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Mega-ISPs And Spam Support
WH writes: "Over at CNET there's an article about how PSINet and other huge ISPs have been secretly signing deals to provide spammers with internet connections." The other one I've seen is AT&T signing a contract with someone -- there were restrictions, but it's still troubling to see people's appetites for money overwhelming their ability to discern good vs. bad business practices.
wish i could do like pitr in userfriendly
ound the message used repetitively over and over still nothing grows silen
My sendmail doesn't forward but my li'l home server could still get choked by idiotic Spam-bot attempts to get it to do so.
It also returns the mail to whoever sent the spam. That ties up the line in two directions. What I'd like is for sendmail to return the first message from a location and to swallow all further attempts to forward mail from the same location. I'm looking at "sendmail for Linux" to figure out how to make it do that. That takes care of my end of it.
The other end is to make spammers pay for each message they send. You saw the numbers: Up to 20,000,000 emails in one night in a single mailing. That's $660,000. that they don't have to pay the post office.
They paid a mere $27,000 to PSI Net for the priviledge of saving themselves over $500k+ per night and annoying the sh*t out of us?
Sick the authorities on them for email fraud and depriving the post offices of the world of up to $234,960,000 per year in revenue.
Even a paltry 5% sales tax on this amount is $12,500,000. Stolen straight from government coffers. And that's just from one of these ghastly Bozos. There plenty of them. This is a big enough crime to get the FBI, Interpol and governments from around the world interested.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
They are headquarterd in Virginia which has an anit-spamming law on the books. $10 per incident. hmmm I may have to make me some money now. Can anyone say class action suit?
Papa Legba come and open the gate
There's not exactly a lot UUNet or PSINet can do about spammers. They resell dialup services to TONS of ISPs, they don't really sell to the customers. Now, if somehow you can figure out what ISP the person's account is with, you can actually get something done. And if that person turns out to be using an Earthlink account, may Bob have mercy on their accounts :). I work for Earthlink (who uses both PSINet and UUNet), and we do our damnedest to remove spammers from our customer base.
:)
Yeah, it's damned easy to forge From: fields, but it's worth a shot at least.
BTW, if you DO get spam from an earthlink.net or mindspring.com address (or a fullon hostname from either), send that stuff off to spam@mindspring.com. My buddies in AUP need work to do
I should have previewed, sorry! :)
Bullshit. The dial-up accounts get canceled. The dedicated customers get wacked when they generate complaints and refuse to resolve them. The 63.x.x.x netblock is not all UUNet. Please get your facts right before posting.
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I absolutely, unconditionally believe in the right to be left alone. So, if I ask you not to send junk mail (you can do that here with a simple entry in the phone book, it's widely respected): Don't!
If I ask you not to call me for any sales pitch: Don't!
If I not explicitely authorize a commercial entity to contact me by email: Don't!
The major difference is that junk mail doesn't arrive postage due and telemarketers don't call reverse charges. But with spam I'm forced to foot the bill and I don't care if it's for barely legal fisting teen sluts or for KDE2 from a "Linux Software House".
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Here's why I disagree: if government is to step in, then that means that society wants it, right? But if society really wants it, then society can fix it itself. Just use blacklists, or require crypto sigs on mail that you receive and look it up in a trustworthy-vs-spammer database, etc.
IMHO, the only advantage that is gained by using government for this, is not that it forces society to deal with the problem (since, if government is involved, then unless there's corruption, it means that society already wants to deal with it). Rather, it forces society into a consensus of how to deal with the problem. The problem I have with that is that when government tries to dictate how to deal with a problem, they come up with crap (e.g. DMCA).
You may think that your government solution for how to deal with the problem is perfect, but it has holes. For example, if the spam doesn't have a valid return address, and you trace it to having come from a relay outside of USA, what can you do? You just end up with an unenforcable law. I hate unenforcable laws.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
But if enough people blacklisted those people's ISP, then those people whose mail you risk losing, would go to another ISP (or their ISP would do what it takes to get off the blacklist).
This reminds me of the prisoner's dilemma. If everyone adopted the blacklist strategy, then it would become the best strategy, and mutants who didn't use the blacklist would be the ones who suffered (they would get spam, but no additional legit email). But if most people don't use the blacklists, then the few people who do use it, end up losing.
Argh.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Yeah I get that too alot... a lot of spammers take an address @home with a common name and just keep adding letters to it, the header will look like this...
nitehawk1@home.com
nitehawk2@home.com
nitehawk3@home.com
nitehawk4@home.com
nitehawk5@home.com
etc...
no wonder @home's email servers are so faulty...
-nite
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Spamming to stop spamming is ... stupid. Why is your spam better than anyone else's?
The only thing that have to do is keep it at a level where it doesn't stop people from using email altogether. But untill that limit, as far as they are concerned the more spam the better.
I was about to change my long distance company from MCI-WorldCom to ATT last week in an attempt to boycott telcos that promote spam, but then the ATT spammer deal emerged. So, I guess it will be Sprint, which seems to have cleaned up its act.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
What amuses me about the system though is that you can almost always tell if you're receiving a call from a telemarketer because of the two or three second "silence" period before the start of the call. It's a great cue to hang up straight away, or better to put the phone off the hook and continue doing whatever you're doing.
I hope to start asking for "Do not call" policies though soon. Also a friend regularly answers the phone with much on-phone nodding ("yes, yes") followed by "I've got new socks on." And when the telechimp continues, "I'm allowed to walk home now all by myself."
It usually works...
--
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I found this site a while back and found it very interesting. Check out Behind Enemy Lines.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
According to the SpamCop statistics the biggest sources of spam are currently:
UU.NET wins this contest easily... :(
Good idea... in theory.
How about mailing lists - I'm a member of many of them (including spamtools), and it just wouldn't be possible to encrypt each message (or digest) per person. Some lists have several hundred valid subscribers.
Richy C.
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Well that's exactly what is the worst about Spam. People like you don't even realise why it is so. Don't you consider your mail Id more private space than a tv program? Who stopped you from placing Banner ads?
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
Let's be honest, AT&T is a spammer. It has been well before the term existed, before even the Internet was popularised enough to be spams originator. It sends unsolicited messages to people who don't want them. It sends them 6, 7 times a day. It receives a negative reply to every message but still doesn't stop.
I assume the same is true of Worldcom as well, but I currently have their long distance phone service so they don't call me. Curiously Sprint don't call me either.
I don't think we should be remotely surprised AT&T is happy to accept spammers as customers. They've been profiting from older forms of spam for decades, there's clearly no code of ethics that's stopping them from doing this, and it's money for nothing. All we can do is complain, tie up their system administrators and support lines with so many complaints about the behaviour that it becomes uneconomic to continue. And I don't know what the chances of us achieving that are, but with enough spammers and with complaint fatigue being real possibilities, it's questionable we stand a chance at all.
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You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Subscribe to the MAPS RBL. Use their BGP feed to drop traffic. This way, the outage is coordinated with vast numbers of other RBL subscribers. As a result, it hits the spammers much harder and gets action taken much more rapidly.
This will still cost you legitimate traffic, but there's no way around that. You simply have to bite the bullet and suck up some short term costs for the long-term health of the net.
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Is there a "clueless" moderation category for posts like these? Like, please...
A hotmail acount I never used, is spammed by +- 30 emails a day.
Same here, I created a Hotmail account intending to use it while my-deja.com was down for upgrades. The upgrade got postponed, I didn't use the Hotmail account for a while, but when I went to first send mail through it, the box was full of spam.
The account name is only 4 letters, thus I suppect that the spammers spam form A to ZZZZ.
Well, my account name was 14 letters long, so I suspect rather than Hotmail sells the addresses themselves as an extra revenue stream.. ;-)
How many people think that perhaps we need more free (or minimum-pay) services like SpamCop? I forward spam to them on a fairly regular basis, with an average of one out of eight spammers' accounts being reported closed by their ISP. And to date, after a year and a half of usage, only two spammers have managed to avoid identification, the last being about seven months ago.
Questions, comments, flames? Operators are standing by...
All the world's an analog stage, and digital circuits play only bit parts.
Yes, I do; when the amount of advertising completely overwhelms and drowns the content.
Sometimes it seems to me like we're headed that way with spam as well.
Besides, with TV / magazine ads, I have the option
to completely forget about them, ignore them.
Not so with spam. I have to invest time and effort
to filter and delete all this junk.
If someone was to ring you up 20 times a day to
throw different salespitches, you would probably
want to outlaw phone sales, wouldn't you?
I think that the big problem with spam and why everyone hates it so much on the user level is not the volume of it (although that's a different story on the admin level) as much as the content. Who wants to get mail from "Hot, fisting teen sluts"? or "make 1 million a year just by sending a dollar to everyone on this list". I think that there should be an accepted standard of whats sent by Email. You never see ads for porno coming through snail mail to your 6 year old son. people would be outraged and the companies and/or persons would be forced to stop. I think that we could get just about ever Xrated spammer on charges of distributing pornography to minors if we really tried. Even if they just put links in thier Email, look what happened to 2600 for placing links to DeCSS on thier site. On the other hand, I know that most people here would disagree, but I dont mind getting ads for Technical magazines and similar items by Email and similar content and I think that that should be accepted.
What's new about this is that we now have documentary evidence that AT&T and PSInet have both conspired with spammers to look the other way whilst the spammers commit theft and trespass; and since PSInet is incorporated in Virginia, their conspiracy is probably a felony crime, while AT&T's is mere tortious behavior.
However, in both cases, the existence of the "pink contract" constitutes evidence of classic "simple conspiracy," which is also a criminal offense, and since it crosses State lines in both cases, it's probably under Federal jurisdiction.
Spam costs me money. It costs me time and bandwidth, it costs my ISP bandwidth and disk space.
I'm absolutely for free speech, but I draw the line at being forced to accept collect calls from anyone with something to sell.
If I sign my business up with a cheap hosting company, and I end up with the same IP address as goatse.cx, I can expect to get blocked by censorware. If I think my customers are the kind of people who use censorware, then I have to find a different host.
I personally think MAPS is the right way to go. You're free to use it, or not, or use your own list. The spammers can keep making their collect calls, but now I don't have to pick up the phone.
--
--
E_NOSIG
if the same message is sent out to more than X number of people where X is fairly low, KERPOW! No account.
Which also keeps legitimate (listserv/majordomo) mailing lists from being operated from behind their connections.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The catch is that the government would have to get out of the way of society's efforts to fix the problem. How about old-fashioned outlawry (i.e. the protection of the law no longer applies) for spamming? (That is, if you can prove that X spammed you, turning X's box into a $2K doorstop is legally treated as self-defense, not cracking.)
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
I dunno. Many months ago I created a Hotmail account with a completely random 12 character log account name. I check it every couple of weeks. I've sent mail to it occasionally. But it has never, ever recieved a piece of spam. Ever.
Oddly my main ISP email address got on a Chinese spam list a few days after joining, and I still get chinese spam to this address two or three times a week.
I now use this email address for all web activity where security is not needed.
I understand. the advantage is that the small fry cannot go over seas. and other countries may get into the act.
[insert visions of KGB agents hunting down russian spammers]
Well. there is always the following option, as posted on Segfault back in april 99:
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
It's pretty much exactly the same sort of deal the the US Postal Service has cut with bulk mailers. It also happens to be the single most (and perhaps only) profitable segment of the USPS. The only reason that you can still mail a letter for a mere 32 cents is that they make all of their real money stuffing your mailbox with credit card offers and Wal-Mart circulars. Seems like ISP's will inevitably move in the same direction.
Difference, of course, is that you can still choose your ISP in the US, so free market economics should sort the issue out in the end. Doesn't seem likely that you'll get your choice of postal carriers any time soon...
Beeboy(!)
"This is my sig file. There are many like it, but this one is mine."
I believe a very effective way to stop spam is to regulate that each ISP must specify valid SMTP servers much in the same way there is a whois database with all the DNS servers listed. If we do this, then organisations can easily choose to deny all messages coming from dialup connections and it leaves spammers with only one method of sending spam. They would have to use their local ISP's SMTP relay to get their spam out. This would be trivial for the ISP to find and shut down. It would also bring stronger incentives to monitor and stop such activity if their own SMTP servers were being hit.
The idea is to create an SMTP server registry.
Reasons against (off the top of my head):
1.) There's way more SMTP servers out in the world than DNS servers. Maintaining the list would be a nightmare. And how will we validate who's a valid ISP and who's a dirty spammer?
2.) This would block tons of legitimate mail servers. Dialup ppl who couldn't register because of dyn IP's, small businesses who don't know how to register, but bought MDaemon or a WhistleJet or some other out-of-the-box mail server, etc.
3.) This would add an onerous registration process to the setup of any small business network, if they wanted their own SMTP server.
4.) Some (many?) ISP's don't provide SMTP relay for their customers.
5.) This would impose a time delay in getting mail servers up & running. Do you want to wait a week, 2 weeks, a month for your SMTP server registration to go thru before you can send mail?
Etc...
I hate spam as much as anybody but this is a yucky idea.
-david
There in this for the money. They're going to make that money any way they can get away with. And since Joe Schmoe does not have a clue what it's all about, they'll be able to keep getting away with it for the new future. If it bothers you, you can either ignore the Internet (like really...) or start your own ISP. Deal with it.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Not ten minutes after I created an @Home e-mail account for my parents, they were getting the same spam I was. Thanks for selling my address, @Home.
--
Todd's Law: All things being equal, you lose!
I must admit the the few bit of spam I receive almost exclusively come from PSINet. On the other hand, a mail to abuse@ does seem to cause the spams to cease for a few weeks, and I rarely see them returning from the same source (i.e. the style and content seem to be different).
A hotmail acount I never used, is spammed by +- 30 emails a day. The account name is only 4 letters, thus I suppect that the spammers spam form A to ZZZZ.
Do not underestimate the power of the Dark side
What He Said.
The net has got to protect itself against parasites that would destroy it. When sites don't play by the rules, they need to be cut off. The bigger a site is, the harder it is to cut it off, it's true, but if a site's behavior is egregious enough (as PSI's clearly is, with these pink contracts) then it can and will be shunned.
Back when I was working at MCI (Before the Worldcomm takeover) we had a very strict anti-spam policy. If we got enough complaints about spamming from your domain, we'd cut your ($1600+ a month) internet connection off. That was always something I respected about the company.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Your e-mail has been received by [insert isp]'s abuse investigations. You have been assigned ticket number #SpammersAreCoolXorAndRot13. DO NOT REPLY TO THIS E-MAIL. It's automated. So shut up.
Then, almost like clockwork, a follow up letter arrives:
This is a follow-up letter from [insert isp]'s abuse team. Ticket number #SpammersAreCoolXorAndRot13 has been dealt with according to our AUP, and action has been taken against the individual.
This means, the "individual" gets a gentle slap on the wrist (if that), and they go about their business. PSI, UUNet, and all the big ISPs don't give a rat's ass about spammers. That's why a *very* good percentage of spam you get has 38.x.x.x or 63.x.x.x in the headers. 38 being PSI, and 63 being UUNet. Try it sometime. It'll suprise you.
As for this article, it comes as no suprise to me. UUNet and PSINet have been known to forward your abuse@ complaints to the spammers themselves, and are both well-known spam harbors.
DIE SPAMMERS, DIE. (Oh, and please take a few Spam-Friendly ISPs down with you. Okay?)
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
What happened to the blacklist of 'spammer' domains that was constantly kept up to date.
(With its oh so memorable FLA name!)
My "ISP" has the following 550 messages waiting for you if you connect to its SMTP port from the wrong location
550 We do not accpet mail from Yahoo.com a known spammer domain.
Anyone with their own SMTP port can implement this.
FatPhil
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Kuro5hin had a story about this on Nov. 1. Here .
This is why I support the idea of a spammers license. This point of the spammers license is not to legalize spam. The point is to get a legal address where they can be billed for spam, and make it legal to bill the spammers for the traffic at each step of the chain, including the recipient. Enforce the collection via you favorite government agencies - say the IRS and the ATF for example (take your pick). Sufficiently high billing rates would make it rather unprofitable.
.
"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem"
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I don't really get spam, so I guess I don't care. People can subscribe to RBL/MAPS and block my legit emails if they want I guess, but I don't see spam as ever stopping. Filter early and filter often that's the only way to deal with it.
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
I think any ISP that starts this garbage should have all it's users LEAVE! Then they should be DDoS'ed. Spam is NOT free speech it is HARRASEMENT! I think that These ISP's should also be sued for harboring criminals - people who harrass others. Since they are signing contracts with these scum it would not be hard to get suppeanas to get the name, address, phone numbers of these scumbags to sue them for harrassment - then sue the ISP for harboring criminals.
That would teach 'em!
The Truth is a Virus!!!
A few years ago, AGIS (Is that spelled right?) tried to openly become the ISP of Spammers. It hurt them bad. Where are they now?
Now, PSINet is trying to do the same thing, only covertly.
I vote, BLACKHOLE PSINET!! Drop usenet postings from PSINet addresses, drop their packets, drop their email. DEATH TO SPAM! DEATH!! DEATH!!!
Picket their booths at trade shows, buy a share or two and complain at their stockholders meetings.
Anyone who does business with PSINet, try to convince them to switch.
Hit them high, hit them low, make supporting spammers such a source of intense, continuing, increasing pain that they will stop -- one way or another.
What about putting PSINet in the MAPS RBL?
Your so stupid, charge $50 bux for spam emails, when it didn't even cost a total of 50 bux to send out the spam, God ppl like you should just shutup, it's crazy to think like you, I bet You voted for Gore huh? Oh wait, did you even vote? Man, drop the stupid stuff, FTC huh? wow, Spam ever hurt you? You ever lost more than 50 bux because you got spam? Dude your wasting time and money on a issue that don't REALLY have any meaning, If your gonna stop spam, please also stop TV ads, pizza shops putting them things on my door, Please tell Gore to quit playing TV ads on my TV or i'm gonna charge him $400 bux per tv his ad was played on. SHUTUP it's stupid! Get out of here... SHEESH! No wonder USA is in the shape it is today! Go vote, MANY MANY men lost there lives so your crying about spam ass could vote.
Got shack?
ShackCentral Network
Worlds best gaming network!!!
Good point - I feel extremely irritated when I read e-mail which read 'this mail is legal and sent in accordance with.....' etc. as if they should be above reproach.
Of course, suing MAPS seems to be coming into fashion, and I could the the shit really hitting the fan in this situation. Hopefully, though, things would go the right way and a precedent would be set in favour of blocking prominent domains.
And it would be fun to watch the telco suits squirm like the worms that they really are.
Here's why I disagree: if government is to step in, then that means that society wants it, right? But if society really wants it, then society can fix it itself. Just use blacklists, or require crypto sigs on mail that you receive and look it up in a trustworthy-vs-spammer database, etc.
So instead of enforcing a law that says everyone must identify themselves (or at least their originating address), you would have us work at one level removed from the problem. After half the people in the world have been spammed, the spammer's name can go into a blacklist. Of course, what will be blacklisted if no name was sent, and what's to stop them from using another throw away account.
IMHO, the only advantage that is gained by using government for this, is not that it forces society to deal with the problem (since, if government is involved, then unless there's corruption, it means that society already wants to deal with it). Rather, it forces society into a consensus of how to deal with the problem. The problem I have with that is that when government tries to dictate how to deal with a problem, they come up with crap (e.g. DMCA).
e.g., traffic laws (what we have now is so much worse than the early days of the car when people could just cross the intersection whenever they liked, isn't it?).
e.g., environmental control laws (it is much better when companies get to decide when their waste is too toxic for the environment, isn't it?)
I could go on with a long list of good laws that lead to an orderly and civil society, but suffice it to say that not all laws are bad. Your slander of the entire legal system supported by a single example pushed through by powerful individuals in a manner that, if not corrupt, is at least questionable, does not give due credit to a system that has served us well for two centuries. Right now we have a tension in how people should interact. It is a proper role for the government (the organization appointed to add order to how we interact) to add order to this interaction.
You may think that your government solution for how to deal with the problem is perfect, but it has holes. For example, if the spam doesn't have a valid return address, and you trace it to having come from a relay outside of USA, what can you do? You just end up with an unenforcable law. I hate unenforcable laws.
If it becomes too much of a problem, you can block the entire domain at the US borders? We can nuke that country? How about, we exercise trade sanctions or even enter into a treaty with said country? Since the citizens of that country would most likely have the same problems that we are, maybe we could get them to implement a compatible law.
BTW, when was the last time you got a fax without the transmitting number being printed on it? All fax machines, and programs automatically add the originating phone number because companines large enough to make a profit selling these consumer products don't want to run up against the law. A lone spammer on AOL may spurn the law, but do you think PSINet or AT&T would do it openly without getting paid some fairly high dollars? And if they get paid that much, that means that the cost to the spammer will be increased, which should cause a decrease in the quantity of spam. Which in the end is all that we really want anyway.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
The other one I've seen is AT&T signing a contract with someone -- there were restrictions, but it's still troubling to see people's appetites for money overwhelming their ability to discern good vs. bad business practices.
Just like any other industry, early in its days, and is trying to discover itself, "good" or "bad" is in the eye of the beholder.
-- George
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
I would even give money to support some organization whose sole purpose was to bring down known spammers and destroy their servers.
Go ahead and bitch me out for not going about it the right way/advocating hacking/whatever. This is how I feel.
I can't blame PSInet for this, they're young and needed the money (kinda like Cartman's mom). I would never work with them now, but I can see why they did it.
Trains stop at a train station. Buses stop at a bus station.
Buses stop at a bus station
Trains stop at a train station
On my desk there's a workstation....
Molog
So Linus, what are we doing tonight?
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
Yes. You are spot on.
Simply make sure that you bounce it with a 550 or whatever, and then any real human beings will see why they can't get things to you. And spammers end up with loads of 550s in their in-boxes. Tough doodoos for them.
FatPhil
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Bullshit. Spam is bad as long as its non-invited. Yesterday, "nissan computer corp" spammed me because of nissan auto wants to shut'em down. Guess what? ncc is now one of my sworn enemies, and i've complained to their ISP's, simply because I don't want their spam.
If they had gone other ways than spamming, I would've supported them. But, by spamming, they made me one of their enemies.
--
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
a dialup & email account I had since 1994, from a small startup ISP, was recently sold to Earthlink, notorious for allowing spam - I prefer the local FreeBSD Mom&Pop shop (w/ roots going back to BBS days) anyway, wasn't using the dialup anymore, the email address was on many spam lists, all signs said CANCEL, and good riddance it was.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Yes, this is grand. No more spam from Yahoo! But what about legitamate Yahoo users? Filtering free email services just isn't going to work, because you will destroy legitamate messages. I'm sure that even Slashdotters use free email sometimes.
Captain_Frisk
You mean that spamers are wining the war, for now... But more can be done, the AI ramifications are clear, text interpretation may have a big job here. I don't see Spam as a problem, just a big incentive for certain technologies that , until now, didn't have a commercial value. Artificial intelligence, and specially the field of text interpretation will have a field day working against spamers. I know, not everything worth pursuing should be commercial, but by our misfortune it's the rules of the world we're living in.
Long live TUX!
i get 4 email accounts with my dsl. i set up all 4 and only used 1. within a week every mailbox starts filling with spam. how is this possible if i never used the other 3 addresses for anything???
the only possible explanation is pacbell sells their customer's email addresses to spammers.
or a spammer owns them (yeah, right) and is silently grabbing their customer's info.
anyone out there have another possible explanation? i'd love to hear it.
Is there any reason why e-mail spam gets targetted, as opposed to snail mail "spam"? I routinely get a books worth of coupons in my mailbox weekly. If spam really is evil, why not target the business practice as a whole?
-will
http://wharris.poweredbygeek.net
Well, I suppose we could start an open source project. Most spam seems to have certain key phrases in the title (I'm not sure about the stuff in, I guess, Hiragana, since I don't read Japanese at all). I suppose that a good start would be a simple filter that stripped out "home morgages", "free viagra", and "hot teens" (I can't remember what the phrases really are, but you get the idea). I keep meaning to write that myself. But if it became popular we would get into an arms race between the filter attempting to block undesired e-mails and the spammers attempting to get past it. That's why I suggested an open source project: So that it could adapt rapidly, without resorting to blocking off, say, all of uu-net (which might be a bit awkward).
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Exactly. My main email all comes from my yahoo account. I have found it very useful, good uptime, and one can setup a great set of filters. I get maybe 1 spam a month to my inbox (all the rest is routed to the trash which I never see). I find web-based email much easier to get to than a shell because you don't always have SSH handy.
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
Wow, imagine a beowulf cluster of THESE (see #89)&l t;br>
funny munging
Here is an interesting idea. If spam was legitamized (or put under legislation), we may be able to force them to include SPAM in their subject, and effectively filter it out. At some point, they'd realize that to do it legally wouldn't allow them to reach a large enough audience, and they'd get out of the business for financial reasons rather than coersion (posting their names/addresses/etc.) If they decided to avoid putting spam in their subject line, they would be subject to criminal investigation.
I really don't think that spam should be outlawed, because we have an exact duplicate of the business practice going through snail mail and telemarketing every day.
Oh, and I don't want to hear about the problems of wasting computer space and time...snail mail spam kills trees and costs us millions in delivery costs, pollution (gotta deliver it right?), etc. If spam is bad, lets hit it at the heart an criminalize the business practice as a whole, INCLUDING snail mail and telemarketing.
But guess what, that will never happen unless we get serious about stopping this style of marketing in every industry. Better get your pen and paper out and write to your legislator. I for one could care less...I block spam at the source at my workplace, and I'm smart about giving my address out....in fact, I haven't received a spam in 3 years of having my account. Funny that...
-will
http://wharris.poweredbygeek.net
I found a procmail recipe set called "SpamBouncer" which has catches for most common spams and can read from RBL and other sources for more spam goodies. Besides being able to install as either a machine-wide or a individual user setup, it can also have several options for dealing with spam: /dev/null, bouncing the mail back to the domain for possible spam dealings, or, my favorite, dumping all spam to a specific mailbox. This way, I can read through the spam that was sent and see if any messages were truly legit (and in a list of subjects which is mostly spam, it's easy to pick out the legit headers, as opposed to picking out spam headers in a bunch of legit mail).
Only drawback with this is that it is processor heavy; a long overdue fetchmail that pulled up a 100 messages got my CPU usage on a 200MHz to 15+. But the program is actively maintained, usually with weekly updates.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Now I know the irony of this and that it isn't the BEST way to deal with it, but if enough people do the same, it calls attention to the problem. It won't work in all cases either, but makes me feel better.
"When it rains, it pours." --Morton's Salt
There are over 3,000,000 businesses in the USA which are members of the United States Chamber of Commerce (a href=http://www.uschamber.com/_About+Us/Who+We+Are /default.htm>source). Now, assume that spam becomes an accepted business practice, and 10% of these small businesses decide to send out 1 spam a month. Assume you are only on 10% of these companies spam lists (a generous estimate, since once you get on one, you tend to get on them all).
Now, if you received 1,000 spams per day because spam was legitimized, just how useful is email to you anymore? I'd say not very.
As /. readers will know CAUCE has been supporting
anti-spam legislation. And you can report it to
the FTC too. I identify any forged headers,
generally there are a few, find out which ISP
was first legitimate mail header and attach the
following:
On 18th July 2000 the House of Representatives passed the bill HR 3113 [Ref: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d106:h.r.3 113:] which is summarized at CAUCE [http://www.cauce.org/newsletter/v4n1.shtml].
I will investigate my legal rights of redress, and will be reporting this to the Federal Trade Commission as per HR 3113.
This has dropped the spam I've recieved but I'm
still waiting to hear from the FTC and the ISPs
over who I can charge $50 for the hundreds of
spam email letters I've kept.
I've deliberately left the URLs in non-tagged
format.
"There is magic in the web." - Othello Act 3 Scene 4.
The art of using a spammers strength against them:
http://www.yelm.freeserve.co.uk/spamido/
No need to get spam.
Deleted
how many was "enough"?
Don't forget the never ending spam of degress you can get.
Yes, rejecting all traffic from ISPs of that size IS possible. Ever heard of the Usenet Death Penalty? Those were applied to a lot of major ISPs and backbone providers, inculding, as it appears, PSI. The same is possible for all net traffic. So how do we fight this? Talk to your ISP's/uplink's friendly sysadmin.
This is an EX-PARROT!
Try complaining to PSINet about some of their corporate spammers like LifeMinders. Their abuse team lieas through their teeth and has been sending out the exact same response to the complaints for more than a year. PSINet pretends they don't know what happened, claimed I "opted-in" and then refuses to answer any further complaints. Same game when I called them on the phone. These people are liars and frauds and I look forward to them going out of business. Russ Smith
But Grey (I hear you cry) we still get junk mail despite the postage. True, but THEY actually have something to sell you. Spam alienates most of the target audience so only shifty companies advertise that way. If they can blast out 2 million E-Mail for free and have 10 or 15 people they can bilk respond, they've made a profit. Require bigger hardware for encryption, plus the time it takes to encrypt to 2 million public keys and all of a sudden, spam gets a lot less economical.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Odd... A few months ago a spammer really got on my nerves , 4-5 mails from the same idiot. I decided then and there it was time to contact the ISP, even though it's usually useless. I contacted PSInet (his ISP) and they replied they'd look into it. I figured I'd just been brushed off, and went about my business. A week later, I got a mail from PSInet, that the person I had reported was indeed a spammer, and that they had canceled his account. I was really impressed with them, the fact that they took action, and that they even took the time to mail me back. PSInet isn't all bad.
--Craig
---
www.stallman.org is running Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) on FreeBSD
I got so sick of spam coming to me from PSINet addies that I started auto-forwarding them not only to their abuse department, but to sales@, info@, and management@ as well. They contacted me and were outraged that I spammed them. They now filter all e-mail from me.
--- Heeeeeeeeeere, FIDONet.... heeeeeeeeeer, FIDONet. Hey... where'd FIDO go?
What the fuck is wrong with your protect the children crap? It shows that you're an irresponsible parent.
/should/ shoot spammers in the face, but because they annoy /me/, not some 8-year-old snot-nosed brat.
We
Also subscribe to the MAPS RSS and DUL lists. Out of the spam that I get here, 99% of it gets blocked by RSS and DUL, and the other 1% by RBL. I've not received a single spam since installing these.
If you have sendmail 8.10 or later, do this in your sendmail.mc file:
FEATURE(dnsbl,`blackholes.mail-abuse.org',`Mail rejected, see http://www.mail-abuse.org/rbl/')dnl FEATURE(dnsbl,`relays.mail-abuse.org',`Open relay rejected, see http://www.mail-abuse.org/rss/')dnl FEATURE(dnsbl,`dialups.mail-abuse.org',`Dialup rejected, see http://www.mail-abuse.org/dul/')dnl FEATURE(`delay_checks')dnl
You won't see any more spam, and your log file will show the address they tried to send to (this is what delay_checks is for).
---
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
OBInfo: I maintain a FAQ for figuring out the origin of forged spams and how to complain about them here. I hope folks find it helpful.
I'm sick and tired of ISPs where you have a hard time convincing some dork that a spam-swine violated their lame TOS. It's even more sickening to see the backbone providers are getting into the game.
"In their case, we signed a contract saying they were going to handle customer complaints, and if the complaints were too much, we would discontinue"
How very elegant. So they don't only allow this junk on their fat pipes they're pulling themselves out of the resposnibility to handle the consequences.
It never ceases to amaze me how companys that feed themselves of the net go through great length to annoy and allienate the very community from which they make money (amazon, etoys, etc...).
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Hmm... hope they kept the bribe. :)
I assert ownership of all trademarks and copyrights on this page.
If there were a lawyer who was prepared to handle spam cases where they assist in suing the spammer, I'm sure there would be a reasonable market once a few high-priced cases got through.
I switched ISP's because my Concentric account was getting hammered so bad. I would have stayed with them, but they wouldn't let me have the email account name I wanted: I wanted a longer name with letters and punctuation, but they capped at 8 characters.
So, a new ISP and a non-dictionary word that contains numbers.
I haven't received a single piece of spam on my new account. And you'll notice that my email address here is not readily harvestable. A decent Perl script could probably fix the address, but why should they go to the trouble of that when so many other addresses are (or appear to be) valid.
--
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
I had a run in with some spammer PSINet was hosting. He was forging the domain of the company I work for, spamming AOLers time and time and time again. As webmaster, I had to deal with ignorant AOL'ers expressing their at times extreme anger over being smut-spammed. I sympathized with the AOL'ers for the most part, but still, having to deal the a fuming mad father of an 8 year old girl...
Most of the time, this spammer was coming from BBNPlanet and PSINet. Attempts to get PSINet to help us rid ourselves of this nuisance were utterly futile.
BBNplanet, on the other hand, was very straight forward with what they needed. They had fax documents containing line for line what they needed to turn over the logfile data while Mr. Roger Traversa, PSINet's paralegal, was too interested in giving me the run-around.
I say BURN PSINet, BURN!! I would not piss on you if you were on fire. Take your spam and drown in it!
Washington State's Anti-Spam law says that if you receive spam with either altered headers or misleading subject lines, you can hit the spammer with a suit for $500 per occurrance, whether or not the spammer is located in Washington State.
Since the ISPs are apparently collaborating knowingly, should they be held accountable somehow?
include $sig;
1;
One question - has anyone figured out how to do this on a windows (Figure "The Bat" as the client) system?
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
> There in this for the money.
Yes, which is why we should filter out ISP's who support spammers. This will cost them customers, and thus money.
And when MAPS refuses to RBL spam sources like uu.net (likely via msn.com dialups without port 25 filtering, but uu.net refuses to identify their rogue resellers), and dialsprint.net (Dialsprint took ~6 months before it finally cleaned up its act and blocked port 25), and att.net (who denied the existence of pink contracts right up until the news broke)?
RBL is a good start.
But the /. article is about how you deal with institutions that appear to be "too big" to RBL.
I say - block 'em yourself. If uu.net gets RBL'd (which will never happen), then they only have to twist one arm to get themselves unblocked. But if 1000 sysadmins independently drop uu.net traffic on the floor, they're well and truly fscked.
There are still AGIS netblocks from 1997 that remain on the DENY list. May uu.net suffer the same fate.
This is a pretty common practice from what I have seen in the industry. I can't be very specific here, but to my knowlege there are a lot more large providers that will sign these contracts. The one thing that really makes me hot is if you have a user who signes up for your service and then abuses it by spamming, some backbone providers will do things like block all smtp connections, and a lot of other stupid stuff without bothering to contact you, even though the account has already been removed. It seems to be that the isp's with the strongest abuse policies are the ones that are guilty of signing these contracts. I'm not saying that this holds true for all of them. To me it looks like they make their abuse policy appear very strong to cover up the fact that they are allowing spam.
I think this would be a place where we need the government to step in. It is illegal to send a fax without the originating phone number. This is both acceptable and effective, since if someone wants to converse with me I have to be able to contact them. Spam should be the same way. It should be illegal to send email without the correct and legitimate origin as a return address within the same domain. That way I could respond to the email with an encrypted, uuencoded copy of a core dump or two. Anonymous re-mailers are safe here, since they would only be required to attach the remailer's address.
PSINet, AT&T, et. al. will think twice about these contracts once they understand that mass spamming will result in a righteous DoS attack. The spammers will have to either pay higher rates, or find a legitimate job. Either way I won't have to delete 30 bogus emails a day anymore.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Because of unrelenting complaints from people who didn't want the spam, cyberpromo went broke that year. AGIS also relented (possibly due to pressure from their parent company, Alltel; many of the complaining spam fighters were stockholders).
AT&T and PSI should take a lesson from history.
- Bloody " I hate spam " Peasant.
-- This
Interesting. My gf has an altavista a/c which she uses to send e-mail to precisely 2 people. So only 3 people in the world know the address, never been posted anywhere, nothing. But it gets spammed all to hell. Come to think of it my own spam has been a lot more intense lately - perhaps my own altavista a/c is having the same trouble. It's all very worrying.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
Money is the bottom line. Actually, its every line. Now be a good little sheep and get in the line.
Last time i receive a spam email, i clicked on the link and left my adresse. So 2 weeks later i receive the information package they where talking about. IF all /.er answer every spam letter, they wont be able to get the difference between a real customer and someone who is a waste of time and MONEY to them. Tell have to find another way to get to people.
One other cool option is to make a small script that send TONS of mailing address or phone number to the form on the spammers site. He wont know which of those address are good.
"Failure is not an option, it come bundled with the software"
Wow - imagine a beowolf cluster of spammers!
"Making linux GPL was the best thing I ever did" - Torvalds. I'd hate to see the worst thing...
Really.
Spammers hail from the same lack of moral decency as Pedophiles, and should be treated as such. They will NOT THINK TWICE about bombarding our children with advertisements for sick, perverted filth. In the course of a few years online, I've received _unsolicited_ links and images which have totally disgusted me.
Imagine what this unstopped torrent of filth will do to a child's state of mind! I don't think any parent wants their young child to turn round and ask them what words like "Anal", "Fisting", and "Cum filled whore" mean.
What price innocence? In older times, peverts and hucksters like these spammers would have been hounded out of their community by decent folk. Instead, it seems that they would rather bring in legal measures to sue anyone who cares about what filth their children receive through email.
They are NOT legitimate businessmen. They are violators of a parent's right to bring a child up as they see fit! You wouldn't want to invite a child molestor into your home, so what gives them a right to molest your children via email?
Yes, I know that eventually a child will grow up and become an adult, entering the cynical, embittered world we all live in. But surely their innocence, and joy of discovery should be treasured, at least for a few brief years?
Spamming and acting as a spam haven is clearly bad netiquette, but that's not necessarily the same thing as bad business practices.
At the moment, I'm not sure that it's truly established in their minds that spamming is a bad business practice. From their point of view, it's CHEAP advertising, so cheap that it doesn't matter if the business rate from it is REALLY low.
If you really want to stop ATT from spam-related behavior, either permitting it or doing it, then drop them as a long-distance carrier. Do it by mail, and tell them why you are doing it.
Corporate spam won't stop until we, as consumers, manage to change it from a good business practice into a bad one.
Either that, or we'll get into the "JC Whitney" business. When I first moved to Vermont, there was a JC Whitney catalog waiting for me in my never-before-used mailbox. I was even the first occupant of that apartment, so it wasn't bulk mail for the previous resident. But JC Whitney and Sharper Image catalogs are a fact of life. We all get them, and several others. They've degenerated into background noise. As we get to more sophisticated mail handling, maybe spam will assume a level of normal noise, too.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
i wonder uu.net is worth than psi.net
i received each day spams from various account, and more than half of them comes from uu.net
i send all my spam to spamcop, sometimes it tak a while to process more than 30 emails, and see than more than 20 come from uu.net!
--
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
- Take your business elsewhere, and tell them why.
- Refuse to carry their traffic.
(1) doesn't apply to me. I am not one of their customers, nor is my company. (2) is very difficult. Can anyone afford to reject all traffic from ISP's this size? I certainly can't. I get far too much legitimate traffic from them to do that without a sever degradation in my service. So how do we fight this one WITHOUT LEGISLATION? (I'm not 100% sure, but legislation sounds like a losing proposition to me!).sig: file not found
Why on earth would I want to lose 3"? Now, if they can tell me how to add 3" (If you know what I mean), I might be interested.
-Dead Lesbian Witches! Think about it!
Sending out emails twice is "annoying to the customer" because they receive two emails. I take it that means annoying to the potential customer receiving the spam, rather than the customer on whose behalf the spam is sent. Kind of interesting that they don't want to annoy the customer twice, but they are completely willing to put up with annoying us just once. Actually, there is one advantage to email: if I try to flame someone who sends me paper junk mail, I would probably get charged with arson.
If you are modding me down because you disagree with me, use the "Flamebait" category, not the "Troll" one.
Don't they realize what this kind of thing does to bandwidth? I mean granted, people like me waste it with useless replies like this one, but I'm only wasteing a little bit.
When big corporations give spammers big bandwidth, it wreaks havock with the whole 'net.
Actually, in the long run, it will be self-destructive for them. I have a mental image of one of the executives trying to get through to a website, and he can't b/c, unbeknownst to him, a router in the path from his computer to the computer the web page is served from is overloaded with spam that his company let someone send.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
I think the huge problem is that capitalism is solely defined by the concept of selling for less than you paid for it, ie market forces -- the idea that some other set of values should influence "business" decisions corrupts the system of capitalism.
Under socialism it corrupts the market to the extent that it doesn't work or works quite poorly, without regulation at all it produces a kind of barely civil anarchy dominated by robber barons.
The current debates about "blood diamonds" from Africa, past debates about di- or in-vestment in South Africa and business deals with the Nazis are all examples of the principals of capitalism triumphing over other principals.
In some ways this is supposed to be good -- if you're a "pure" capitalist and you don't think about other things, you're supposed to help end things like discrimination -- you buy based solely on value and not on other "values" like race, religion, et al. In some ways its one reason why Jews have been so successful in business -- everyone else is a non-Jew and gets treated equally.
Of course when it's bad you end up doing business with thugs or cheats.
As SPAM gets more and more bandwidth we should get more effective filters.
I guess that in a while we will have a war between spamers and filter designers, the same way we have a war of Cryptanalysts and cryptographers, each trying to evade the scrutiny of the other...
Long live TUX!
I think the users generally got a warning first, so if they had an open relay they could close it without getting cut off.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Yeah, I've gotten several emails about cable descramblers. There are two flavors. There's one where they want me to buy the descramber and there's another kind where they want to sell me the instructions for how to build it.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
I sure would love to do the same.
...
Unfortunately it is quite hard for us europeans to call US 800-numbers and let the spammers pay the bill.
I would not mind if anyone told me how to do the trick
Microserf: 18.5% slashdot corrupt
I've read about the Internet Death Penalty, the occasionally-threatened but never-implemented blocking of ANY packets originating from that site. It's a very serious threat, but something like this may warrant it. Does anyone have details about how this might be initiated?
-TBHiX-
...they were actually selling something useful.
Has *anyone* ever seen a spam that wasn't advertising:
Gambling site
Loans/credit for losers
Accept credit cards
Sex site
Weight loss/nutrition supplement
Get anything on anyone
Spam software
Sheesh!
God, that's why I don't use Sendmail. If you, like me, prefer to retain your sanity when configuring your MTA (and thus use Postfix), here's all you need to add to your main.cf:
maps_rbl_domains = blackholes.mail-abuse.org, dialups.mail-abuse.org, relays.mail-abuse.org
maps_rbl_reject_code = 550
smtpd_client_restrictions = permit_mynetworks, reject_maps_rbl
(That was three lines. Unwrap if necessary.)
Another trick I use on spammers that aren't in the MAPS RBL/RSS/DUL is to prevent them from finding out what my mail server's IP address is in the first place, by adding this to your named.conf:
blackhole {
3.2.1/8;
4.3.2/8;
5.2/16;
123.123.123.123/32;
};
(Obviously, insert the proper CIDR addresses/ranges in there.) Violà! Now spammer can't send you mail (or know anything else about your IP addresses). Don't forget to implement the blackhole on your slaves, too!
Oh, and don't ever give Ebay your real email address and then bid on, or sell, anything there. Spammers very routinely harvest bazillions of real legitimate email addresses from there, and send spam directly to you. (Use a spamtrap alias that you can change routinely for use on Ebay, like youruserid-ebay@domain.tld.)
--
We should have seen this coming. Ever since the "Green Card" spam, things have been getting worse as these gutter-snipes consider themselves legitimate businessmen.
Now if someone had walked up to Canter and/or Siegel in the street and just shot the fuckers in the face, the net wouldn't be in such a sorry state as it is now? The warning would have been heard and this pissants would have moved on to a less dangerous profession like running a crack house.
Or maybe little 8 year old Timmy REALLY enjoys receiving emails advertising "XXX RED HOT FISTING NECROSLUTS" Do you want your kids getting such filth? Of course you don't. So take action!
Protect our children - Shoot a spammer in the face with a high calibre handgun!
And how do I do with Sendmail 8.9.3?
Because SPAM is much more intrusive
than a TV add.
Each message comes in and takes a small part
of your hard-drive space and time. It would
as each producer of each tv ad came into
your house and took a single grape and a single small slice of cheese.
While each grape or slice of cheese doesn't cost much, the collective mountain of foodstuffs
would be quite expensive.
I added up the sum of the cose of HD space and
time I wasted on spam once (took an average week and projected it out over a year). It came to
something like 1 day(deleting my junk folder repeatedly) and about $15,000(obviously the space was deleted and reused) in HD space.....
And I'm very careful who get's my home address. (I have about 3 different spam addresses though.)
---
RobK
Myddrin
Does this mean I will be spammed at will with no recourse?
ÕÕ
SPAM is theft of bandwidth, and theft of recipient's money ! Usually people _pay_ (phone bill) to receive mail.
-- javaDragon is an instance of JavaDragon.
Could be worse. I get them, and I'm female.
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
You've been hacked!
ETRN x
Everyone's spam block works. Isn't ipchains wonderful! I wonder if the ISP made the Real Time Black Hole List?
The truth shall set you free!
Momma says if I finish this term at the trade school, she'll send me to the Big City, where I can get a job polishing knobs at an electronic computer company. In no time, I'll work my way up to a good job, so I can send some cash back to Mississippi & buy my sister back from her pimp.
Anyways, please visit my website & see how kewl I am. If you sign my guestbook, I'll be sure & forward it to Momma at the institution.
Thanks a bunch! You guys at
--
--
You are a fucking moron.
--
--
You are a fucking moron.
Just as they cannot hide activities such as this, they cannot escape the consequences... Sooner or later they'll be forced to eat the gelatinous residue that comes in EVERY can of SPAM® -Whoppo- ============ I had a clever .sig, but I lost it in the divorce.
============
chown -R us
...have an isp set up an email system so it only accepts valid PGP encrypted emails. Spammers would then need not only an email address, but a valid key for each person, plus cpu time to encrypt the message for each person.
Or does someone already offer this service. Strictly PGP encrypted ONLY.
Dan Bernstein's Unix Client-Server TCP package now comes with rblsmtpd. Although it's possible to run qmail without the ucs tcp package, you most probably already have it compiled. You will want to check out the qmail-HOWTO, section 12, on how to configure rblsmtpd: http://www.flounder.net/qmail/qmail-howto.html
If you ask a question and I've got the answer and take the time to write you, and you bounce my mail because I sent it from Yahoo, you can bet I'm not going to waste any more time trying to help you.
An idea I'd like to put forth for consideration: spam auctions. If your mailbox were your legal property and commercial use without compensating you was legally theft of service, you could let the spammers PAY YOU to read their stuff by auctioning off a limited number of mailings per day or week. I rather like the idea of every "GET ANYTHING ON ANYONE" piece in my mailbox being a quarter in my pocket.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I got the spam directly from the RNC echampions2000 site, TWICE... at an address that very few people have (recently changed isp's).
I assumed that one of the dozen plus people who had the new one was nice enough to submit my new address...
But then I looked at the freelotto results for that day... guess who the featured advertizer was... RNC echampions2000.... So much for freelotto. Changed email to a freelotto only address, and sent an email to opt-out at freelotto.
If they ever do that again they get a note offering to take cash directly instead of sicking a money grubbing lawyer on them...
FEC needs new rules... all people signing up need to send a confirmation email. All purshased lists must be approved by some internet overseeing body (eg no spam lists) If lists are bought, they are sent through the established site, and use that sites opt-out options (if you send me a political message, I sure as hell want off your email list).
"We are very up-front about what we do and how we do it," said Cajunnet general manager Eugene Wanless. "I think a lot of people consider it spam.
WTF is it if it's not spam!?! After getting kicked off of a few ISPs, WANless seems to be a perfect name for that bozo.
We'll send out between 5 (million) and 20 million emails at a time and take a lot of heat from people whining and complaining. Eventually our ISPs wind up turning us off."
It's asswipes like this that waste bandwidth, take up disk space (which I have to clean up, or set up more on deny files before it gets to my users who will leave them on disk or will "remove me from list" which just gets them more spam), and waste admin time. And they wonder why they get shut off. I should charge them for the the disk space they take up.
Since these spam-meisters are in South Louisiana, I invite all spam haters in that area to egg Cajunnet's building, so we can bother them in the same manner that they bother us. Anyone have an address? :)
/*drunk.. fix later*/
This just makes me even more ashamed of the huge purple neon "PSI NET STADIUM" I pass by every time I head downtown. It was bad enough to know that Maryland gave a sweet deal to a known corporate criminal to bring a football team here; bad enough that they sold the name of the stadium to the highest bidder; but now I have to deal with the fact that my state government is in sweet with a bunch a spammers.
The shame. The horror.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
If you could give giant ISPs more money NOT TO carry spammers than the spammer can give them TO carry them, then perhaps they might listen to your arguments. Until then, it is a simple function of money. Spammers pay to have their traffic carried, you all pay nothing and bitch. Gee, I wonder who the ISPs are going to listen to.
Speak truth to power.
Like many of you, I seethe each time I open my mailbox and see FREE XXX/Make $10,000 per week from home/lost 3 inches guaranteed crap.
Hunting/identifying/shutting down spammers' freemail address and geocities/angelfire sites is not that satisfying - you know the jerks are just going to start another one.
Fight fire with fire!
I've been having fun saving the 800 numbers in my Palm V and calling them from public phones - and leaving the 800 number of other spammers in their voicemail. Call 800-555-1219: "Hi, this is Mark Miller, and I'd love to make $10,000 from home each week. My number is 800-555-4492. Look forward to hearing from you!"
Call 800-555-4492: "Hi, this is David Logan, I'd be very interested to talk! 800-555-1219"
Alternatively, I've left messages pointing to my home fax line. And I KNOW those thieving motherfuckers call back - there's always a few call-and-hangups after each phony voicemail I leave.
The idea of jamming up hopeful get-rich-quick idiots gives me warm fuzzies at night. Sure, it's a cheap thrill, but they are gratifying nonetheless. That 800-number "duck quack" meme cost the company over $10,000 in long distance charges per day. Don't just ignore spam - run up their telephone charges and drive them out of business. Your country is counting on you.
- The Mischief Commitee
(a wholly owned subsidiary of Project Mayhem. Member FDIC)
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-- If the blues don't kill you, brother, they'll make you a mighty, might man.
The Pjammer Chronicles --
How does it do that? It listens for a pattern in the sound when answered. Typically, an answering machine has a message like "Hi, you've reached so & so, please leave a message" - basically a long, uninterrupted pattern of sound. When a person answers, they generally just say "Hello?" and wait for a reply - a quick pulse of sound, then nothing.
That's what the predictive dialer listens for - a quick pulse. If a long string, then it hangs up, so they don't waste their phone bill on an answering machine.
How do you take advantage of this? Instead of putting "Hi, you've reached so & so, please leave a message", instead put something like "Hi" "you've reached so & so, please leave a message"
This will fool the dialer into thinking it's a real person, and transfer the call to a telemarketer. Sure, the telemarketer will hang up, but you've just consumed an extra five or ten seconds of their time, and a few cents of connect time. This impeded the amount of time they can spend bothering other people, and when it happens in the thousands, it can actually have an effect.
Do it, try it!
And does this legislature have anything to say about the ISPs that support the sending of spam?
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
This site uses some very tough filters:
The negative impact is that there is about one piece of mail per week SpamCop holds back. And people who send email to me are often people who cannot understand the confirmation request.
So I think that this war cannot be won. After my experiences with ORBS, MAPS and SpamCop, I must say that having a nearly spam-free mailbox has severe disadvantages, and I think that there are lots of people who will accept SPAM in the end; simply because it is too difficult to build filter software that filters most SPAM and is user-friendly at the same time.
Yeah, I get heaps of spam about Viagra!
That wasn't in your list.
Dunno why I get them, considering I'm only 19.
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