from everywhere it might leak. There are various tricks for doing this, false addresses, complex usernames, different accounts, etc. That only really works for people--typically college kids or younger--who never need to DO anything in the world. For the rest of us, hiding an email address would be like hiding our snailmail address from business contacts, because we might get junk mail from releasing it.
Use this script to find out... (Score:2)
I ran the script a few minutes ago on a machine that I host for a friend (web counter service, her websites/etc - she's been on the net for many years with her own domain/etc)
Total Messages...: 14950
Clean Messages...: 6413
Spam Messages....: 8537
Spam Percentage..: 57 percent
57% of the email out of nearly 15,000 emails in
That is *ridiculous*
This is with SpamAssassin, Razor, Pyzor, and several RBL lists in
The spam still gets through. It sucks up bandwidth. It sucks up resources. It's really offensive sometimes. Spammers know there's no federal legislation in place to block them, so they go on their spammy ways.
Spammers are scum. They *do not care* that you don't want their spam.
Re:just wondering (Score:2, Informative)
Re:just wondering (Score:2)
sneakemail [sneakemail.com]
200 spam per day? (Score:3, Insightful)
Really, all you need to do is manage your address properly from the beginning, don't do obvious spam-lure tactics with it, use sneakemail/other aliasing and you're set.
Seriously ... in the last year, maybe 3 total spams have come to my main address. (They're all the same spam too. Something about skin care. Weird.)
Re:200 spam per day? (Score:2)
Having said that, I get ~10 spams a day to these bogus accounts per domain name -- not 100.
Re:200 spam per day? (Score:2)
If manage a domain, you will get one to your contact address (usually hostmaster@your.domain) and also sales@, webmaster@, and a few other garbage addresses.
That's why I block those accounts.
Re:200 spam per day? (Score:3, Interesting)
I know its a throwback to the days of yore, but those accounts are required to accept mail per RFC 2142 [ietf.org] (scroll down to #5). In this world of total non-compliance, lets offer a moment of silence in memory of how the Internet was *intended* to run.
Re:200 spam per day? (Score:2)
Easy
1. Put your email not encrypted on your web page (or on other web pages).
2. Type your email on every site where they offer you "free" downloads, pictures or jokes in your mailbox.
3. Use your main email in newsgroups.
4. Read or "preview" the spam messages while connected to the net with an email client that can read html, javascript and download pictures. That way, your email is activated and gets much more spammed (I tested this and I got 10 to 20 messages with an activated email and 1 to 4 with an unactivated one.)
5. Sell your email to advertisers who promise to send you interesting ads. In fact they just resell it ! I also tested this and you get
6. Use some crappy webmail like hotmail (hotmerde as I call it) where either they send your email or there are so many users that spammers can send messages to anything@hotmail.com
Other ideas ?
Sigh (Score:5, Funny)
It's a shame, because I'm pretty sure that ceaseless, unrelenting, brutal torture of known spammers would be equally effective, but is unfortunately illegal.
Re:Sigh (Score:2)
So which are you using? And what's wrong with them? I've tried both some custom filters using 'Bayesian' categorization and also used SpamAssassin. Both have proved *highly* effective? What is it you're doing wrong?
Re:Sigh (Score:2)
I haven't tried any of the Bayesian stuff (yet), but I imagine it'll have a similar hit-ratio.
The problem is that if your spam-filter blocks even ONE non-spam email, it's unacceptable.
As for the public DB of spam messages, I can't see it doing much if any good - all it will do is force spammers to completely personalize/randomize each mail they send out (move a bunch of words around, swap paragraphs, add nonsense tags everywhere), so no sort of quasi-CRC check or even fuzzy-algorithm'ed spam detector could recognize it.
I'm afraid the grandparent is right - whitelists are the only way to block as much spam as possible, while guaranteeing all valid emails get through.
(ps. I like the concept of having a daily, automatically generated .GIF file with some password in it that anyone wanting to get on your whitelist reads and types in - no need to have a "handshake" of sorts before they can send you email).
Re:Sigh (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, I just switched from my shell hoster's systemwide spam filter (no idea what it was, but it puts X-Spam-Warning in the header) to the Bogofilter Bayesian spam filter running only in my shell account. I planned ahead and saved up over 250 spam emails (and 590 non-spam) for its first day of training. After three weeks of catching 35 and missing about 4 spams a day, it *just* marked its first legit one as spam today -- HiltonHonors assumed I wanted HTML mail and never referenced my name after the To: line. Not that HTML mail is necessarily a trigger for everyone, but it is for me.
If your mail goes through a shell account somewhere along the way, I would definitely recommend trying it out. After using pine for so many years, I can visually scan hundreds of emails in my spam folder for known senders in less than a minute. Under a minute every few days is okay by me.
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Interesting)
As long as there's no M(ail)T(ransport)P(rotocol) which get rid of the overly S(implistic), without true authentication of the sender, we will get spam because email is public in the first place.
Maybe something like email cookies would be a first step in trying to establish a pseudo-authentication system.
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Funny)
A single word might not be enough. Maybe a few words might be best. Here are a few that for sure would never be in any spam message
"Want a smaller penis?"
"Gain 30 lbs NOW!"
"Work from home and make mediocre cash!"
"This is a pyramid scheme and you'd be a gullible fool for joining. Act now!"
"Hi, I'm the Prince of Nigeria, and I'm trying to screw you out of all your money."
Yeah, those should do it..
Re:Sigh (Score:2, Interesting)
The best filter for anybody who maintains a website would be a Bayesian filter, where the mails are analysed, with a database of words contained in spam and non-spam emails. This way, legitimate Nigerian money laundering offers would not be blocked out, while the pr0n stuff goes to /dev/null. I don't receive much email, and I would say that spam might only make up for 25-33% of all the mail I receive, so I can't yet report on the success I've been having with this method, but I am using Bogofilter, an opensource project. You can find it on SF.net [sourceforge.net]
Not so fast... (Score:2)
Re:Sigh (Score:2)
In the last 24 hours, ordb has caught 200 attempts to connect, spamhaus has caught one.
I suspect that by using algorithims, we can reduce our spam even further. If more ISPs were to impliment spam filtering - even as an option - to the same extent as ours, a lot less would get through. If we can get the response rate from spam to drop from a quarter of one percent to maybe a tenth of that, we may start to get close to a position where spam actually becomes uneconomic. It's only by achieving that that we'll see the current volume of spam reduced.
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been kicking around an idea to reduce the response rate, but don't know how to implement it properly (yet!). My idea is to setup what *APPEARS* to be an open relay. Spammer will try to send their garbage through it, but NOTHING will actually get delivered. That's gotta cut the response rate way down (to zero), plus saving a lot inboxes. If the response rate goes low enough, it becomes uneconomical to send spam and the spammers find a new line of work.
Anyone have any pointers for a Postfix installation?
Re:Sigh (Score:2)
You could certainly escalate the smoke and mirrors by allowing a low rate of messages from a certain IP through while killing a higher rate. But spammers would escalate right back by automating the system of sending test email to themselves.
Besides, the true industrial grade spammers simply find connectivity that accommodates their practices instead of relying on open relays.
On the client side, Bayesian works for me. Well past 99% accuracy classifying a wide variety of email (not just spam vs non-spam) and of the false classifications very few of those are false positives.
an idea (Score:2)
Another idea might be to protect spam utilities using the DMCA -- if you use it, you're not allowed to figure out how it works, and you're not allowed to circumvent its spam protection.
Thought I doubt either would work, it'd be ironic to use stupid laws for protection for a change.
Re:Sigh (Score:2)
I've personally had great success with bayesian filtering. With a training corpus of only about 1500 spams and 6000 good messages, not a single spam has made it through since running it. Fearing false positives, I'm doing all my filtering on the client. All procmail does is append a spamicity score to the message header, and the user can use that for filtering. Use of a spam folder will eliminate a totally blind false positive which would result from server side filtering. I have had a few false positives on order confirmations (which, considering that you would have already written down the order number and/or saved the html order result page, is probably spam anyway), but you're usually expecting these when they come, and can pick them out of the spam folder pretty readily.
All this brings up a very important benefit to this database - training bayesian filters. I only have 1500 spams. Bayesian filters get more accurate with respect to the size of their training corpi, effectively topping out at around 6000 messages, so being able to download a couple thousand spams from this ftp site would greatly help me train my filter.
Re:Sigh (Score:3, Informative)
In the long run, I think you're right, but thank the stars for spamassassin [taint.org] in the meantime! When I first installed it, about a year ago I think, it was blocking about 8000 message/month just to me! I checked earlier today for other reasons, and found it's grown to 13,000 blocked messages in the last month adding up to 116Meg. It's just f***ing insane. Unfortunately, the 4% it lets through adds up to over 500 messages in the last month, and it did manage to block 3 real messages, but it's still worth it...
Re:Sigh (Score:2)
I've determined that I have to whitelist my universities domain and my work domain since I cannot risk loosing an email from either - however many spammers now forge the from address so as to appear spamming from your own domain.
Best of... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Best of... (Score:5, Funny)
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How about subscriptions? (Score:5, Funny)
So ...? (Score:2)
Awww. CmdrTaco [slashdot.org] has [slashdot.org] finally [slashdot.org] installed [slashdot.org] a filter [slashdot.org].
First they get rid of Jon Katz, now CmdrTaco is filtering his emails - as soon as Timothy starts checking for dupes we'll have to start finding new ways to take the piss :o)
Best way to detect spam messages (Score:2)
The email to the fake account can be discarded in any case, so you don't get more junk email this way.
Only 200? (Score:4, Interesting)
Somedays, ALL I get done is dealing with spam.
Too bad we cant bill them back for my salary, and lost network resources, like we can do for un-requested faxes.
And arrest them for sending porn with out verifying a person's age. Around here, you would be either fined ( bookstore ) or arrested ( individual ) for trying such a stunt in 'real life'.
It doesn't take that much time (Score:4, Informative)
For corporate-wide spam blocking, sendmail has some great spam filtering features via DNS Black Lists (dnsbl). I use spamhaus.org and relays.osirusoft.com.
Add these lines to your sendmail.mc:
FEATURE(dnsbl, `sbl.spamhaus.org', `"550 Mail from " $&{client_addr} " rejected, see http://www.spamhaus.org/"')dnl
FEATURE(dnsbl, `relays.osirusoft.com', `"550 Mail from " $&{client_addr} " rejected, see http://relays.osirusoft.com"')dnl
There goes 90+% of the problem. After that, spamassassin handles the 10% that trickles through quite nicely.
If you don't use sendmail, all other modern mail relays can handle this problem in similar ways.
Re:It doesn't take that much time (Score:2)
And it's not EVERY day i spend huge amounts.. but somedays it gets way out of hand. normally its much less.
Though personally i feel 1 minute is too much time.. it should not even be coming in the first place.
Re:It doesn't take that much time (Score:2)
The time and money you invest in the sort term will be repaid many times over in the long term. Spammers will send less successful spam, which is a win for all of us. You & your users will be much happier, too.
osirusoft.com can be overzealous (Score:4, Informative)
what osirusoft does?
I fint it unfortunate that so many
administrators seem to put in osirusoft
as a blacklist without examing what it
does. Osirusoft combines the blackhole
listing of many many other blackhole
listings, one of which is unfortunately,
SPEWS. SPEWS in my opinion is
overzealous with blacklisting and it
is unfortunate that osirusoft includes
them in its list. To read more about
the problem, read this posting
here [216.239.37.100]
here is a relavent quote...
ii. a grep on osirusoft - which yields about 1/2 the messages -
but.. when there's a false positive, there's a really good chance that
it's in this group - and of this class of false positives, there's a close
to 100% liklihood that it's SPEWS that's given the false positive
You can alos check out antispews [antispews.org].
Re:osirusoft.com can be overzealous (Score:2)
Re:osirusoft.com can be overzealous (Score:2)
osirusoft is combining many many rbl. The problem I have with it is osirusoft just seems to include every rbl they can get a hold of. SPEWS specifically seems to generate a lot of false positives. This seems to be because they will block entire netblocks, the administrators can not be contacted, the list is closed, and efforts to try an contact the administrators of the list are often futile as exemplified here [mandrakesecure.net] It would seem to me that just using one or two "quality" rbl would be just as effective.
Here are some relevant quotes from people posting about their SPEWS blacklisting problems.
"Hi, we are a law firm that bought from UUnet and it seems the last owners
of this IP block were spammer. We're not, can you please remove us."
"Every heard of due diligence? Thats what you get for buying from UUNet,
you'll get unlisted when they clean up all their spammers."
"Hi, we bought from some people who turned out to have a problem with
hosting some spammers, but we're locked into a 3 year contract. We're a
small shop without the money for lawyers to get out of it. We're not
spammers, could you please unblock this one piece of IP which is just us."
"Sorry, you have to change providers. They breached your contract by
failing to provide full internet access (since people are filtering them
based on our listing)"
Re:osirusoft.com can be overzealous (Score:2)
SPEWS specifically seems to generate a lot of false positives. This seems to be because they will block entire netblocks, the administrators can not be contacted, the list is closed, and efforts to try an contact the administrators of the list are often futile as exemplified here
Yeah, but that's what I want for spamassassin. Statistically, as long as more than 50% of the email coming from IPs in SPEWS is spam, it should have a + weight in spamassassin. If I wanted to get fancy I could put each of the separate blacklists into spamassassin individually, and weight them accordingly. Then maybe SPEWS would only get +1 instead of being mixed in with a bunch of others and getting +2. But the way I have things set now already gives me no false positives and a high kill %. Maybe it's time for some DNS based whitelists. Then I can give them negative weights in spamassassin.
Re:osirusoft.com can be overzealous (Score:2)
SPEWS not in the first place a list to block spammers, but to block spamfriendly ISP's. Given that goal, they're not overzealous at all. It's true this regularly results in collateral damage, but since this is the only way "regular" people can do something against spam-supporting ISP's, the users of SPEWS accept these consequences.
Re:osirusoft.com can be overzealous (Score:2)
It is difficult to acertain what the majority of users of SPEWS know, but from searching through google it seems to my (albiet limited) knowledge that the users do no know the consequences.
Part of the problem seems to be administrators subscribe to osirusoft without the knowledge of how all the various blacklists aggregated under osirusoft work. osirusoft does not state boldly and in plain language how SPEWS works.
SPEWS has many class C's blocked when sometimes the spammer was only operating in a subnet of the class C. It does not even appear that their rational of blocking an ISP for hosting a spammer is quite valid, because they do not block all of the IP ranges of the ISP, they just block on a class C, by class C basis. I suspect the reason for this is because it is easy to block a class C, but not a subnet (because of the way decimal notation of IP ranges works)
It just does not seem like these mail administrators using osirusoft know that SPEWS is blocking class C's with the goal being that if enough innocent people are affected, then those innocent people will complain and get the spammer banned. Their tool for accomplishing this is blocking class C's
Re:osirusoft.com can be overzealous (Score:2)
I think the reason that osirusoft.com doesn't state explicitely how SPEWS works, is that it contains so many different blocking lists that explaining how each individual one works would be a lot of work. They do link to all the blocking lists they use though, where you can get this information. Using the information without informing yourself first is asking for trouble imho.
Re:osirusoft.com can be overzealous (Score:2)
I do believe that is the heart of the matter. I do not believe that many administrators are going through the effort of checking each and every rbl that is listed in osirusoft.
I believe that if many of these administrators knew that SPEWS policy was to escalate cases to cover entire class C ranges (whether or not all the subnets are spammers or not such as this case [zdnet.co.uk]) thereby doing what is termed collateral damage... many of those administrators would not be subscribed to osirusoft (due to SPEWS)
Re:It doesn't take that much time (Score:2)
It is massively irresponsible of an ISP to decide what email their users get. SPEWS blocks a lot of non-SPAM email through their policy of targeting ISP's, not individual spammers, meaning your customers _could_ miss out on important email.
I'm not saying I have anything against SPEWS - they make it perfectly clear on their site that they hold an opinion and if you wish to share their opinion that's up to you; but I do have a problem with sysops that decide to go and implement this kind of blocking off their own backs without proper consultation.
Cheers,
PHB.
Re:Only 200? (Score:2)
I just got an idea, it might involve a fine/arrest/punishment on the person who does it. But it could be the push for starting a conversation in the media and on important news channels:
Start printing porn spam that you get and send it in an envelope to your senator/congressman or whoever is represententing you and send one to the media. It would be one way to try to get them to understand the problem. Put the porn letter in an envelope and put the envlope in a new envelope with an attachment that says that it could have been a child that opened the letter (warnt them that the envelope inside contains 21+ material). One would also need to state that this is going on daily on the internet and that children also receive these kind of SPAM e-mails.
It could also backfire and make them demand more control over the internet...
Re:Only 200? (Score:2)
what do you mean backfire?
more control is exactly what you're asking for.
Re:Only 200? (Score:2)
And arrest them for sending porn with out verifying a person's age. Around here, you would be either fined ( bookstore ) or arrested ( individual ) for trying such a stunt in 'real life'.
Hmm, interesting problem: If you come to Australia, and break a law, and then go back to America, we can requst to get you extradited to Australia, right (not that the American government would comply)?
Similarly, if Australia passes a law banning some forms of spam (as we saw earlier, we would have to kick out Loser Alston first), and you send spam, using *my* resources, break *our* laws, physically in *our* country (the electrons are passing through my server that is under my desk), then can we not request extradition?
Bring back hanging, I say.
Re:Only 200? (Score:2)
Re:Only 200? (Score:2)
I do block my spam from hitting my personal desktop, however i keep track of the sheer # that i get, just for reference.
Even if i dont SEE them they are still a network resource drain.
Re:Only 200? (Score:2)
I would like to see how you come up with taht figure however, as that is WAY too low.
Do they need donations? (Score:2, Funny)
Is this to provide a amusement to future anthropologists and social historians?
Spammers attack archives with copyright threats (Score:5, Interesting)
Rich.
Re:Spammers attack archives with copyright threats (Score:2)
No dupe.. follow up (Score:2)
Erm (Score:2, Funny)
Nope thats actualy whats known as a Pr0n mailing list
Allready been done (Score:5, Funny)
What about examples of legit mail? (Score:4, Informative)
Of course it could be useful for evaluating classifiers built using smaller corpora.
despammed.com (Score:2, Informative)
Now does this make EVERY email you receive spam?
Regardless, it works. I have never received spam through their service.
Smarter Spammers (Score:3, Interesting)
Foreign spam?? (Score:3, Interesting)
Almost all of my spam is from taiwan or china and sadly enough yahoo mail doesn't provide any good way to filter this out when the messages have fake headers. If I could simply filter on something in the Received path then it would help, but all they allow you to do is the From address as far as where the message came from.
Re:Foreign spam?? (Score:3, Interesting)
I was going to post my
charset="?(big5|ks_c_5601-1987|iso-2022-jp|euc-
instead.
More to the point, you never want to filter based on Received: headers, unless you can safely say that e.g. *no-one* in Korea is ever going to want to contact you. Otherwise, grab the IP# listings from IANA and see what netblocks are assigned to APNIC and score them down in your mail processing rules.
For what it's worth, I've had a lot of success using Bayesian filters to identify dodgy-charset mails - both ifile and bogofilter do a great job.
Yahoo (Score:2)
I did like it when I was using unix based mail and could procmail everything. *sigh*
When/if I get a newsystem maybe I'll leave my current one up as a permanent dedicated mail client.
spam algorithm (Score:2, Insightful)
- wget spamarchive
- grep emailaddresses spamarchive
- mail emailaddresses
- ???
You know the rest...They should ... [Re:spam algorithm] (Score:2)
A message in the archive would have the following structure
Where I have replaced every name before a @ with SSS-PRIVATE. What do you think ?
I wouldn't give my spam archive if my emails privacy was not protected.
Note this message is not a spam.
Free mp3 storage (Score:3, Funny)
Spam is Worse Than Most (Even Here) Think (Score:5, Interesting)
> giggles, but seeing that file grow to 100+ megs
Geez... Tell me about it.
I started collecting spam at the start of the
year. Gzipped and in mbox format, it uses 435+
meg. On November 27 alone, my spam catcher caught
9,040 pieces (and missed dozens more) for 46 meg
of spam.
This just is my tiny server. My mind boggles at
the volume of spam traveling the internet on a
daily basis. I don't think most people understand
the true magnitude of the problem.
By the way, more than a week ago I offered my
spam archive to the Spam Archive. They have yet
to get back with me. I suspect they are
overwhelmed by the response. They say they are
receiving over 5,000 messages a day. I'm offering
to send them 8k to 10k a day. If everyone who saw
the Slashdot article forwards them spam, they
will be underwater in a matter of weeks.
So, folks, update your procmail scripts and
whatnot to bouce your spam to spamarchive.org
before deleteing.
If only Spam Archive would track contributions.
I think it would be fun to compete to see who
gets the most spam.
InitZero
Gotta give Rob credit on this.... (Score:2)
But I must give Rob credit on this - I've emailed him a couple of times about problems on
Would that more admins were as responsive.
Criticize
Criticize
Criticize
Getting good science done (Score:2)
What should be done: Make spam sandwiches (Score:2, Offtopic)
Just another use for spam (jaufs)
the reply-to opt-out option (Score:2)
This story [cauce.org] is about someone who tried a little experiment: she wanted to see if the "click here to unsubscribe" link in most spams REALLY worked. So she tried the link and got INUNDATED with MORE spam.
Anyone have experience with this? A friend of mine agrees--she says that hitting the "Unsubscribe" link just verifies that your address is in fact a real and active one.
I always thought that was bullshit, because spammers don't seem to care whether addresses work or not (see The Story of Nadine [spamresource.com]. Any comments?
--Theresa
Re:I don't by any means (Score:4, Informative)
dave
Re:I don't by any means (Score:2)
SpamAssassin is rule based and doesn't as yet use this new, dubios, spamarchive. It can use Vipul's Razor, however, as well as SPEWS, SpamCop, etc.
But, err, SpamAssassin also uses Vipul's Razor to filter inbound mail if you ask it to...!?
Al.Re:I don't by any means (Score:2)
dave
Re:Isn't this a dup as well ? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Yay Internet ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, some people ask for it by using their personal email account for signing up on sites, posting on usenet etc. Use an email account for these purposes, and the personal email account for friends and family. I don't receive any spam on my personal email account.
Re:Yay Internet ? (Score:5, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Blame the Victim (Score:2)
It was a figure of speech.
Don't you even resent the fact that spammers have made it impossible to post on Usenet with a legitimate e-mail address?
Of course I'm annoyed by it, but just like crime and terrorism, you have to adapt and try to avoid it. You wouldn't park your brand new car in a crime-infested neighborhood, right? You park it where you think it might be safe to park it.
Doesn't it piss you off that you have to be paranoid if some less-computer-savvy friend tells some web site to mail an article to you or sends you an online greeting card?
Maybe you should inform them about the risks or they need to learn it the hard way by getting you pissed.
Don't you get annoyed that every e-mail address that you post, no matter for what reason, get spammed?
That's why you shouldn't post with your private address, but with an address that you don't care much about.
Blame the criminals, not the victims.
Spammers won't go away, so you better start adapting your life on the net to avoid them. Sometimes you have to blame yourself, because after all... you put yourself in that situation.
Re: (Score:2)
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