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Norway Bans Spam
nordicfrost writes: "Everyone in Norway has aquired a law-given right to say "no" to spam. This is also happening in other countries like Germany. The spammers have to check that the people they send advertisements to aren't on the "opt-out" list, a list centrally operated by the government's National Data Register. This means that anyone sending me something I haven't requested, faces fines and up to six months of jail time." Recently a spammer got one of my addresses and is spamming me 10 times a day. Forged everything, random everything, many different messages, only a similiarities in the subject line to tie them together. At least I can filter it, but I'd love to see this ass get 6 months of jail time, especially if he's doing this to thousands of others.
When spam is made illegal in brand-name countries, it will just move, and you'll start hearing terms like "off-shore spammers" and "swiss spam accounts". If it isnt obvious, this paralles the drug trade, where drugs were made much more profitable.
Sneakemail is to spam filters what an ounce of prevention is to a pound of cure.
No one will read this because it's pretty far down, but this raises interesting possibilities. Would it be possible to set up a mail server their (web-based, like Hotmail) and automatically add all email addresses created to this list?
This would be a good way to have a 'safe' email account for emailing friends, collegues, etc. without digging through messages.
The only issue would be enforcement. In theory this works, but to ensure that the law would still be in effect for such a server, a lawyer would have to look at the law itself. Basically, do you need citizenship?
Well, Well, Well, long time no viddy, old droogie SPAM! I am going to have to dissagree with laws against spam. You see, if you do not punish EVERYONE for unsolicited advertisements then NO ONE should be punished for it...period.
I know everyone that reads this will agree that spam sucks, telemarketers suck, and stupid pointless snail mail advertisements suck, get over it...Life sucks.
And who in this forum can back up claims that spam is like a DoS. I have never had any bog downs, loss of service or anything of the sorts from being the target of spam, nor has any of my friends, nor have I ever heard of such a thing other than those who's only purpose with the internet is to kill spam. Please give me a break, delete the message, and go on with your life. People who run mail servers choose to have an open relay.
All I am trying to say is this: Don't punish people for spamming, if you do then punish EVERYONE for advertising to people who don't want it. As far as spamming costing ISP's money and so on, hey that's part of your service, delivering email and so on...get a life.
"When I look back, my life is not a foreign country, it's more like a library book returned long ago." - ????
I agree. I personally think they've got it backwards. The National Data Registry (or whatever it was called) should keep an opt-in list. If anyone wants to receive spam, they just sign up for it.
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
This guy's article is about the most flawed thinking I've ever seen concerning spam (apart from the spammers themselves).
If you want to check it out, look at: the article (safe browse mode via SamSpade.org). It won't be long before this guy gets kicked off his ISP for violation of his TOS, and giving out your home phone number to spammers (especially when there are sooo many reverse lookup systems out there) is suicidal.
Newbies: DO NOT FOLLOW THIS ADVICE!
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'No rational religion claims "supernatural" exists, that's an atheist slander.' - seen on slashdot.
My mailbox which collates a number of addresses currently is about 70% spam. This is only because my previous (soon to be destroyed) address was listed on Usenet, web pages, NIC databases and so on.
Needless to say that my current address will never be listed anywhere. I use sneakemail addresses while I setup a complete DNS and MX and will use temp addresses after that. Any temp address that gets spammed more than 5 or ten times gets dunked.
Oh and I contact, call, protest, and generally make myself a nuisance with any spammer I can identify. Spam may not be officially illegal (there's no law but there are numerous "recommentadions" against it) in France, however owning a database of personal information without prior declaration is illegal. Spammers do not declare their databases and I can therefore log formal protests against them.
Pity it doesn't work with the ones from the US and Japan though.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
The flaw in your reasoning is all contained in one sentance near the end:
We live in a free society
We do. The Chinese do not. The difference is that in the western world it is an offense to send somebody a junk fax. In China it is an offense to criticise the government using a fax machine, to somebody you know.
Hey guess what? A dictatorial government lied to cover up the introduction of a law preventing opposition from organising. Nothing to do with spam.
And I'd point out that you no longer get faxes from people sending you adverts, and you've got more ink and more paper in your fax machine as a result. Also, you can use your fax machine, as it doesn't start trying to print another ad whenever you plug it in. I think that's a bonus, and the definition of Junk Fax seemed to work.
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'No rational religion claims "supernatural" exists, that's an atheist slander.' - seen on slashdot.
Most of the government regulation of personal lives comes from conservatives. They are the ones that are pushing for the government to regulate and/or outlaw abortion. They fight against needle-exchange programs so that drug addicts don't spread HIV. The conservatives are the ones that launched the whole "War On Drugs" and have fought for mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related convictions.
I think your point is highly debatable. I agree with you that conservatives are the ones pushing for government regulation of abortions. But it is more typically liberals who are pushing for government regulation of smoking. Liberals also push for laws to restrict your 2nd Amendment rights. Further, they are constantly advocating laws to control how you may use your own personal property. Both groups advocate taking large portions of your personal income to spend as they see fit. And both groups are equally strong in their support for the War on Drugs. One of the few truly liberal groups that is against the WoD is the Libertarians.
Conservatives tend to support laws based on traditional Judeo-Christian morality: laws against abortion, laws against homosexuality, laws against adultry, laws against what your body may ingest, etc. "Liberals" tend to support laws based on New Age morality: laws against smoking, laws against guns, laws against your use of your own property, laws against freedom of association, etc.
Both groups are equally culpable in the regulation of our personal lives. Again, the Libertarians are one of the few groups honestly advocating getting government regulation out of our personal lives.
You can screw spammers easily
just follow the link in my sig. for details
http://Lenny.com
Hey dumb fuck, my cell phone has an e-mail address. I don't have to forward anything. If e-mail is sent to that address, it appears on my phone. Because of spammers, I dare not give that address out -- but what right do spammers have to render useless a feature included with my cell phone service?
You also act like the spammers have a right to waste my time by making me set up filters and compression so that I can access my own e-mail. Maybe your time is worthless, but mine is not.
By the way, Mr. Wizard, do you know that your ISP is passing the costs of spam on to you and every other subscriber?
(try using exim and its filter forward rules)
I use VAMP (Very Advanced Mail Processor). Exim only runs under Unix/Linux and that's not what I use on my mail server/firewall/ftp server/etc. machine.
P.S. If you are so skilled at filtering your e-mail, why doesn't your e-mail address appear with your posting?
I used to get the same kind of spam, and I had to drop cypherpunks because of it. As it turns out, sneakemail can prevent this kind of spam by allowing only mail from a particular domain (the list domain) to arrive at the mailbox. On the whole, I am very impressed with their system.
It may not be just, but it is fair, and that is more important.
Heh, we must be on different lists. I get all the "How to Make $80,000...", but never get the teenage girls or college degrees. In fact, lately the only thing I get that ISN'T tools for creating more spam is cable converters or satellite dish ads. All word-for-word identical, from some random email address routed through Japan or Korea.
The first amendment (free speech) is one of America's most basic tenets; something people do not take lightly. That's why you can still buy Nazi memorobilia, KKK literature, etc. It's generally accepted in this country that limitations on speech are very damaging, and should only be applied in extreme circumstances.
Limiting any kind of electronic communication could quickly become a slipperly slope, and free-speech advocates would most likely fight this (even though it would mean having to deal with spam).
There is a noticable difference between "Free Speech" and spam. I can walk away from Free Speech. I don't have to listen. And if the speaker continues after me, it becomes harrasment, which is not constitutionally protected.
Spam, on the other hand, cannot be as easily avoided. Yes, I can block certain e-mail addresses, or just redirect them to trash, but I have to continually update that, or I get swamped. And some mailer don't have that option. Hotmail, for instance, only allows you to block 50 e-dresses, last I checked.
Spam is not free speech...
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
In WA there is a law on the books: if you spam someone who is on the opt-out list they can sue you for $500 per infraction. Check out http://www.waisp.org/
It's tough to enforce on anyone who doesn't live in Washington though. I know that a guy in OR was taken to court but I'm not sure how it ended up.
-Brian
"Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness." -Robert A. Heinlen
Let say it takes 3 seconds to process each item of spam in your mailbox. The spammer has just wasted 3 seconds of your time. No problem, right?
Spammer has sent this spam to 1 million people, wasting 3 seconds of each of thier time...
Thats 3 million wasted seconds, or about 37 days.
How would you feel if the spammer kidnapped you and held you for 37 days? Thats exactly what he is doing, only its distributed among a million people.
I think 6 months in jail for a 37 day kidnapping is not enough.
Reality has a liberal bias
Most e-mail servers will always put who the message is being sent to when it's being processed. Look in the headers at the 'Received:' lines. At the end, you'll likely see 'for: ' bits. Sendmail, at least, does this.
As a personal rule, I do not accept telephone solicitation. For many, filtration software is a needed tool for communication sanity. Too often, the Attention Market has you at a disadvantage, ready to commit you to a purchase, legally obligating you to a recorded whisper of "okay." Meanwhile, you often have no such record of their verbal promises, if you have need of committing them to rendering services. And while Spam on email at least gives you written record, the company's credentials are often every-bit-as-nebulous.
If nothing guarantees success like having Human Attention lavished on a project, then does Love indeed make the world go around?
I have some familiarity with Norway, living rather near (Finland). One interesting thing is that they don't use curse words. If someone uses them, he/she is considered foolish. They don't, for example, translate curse words in movie subtitles. Therefore I am not very surprised that it was Norway that did this sort of thing first. I hope the rest of us will follow soon.
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The Tale of the Frantic Shapeshifter
6 months for spam is the attitude of a fashist state, you dumb jerk.
You grand slashdotters are always complaining about losing your digital freedoms and electric tolerance all but evaporating...
These new digital freedoms are grand for us users, but hell for the conventional industry, since they fear losing revenue (warez, mp3z, bookz, moviez)... that's why they're pressuring for new laws that'll change this stuff from petty delicts to high-cost crime for the perpetrator.
Of course we all bitch about that, right.
But if you're suddenly on the losing side of the new grand digital order, and are "being taken advantage of" by getting spam, then SUDDENLY it's:
You dumb jerk, your grand additude leads to exactly the same kind of goverment attitude:"Give those damn spammers SIX MONTHS!"
(it's just SPAM, for crying out load, you want somebody to go to jail for SIX months for spam!?!? YES, I'm am all for fining the guy, but not for incarceration)
______________________________________________
sigamajig...
How is it proven that a company whose product is advertised in spam is the originator or even a conspiritor in sending the message out? Motive certainly isn't sufficient. It seems like they will have a hard time prosecuting companies who take the extra step in assuring plausible deniability before ordering (I have no recollection of that senator) unsolicited mailings.
What seems even more interesting though is that, were the government to take a really strong stance towards prosecution, "fake" spam campaigns would become that much more effective in damaging a company.
[ This space for rent ] - Your full service media whore
Be careful who you give your email address. If you participate in news groups, mailing lists or competitions on game sites, you are in the danger zone.
"Spam" is the term for unwanted ads to your email box. Spam (pronounced "spæm") got its name from an old Monthy Python joke, where a bunch of vikings interrupt in the action singing "Spam, spam, spam, lovely spam, wonderful spam.
This spam is mailed by more or less ruthless business people hoping to sell services and merhandise. The method is flooding your mail box with offers.
Illegal in many countries
Spam is illegal in many countries, and on the 1st of March Norway will get one of the strictest regulations in this field, as will Denmark, Finland, Germany, Austria and Italy. A new and more EU-adapted law of marketing becomes effective, and prohibits advertisements via email and SMS (text messages) unless the consumers have given their consent in advance.
Companies violating the prohibition, will have to deal with the Forbrukerrådet (Consumers' Directorate). The reactions for breaking the new law of marketing are definitely harsher. One risks having to pay expensive tickets or having to serve up to six months in jail. Or both.
The trouble with that position is, it assumes there has to be cost involved with spamming. As long as it's possible to hijack someone else's account for spamming, or use a throwaway account while paying a flat rate, the cost is effectively dumped onto the recipients. That is the whole _point_...
at least in Denmark. It is part of the marketing law, which regulates what you can do to advertize your products. One of the rules is that you cannot take direct electronic contact (email, fax or phone) with individuals for the purpose of sale without their prior agreement. At least in Denmark, you are still allowed to spam people with "Jesus loves you", and you are still allowed to spam companies with adds.
With regard to your friend, your prior contact with him would probably get you free, you are not selling anything so you would not be covered by the law, and finally, it is not criminal law in Denmark, so you would not get in jail (even though spammers should be shoot).
Maybe the future is more about web sites, boards like Slashdot etc. and less about 'commercial email' or even 'this is very important to you' email.
I know that if every single political fringe, environmental activist group, union, whatever that I AGREED WITH AND SUPPORTED felt free to send me email whenever something happened in the world that interested me, I would STILL BE BURIED in email and my email account would be unusable. I can't overemphasise this. It's not about my consent or interest in what's being sent, it is about the fact that the world contains more information than I can process, and always will. In this light, mass mailing of _any_ sort is a disturbing mechanism to me, because it always keeps the potential to go right off the scale and become impossible volume.
I think it's time to redefine email as 'private communications only'. There's no way to consider it a public resource without causing trouble. I can have an email account on my web page about Stratocasters, but this doesn't mean that everyone who sells Stratocasters can proceed to email me about what _they_ want to sell. The trick with the internet is that one aspect to the loss of privacy means that sellers can research and identify potential buyers: in the future ten thousand people a day can research what I really want and need, and then email me entirely personal letters asking me to buy something that I specifically want. That doesn't change the fact that ten thousand emails a day is still impossible, unmanageable... the ability of the world to produce RELEVANT information is far greater than the ability of a person to process it.
THAT is why spam is a crime. In a peculiar way it is more akin to rape than theft. "You _are_ going to love my special offer now! Your attention belongs to me now. Don't try and get away!"
> The defining requirement about spam is its unsolicited nature.
/., and I send you private mail to say I liked it, I've spammed you, since you didn't solicit my opinion?
So you're saying that if I see your posting on
Chuq Von Rospach, Internet Gnome = When his IQ reaches 50, he should sell
If your list is tainted, possibly because its opt-in procedures allow or once allowed abuses, why not throw it away and begin assembling a new one? It sounds like your list is tainted.
The companies are forced to check their lists for a certain time before they send the spam, and have to remove any matching names permantently from their records.
The link is here: http://www.brreg.no/oppslag/reservasjon/index.htm
If want any charitable orgs to continue bothering you, there's an option that will let them, but not any profitable orgs, continue sending you spam / call you etc.
You may very well hide it, but deep inside I know you Americans envy us the right to jail a telemarketeer...
Try this one: start.no It's in Norwegian, could be a problem...
How does Norway plan to enforce its spam ban when the spam is created outside of Norway?
if a person in Brazil, or more likely, Malaysia, sends you spam, and it's not illegal where he sends it (which it's not in both those countries), wha's Norway going to do? Hold its breath until it turns blue? Extradite you (oops, Brazil doesn't have extradition treaties) and charge you with a misdemeanor?
what is Norway's definition of spam? is it generally accepted and legally unambiguous?
it's great they're banning spam. i'm all for it. Now -- how do you enforce the ban? Especially since almost all of norway's spam starts somewhere other than norway?
Chuq Von Rospach, Internet Gnome = When his IQ reaches 50, he should sell
how does the RIAA get a norwegian kid arrested for decss? how does a french court prevent yahoo.com from auctioning off nazi memorabilia?
it's nice to see though. someone has been harvesting ebay.co.uk recently and about 70% of my spam is addresses to my ebay spamtrap. grr...
dave
Yes, I get spam too, and yes, I hate it too, but realistically, the bother of having to delete some extra emails every day does not deserve the same kind of punishment as, say, rapists, car thieves, bank robbers, etc. The world's prisons are crowded enough.
This much appreciated endorsement of Sneakemail was not solicited or sanctioned by the management of Sneakemail in any way.
8-)
All shameless promotion of Sneakemail on
Sneakemail is to spam filters what an ounce of prevention is to a pound of cure.
> There is a noticable difference between "Free Speech" and spam. I can walk away from Free Speech.
Tell that to the doctors and patients at abortion clinics that are harrassed and abused by Operation Rescue under the claims of Free Speech.
chuq (this posting self-moderated to -1:flamebait)
Chuq Von Rospach, Internet Gnome = When his IQ reaches 50, he should sell
No, there are however a certain health risk telling blond jokes in a country where 90% of the population are blondes.
> they can find them all on a government provided
> list!
I don't think the Norwegian government provides such a service, I suspect anyone can set one up. Someone else refered to the Norwegian phone company.
There is more than enough organization and technology in place to prevent mass abuse of spam without government intervention. The grey areas are places we probably don't want a government arbitrating. What if a friend signs you up to a mailing list? What about mass political mailings that are of immense informative value? What if a company is limited in their competitve tools to fight entrenched near-monopolistic companies and mass, unsolicited email messages is one of their only options? Do we really want to vest this kind of regulatory control in a government that could potentially abuse it?
If there were no feasible way for the private sector to regulate itself, regulation might be worth considering. However, that is not the case. Upstream providers can filter mail, refuse to route packets from offending domains, use tools such as ORBS to block mail, etc. That's not even getting into personal efforts to deal with spam.
And, if all this fails, a person can use the civil courts as a last resort to arbitrate particularly offending cases.
Getting the government involved is usually a bad idea, because once they have the authority, they never let go. Everybody should take seriously Thomas Jefferson's admonition that government governs best which governs least.
...I'm moving to Norway!
This was proposed in Sweden, and it's as lousy an idea now as it was then. There was a public outcry since the only thing something like this will do is to legitimize spam. Enforced opt-in or a ban of spam altogether is the real solution. And, honestly, how many people think that this opt-out list will be used as anything except a list of addresses to spam? Now the governent does the address harvesting for you!
"The good die first." "Most of us are morally ambiguous, which explains our random dying patterns." --- MST3K
What I do obejct to, though, is ruthless spamming, forged headers, and all the other things we have come to know and hate.
Opting out, which you appear to favour, is not a solution for me. And I certainly won't reply with "unsubscribe" in the subject.
This might indeed be one of the rare cases where government intervention / regulation is needed. The problem, though, is that most spam comes from the US and/or overseas, so individual laws (spam is outright prohibited where I live, eg) are not the solution. States need to cooperate. If the EU could find a common position on this subject, it'd be a step in the right direction.
DNIS actually stands for Dialed Number Identification Service. It's commonly used in call centers where you want a screen pop to an operator's station which switches contextually with the number the caller dialed....
-drin
Let say it takes 3 seconds to process each item of spam in your mailbox. The spammer has just wasted 3 seconds of your time. No problem, right?
Spammer has sent this spam to 1 million people, wasting 3 seconds of each of their time...
Thats 3 million wasted seconds, or about 37 days.
How would you feel if the spammer kidnapped you and held you for 37 days? Thats exactly what he is doing, only its distributed between a million people.
I think 6 months in jail for a 37 day kidnapping is not enough.
Reality has a liberal bias
(Me? I bounce Chinese-relayed spam with "550 - Free Tibet" or "550 - Falun Gong thanks you", followed by a random set of characters. Makes the relay operator sweat, confuses the PRC gov't. Win-win.)
Thank you. That really punched my giggle button.
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
In the USA!
Now that SPAMMING is becoming a crime, what happens if someone attempts to frame YOU for the spam... "Mr. Johnson is now facing trial and plea's innocent and claims that the real spammer hacked his email account".
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
One solution, endorsed by CAUCE is to instead rely on a "NO UCE" banner added to the mail server's banner. This has some obvious drawbacks (it's not per-user and requires administrative intervention).
A slightly better solution for an opt-out list (I won't argue the merits of opt-out versus opt-in) would be a list of the MD5 hashes for each email address. The downside would be that this would prevent regular expressions to handle any and all valid variants of an address. One partial fix would be to require that the spammer query a number of variants of a given address. For example, if the address were "erasmus@foobar.invalid", we could require that the query both "erasmus@foobar.invalid" and "@foobar.invalid" for MD5 matches.
A slightly different alternative would be a query-only list maintained by a trusted party. So internally the list might have "erasmus(\+[^@]*)?@foobar\.invalid" but all the spammer would get back would be a "do not spam this address" when they attempt to query "erasmus@foobar.invalid", "erasmus+foo@foobar.invalid", and so forth. The downside is that this requires a central authority that can be trusted with email addresses (not too hard) and is extremely competent with security (much more difficult).
...only outlaws will have spam! And I don't know about all you other jack-booted gub'mint thugs, but you can have MY canned-meat product when you pry it from my cold, dead hands!
--M.
Change it to a mass email to people you've never met or heard of and then it becomes spam. Even the Junk Fax law allows exceptions for people with whom you have a previous relationship. Companies can send you faxes if you've bought from them previously. They just can't send anything prior to you actually having contact with them in another medium (and in person certainly qualifies, even if it IS in a bookstore).
so could somebody provide a rough (even just a partial) translation or the article? I don't think Altavista knows Norwegian.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Check out SpamCop for a great way to help deal with spam. SpamCop is free to use, but you can also sign up and pay them money.
Really, paying them money is to support their work, but you also get a spam-free email forwarding service where yourname@spamcop.net gets forwarded to your favorite mail drop without any of the spam (which they do a very good job of filtering).
I'm using harmil@spamcop.net now as my primary "public" email address for things like slashdot and USENET, and it works pretty well.
Their spam reporting service is very cool. It tracks down the ISP of the spammer, submits the IP address of relays to ORBS, and also tracks any URLs in the spam body. Plus, ISPs who play ball with SpamCop can mark accounts as deleted and otherwise feed back into the system to reduce their request-load. Such things can be appealed by paying SpamCop users, but for the most part, ISPs are pretty good about it.
For the record, I'm just a customer.
The spammer would just leach addresses from the list. Who said spammers have morals?
Spam is certainly very annoying, but is it sacrificing too much of our Internet Freedom to let governments fine and even jail people for spamming? I mean, everyone always talks about freedom on the Internet, keeping it unregulated, etc. Why should this be different? This is a huge regulation. Who is to say exactly what spam is? And what would prevent the state from jailing me for sending a friend an unsolicited email about a product i recently saw and thought he might like to buy? A little far-fetched, I admit, but this just seems like a dangerous road to go down. I say turn the filter on and keep government out of the Internet.
How difficult will this be to prosecute?
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Warning: I don't speak/read/understand norweigan.
.no redirection service that doesn't add any special header or footer to the messages?
Does anyone know if this legislation covers email redirection? If so, does anyone know of a good norweigan
--
All browsers' default homepage should read: Don't Panic...
All browsers' default homepage should read: Don't Panic...
All the free speech concerns aside, this stilly has some pretty scary implications. What constitutes spam? Is it unsolicited commercial email? Is it harrasment? Or will this turn out to be abused in much the same way the (very necessary) sexual harrasment laws have been?
Does anyone have an Eigo translation of this article so that we can get the specifcs? The fishy don't do Norweigan.
"Sir, you're under arrest for spamming your coworkers."
"But they *asked* me to send them 'The Big List of Blonde Jokes'! Honest, officer!"
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Your list of blonde jokes would not be covered by the anti-spam law, however annoying these kind of emails are.
The article isn't very specific, unfortunately. The Danish law is pretty specific, and leave out a lot of cases that are usually considered spam, such as non-commersial UBE, and UBE directed at companies rather than individuals.
Yeah, but I don't get any regular mail from the Cayman islands. Filter on that and you get most of it.
Regulating spam isn't so much about freedom on the internet as it is about freedom to be free of crap.
Now, I know we all get tons of snailmail everyday we didn't ask for. I get at least one credit card in the mail every couple of weeks or so and I just tear it up and throw it away. For some reason it's just more annoying to get that crap in my email! I don't know why really, it's just a mindset I guess.
Spammers are truly the scum of the earth, right down there with lawyers and people who key random cars in parking lots. Perhaps jail is a bit extreme but for crying out loud this madness has GOT to end!
Spam sucks
Silly slashdot, sigs are for kids!
And what is this about opting in and opting out, anyway? I think what we're seeing is that the email protocol is just too trusting and open-ended for the current net environment. I mean, lots of sites will tell you I 'opted in' to receive their junk and a bunch of others', and, if I don't believe it, I can go back and [find and] read the small print that was hovering closeby when I tried to download something or other. It would seem that we're constantly letting other people define 'consent to receive spam' for us.
Disposable email addresses are the way to go -- by this I don't mean a hotmail address or something like that, but, rather an address that is only good for x uses. My favorite site for this is www.spamgourmet.com (free and ad-free) because the addresses are created as used -- this means there's no maintenance on the site, and, theoretically, you'd never have to go back to the site unless you changed your forwarding address, or whatever. The psychology behind this is that taking control of my inbox away from the spammers has to be easier than receiving and deleting one piece of spam, and I have to perceive this fact at that critical moment when I'm signing up for something...
From the faq:
Q. How do I create a disposable email address?
A. First, set up an account here, if you haven't already, and save your real email address in the space provided (don't skip this important step!). Remember your username. Later, when you need a disposable email address, just think of a word (any combination of letters and numbers (20 characters max), provided you haven't used it before), and decide how many messages you want to receive at the new address. Then, put the word, the number, and your spamgourmet username together with dots to form the disposable address. For instance, if your Username is "spamcowboy", then you could make a disposable address like so:
someword.2.spamcowboy@spamgourmet.com
Then, you can use the address to sign up for your favorite spam-prone website, get a confirmation message, get your password in the second (and final) message, then smile and consider for a moment that no one, no-how is going to send you email with that address again.
Please note: This service summarily deletes any message that doesn't pass muster with the forwarding rules, rather than preserving it for future viewing -- I love this!, but you may prefer something that saves your spam -- you may have to put up with ads or small payments to accomodate the higher cost of saving the spam, though.
who's moderating the meta-moderators?
This is exactly what I do right now.
My ISP (Demon Internet) gives you unlimited email addresses at your own domain (albeit a sub-domain of demon.co.uk). This way I can sign up to anything with a unique name, e.g.: unique@myhost.demon.co.uk, and then I can tell where the spammer got my email address from.
Using this technique I have been able to tell that BT sell their customer's email address to sports.com, and Virgin Radio will sell their user's addresses to almost anyone selling junk!
Sure is interesting to find out where the spammers harvest the email addresses from.
I like this idea, but I see some problems... how open is this opt-out list? Can anybody join this list or what? It seems only norwegian spammers are going to be held accountable, so anybody else can ignore this list or even abuse it... that is: use it as a free source of email addresses.
I'm interested to see where this goes.
Moz.
see a Text Widget
"Stop the e-mail commercials
Now, nobody are to be allowed sending advertizing to your e-mail box unless you allow it - in Norway that is. Because more than a Norwegian EU-adapted law is needed to stop the flow of ads through the Internet.
[link] How to stop spamming
[link] Prevent peepers from looking at your machine
[link] How to opt out
Watch out who you give your e-mail address to. If you participate in newsgroups, mailing lists and compos on gaming sites you are especially at risk.
"Spam" is the term for unsolicited advertizing aimed at your e-mail box. Spam (pronounced 'spæm') have received its name from an old Monty Python-sketch, where a band of vikings continue to interrupt the plot by singing "spam, spam, spam, lovely spam, wonderful spam".
This spam is being sent by more or less conscienceless business people who hope to sell services and goods. The means is to overflow your inbox with offers.
Illegal in many countries
Im many countries spam is illegal, and the 1st of March Norway will get one of the strictest regulations in this area, paralelling Denmark, Finland, Germany, Austria and Italy. A new and more EU-adapted law of marketing is then made valid, and advertising through e-mail or SMS (mobil phone text messages) will be illegal, unless the consumers have opted in nin advance.
Companies that break the law will be dealt with by the consumer ombudsman[1]. The maximum penalty for breaking the new[2] law of marketing has also been raised. One now risks heavy fines or six years in prison. Or both."
[1] No good english equivalent as far as I know, it's an organization not a person.
[2] Improved, actually
The newspaper VG is the biggest tabloid in Norway, no nude girlie on sundays but not far from it.
Hrmm.... That's a really bad comparison. You can't compare free speech with spammers. I have the right to host a Nazi site if I want to. Hence, free speech. Hopefully there will never be a standard of internet regulations agreed upon by the EU/USA/ Rest of world.
Actually, the whole point is _profit_ and this is generated by advertising revenue. Spammers make money by selling a service, and if there are no buyes, there are no spammers. Convince the advertisers that they are wasting their money and they will return to their usual media, e.g. filling our Snail Mail boxes.
All your belongings are base to us.
The price is too high. I hate spam just as much as the next guy. But this solution is worse than the problem! Government registry of personal email addresses! Do you understand what this means? Have you thought it through? Is preventing spam the legitimate role of government? Does it even come close to being legitimate?
Spam is an annoyance. Government registration of internet users is the foundation for technotyranny. I'll gladly put up with the former to prevent the latter.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I think most of Slashdot is missing out of the real story here. The national register is including many types of spam; over snail-mail, E-mail and telephone. Combined with these are many categories you can freely choose to opt-out of, like advertisements, free newspapers, statistical queries, humanitarian/non-profit organisations and so on. Every company and organisation sending out unsolicited spam, must wash their spam-lists against this register before sending out their piles of junk.
However, being a customer or member, they have a right to send you material and the whole issue gets a bit shadier. Also, this will not prevent rogue spammers or companies originating in foreign countries.
All in all, I believe this is a great innitiative. A central register like this means much less hassle in opting-out. Eg, many postmen blatantly ignore the stickers you can put on your mailboxes. They get extra paid for delivering spam. I only hope this'll work.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Go away and read your spam. It's not like your time has any value.
Duh! Really! Well, thanks for pointing that out! So, spam attacks were big back in the 70's as well then?
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Moderator's essentials
The sender pays for junk snailmail. YOU pay (in increased ISP costs, and -- for europeans -- connect time) for junk email.
Yes, bandwidth , I mentioned this if you read my post.
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Moderator's essentials
First, let me say that yours was a very well-written and argued post. I do think that there is an important distinction to be made between liberal and conservative regulation of personal freedoms:
Liberals tend to limit personal freedom to protect others from things like secondhand smoke and gun-violence.
Conservatives pass laws to impose their religious and moral beliefs on others.
The latter is indefensible in a society that purports to have a separation of church and state.
BTW, most spammers email addresses are forged, and often, they use a disposable reply address. You only hurt the ISP by replying to them.
Both myself and a friend had demon accounts, and had a major problem with spammers forging their headers to read something like:-
jklahdfa@myhost.demon.co.uk
The result when this happened to me was that I got hundreds of messages per day which were spam that had gone to a dead email address and bounced back to me. The friend of mine to whom the same thing happened a year later ended up besieged with obscene emails and viruses. She wasn't amused, and did the same thing I did. Changed address.
Be afraid, be very afraid...
Hurray for Norway, is what I say. Lock up the spammers and throw away the key!
Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems
"Information wants to be paid"
Make it law that all email must contain proper headers and that all email from an advertiser must also contain a phone number and mailing address for the company.
:)
Since no normal internet user will forge headers and all legitimate advertisers will have an office, this will not be a problem for anybody except mass spammers. All other email can be sent to a government agency who tracks down the original senders and forces them to read 5000 spam emails every day for 5 years
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
There is.
Here's a good guideline -- if the originating address is forged, that's a pretty good sign that the email is unwanted (and the sender knows it). I don't think the email you mention above would count as "spam" by any reasonable definition, because it's not advertising anything.
#1, it is opt-in, not opt-out (despite what the submission text says).
#2, what is the problem? Political spammers are just as bad as any other kind of spammer, and deserve to be shoot.
In any case, enforcement is unlikely to be an issue. Only Norwegain spammers are really covered by the law, and the main effect of the law will be that a nice letter will make them stop, without the need to involve law enforcement.
#3, please reserve your paranoia for US politicians, and in any case, who cares about their motives as long as the do the right thing (as in this case).
BTW, in Denmark we already *have* an opt-out system for unadressed junk snailmail, it has worked well for years. We also recently god an opt-out system for direct snailmail, and I haven't received any since I opt'ed out.
Hershey's Chocolate Syrup goes pretty good with SPAM (the salt, grease & sugar forms a great combo :)
9. While getting ready for bed, you stub your toe on your wife's dressing table. What do you do?
(a) Shout and swear a bit, after all, it did hurt
(b) Make a mental note to move the table so it doesn't happen again
(c) Immediately call a hotshot lawyer with an uptown reputation, and sue your wife's ass.
Doesn't this sound painfully familiar? Not the toe - the whole suing thing with Americans. Check out this statement by spectatorion:
Who is to say exactly what spam is? And what would prevent the state from jailing me for sending a friend an unsolicited email about a product i recently saw and thought he might like to buy?
Well, duh! If you get sued and jailed for sending your friend a review about a product you liked he wasn't your friend to begin with!!! Get your priorities straight people - the whole freedom thing extends waaaay too far. There are certain societal rules that you just DON'T tresspass!! Stealing time/resources/whatever from ISPs and individuals is a CRIME! Period.
Now if we could extend the same kind of policy to telemarketers and those companies that flood my mailbox with stupid coupons on a daily basis.
* The telephone directory has finally been released on the net. Datatilsynet struggled against this for years, but finally accepted it under the condition that users need to be registered to search in it. Registration includes e-mail address, full name AND social security number! Is this protection of my privacy?
* Datatilsynet has long struggled against closed-circuit video surveillance, and this is now heavily regulated. Their latest restriction on companies and individuals who set up a camera is this: You need to report your camera to a central register. Does this protect my privacy? It certainly increases the government's capability of surveillance.
I cite the Swedish secretary of economy: "Norway is the last remanining Soviet state".
Nor can you simply add "unsoliciated email advertizing" , as I've seen spam that is generally a plea for help, though poorly targeted and still going through the classic spam patterns. The content of the message does not guarentee it being spam.
And of course, you can't simply add how headers and recieverships might be hidden or such, because there are spammers that actually follow proper protocols -- they don't stay very long at one ISP, mind you, but they do continue to spam.
I think that any spam punishment provision must include the fact that if the person attempted to out-opt and yet recieved the spam from the same people after a sufficient timeframe passed for the opt-out request to be processed (2 weeks), then if they are spammed again, then the penalties start. This would allow those that run mailing lists, for example, to be free of concerns of ruthless subscribers, as well protecting casual one-time emails, while most spammers, who'd refuse to prune email lists, would be caught pants down.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
- If there really is a public opt-out list available on the list, it helps spamers getting email addresses.
- Every law that can hardly be enforced potentially leads to ambiguity. Investigations will not be done for every spam mail, instead investigations will start with unpleasant people. Thus for a crime done by thousands of people only a small group (e.g. activists who spam a political essay) will be imprisoned.
- It is ridiculous to assume that the goal of politics is stopping spam. I still get about 2kg (4.4 pounds) of snail-mail spam a week. It would be easy to enforce a ban on it, and it could save me a lot more time compared to saving 1 second dedicated to deleting an email.
- They just want to show that they care for the "internet generation".
- They try get into regulating the internet, getting a long list of potential internet-delinquents.
I think people are so much concerned about spam, because they feel watched. They get email from a website, that they wanted to deny having accessed.I suggest 2 other explainations:
In the example you've given with the anonomyzer personal email, it's unlikely to classify as spam under any resonable definition (there's only one recipient), and more importantly, the only recipients of the message are those who want to read it (and laws prosecuting spam would almost certainly use complaints against the spammer as key evidence, especially since 'genuine' spam attracts an enormous volume of complaints)
To sum it up, I don't agree that others have the freedom to pollute my inbox or abuse resources that I pay for. Your freedom to swing your arms around ends where my nose begins.
In Denmark we have an opt-in law as well, and here it is also the consumer ombudsmand that is administrating the law.
Result: The ombudsmand no longer accepts complaints to be filed by e-mail. Their system couldn't handle the load. Not a single company has yet been convicted.
There is a Linux consultant who is collecting money for running a civil case against one of the spammers.
I have one case that I am going to file. The sender in his apologee admits that he has harvested news and mailing lists for e-mail adresses, and he sees publication of e-mail adresses as opt-in. We need a conviction here in Denmark. 30 days in the shadow would help fight spam.
I don't think anyone is advocating stifling freedom of speech or whatnot. If someone wants to send out a million spam emails, that's his business -- as long as he does it from his servers and/or accounts. I have a personal mail server running out of my basement. The default installation leaves relaying on (I know, my bad). I got quite a few angry emails from people reporting getting spam from me.
I checked the logs, and some azzwipe in Toronto sent out hundreds of thousands of emails, USING MY BANDWIDTH, EQUIPMENT and NAME. My log files alone totalled 100 Meg after just two days.
Those people should be hung up by their sack and disembowled with a rusty spoon. Spam, fine, just don't hide behind legitimate operators to deflect the heat and hate from you. Be decent enough to accept the repercussions from your acts... /sarcasm (I know, we're talking spammers here - they have no decency....)
Such laws are completely ineffective. Firstly, why assume opt-in and force users to opt-out ? I would have thought that most users would prefer opt-out, so it seems to make a more sensible default.
I can also see problems with the opt-in thing though. One problem would be how to decide what is and isn't spam. I often get unsolicited email that is written to me personally (sometimes job offers from publishing companies for example), and I certainly wouldn't want the senders charged. I would propose that for a spammer to be charged, several complaints should be brought against them. (in other words, it really has to be bulk mail for action to be taken)
I propose that for email to be spam, it should satisfy the following:
I cannot believe the moderation that this troll has gotten; people have been moderating down natalie portman naked and petrified with grits and honey for so long they don't recognize a real troll, I suppose. (Clue: thinly explain parallels that claim 'this is just like commies' or 'this is just like nazis' are either Trolls or Fanatics.)
Anyway, the reason this whole post is not worthy of its rating is that, a) we passed the unsolicited fax law in the U.S. and we have not yet joined the communist bloc, if there even -is- a communist bloc anymore, and b) we have lots of laws like 'do not steal' and 'do not speed' but we don't tag everyone with remote transmitters to enforce those laws. Neither does outlawing UCE necessitate that we will pass laws to monitor every computer. If you're worried about it, join the EFF to make sure privacy issues are watched in any anti-spam legislation.
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
Remove the law that forbid you from shooting spammers.
Most of the government regulation of personal lives comes from conservatives. They are the ones that are pushing for the government to regulate and/or outlaw abortion. They fight against needle-exchange programs so that drug addicts don't spread HIV. The conservatives are the ones that launched the whole "War On Drugs" and have fought for mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related convictions.
While conservatives are perfectly comfortable regulating people's personal lives, they are far less willing to regulate big business. With the Direct Marketing Association fighting anti-spam laws, it's unlikely that we will have effective laws against spam any time soon.
Well...
If I'm being oppressed by my government, and they're committing atrocities in secret, then I'm going to tell people about it, spam law or no spam law.
That's the great thing about humans -- they're flexible. If the phone rings and you pick it up to find that it was someone who dialed a random number, looking for help because he was shot in the guts (let's just pretend he forgot about 911), what would you do? Curse at the "fucking moron" for making an unsolicited phone call, or call 911 on his behalf?
Yes, we do have laws. But they can be bent or exceptions could be made for humanitarian reasons. Otherwise, "self-defense" wouldn't ever apply defense against a murder charge.
I hardly think that a chinese man would hesitate to send spam just because the PRC made anti-spam laws. Speaking out against the PRC is illegal (in China) anyways, so what's one more broken law?
It's commercial spam that we *DO* need protection against, especially since they're working so hard to avoid getting blocked by forging their return addresses, spacing out the subject line to avoid keyword filters, etc.
It's fun spreading conspiracy theories, but do try to keep things in perspective.
A lot of the spam you recieve may not be unsolicited. Be careful. Everytime you "submit" info on the web, read the privacy policy. What if this company says that it may give your eMail to some list? Then you will have solicited the spam unknowingly. Even though you are on the "opt-out" list, that will only block spam that can not be justified. I think that spammers will have little trouble making their spam "solicited".
But it is a start, anyway.
Fantastic! Can you help me configure sendmail to do this on my machine? I'm running WindowsME...
OK, seriously tho, it's a great idea. I'll probably implement that on my Linux box once I get around to messing with sendmail. Unfortunately, very few people actually have this kind of access to their mailserver.
(and no, I'm not REALLY running WinME on anything)
An English translation of the law is available from The Data Inspectorate. The law in Norwegian is available here.
- "Every demand is a prison, and wisdom is only free when it asks nothing." Sir Betrand Russell
What if:
- Norway compiles a list of American spam-fugitives
- A US Marshal arrives at the Norwegian border asking to 'interview' an alleged DECSS violator
- Norway sez: "First bring us the spammers so we can 'interview' them"
Would the US Marshal go away?
Also, ISP's should be allowed to sue individuals who use their services for spam. Network bandwidth usage, and spoofed domain names cause monetary damage to ISPs' business.
The Norwegian authorities were tripping over themselves to hand over the guy who wrote DeCSS; I reckon the US State Department owes them a couple of spammers in return.
The article mentions that Norway getting a strict version of laws that already is in effect in other countries. Denmark, Finland, Germany, Austria, and Italy
It also say that this law will mostly affect _Norwegian_ companies and people sending out spam. So all you spammers operating out of other countries can shill.Spam will not be illegal if you ask for permission. The rest of the article is the same crap you can expect from a tabloid.
There's one big difference between garden-variety censorship (which I agree, we must resist) and some kinds of anti-Spam laws: WE as recipients bear the cost of unsolicited commercial email as much as the sender. Our servers, our bandwidth, our memory suffers in order to accommodate messages that we did not request.
It's the same rationale that was used to support laws against "broadcast faxing" a decade ago. Unlike junk mail through the post office (where the sender bears the cost of printing and shipping, and all we do is read) junk faxes rely on the recipients' hardware and force them to bear the cost of printing. Both Spam and junk faxes have a small incremental cost to send, but impose costs on the people who receive them -- even when they don't want to pay it.
Datatilsynet are legitimately fighting *for* the privacy of the Norwegians.
Point 1: If you had bothered to check, you'd know that the registration is for validating your ID agains the national people register, thus making sure only legitimate people get access to the phone directory. You also have to explicitly allow redistribution of your e-mail.
Point 2: The government are also under the same video surveilance rules as everyone else. And you forgot to include that these are open registers that everyone has access to, so you can check where there are cameras and if you want to, avoid them.
It's interesting that there are steps afoot to outlaw electronic spam already, after all the www is not that old.
I have been recieving snail-mail spam (junk mail) for many years. How is this different from electronic spam (aside from bandwidth problems) ? Would the authorities not have to outlaw this kind of spam also?
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Moderator's essentials
Spam is annoying. I expect to delete as much of it these days as I receive in real mail. At last count, I have been spammed in 7 or 8 languages, some of which I can't puzzle out even a single word of. It uses bandwidth, wastes disk space and takes up my time.
But I will not concede to any government the right to determine what can and cannot be considered unwanted e-mail. When the intent is clearly something that would be criminal when done by other means, such as death threats, fraudulent stock scams, etc., certainly those should be illegal. Consider how far anti-spam legislation may go. Do you want to jail time for a message like this:
To: Not Yet Clueful Newbie <new-b@domain>
From: Open Source Hacker <hacker@lug>
Subject: Come to our meeting next Thursday
Hey, I'm the Linux zealot you met at the
bookstore Saturday. Since you were local I
just fingered the local ISPs for someone with
your name. Are you interested in coming to
our Linux Users' Group meeting next Thursday?
I shouldn't have to consult a lawyer to determine the legality of every action I take.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Good, then we can just filter all traffic from the Cayman Islands. Who'd be hurt by that, us or the people of the Cayman Islands?
When it hurts enough, the people will demand that their government does something about it as well.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
Opt-out means that I have to send my address to a register in order not to receive spam. Sweden has this system, and it does not work well.
Norway has chosen an opt-in system, which means that I have to actively request the advertisement from the spammer. If they can't show that I've requested the mail, they are acting against the law.
The translation mentions opt-out, which is wrong.
Norway's new law also covers advertisements sent via SMS, the instant messaging service in the GSM mobile telephone net.
There are some federal laws wrt. do not call lists and all though. I wonder if you could get something like this through here. It'd be a lot easier to prove the spammer was intentionally breaking the law if there were a single federally maintained do not call list...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Hi!
Everybody hates spam. Everybody thinks spam is a pain in the neck. Everybody thinks spam should go away. And those inclined to expect the government to do everything for them will--not surprisingly--tend to expect the government to protect them from spam.
Which may be a good thing, except for one little detail. If the government is going to protect you from "spam", the government is going to define what "spam" means. And you may not be happy with that definition--because as sure as the fact that the sun is coming up tomorrow, any government is going to figure out a way to protect itself with its definition of spam.
Remember "Junk Fax"?
Back when fax machines first appeared it didn't take office supply companies, delis, and a horde of other advertisers to figure out that they could send you virtual flyers with a local phone call--substantially cheaper than paying for postage.
Lots of people objected to junk fax. Lots of legislators climbed on the bandwagon--junk fax came to be viewed by politicians as an easy target: nobody was in favor of (euphemism) "unsolicited commercial fax."
Then a funny thing happened--except that it wasn't funny at all if you are old enough to remember watching it on CNN. Students in the People's Republic of China staged a demonstration in Tianamien Square in Beijing that quickly became a serious challenge to the authority of the Communist Party. At first the authorities dismissed this as an annoyance--but as the protest continued, the government got more and more scared. The government ultimately crushed the protest with tanks and machine guns--no one in the West knows yet how many students were killed.
What was significant about the "uprising" was that the Chinese government was right about one thing: the PRC kept insisting that the protest was being directed by "outside agitators". They were right--Chinese dissidents, in the U.S. as graduate students, were directing the protests across China from an office in suburban Boston--via fax. The PRC finally figured it out, and blocked phone traffic from the Boston area--but they never figured out concepts like call-forwarding, etc. The students were able to communicate with very little restriction right up until the end.
In the aftermath, the Communists decided that "the people" needed protection from "unsolicited fax". They required every fax machine to be registered. They enacted laws spelling out draconian punishments for unregistered fax usage. They tried their damndest to prevent anybody ever doing this again.
Now the Internet is here.
And try as the Chinese Communists might, they're having a tough time preventing people from getting information. The PRC has worked diligently to block access to foreign news sites, foreign chat sites, etc.--especially anything published in Chinese. I'm certain that one dimension of the PRC's reported enthusiasm for Linux is that they can be certain that the U.S. doesn't have a trap door in their computers--and that they can install a trap door of their own. (Somehow, I'm sure the PRC will--what a surprise!--forget to distribute the source code of their distros.)
But they can't block e-mail.
I have mail in my in-box from a young Chinese man. He and his wife are deeply fond of my mother--she and my late stepfather helped them escape from China in the immediate aftermath of Tianemien Square. They are still actively in touch with friends and relatives back in China--by email. And if the need ever arises, they can maintain those communication links: through open relays; through "anonymizer" relays; through throwaway accounts--in short, using exactly the same techniques as the spammers.
We live in a free society--with the advent of the Internet our freedom of expression and (if only virtual) assembly are practically limitless. It doesn't work that way everywhere in the world. There are places in the world where defaming the Imam earns you a fatwa--a price on your head. There are places in the world where refusing to pledge allegiance to the Dear Leader and embrace the "scientific truths" of Kim-Il-Sungism means that your family doesn't get food rations, and is left to starve. There are places in the world where billions of people are "protected" from "unsolicited fax" and other such dangers.
Those places all have governments that would be more than happy to "protect" their citizens from "spam."
Yup. Spam is an annoyance. By golly, I have to press that Delete key four, sometimes five times a day. And I'm sure that having the government decide what email I can see, and making sure that I only see "unsolicited" mail from people they approve of, will make my life so much more enjoyable. So much more buoyant--so much more vibrant--so much more liberating. At least, right up to the point where I want to send or receive messages the government doesn't approve of.
Thanks, but...
For me and my household--we'll just use SpamCop, and the Delete key.
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
...you have to explicitly opt-in in order to get spam. Oh, so now ALL of the spammers can find of list of people who are willing to recieve spam. Now they don't even have to buy lists of email addresses, they can find them all on a government provided list!
Or course, this is rarely sucessfull since most spammers don't disclose recipient lists (I'm assuming they just BCC everyone) so I rarely see the address used to get to me, but it works every now and then.
Postfix has a Delivered-To header that will tell you what mailbox it was delivered to, so even if it's not in the headers, since it was in the envelope you'll know.
--
cjb.net is better. It supports unlimited addresses at @yourname.cjb.net and you can delete abused accounts.
forward your spam to the e-mail address spamcop@spamcop.net
You will get a reply back that will allow you to parse headers and send a complaint with just a couple clicks. Try it, and you'll never go back to reading headers yourself.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
My inbox is my property. I may be renting it from some provider, but I am the primary custodian of my inbox. Spam in my inbox is the equivalent of vandalizing my property.
I wish they'd just make it legal to kill spammers. That would solve everyone's problem. I wouldn't get any more spam, and the poor pitiful bastards who can't think of any better ways to market their product than by spamming would be dead. Everybody wins!
--
Pretend there is some witty statement here.
Over time, I've seen quite a few people talk about their mail bouncing techniques. Invariably, these people have scripts for UNIX mail programs. Is there anything for Windows? Ideally, I want something that works as follows:
* Operates as either a plugin for my mail client (Netscape), or more preferably:
* Operates as a local POP3 server, thus any mail client can use it.
* Can be configured to grab mail from multiple POP3 servers.
* Can utilise ORBS/MAPS
* Will allow me to review my email before accepting it. Any suspect emails to be placed in a separate list which I can check for bouncing as if the email address were invalid. Perhaps integration with spamcop.net, although they alreasy provide similar services.
IMO, this works much better than munging your email address, as the fake address does work (as opposed to having a legit email sender try to figure out how to demunge your munged address), and it's rather easy to turn off the mail feed for a particularly spammed account.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
The Spam Bouncer, a procmail script to identify incoming spam and either tag it, move it to a different mailbox file, or bounce it.
SpamCop, to file official complaints about the spam that gets through.
Sugarplum, to stick lots of irrelevant fake email addresses (and the addresses of other spammers) up on my web pages. If spammers want to harvest addresses from MY pages, they're going to fill up their databases with useless data and end up spamming each other.
And finally, Web Ad Blocking is a site which provides a new 'hosts' file which redirects major web page ad sites to 127.0.0.1, which removes a whole lot of banner ads from web pages.
Here's another way of finding out how spammers got your address: When you're filling in your address on some form, capitalize some letters, the mail systems never uncapitalize them. So if you get spam with certain letters in your address capitalized you can trace it.
I suspect that the way spammers get my address most is by computer-illiterate friends (especially girls) using my address carelessly. Filling my address in forms to send me 'fun' stuff like on-line postcards, personality-tests etc. etc.
I do this now since every single mail send to any address in my domain is forwarded to my one 'main' address. I usually fill out froms with emails such as spamfromrealaudio@domain.com or spamfromebay@domain.com with the intent of finding out just who is leaking my name. Or course, this is rarely sucessfull since most spammers don't disclose recipient lists (I'm assuming they just BCC everyone) so I rarely see the address used to get to me, but it works every now and then.
Finkployd
I know that's an extreme/unrealistic example, but I don't think anything like this will ever happen in the US. I think most people in this country associate email with snail mail, and accept junk mail is a part of it. It needs to be associated with telemarketing, where lots of legislation is already in place to protect people from being harassed.
Base Price per month $17 for 10 hours Cost for additional hour $2.90 per hour
The truth shall set you free!
My ISP (Demon Internet) gives you unlimited email addresses at your own domain (albeit a sub-domain of demon.co.uk).
So doe Freeservers, who hosts PinEight.com. Freeservers redirects all mail sent to your subdomain to the email address (a Hotmail/Yahoo account is OK) you gave when you signed up.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
spectatorion, you have to rember CmdrTaco is a far left liberal. Liberals don't give a hoot about others personal freedoms, only thier own. If endless people are fine and put into jail for petty crimes it's all the better, as long as they aren't affected. But just like any liberal, he fail to see the long term affects that you have decussed in your post.
Regulations are bad. It puts more goverment in peoples lives, increase taxes (someone has to pay), and makes life hell for everyone. No one need move goverment. Goverment is not the answer. The only answer is people doing what is right. Not accepting spam, not making so damn easy to send spam, and not looking looking to the goverment to solve all of thier personal problems.
MarNuke
follow the link in my sig.
to findout how you can
fight spam
http://Lenny.com
I guarantee that the internet slowdown that results in is causing you a lot more delay and inconvienience than the occasional click of the delete button.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Follow the link in my sig.
to findout how you can help the cause
http://Lenny.com
what is all this complaining about email spam? i've seen this here too many times before, and i just don't get it. why should email be any different than any other medium? why not make it a law so that no one can send anything that they don't want? I'm sure we all get loads of crap in the mail box every day that we didn't ask for. we should send those people to jail and gouge them with huge fines. how about the grocery store ads that somehow appear every week in a plastic bag on the door? should those people check a list to see who wants the ads and who doesn't?
any regulation of this sort is going to cost tax dollars. how much money should the government spend to fill a jail with "spammers"? how much of your tax dollars do you want to be spent fighting spammers in the courts?
please, can't we all just filter the crap and get over it?
Folow the link in my sig.
and you to can ruin a spammers day
http://Lenny.com
we have an opt-out list that we can join, for a fee. It is sponsored by the telephone company.
However, it doesn't do us a blooody bit of good because telemarketing companies are not required to subscribe to it.
If we do that with email, it's the same thing...if headers are forged and companies don't use it, what's the use of the list? I'd like to bill some of the S0B's for the time and bandwith they are wasting.
Of course, that is the point, that they figure we will just ignore them rather than hunt them down. A few places I know have sold my email addy...I call them up personally and tell them to stop it; it usually works. Then again, that's what I have my "spam me" email account for.
Face it, people are stupid, and the internet is the place where they all meet.
I doubt they can enforce Norwegian law on a spammer not from Norway, so it's still kind of legal in the rest of the world. And this means nothing has really changed yet, although this might set things in motion. As long as it's legal *somewhere*, it will be a problem. Just look at all the Nazi sites in free speech USA and the high number of child porn sites in Russia.
Fining spammers is difficult, since they are hard to find. Better to fine the shitty pr0n website or the asshole selling you the toner. If there are no _markets_ for spam, it should decrease.
As for the people doing it in house: same idea. Fine them into oblivion.
Neat way for the government to get a complete list of national email addresses.
Suppose I have a competitor I want to put out of business. All I'd need to do is hijack an email gateway and spam the world with an ad for my competitor's product, and they would be out big bucks. So you can only fine the advertiser if you can prove he gave money to the spammer to annoy people... which sort of requires you to find the spammer first, doesn't it?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
I'm as annoyed by spam as anyone, but it's nothing compared to driving all the way to the P.O. and finding my box full of nothing but junk...
It's interesting that there are steps afoot to outlaw electronic spam already, after all the www is not that old.
Dude, get a fscking clue! WWW is not the Internet. E-Mail dates from the early '70s.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I believe one can opt-out of the junk mail that the postal service delivers to everyone. I think there is a form you have to fill out though. Your best bet would be to talk to somebody at your local post office. Now this of course does nothing for the junk you get from people who have your exact address though...
From their website: http://www.sneakemail.com - Neat.
------------
CitizenC
Oh, and the difference between junk snail-mail and junk email is who pays for it.
The sender pays for junk snailmail. YOU pay (in increased ISP costs, and -- for europeans -- connect time) for junk email.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
-----------------
Get a spamtrap account into their database. You then won't get any mail from them.
http://www.yelm.freeserve.co.uk/spamido/
Deleted
This is the domain of the vigilanty
follow the link in my sig. for details
http://Lenny.com
Six months of jail time? That seems more than a little extreme to me. Fines would be much more suited to the crime.
And watch the spammers just absorb those fines into their operating expenses. Jail time is the only way to discourage spamming.
bother of having to delete [spam] does not deserve the same kind of punishment as, say, rapists
spammers rape your wallet because it costs the ISP to receive spam (costs passed on to subscribers), and it costs subscribers per minute to download spam through the telco's phone lines. (Local telephone calls are AFAIK billed by the minute pretty much everywhere but North America.)
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Well, this isn't a fix-all, but community involvement would really help reduce spam. Here's how:
You receive spam. This particular piece of email is one you've recieved tens or hundreds of times. I have one that comes in regarding "U N I V E R S I T Y D I P L O M A S". You call the number and talk to the people. You may have to leave your phone number. Yes, I know they put you on a phone number list. When they call you back, keep them on the phone for a while.
For a week or two, I'd get calls from people who wanted to talk with someone who didn't live at my residence. They always asked for the same wrong person. I finally realized that they were saying my name wrong.
With that particular company, I spoke with the guy who called me back for 10-20 minutes. I gave him hell about the spam. I demanded that he not contact me again.
A week later, a woman from the same company called up. This time I spoke with her for 30-40 minutes. This is long distance for them, BTW. I told the woman that I would try to make it unfeasible for her to afford to do business using spam.
If just a small percentage of the slashdot users alone would do this, I think some of these high-spam senders would go away. I did this once, and I'll do it again. If you make it your habit that once a month or quarter you'll give your least-favorite spam company hell, you'll be helping everybody.
rhadc
You should reply to any spam
you get yo can be a real pain for spammers
you can even cost them money!!!
follow the link in my sig. for details
http://Lenny.com
...The spam-banning is a very good idea, but it has to be implemented very carefully, so as not to tread on freedoms.
The way I'd do it is as follows. All advertising sent over the Internet, solicited or not, must have the option attached in some manner to not receive advertisements from that company at any future date. Whether this is via a Web form, replying to an e-mail with specific commands, or whatever does not matter, so long as the option exists.
Once a user opts out, they are sent one final message confirming this, as a sort of receipt so they can prove that they opted out. If the company ever sends them advertising over that channel again, they can be held liable for harassment.
Another possible implementation of this would instead require all direct-marketing advertising to be opt-in; a company may not send advertising to someone who has not previously given his or her explicit consent. This one leaves more of a bad taste in my mouth, though; it has the potential to set some rather nasty precedents.
A third approach would be to ban direct-marketing outright, on the grounds that it is necessarey to violate a person's privacy in order to obtain the requisite data. This one's only arguably good, though. It's true that no speech is actually being banned (you simply have to resort to mass-marketing techniques in order to say it, in the case of advertisements), but again some very dangerous precedents could be set here.
The fact is, we do have a right to free speech, and this is a Very Good Thing. But we also have the right to not be harassed, and that's basically what spam does. It's all about striking a good balance. I'm not sure what the ideal balance is. Anyone else have thoughts on this?
----------
I'll give you one on my server in the US for one on your server in Norway. :)
Would be nice to have one address that doesn't get spam.
Just three more hours seapeople and you can finally take me away from this crappy God Damned planet full of hippies
This is an implementation of an EU regulation. Norway is not a proper EU member, but is a member of the broader EFTA group, and tend to implement EU regulations even more than most EU member.
I don't speak (or read) Norwegian but...
If a spammer from the USA (most seem to be from there) spams someone on this list how are they going to be fined?
Surely it is unrealistic to try a prossecution or even an extradition.
It does. I've filtered it out so that you can't see it, dumb-ass.
your ISP is passing the costs of spam on to you and every other subscriber?
not really, the ISPs usually only have fixed costs (maintenance, people, power, rent, lines and hardware), the only thing that suffers when spammers reign is bandwidth. But spam uses far less bandwidth then moviez, appz, isoz and mp3z...
Ever though 'bout the grand costs that are being passed to you (your argument) thanks to such activities, cell-phone-email-meister?
Hey dumb fuck, my cell phone has an e-mail address. I don't have to forward anything. If e-mail is sent to that address, it appears on my phone. Because of spammers, I dare not give that address out -- but what right do spammers have to render useless a feature included with my cell phone service?
Hey bubba, you gotta be a fool if you actually pass out your cell phone email to people. That absolutely sucks. So what's you grand email address? your line is something like this right:
- Yeah, you can send me email on my cell phone.
Set up an account and forward it. Make sure that only you know the real cell email address and only you forward to it. then the above line would be lots better:The address is 555-1234-123@cell.at4.mci.com
The address is cellphone@Im-still-a-dumb-ass.com
______________________________________________
sigamajig...
Line 9: Argument of type SIGNATURE expected.
There is also an article on The Register about Europe considering a ban on spam.
I've also got a collection of Spam resources, along with details of WIndows spam prevention and details of spam filters.
Richy C.
The submission text is misleading, you have to explicitly opt-in in order to get spam.
Denmark has a similar law, allthough it only covers UCE, not UBE, since it is part of the marketing law. We also have an opt-out system for snailmail, including a central list for direct snailmail.
The surest way to kill off spam is make it unprofitable by educating users in the tricks most of us already know to limit our spam intake. One the ad biz hears that 90% of all spam gets killed on the server through user filters/blockers, the ad money will dry up and the spammers will die. I think that if ISPs were sincere in the no-spam policies, they'd do a better job of explaining despamming tools to their users via FAQs and tech help. A big fat law would do the trick, but like most I believe that when it comes to government, less is more.
All your belongings are base to us.
That would be great to have at home, wouldn't it? You get a range of 100 telephone numbers, and you can assign them how you like. Based on the incoming number (and the caller ID too, if you like) you can give an engaged signal, direct to a screening service, have the phone ring with one of several identifying tones, etc. The possibilities are endless! Pity it's only available on ISDN-like connections, and usualy only the really high bandwidth ones. Still, sooner or later...
But this whole "identifying marks" thing is something you can use in a broad sense. I'm one of the privileged many (many on Slashdot at least) that can create new email addresses at whim because I have one or more domain names and administrative control over the mail for that domain. But how about physical mail addresses?
I use a PO Box, of course, but that doesn't stop companies sending me junk. But what I make a policy of doing now is tainting every postal address I'm obliged to give out. The address for a PO Box is very short, and it usually gives me one spare line to fill in with irrelevant data. I use this to fill in a "care of" address. Thus, if I'm obliged to give my postal address to buy-a-cd-online.com because my employer gave me credit there as a Christmas gift, I tell them that I'm "Air Supply, c/o C.D.Overmeyer, PO Box blah blah etc". The "C.D.Overmeyer" guff is enough to remind me who I gave that address to, and to write "return to sender" on unpoened envelopes to that address if they start spamming me postally.
As an aside, the most annoying junk mail I get in my PO Box is the stuff that the Post Office puts there, having accepted money from someone else to do so. I think if I'm paying for the box I should be able to say no to this, but I've yet to take it up with the staff. In the meantime, I hurl said junk back through the PO Box onto their floor. Why should I put their junk in the bin for them? Always aim for the bottom line. If everyone did it, they might at least ask us all whether we wanted the junk in the first place instead of stuffing it straight in.
I hate spam, in all its forms.
AirSupply: go ahead, cut me off.
If you reply to spammers you can ruin
thier day and cost them time and money!!
follow the link in my sig. fo rdetails
http://Lenny.com
I'm struck by a couple things in this article:
1) In the amount of time you took to write this article you could've deleted 200-300 spam emails.
2) Don't you think throwing people in jail for spam is a LITTLE bit extreme?
3) Do you really want to register email addresses with the government?
I get 150 emails a day, perhaps 5 of them are spam, they get deleted so quickly I can't remember doing it. Do you really get that much spam a day that its worth throwing out the 1st amendment?
Aren't there serious issues to discuss? Like say, the French taxing CD-R's?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
The submission text is misleading.
Even if US and EU banned spamming, what would be the result?
Small spamming companies would be founded in Cayman Islands, I guess.
6 months in prison for sending you 10 emails per day? Suppose you want the chair for that guy who runs a late yellow in front of you, or that new mother who brings her screaming child to your restaurant.
We live in a free country. One filled with tons of shit I don't like, for instance your personal vendetta with everything that annoys you. But you know, I like it that way. And if the freedom to swing your arm stops at another man's nose, then that spammer missed yours by a good parsec or two. 6 months of jail time for the time it takes you to filter his messages isn't exactly an eye for an eye.
So why don't you shut up, grow up, and start worring about what really matters. Stuff like your obviously hypocritical attitude toward censorship.
Just a thought
SetupWeasel
6 months in prison for sending you 10 emails per day? Suppose you want the chair for that guy who runs a late yellow in front of you, or that new mother who brings her screaming child to your restaurant.
We live in a free country. One filled with tons of shit I don't like, for instance your personal vendetta with everything that annoys you. But you know, I like it that way. And if the freedom to swing your arm stops at another man's nose, then that spammer missed yours by a good parsec or two. 6 months of jail time for the time it takes you to filter his messages isn't exactly an eye for an eye.
So why don't you shut up, grow up, and start worring about what really matters. Stuff like your obviously hypocritical attitude toward censorship.
Just a thought
SetupWeasel
Sure, mod me down as redundant, but I said it my way.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
So, the Libertarians are liberals?
:)
Yes, actually, in the truest sense of the word.