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However, there are always a certain percentage of readers who know about these forgeries, and the spammer will lose his account eventually anyways. Btw, there is even a even a web site in which you can paste your spam, and which automatically sends complaints to the correct places: Spamcop.

So, unless this forgery was done with the express purpose of annoying someone at IBM, don't make it into a criminal case; it's just business as usual.

I have a somewhat unique perspective on this, as I'm the main Abuse handler for Dreamhost - the web host for rinkworks.com. I mostly handle spam and the odd copyright violation...

The way I see it, what he COULD do is provide an opt-out list of some sort for sites that don't wish to be Dialectized. So, if SomeBigCorp.com doesn't like their site being munged, they can specifically request removal. You don't need to take the whole thing down, just make it fair to all involved. I personally think most people wouldn't mind at all.

You could have a basic MySQL database with domains that have opted out, or a flat-file or something. If the URL being parsed is in the list, the person using the service gets a notice that due to complaint the process can't continue.

SpamCop does something like this as well, for ISPs that don't want spam reports from their service (kind of lame, but...).

I guess the big trick is making sure that the person opting out is legit, but that's mostly an implementation and policy detail.

Anyhow, I hope Mr. Stoddard finds a way around this. It's a pretty nifty site, I think.

<PLUG TYPE="shameless">
Oddly enough, when I first saw the original story I skipped over it. As a web host, I think it's pretty cool that we were prone to the dreaded Slashdot Effect and didn't even notice. :>
<PLUG>

BTW: these comments are my own, not that of my employer. etc. etc...


- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)

Check out a sample report that SpamCop generates!


.- CitizenC (User Info)

Check out a sample report that SpamCop generates!


.- CitizenC (User Info)

SpamCop does a wonderful job of helping eliminate spam -- you just paste the headers and full body of any spam you recieve, and it chews through it, and reports the spam to the account's admin! It's VERY VERY cool! And free too.. check it out guys =)


.- CitizenC (User Info)

belgin and timothy are not alone in the fear of where this might lead, that's for sure... I hate spammers with a passion, but I'm not sure if I really want to start down the road this could take.

Anyway, I much perfer Julian's philosophy over at spamcop.net: "Protecting the internet community through technology, not legislation." If you're sick of spam and want a way to slap those responsible, then join up (or don't, there is a free service as well) and parse all your spamage. But please read the intro and the FAQ, we need to preserve the image that spamcop has in the minds of the abuse desks; it's only a tool being put in your hands, YOU are responsible for what you use it for.

and besides, an address like cabbey@spamcop.net, is bound to make a would be spammer queasy.... (note: happy spamcop user, not an admin.)

Spam Cop lets you paste your headers and text into a text window, automatically processes the headers, and gives you the option to send notification of the spamming to where it originated from. It's an easy way to fight spam, and I've personally helped get a couple of spam accounts killed with it.

Hotmail recently introduced their Bulk Mail feature quite recently.
The filter is simple: any email that doesn't have you in the To: or Cc: is moved to the Bulk Mail folder.
And since most spam use Bcc, you can rest assured some 99% of spam will never reach you.

I use to report spams to spamcop.net, but now with that feature, not anymore =)

I know how the service I'm using, SpamCop, makes money.

There's a service (of which I'm a satisfied customer) called SpamCop, that parses spam headers (including addresses hidden in JavaScript, decimal IP's, etc.) for you and makes it painless to report spam. Sites hosted by legitimate ISP's referred to in a spam to me have a life expectancy measurable in minutes from the time I receive the spam. There are both metered subscriptions and a free (with a 4 second JavaScript countdown nag) one available.

<humor>BTW, spamrecycle.com has an anti-spam petition . I hope it doesn't involve forwarding the petition to ten friends, who will forward it to ten more, and . . . </humor>

I used to get that Toner Spam from Benchmark Industries about once a week. The interesting part was that they didn't BCC the email list. This was nice because you could pretty easily figure out where they got the list from (obviously it was also bad because any of those other people on the list could use it for their own spamming purposes.)

Anyway, after reporting them to spamcop for months and filing complaints against them with the Better Business Bureau (both good resources for this) I decided to actually look at the email. At the bottom they included two different 1-800 numbers for customer support and to remove your name from their list.

Now, obviously I'm not going to tell them which email is active, because they'll just send me more, so I had my computer call them up over and over and over and over again leaving long messages (at their expenses, thank you 1-800) telling them to remove all email addresses from my school (everyone on their list was from my university). They were never there in person, always had a machine answer the phone, but I think they eventually got fed up with paying the 1-800 bill and eventually stopped sending me spam.

It was some work, but it eventually got rid of them. So remember, first use spamcop, second use BBB, third spam them back... always check for that 1-800.

I used to get that Toner Spam from Benchmark Industries about once a week. The interesting part was that they didn't BCC the email list. This was nice because you could pretty easily figure out where they got the list from (obviously it was also bad because any of those other people on the list could use it for their own spamming purposes.)

Anyway, after reporting them to spamcop for months and filing complaints against them with the Better Business Bureau (both good resources for this) I decided to actually look at the email. At the bottom they included two different 1-800 numbers for customer support and to remove your name from their list.

Now, obviously I'm not going to tell them which email is active, because they'll just send me more, so I had my computer call them up over and over and over and over again leaving long messages (at their expenses, thank you 1-800) telling them to remove all email addresses from my school (everyone on their list was from my university). They were never there in person, always had a machine answer the phone, but I think they eventually got fed up with paying the 1-800 bill and eventually stopped sending me spam.

It was some work, but it eventually got rid of them. So remember, first use spamcop, second use BBB, third spam them back... always check for that 1-800.

I normally use Hotmail through Outlook Express (no flames please; my filename extensions are not hidden). When I get a spammer, I just report her.

I send spam reports in about legit businesses just like I do with boiler room operations. I use Spamcop to filter my mail, and do the reporting. It makes it super easy to do.

Sometimes it is good to follow up your spam report to the CEO of the company, like I did with Insight - yep the mail order company. Their marketing drone decided that there were not enough people on the mailing list, so he resubscribed EVERYONE they had an email address for (even if you chose not to receive their junk mail when you purchased something from them). So, I wrote a letter to the CEO. The next morning he sent back a message and he was none too happy about it. Not sure what happened to the marketing guy, but from the tone of the CEO's message I would not be too surprised if the guy is now looking for another job.

Here's a great website for disecting those headers and automatically notifying abuse@spammer.com for you. It's called SpamCop, and certainly beats the 'ol nslookup and whois.

Try spamcop.net instead... it works very well and you're not selling your soul to one telemarketer to get rid of another.

-Earthling

It's a service that uses the headers to track the probable spammer and sends e-mail to relevant abuse address.

The DMA represents the interests of the marketers, not the consumers. As they say, "The DMA is the industry's leading trade association, dedicated to helping our members increase their effectiveness and profitability. . . . The DMA delivers the tools and services that members need to succeed! Whether it is the latest industry knowledge and techniques, education, legislative representation [i.e. lobbying] or targeted marketing opportunities - we've got it covered!" [emph. added]

For better protection against spam than the DMA email preference service (that no real spammer would ever look at), check out www.spamcop.net.

Speaking of useful links, this site is one of my favourites. It means I can cut and paste the header and body of a spam into a box and press a button. Hey presto, header automatically parsed, and an automatically generated complaint I can send to the abuse@ addresses of any dodgy-looking ISP's.

One tool that I have found to be quite effective against spammers, especially those with forged headers, is http://www.spamcop.net They are able to scan the spam's email headers, determine the origin of the spam, and then generate an email for the offending spammer's ISP administrator to deal with them. JM2C

We have also added a similiar statement to our website to help deter the spam that we receive at our domain. I haven't enforced it yet, and would like to hear of any more successes in getting the spammers to actually cough up the money that they have all cost us in time and effort. One particular method that I have found very effective and useful is the free Spamcop service. They will automatically track down the origin of the offending spam email and notify the appropriate administrative and abuse contacts of their ISP. I've had several responses from the ISPs stating that they have terminated the users account. Check it out at: http://www.spamcop.net

8. If you have to give out an email address for one-time use, tag it; /. asks, use
something like slashdot_yanky@hotmail.com or some such (or better yet, get your
own domain and mail server...quite handy!)

Or get a SpamCop account, run all your publically-known addresses through that and keep your private address secret. Spam ends up in a web-based in tray, from which you can automatically send complaints to relevant parties at the touch of a button.

I'm not connected with SpamCop's operators; I've been using it for several months now, and so far have seen only about 3 spams make it through (and those were soon dispatched via a URL in the headers). I highly recommend SpamCop.

Make the shopping button point to SpamCop :-)

>So you get Spam -- now what? It's usually
>difficult to trace
All you have to do is visit www.spamcop.net

I know that this sounds silly, but I don't know them, and I don't trust them. Remember the service -- can anybody back this up with facts? -- that popped up about a year ago? Report spam, get a $10 gift certificate at CDNow? As it turned out, the company running this program was a huge marketer and spammer.

So now I'm wary of sites like SpamCop. Anybody know anthing about the history of it, or the person that runs it, Julian Haight?

To be honest, from what I've seen, it looks trustworthy. But you know: once bitten, twice shy.

BAntiSpammerFH motto: "Why hide from spam when you can go out and have the spammers killed?" :) (please don't be a fscking idiot about it, tho- forwarded lists of jokes are not commercial spam, they are some friend of yours being a luser. Spam goes to huge monster lists of addresses, it's not merely email you don't like.)

What do I do with it? http://spamcop.net/. I own airwindows.com, so the address I sign to my reports is postmaster@airwindows.com, which I think is a nice touch (yes, I do get that mail). I've killed sixteen spammer's accounts, and that's only the instances where I was told directly by the ISP that the account was killed.

I really _like_ knowing that I killed sixteen spammers' accounts through personal action (with much help from spamcop). If you spam me you are taking a definite risk. I'm not a safe dude to spam. >:)

Personally, I prefer Spamcop. There's something satisfying about cancelling accounts.

--

I'm well aware of that, but that's not really the point. I do it to try and help good ISPs punish spammers so that spamming becomes less profitable, and to try and thwart fraudulent fast-buck schemes (there are a lot of them out there). Also to get open relays closed to make it hard to spam anonymously. So I'm doing it for both selfish and altruistic reasons.

Reporting spam does make sense, especially when you're getting flooded by it to the point where it's hard to find real messages. Check out spamcop.net for an easy method and an FAQ.

...that nobody has mentioned SpamCop (http://spamcop.net) yet.

It is the single most effective trace-and-LART tool available.

I don't know if it has reduced my spam volume any, but it sure is fun to fire off those abuse messages.

(And no, I don't work for them, I am just a contented user of their free service.)

I have a Hotmail account that I use regularly. There's not a lot of spam traffic, fortunately, and this makes it possible for me to use SpamCop on all the spam to report each offender. I'm getting a couple of confirmed kills a week - it does give one a warm, fuzzy feeling to read an e-mail that contains the words "spammer", "account" and "terminated".

At least I would report all the spam, except for a problem that Hotmail is having with their mail servers. When Hotmail receives e-mail, about 30% to 40% of the time it does not attach "Received:" headers to the message. I have told them about the problem, and they report that it is under investigation.

Now all we need to do is get psi.com and aol.com added to the RBL....

As an aside, I think a good way of combatting the spam problem is for disposable dial-up accounts to have account limits placed on them. In the old days of timesharing, each user had restrictions on what they could do, such as disk quotas, print limits and so forth. If these "free" dial-up accounts had limits such as a maximum amount of data uploaded per hour, maximum e-mails per hour (enforced by monitoring received packets for SMTP traffic) and so forth, then there would be less of a spam problem. These limits could be removed after a month once the ISP received payment for the dial-up account.

A limit of twenty e-mails per day for new accounts would not be an onerous limit for the majority of people who are just getting started on the 'Net, and it would make such accounts unusable for the spammer.

--

My hotmail account has been getting about 10-30 spam mails a day for a while. Usually I will use spamcop.net to report offenders - but hotmail has allowed the spammers to send mails with no sender, no recipient - basically, no headers but the subject and a fake from line. No way block those has existed. Wonder if they will do something about that now ??

Get that Spammer with SpamCop!

I don't see why not. News messages are propagated by an ISP's news servers, and end up on other news servers. The spammer is still misusing the ISP's hardware, albeit the recipient list is probably smaller. The Usenet "community" is pretty good about finding spam messages in the higher groups-- cancel bots handle a good portion, and rogue cancellers catch some others. Most of the times I find that a spam message has already been canceled by the time I get to click on it. This only works if your news server supports cancels, though. A side note: If you do find spam and don't want to decode all the headers yourself, take the message (headers included) and paste it into SpamCop. They generate the emails to the appropriate abuse addresses, and even send them out to you if you register (it's free; I use a decoy hotmail account to do my spam reporting). Only you can help prevent spam.

Here's a better refinement of the "fake e-mail address" idea I mentioned earlier.

Instead of filling the spam lists with random "chaff" addresses, use this method to put "canary" e-mail addresses on to the spam lists instead. "Canary" e-mail addresses are designed to catch spams, and serve only to receive spam. Automated software attached to the "canary" can then filter spam based on what the "canary" receives. The canary idea is not new, of course.

A more evil idea would be to attach to the address of the "canary" some software (similar to that found on the web site spamcop.net) that traces the e-mail back to the spammer by examining the "Received:" headers. If done in real-time, one could potentially alert an ISP to a spammer's activity in time for them to disconnect a spammer while they were still sending spam.

The best part is that we use the spammers' own resources (collections of e-mail addresses) to fight spam.

---

The only SPAM I like: www.spam.com (The home page of the canned meat)

Customer account is toast, web page is no more, user bank account will be minus $500 from our clean-up fee, and the spammer is looking for his 50 Free Hours AOL cd.

We've recently tested the Orbital Anvil Bombardment System on this spammer. The results were promising. We had to hire the folks at http://www.asepsistechnology.com to clean up the mess.

... it's good to know that at least 60 people are doing the right things to fight spam. Keep on sending those complaints! I assure you, I (and most sysadmins) hate spammers as much as you do.

This user account has been terminated and charged $1,000 in accordance with our Terms and Conditions agreement.

Woohooh!

Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:

Try this one, too...
---
Put Hemos through English 101!

try
here

Try abuse@microsoft.com. Forward them the complete email with full headers. I know there is a live person living at that address. I don't know if they have the power to get you off, but they can at least point you in the right direction.

-=Julian=-
http://spamcop.net/

Technically, that's http://spamcop.net/

These guys do seem shady, but I gave them my address a few days ago, and have not received anything unwanted from them since (I also took the opurtunity to order over $100 worth of CDs, so I guess they're laughing all the way to the bank). I did have to negotiate a minefield of "opt me in" links, but they do seem to be basically on the right side of "the law", if a bit misleading in their stated goals.

I think it's such a marketing coup for them though. Clearly the whole recycling thing is BS - a way to attract people to their opt-in lists, and they have now been posted on slashdot and macintouch as well as CAUCE. I would never link to these guys.

I just wonder what will become of all the spam that people send them? When people submit spam to spamcop, I treat that info as confidential, and although I dispense it to the ISP involved, I first mask as much ID info from the header as I can, particularly the recipient's address. This site says they will make those spams available for R&D. How do they know the difference between a legit spam-fighter and someone who just wants to grab all the addresses found in the spam headers??

In general, I have found that organizations who are well-established like this marketing one are much better about removal, and opt-in management than other fly-by-night, "$20 for a whole CD of verified good email addresses!!!" types. They push the boundary as much as possible, but they generally do stay on the right side of it.

-=Julian=-
- SpamCop admin

Another really good one is http://www.spamcop.net

Actually, there's a great service that will sort through the headers for you, and notify the right abuse or postmaster address.

It's........Spam Cop.