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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.
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.
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.
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... :(
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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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.. ;-)
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?
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.
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E_NOSIG
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"
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
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.
They're in it for the money. They make tons of money selling WATS lines to telemarketers and other phone-annoyers, why shouldn't they make money off of spammers?
My understanding is that if there's money to be made off of it, corporate America will do it and grease congress to make it legal and then justify it by saying "we're in a legally sanctioned business".
Anybody who thinks that "business ethics" means anything more than "lying or stealing without getting caught" is living in fantasy land. Of course I think it *ought* to mean more than that, but the hard reality is that it doesn'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.
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"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem"
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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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!!!
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
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!
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); }
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!
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:
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.
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!
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?
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).
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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.
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.
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.
I do understand Yin and Yang; there is an element of formal ethics study in largely ethical professions. I know that there is a 'code of ethics' for professional engineering; but that is something that lawyer and business types created so that the engineering profession would remain forever in its place as a sacrificial profession for the consumption of business men and the law.
It is not something that ethical engineers saw that they needed to impose on their unethical fellow engineers to clean up their profession. In addition, from Yin and Yang it is predictable that there would be unethical fields where there are no ethics classes available; crime comes to mind - nobody can take classes in 'criminal ethics'.
Formal stated ethics usually occur in 'Con job' professions like the law or business where it is important that people believe that the fields are ethical when they are not.
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
how about people lying in their spam? (in my case, this is about 3 in 4 spams).
..
>From: spammer@foo.bar
>Subject: Make money fast
>I saw your webpage, and
No you didn't... I'm pretty sure, since I dont have one. then there's ofcourse the old "lotsa money! (if you're american)", and the classic 'here... have some doodles in japanese/korean' which could fall in earlier mentioned categories but I cant read it so i dont really know. Good thing my autoreply is still the DeCSS source..
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
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.
- 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
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.
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?
...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!
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!
All that is required is for a heads up to be sent to the admin: "Hey Mr. Admin, I'm going to run a mailing list for about 500 people. Just want to let you know what all that traffic is. Thanks."
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
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.)
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RobK
Myddrin
Does this mean I will be spammed at will with no recourse?
ÕÕ
Ah, you noticed. UUnet have the beginnings of a history of being crap.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
I report Usenet spams from UUnet more often than not; all I get back is unrelated automated crap from them, with no personal followup later - ever. UUnet ought to have their plug pulled until they wise up.
(General point: go easy on spamcop, btw. Speaking as a sysadmin at a site that occasionally sends out bulk mails, it *is* still the case that bulk mail is not unsolicited, ie reporting us to spamcop.net just because you can't be arsed unsubscribing will not endear you.)
~Tim
--
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
Once again - from Yin and Yang, a largely ethical profession like medicine will have unethical elements to it; medical experiments and things like abortion do present ethical dilemmas.
Conversely it is possible to be an ethical businessman or an ethical lawyer, and I do personally know examples of each. However it is extremely difficult to be an ethical business or legal practitioner who is very rich - I don't know either of those. All of the wildly successful people in both of those fields that I know are unethical. I am sure that there are exceptions to those observations - somewhere there are successful businessmen and lawyers who are ethical - I have just never met any.
Could be worse. I get them, and I'm female.
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
...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.
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!
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.