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SpamRecycle.com Prosecutes Spammers
relyt writes "If you get spam, check out Spam Recycle. Forward them your spam, and they will prosecute the spammers for you, giving you time to do other things. It is also is supported by CAUCE! Send them your spam, and their trained monkeys will poke it, prod it, and kill it. " Somehow I'm skeptical, but hey, I get spammed every 48 hours to buy toner and I don't even own a printer. Sure would be nice if it would stop ;)
http://www.brightmail.com is an excellent way to reduce the amount of spam that you recieve. They act as a gateway -- you set your mailserver to "mail.brightmail.com", your login to user%host.com (note the % and not an @), leave the pass the same, and check your e-mail.
I've been using their service (it's free) for around a year, and the amount of spam that actually reaches my inbox has been reduced to pretty much zero! Check them out; no more spam =)
.- CitizenC (User Info)
CAUCE support has come to mean about as much as a TRUSTe banner. When you have an anti-spam group endorsing such obnoxious, unresponsive and lying spammers as FloNetwork, you know not to trust (no pun intended) it too much.
Sadly, it seems that just like the maintainers of the RBL, CAUCE doesn't have the cojones to bring the fight to the larger corporate spammers. Sure, taking on the Sanford Wallaces of the world was commendable, but this isn't 1997. The internet has evolved and we are now faced with entities vastly more insidious than some entrepreneur in a Miami basement. And when major abusers such as FloNetwork client buy.com (I hope y'all liked their Spring spam run, especially those who never signed up for their opt in list) keep spamming without any response from CAUCE and other likeminded groups, you know time has come to reconsider who the "good guys" really are.
It's illegal under federal law (Title 47, Sec. 223:
... makes or causes the telephone of another repeatedly or continuously to ring, with intent to harass any person at the called number; or ... makes repeated telephone calls or repeatedly initiates communication with a telecommunications device, during which conversation or communication ensues, solely to harass any person at the called number or who receives the communication ... shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both."
"Whoever
This was passed in response to people war-dialing Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition 800 numbers. And don't believe you're protected by caller ID: 800 numbers are equipped with ANI (Automatic Number Identification), which gives the person you just called your name, telephone number, <b>and street address</b>. This is for the convenience of the retail operators of most 800 numbers (i.e. the people paying for the service), and is <b>not</b> blocked by whatever Caller ID service you're using.
If you war-dial, they not only have the right to sue you, they know exactly where to deliver the subpoena.
There's nothing illegal about each person getting a piece of spam dialing that 800 number, though. The only problem is the risk of giving up your home address for the purposes of junk mail or telemarketing.
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
EHI (CHOOSEYOURMAIL-DOM)
162 North Franklin
Chicago, IL 60606
Domain Name: CHOOSEYOURMAIL.COM
Administrative Contact:
Oxman, Ian (IO318) Ian.Oxman@CHOOSEYOURMAIL.COM
CHOOSEYOURMAIL.COM
162 N. Franklin
Chicago , IL 60606
800-767-6606 (FAX) 312-236-4092
Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
Danner, Jae (JD10231) jdanner@IBLI.COM
International Business List
162 North Franklin St.
Chicago , IL 60606
312.236.0350 (FAX) 312.236.4092
Billing Contact:
Weiler, Sandy (SW6900) sweiler@IBLI.COM
IBL
162 North Franklin
Chicago , IL 60606
312-236-0350 (FAX) 312-236-4092
[ac@localhost /]$ whois ibli.com
162 North Franklin Street
Chicago, IL 60606
US
Domain Name: IBLI.COM
Administrative Contact:
Walters, Gary (GW4941) jdanner@IBLI.COM
International Business List
162 North Franklin St.
Chicago , IL 60606
312.236.0350 (FAX) 312.236.4092
Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
Danner, Jae (JD10231) jdanner@IBLI.COM
International Business List
162 North Franklin St.
Chicago , IL 60606
312.236.0350 (FAX) 312.236.4092
Billing Contact:
Accounts Payable (AP6696-ORG) sweiler@IBLI.COM
International Business Lists
162 North Franklin Street
Chicago , IL 60606
US
(312) 236-0350
Fax- (312) 236-4092
Wow what an amazing coincidence two domain, one for spaming another for killing spam same address, same phone, same fax. Gee, I wonder how they make their money!
It's a shame that more network administrators don't make use of Sendmail's built-in mechanisms that deny forwarding of SMTP requests by default.
Simply stated, if you are mysite.org your mail daemon will not accept mail destined for someothersite.org from spammaster.com. You can use the M4 macro technique to create the sendmail.cf file.
Mechanisms for precise tuning include:
relay_hosts_only - Forces list of each host in domain.
relay_entire_domain - Setting this feature allows relaying of all hosts within your domain.
access_db - This enables the hash database /etc/mail/access to enable or disable access from individual domains.
relay_hosts_only - enabled by default.
blacklist_recipients - If set, this feature looks up recipients as well as senders in the access database.
accept_unqualified_senders - Normally, sendmail will not accept mail from a sender without a domain attached.
accept_unresolvable_domains - Normally, sendmail will refuse to accept mail that has a return address with a domain that cannot be resolved using regular host lookup.
relay_based_on_MX - Setting this feature permits relaying for any domain that is directed to your host.
So, sendmail is quite flexible, and will not inconvenience your users. Additionally, your access list is based on a database that you define. `;^)
Have a look at my database driven web site.
No, spam does not present free speech issues. I am as ardent a free-speech advocate as anyone, but it is well established that a "No Soliciting" sign is not a violation of free speech, and that disregarding such a sign is actionable -- even by constitutionally protected groups, such as a religion.
1. Not a public forum
My e-mailbox is not a public space by virtue of connecting to the internet, any more than my driveway or front door are, by virtue of being accessible by public roads. Or even my USPS mailbox -- "[A] letterbox, once designated an 'authorized depository', does not at the same time undergo a transformation into a 'public forum' of some limited nature to which the First Amendment guarantees access to all comers." Justice Rehnquist in U.S. Postal Service v. Council of Greenburgh, 453 U.S. 114 (1981) (skip down to Greenburgh)
2. The paper 'junk mail' analogy demolished
So how does paper 'junk mail' survive? Partly though lots of expensive lobbying, and partly through a special right granted to the USPS, whereby they have quasi-ownership of my mailbox. (The US is one of the few countries to have a "Statutory Mail Box Restriction") The USPS can even prosecute my neighbors for leaving a note in my mailbox that could have been mailed (18 U.S.C. 1725) even if I, as the owner of the mailbox permit and even welcome the hand-delivery. ("Greenburgh" and other cases) However, the USPS cannot 'choose' to deny delivery of "objectionable" bulk mail, per cases like Bol ger v. Youngs Drugs Prods. (1983) (though Judge Brandeis ruled they could 'choose' to refuse to deliver certain political newspapers in Milwaukee Social Democratic Pub. Co. v. Burleson, 255 U.S. 407 (1921) So much for freedom of the press)
However, to bring this back to 'spam', I as a private recipient can ban junk mail from my mailbox, by filing a form with the USPS. This has been upheld by the Supreme Court, despite the First Amendment arguments by the Direct Marketing Assoc. The whole DMA "free speech" argument for spam is based on a premise that has long been defeated for snail mail
3. Abuse of 'Opt-out' is a crime, and should be an additional charge
Finally, even if Federal Law requires an opt-out address, any savvy user knows that much of the spam on the Internet at large contains fraudulent opt-out options. Not only would 'opting out' put you at risk for 'harvesting' (and hence more spam), but most spammers are fly-by-night operators who are long gone by the time you hit 'reply'. In fact, a recent article investigated and found that the bulk of spam reaches dead addresses even for those foolish enough to accept the offer being made.
In short, such spam is useless to everyone, the sender, the potential customer, and the millions of 'innocent victims'. Most users never learn this, because they are conditioned to ignore the opt-out, after a few 'harvesting' opt-outs flood their e-mail with even more spam. Here one abuse (harvesting) creates a hospitable environment that supports another (fake opt-out), a cycle that repeats in many ways throughout the spam 'industry'.
If your workplace puts a fake (or placebo) certificate where the elevator inspection card belongs, is that not a crime even more serious than failure to have a timely inspection (the former is willful criminal intent, the latter may be an accident)? If a con artist is caught in the act of trying to cheat a citizen, is it just 'free speech' until they actually walk off with the cash? Similarly, a 'fake opt-out' should a crime separate from 'failure to comply with spam regs'.
As of April 19, 2000 at least 18 states had passed or were working on legislation to restrict or regulate spam. There are, of course, serious jurisdictional issues.
_____________
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
There are several simple arguments against spam.
First, spam is a theft of service for the recipient. You are the one paying for your e-mail address, you are the one whose time is taken up deleting/sorting the spam, you are the one whose ISP fees go up if they have to buy more disk space or bandwidth to deal with all the spam they get for all their customers. This is a cost borne by the consumer, in other words, not the advertiser.
Second, spam is almost always a violation of an Acceptable Use Policy for the spammer's ISP. ISPs don't like dealing with spam any more than recipients, especially because the spammer is more than likely using a throwaway account and will not be a continuing customer. This single short-time customer might be the source of 75% of the administrative work for the ISP during this period.
Third, spammers rarely use their own paid-for accounts, but find an open SMTP relay server to send their mail through. When they do this, there are two effects: theft of service and denial of service. The theft occurs because they have no contractual relationship with the manager of the relay server, yet they make the relay do all the work (expanding a CC list to hundreds of destination servers, for example), stealing the bandwidth, server disk space, server uptime, sysadmin labor, and other resources of the hapless victim. Second, the bandwidth and disk space taken up by the spammer are denied to the server owner, and if the server crashes under the weight of spam, the server owner's people have no mail server to use. Hence, theft of service AND denial of service.
While some people use "spam" generically to account for all kinds of unwanted e-mail, technically it refers first of all to unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail.
The kinds of solicited mail you speak of (forgetting to uncheck that "notify me of new products" box, for instance) are easily demonstrated by legitimate operations (who probably have to do it periodically). This kind of harassment is another nasty denial-of-service secondary effect of spammers: upstanding customers get raked over the coals for no good reason. Anyway, anybody who gets that kind of mail deserves it. But a legitimate bulk e-mail is also easy to unsubscribe from.
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
If junk email offered useful services with legitimate terms, I wouldn't mind it so much.
..." (They hope that the magic word 'opt-in' will get me off their backs.)
I throw out most of my junk postal email, but every now and then I get good coupons for pizza or free samples of interesting stuff, and the rest of my junk postal email is relatively innocent and irrelevant to me, so I don't have much of a problem with the amount of junk postal email I get. (I'll make an exception for the junk mail that tries to look more important than it really is, such as magazine subscription ads that look like invoices, or credit-card applications that try to look like they've annotated by hand or that come with faux newspaper clippings. And every time my bank sends me a letter stamped 'Important: Account Information Enclosed,' I know to ignore it.)
But I have two serious problems with junk email:
(1) I have NEVER received junk email that's even remotely useful to me; moreover, I don't think I've ever gotten any junk email that even looks legitimate. All of it looks like too-good-to-be-true deals by fly-by-night companies that will be all to glad to take your money and skip town overnight with it. The services themselves are even shady -- the majority of my junk email is for things like "get your neighbor's credit history!" or "buy now and get a list of free XXX web site passwords!" or "buy this list of email addresses for advertising; it's been pre-screened!" or "I tried this pyramid scheme, and it REALLY WORKS!"
(2) What's worse, the spammers lie blatantly about the nature of their spam. For example:
"Hey Dave, here's more info about that great real-estate program I was telling you about last night! Say hi to Margaret for me!" (Making it look like I'm the accidental beneficiary of some choice information.)
"This email is NOT SPAM. You are receiving this email because you have contacted us or one of our subsidiary companies in the past." (I get this sort of spam sent to the email address in my InterNIC domain record, which I've never actually used to send anything.)
"You are on our OPT-IN marketing list. If you would like to be removed, please opt into the removal process by sending your email address to
"Make money fast! This is NOT a pyramid scheme!" (That's the best tipoff that it is.)
"A prime-time television special tried our multi-level marketing scheme, and not only did it bring them sixty thousand dollars in two days, but they also discovered that there are absolutely no laws against it!" (Note that they never mention what TV show they're talking about.)
All in all, it's not the amount of spam that bothers me so much (although I would like to get rid of it entirely, and I support CAUCE). It's the shady, thieving nature of the stuff that really irks me. For every million spam emails that these crooks send out, they're going to find at least a few dozen people who really believe that they can earn $50,000 a month by stuffing envelopes at home, and these people will gladly kiss $70 from their own pockets goodbye.
Why would I want to stop those informative e-mails? Just yesterday I was informed that I may have already won a free cruise. And another message (which assured me it was not a pyramid scheme by the way) made me aware of the fact that I could easily make $50000 a month IN MY OWN HOME! I have also been made aware of the fact that there are lots of hot teenage women who would love to be with me. I mean honestly...this so called spam is the only hope I had left. I thought I was a luckless geek making $8.00 an hour who hates his job and can't wait to graduate from college just to get a boring also underpaying job and I would probably never get to go on a cruise. Just some thoughts.
My Home: Apartment6
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.
--
RumorsDaily
I think the most basic test you can apply as to whether spam should be allowed is this: what would happen if everyone did it?
There must be millions of businesses with email access and if they all spammed a million addresses once per week, the net would grind to a halt.
No-one would be able to use email because rather than just looking through a few dozen spams each day, we'd have to sort genuine emails from thousands of messages.
Spamming is an antisocial act and should be outlawed. And I don't think any free speech ideal should be attached to it either; people should have the right to free speech, but I should have the right not to listen.
Although I suppose you're just a troll.
This company does not prosecute your spam, they only send it to your state representative. They also have an extensive list of spam that they want to to sign up to receive!!!
A (major, I'm guessing) partner in this is Choose Your Mail . com, which let you decide what spam to get. Yeah right...