Slashdot Mirror
The One-Week All-Spam Diet
malibucreek writes: "A writer at the LA Times actually responded to every spam he got for a week. The resulting article about his descent into marketing hell is here.
Of course, everything turned out to be a scam. (Duh!) But some of the scams were just pathetic enough to be funny.
My faves? The pyramid scheme that helped '"George" reach his goal of making $7,000 a month within two years of getting out of prison.' And the bogus weight-loss plan that caused one sucker, er, customer, to gush, "This didn't work, but it was full of fiber and I was very regular!"" And at this very moment, some hot babes who have been clamoring to meet me electronically are finally at the door -- hallelujah!
Y'know, you should really accept all the spam and pop-ups you get on those sites, since you are a sinner for even looking for illegal programs and smut. Repent now, blasphemer! You should spend your time looking for moral things on the web, like nekkid pictures of Adam and Eve having relations with that evil snake, Satan.
It must expand during cooking!
No idea, merf30@hotmail.com , but I do have some spare spams I could forward you if you like?
Shall I mailto:merf30@hotmail.com for you?
As postmaster for a very well known domain on the internet, I find that spammers very often forge my domain in the spams they send. In fact, it seems that a huge percent of the spam that I get is from forged domains. When you set your mail bomb in place, do you check to make sure your actually sending to the place it came from, or are you just clogging up mail servers around the net by sending mail to bogus addresses, which simply bounce, creating more traffic?
Check out the little "$N.NN" markers next to each vendor. That's how much the vendor pays goto.com for each clickthrough.
I just clicked about $20 worth of ads ... want to join me?
Is an email offering to make me an ordained minister.
The best line from the spam:
"MARRY your BROTHER, SISTER, or your BEST FRIEND!!"
Which just seems all sorts of wrong.
- A.P.
--
Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"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?"
One of the reasons I love IE so much is it's "security zones" feature. I default to browsing with everything disabled except non-encrypted form submissions, file and font downloads, and prompts for safe/signed ActiveX controls. No pop ups, no annoying Java-based auto-refreshes, no stupid cookies to a million and one sites. The "Restricted Sites" zone is basically "High" with cookies and a few other things set to "prompt", and "Trusted Sites" and "Local Intranet" are low and medium-low respectively.
If there's a site that requires Java or whatever to even view, I drop it in "Restricted Sites" temporarily. If it's a site I hit daily or hourly (like slashdot), it goes into "Trusted Sites" (because I know Rob Malda is basically Good).
Believe me, this is the only way to browse. Especially when one's showing off astalavista.box.sk to one's female superiors and a pr0n ad pops up after clicking on some 37337 exploit or crack.
Rev. Dr. Xenophon Fenderson, the Carbon(d)ated, KSC, DEATH, SubGenius, mhm21x16
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
Just as many stockbrokers seem to have elaborately printed, worthless stock certificates from things like Chinese railroads, you might want to see about getting your stock issued as a certificate. It may have some aesthetic value, and if you go along with the philosophy of burdening spammers with needless administrative expenses, this is the way to go.
The same goes for worthless dot coms like pets.com. Many of these are still trading at a few cents a share.
You may also be able to get an annual report. These could be real collector's items someday.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
It was quite interesting really, the box was a no-mods straight-from-cd RedHat4.2 with the IMAP remote root, so it wasn't exactly difficult getting in.
I can't even remember what the spam was for, to be honest. What I remember was the fact that I'd just spent hours twiddling my .procmailrc to defend against spam and this one got through. Oh well.
(./a.out;cat) | nc www.HISHOSTNAME.net 143 and I was in.
ps afx went on for several screens. Hundreds of sendmail processes churning away. Several hundred megs of email addresses in alphabetical order in one directory. Oh, and stuff like "sed -e s/nospam//g" scripts lying around as well. (email mungers take note)
I had a poke at the 'abuse' mailbox, it was big, getting bigger. Filled with abuse. (surprisingly :-)
I did prevaricate for a while about what to do, I wasn't the sort of system cracker who rm`d boxes (I don't do that sort of thing anymore BTW) but in the end I made an exception.
killall -9 sendmail; rm -rf / Felt pretty good, to tell you the truth.
Heh.
You have any idea what percentage of spam has a valid return email address? My guess is somewhere in the parts per billion.
What you're doing is mail-bombing yahoo, or whomever they decide to fake the sender as, with email for a non-existant account.
So many other articles and sources claim that it has to do with Spam splattering when you drop it, or some such other odd idea. Kudos to the author for getting it correct.
mahlen
>This is the thing I can't understand. These guys
,eh?
>need to have some sort of valid contact.
For lots of the spamish businesses, the phone
number is the only backchannel. For some of
them, just your calling the number is what
makes the money. For others, when you call
the 800 number, a salesman at the other end
considers you a hot lead, and starts programming
you with linguistic manipulation (a.k.a. salesmanship) to liberate your money from you.
Out of the last three spams in my spam folder (thank you procmail), two had 800 numbers, and
one had a web URL. Ha ha,
the link points to some
spanish-language 404 page
ERROR! El documento solicitado no existe en nuestro servidor.
So, even if I did want a low-interest loan
with a QUICK APPROVAL! and NO OBLIGATION!
I would be out of luck
I love this disclaimer:
"The reply address on this email was active at the time this email was
sent."
To me, that says "We know the address will be cancelled by the time you read this".
Be sure to write to
if you want to talk about how Bulk E-Mail can
help where other means have failed!
RATES DROPPED! JUST RELEASED! SUPER WEB SITE!
FOR INVESTORS ONLY!
SPAM doesn't bother me as much as the thought that there is a common class of people on whom this type of marketing will work. It doesn't matter
if you can make money fast and retire quickly on
an exciting home based business blah blah blah.
Maybe some of the MMF strategies can work, maybe
some of the products marketed in this manner are
valuable to people, whatever.
What bothers me is realizing that there are enough
people out there that actually respond to these ads... I know there's one born every minute, but
to buy anything I've seen marketed via SPAM would take someone beyond "sucker".
This bothers me far more than getting spammed, knowing that there are people that can be influenced by it.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
All i ever get is spam. Have you ever tried
too look for warez, roms, or porn on the web
using a search engine? all you get are 'top 100'
lists that have 100 links to sites containing 500 links
to sites containing javascript that makes 5
windows pop up everytime you close one.
It is time we all get really pissed and moan and groan and bitch about this horrid state of affairs.
Hamsters are at least as feathery as penguins. HamLix
Their base home control stuff is pretty nice, actually. Take 'em up on a starter kit offer when you see it. I wish their light dimmer modules worked better, though - if anyone knows of something better at precise control of light intensity that doesn't cost thousands, email me.
But the camera is junk - I saw it demonstrated at Fry's and the quality was abysmal. I wouldn't take it if it was free.
(Disclaimer: I am admittedly the kind of person who blows $900 on digital still cameras and $4,400 on video. I don't like cheap junk; that's what X10 is. In all fairness, cheap junk is probably a bigger market than the kind of pricey non-junk I buy).
D
----
I've read that spam was very popular in the UK during World War II, due to severe food rationing. If the other option is sawdust sausages, spam starts to look good.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
#/bin/sh
for fqdn in $@
do
finger "${fqdn}@abuse.net"
done
# eof
Call the script with the domain(s) you want to contact and it will respond with the proper mail address, if known, of the abuse handler for that domain.
--
Unselfish actions pay back better
What's interesting about these categories of SPAM (Diplomas, Credit fixing, Spy software, Get-rich-quick, Gambling, Weight loss, Sex enhancement) is that they must attract an endless supply of suckers ("one born every minute") willing to send actual cash somewhere - otherwise the SPAMmers wouldn't bother. This must leave a "paper trail" or electronic trail leading to the SPAMmers. Most of these seem to be illegal in some way so it should not be difficult to bust them.
Is the problem that the "authorities" responsible for enforcement are technologliallyclueless?
That many? Hmmm...perhaps they need to start cleaning the Internet on the 4th of July as well as New Year's Eve. I'll need to dig that warning out, so I can suggest it to the guy responsible for such things.
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
That he didn't get several from Benchmark Print Supplies.
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Not posting your e-mail address anywhere is the best way to go. I have a throwaway hotmail account that I give to most websites.
.edu because a lot of spam lists have .edu addressed stripped. They figure we're all poor college students. I've been posting with the above address (bdjohns1+usenet@uiuc.edu) to usenet for a couple years, and I average maybe one spam a month to that address..
You're probably not getting spam to your
First off, I highly doubt that any foodstuff is able to enter the bloodstream directly and deposit itself on the arterial walls.
Second, Spam is simply canned diced ham. If you slice it thin and cook it, the fat runs off, and you have a fairly lean, warm thick ham slice.
And yes, I started by eating it on a dare, and then because I needed five spam tins for a project, and now I buy a few cans a year for hurricane supplies, and wind up eating them at some point throughout the year.
Our anime club is SFAM - the South Florida Anime and Manga club, and our logo is a spoof of a can of spam, with the "P" turned into an "F" in the same font, with a big eyed slime peeking out.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Trying to hack, flood or DoS his system could get you in big trouble, and if you don't correctly identify the target, you could be causing a lot of trouble for innocent bystanders.
A better idea would be to complain to the spammer's ISP, and the ISP's ISP, either by manually reading the email headers and tracking the spammer down using traceroutes and abuse.net, or by using SpamCop. I've done that and seen several spam accounts get terminated.
Admittedly there are drawbacks to doing this. Sometimes, the ISP that you complain to will simply forward your complaint directly to the spammer, which may result in more spam. But usually, the spammer is forced to move to another throwaway account, and in some cases, is forced to pay a cleanup fee on the order of hundreds of dollars.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
There's too much collateral damage from doing this - you might not be flooding the spammer's account, but you may be hitting innocent bystanders (such as Hotmail & their non-spamming users) with friendly fire.
The only remotely effective way I know of to inconvenience spammers is to dig through the spam's email headers, locate their ISP, and complain to the sysadmins, and if necessary their upstream providers as well. (I use SpamCop to do this - saves a lot of work.) This frequently gets them booted for TOS violations.
Admittedly it's only a minor inconvenience for them - makes them move to another throwaway account, but every little bit of inconvenience helps.
Sysadmins. You can do your part to fight the spam war by hitting spammers with a $500.00 cleanup fee when you terminate their account for TOS violations. After all, the spammer cost you lots of money in terms of bandwidth, loss of good will from others, and time in performing damage control. Get some of that money back and discourage spammers.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
You should do a traceroute to the hotmail-type operation and complain to their upstream provider. Complain that the operation is a spam haven and does not enfore its AUP. With any luck, the operator will get TOS'd.
dave
Out of the two e-mail addresses that I have had for a significant amount of time, neither of them get any spam... one is with my college (I've had that one for almost 4 years) and I've had another one with yahoo for almost a year.... and I never get ANY spam in either. I guess I just don't understand what the big deal is..
Well, lucky for you. I choose to close my old mail account, simply because it got so much spam. Actually I wasn't as plagued as others; some days 4-6 spams, other days nothing. Still, around 50-100 spams a month was enough for me.
There seems to be an element of randomness, in whether ones email account becomes a spam magnet or not. But I suspect my address was spam harvested early on, since I used the account on Usenet, and had it on my homepage too. I seems like, when first an account is in a spammers db, it will resold to other spammers, who will merge it with their db, etc.
Besides the address was a short one, at a local, quite nice, ISP. I guess that ISP domains are popular among spammers, since they got so many users, that a "lexical" spam attack is worthwhile.
I would never post my main e-mail addresses publicly, that would just be asking for it
Me neither. It's just so sad that this how spammers has transformed the net. This is not the idea what the Internet was about; easy communcation between peers. It's cool with me to post under a nom de guerre, or hiding ones mail address, if that's what you want. But it is sad when people choose not post their real mail address, on Usenet, on their homepage, on slashdot etc, simply for the sole reason, that they don't want spam.
And sometimes it is a really good that peoples mail address is posted on the web: eg. a friend of mine is writing his phd tesis. He was able to track down, in only 5 minutes, the only other person in the world, who has written something on the same subject, even though he was from another country. Without the net, without email, without publicly availably email addresses, it would been a small project in it self, to track down that person and starting communication.
In short, be happy that your mail account isn't spam infected. But don't confuse your own luck, with the general spam situation.
Well, guess I better not try my Jonestown jokes.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
For some weird reason (my guess is the warranty on a ceramic knife) I've been getting craploads of spam from Hong Kong - I can't even read Chinese, but they expect me to buy toner cartriges from a "local" address - in Hong Kong. I haven't answered a single one, and have been giving them "550 Rejected as spam. Go away." for 18 months and they still mail daily. I've blocked Class B nets from China. They won't stop.
Good enough reason to sell nukes to Taiwan ;-)
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Years ago one of the first usenet spams involved a company called Madera International (WOOD). They said their stock price would go up to several dollars a share. I figured the spam might cause a rush on the stock and bought $25 worth and got 400 shares. The current closing price is .00700 a share and is down 92% over the last year. My last statement from my broker claims its worth $2 but I fear thats an overestimate.
What kind of company is this? They were going to make assult rifles in Asia for the US market but some law messed that up. Then they decided to log wood in the Amazon. The last time I saw their web page, they were doing some sort of "sponser a rain forest tree" for $10 gig. One of these days I'll sign over the stock to someone like greenpeace.
I wish I could find the orignal spam... I would build a nice web page about this kind of "deal"
mst3k it.
This has some very amusing stuff under the "Mystery Usenet Theater 3000" section.
-- juju_ben. "You dance just like the angels dancing on the head of the pin jabbed into my minds eye."
And lobster thermidor au crevets done in the Bernaise style with a fried egg on top and Spam.
- Have a picture
Until tomorrow, when you got another 10-20 spams.
And the day after that, when you got another 10-20.
By learning how to read headers and report spammers to their upstream providers, I cut my spamload from 10-15 per day in 1997 to 1-2 per day in 1999. It's remained relatively constant since then.
Incidentally, from the names of the "companies" mentioned in the spam, a little searching on Google will reveal that there's much more behind IMG Marketing, Berrytrim, and IGP than meets the eye in this article.
The meatspace identities of the perpetrators behind these three particular frauds are leaking out, and the perps are going down. (Hi, IMG, whazzup Brendan, and a big hello to Ralsky, now reduced to operating his web servers on dialup lines. Too bad for IGP, who, as mentioned in the article, finally got themselves torn a new asshole by the IRS. Guess it was a bad idea to have one of your spammers joe-job all those Lumber Cartel operatives. Whatever happened to Ron anyways? Wonder what's up with the IGP joe-jobber in Sacramento now?) *splorf*
My only regret is with the EIN fraud with the dropbox in Beverly Hills. Last time I checked, Beverly Hills was in CA, and I'd love to ask the deputy attorney-general why, if they know about it, American Financial Services is still operating? (Or perhaps the AG's office is just giving 'em enough rope to hang themselves... muahahahah!)
As regards Pre-Paid Legal Services, thestreet.com did some good reporting on them a few months ago.
As Tom Lehrer put it - "Who's Next?"
I hate to break it to you but it is virtually impossible for x-10 to loose any money as the margins they have on the product is astronomical. They have their own factories in hong kong (or wherever it is) and can build all their products for pennies! They make SO much money its not even funny.
I don't really mind double posts on
You're right. Just goes to show you how much I watch them.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
The guy from the so-called Glencullen University was named Danny Ramalotti. I thought I'd heard that name before. My wife reports that it is a character on the daytime soap Days of our Lives (verified with a web search). You'd think he could have picked an interesting pseudonym, at least.
We shouldn't know this factoid, of course, but that's what you get for working from home.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Advertising supports television, radio, mail, and the newspaper because the advertisers pay money. Spammers don't pay anyone to spam. Spam makes Internet services cost more, not less.
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
You can automate this process by using spamcop.net.
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Most computer users who've used the 'net for a certain amount of time are hip to what is, and what isn't spam. however keep in mind that thousands of users log on to the internet for the first time on a daily basis.
With so many people turning in, all a spammer needs to do is capture a fragment of that amount, and coerce them into spending, assisting them, etc., with their "Great Ideas" and they could have a nice sizeable chunk of money. So this is my thoughts on spam on why its still persistent.
Many people on the internet turn to it for an escape of reality, maybe life it to tough, maybe to depressing, etc., and many of them fall into these scams, because many are vulnerable. Many are also good hearted people who don't give things a second thought, and dish out thinking they can help the world. Some spammers know how to capitalize on this, and those people can make them a fortune.
Its no big deal sending erratic information hoping someone will fall for it, there are plenty of stupid people in this world, however answering spam is even stupider than sending it. What did the person expect by replying to a spammer? An insightful look into why they sent it? A possible product? Get real common sense should've told him/her they'd only get back more spam.
So who's the fool?
Hardcore crypto
Want Root?
If everyone did this, it would completely kill off spam. The chief component in spamming is that you can hit a huge amount of targets in a very short period of time. If you force the spammer to stop and encrypt to your obnoxiously large GPG key, he's going to need bigger hardware (In my testing, it takes about 30 seconds to encrypt a 1 page E-Mail to a 4096 bit key) he will no longer be able to blast out 16 million E-Mails nearly instantly. If the spammer sticks with dirt cheap hardware, his spam will be detected and dropped into a black hole before he gets past a thousand or so. Not to mention the potential legal reprocussions of violating all those PGP key EULAS...
Of course there's no E-Mail client yet that actually does this. You might be able to hack out a procmail script but it'd have to be pretty robust in order to insure that the spammer didn't just encrypt 1 character and leave the rest of the message in plain text. I'm looking at implementing the functionality in a Java mail server but am getting held up because GPG is not particularly friendly to use outside the command line.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Most legit companies know better than to spam. Alienating your customer base is not a good idea. Thre was quite a stir at the satellite TV company I was working at when a reseller sent a spam trying to sell my company's product. It came back pretty quick that we had a strict policy against this sort of thing and we came down pretty hard on the reseller in question.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I had an account with aol for like 2 weeks. I didn't even log into it (it was a backup) and when i checked the email after those 2 weeks, i had like 30 spam messages. after NO activity on the account.
i wish i had your luck!
I wonder if when the first e-mail message was sent over 30 years, the sender would imagine that only a short time later his invention would be abused by marketers. Although it is true that we all get junk mail in our physical mailboxes, it seems like such a violation of the technology to get them in our e-mail. Here we have an system of computers which is so powerful that it links the whole world. It is the ideal medium for knowledge. It is a convient mode of communication. But this great thing we call the internet is becoming more of a tool of advertising than the great source of unity it was intended to be. As nerds and rightful inheritors of this technology we should be outraged that it has degraded into such a state.
A rabbit in the hand is worth 4 in the cage
Get rid of all your spam while making a lot of money! For only $9999.99, you will receive the ultimate brochure on avoiding unsolicited commercial e-mail and unsolicited ads on slashdot! Call 1-900-SPM-HOAX to order the ultimate brochure about anti-spam videos! Forward this ultimate offer to everyone you know, preferably even people you don't know! Free bulk mailing software for this purpose is available right here.
Don't miss this incredible opportunity!
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
One kind of spam that doesn't get enough recognition is boss spam -- you know, when your PHB sends out some inane email to fifty people with twenty Word documents attached and everyone clicks "reply to all", and the thread ends up lasting for days and wasting waaaaaaay too much disk space and waaaaaay too much time. I've considered submitting my boss's Exchange server to the MAPS RBL. ;-)
The only spam I don't mind too much is the porn spam on my Hotmail accounts, just because it's so amusing. There's nothing like stumbling out of bed to check my email and find three messages with the subject "please fuck me now i need you" waiting. :-)
--
--
I like to watch.
Out of the two e-mail addresses that I have had for a significant amount of time, neither of them get any spam... one is with my college (I've had that one for almost 4 years) and I've had another one with yahoo for almost a year.... and I never get ANY spam in either. I guess I just don't understand what the big deal is... I try to keep them from being posted publicly, but otherwise I take no precautions with them... what is it that everyone else is doing with their addresses that I am not doing that gets them spammed? It really doesn't seem that hard to prevent spam from reaching your inbox(maybe just create a sperate e-mail account for stuff like /., I would never post my main e-mail addresses publicly, that would just be asking for it)
Ben
Ben
>I got one last week that contained a 700K attachment - not nice over a 56K modem.
Best arguement i ever heard for a disposable (yahoo/hotmail etc) account!
Thirty Nine positions at Higher Source, a web site development and production house. Our business has really taken off like a comet and we now have quite a few positions to fill.
The individuals at the core of our group have worked closely together for over 20 years. During those years, each of us has developed a high degree of skill and know-how through personal discipline and concerted effort.
We try to stay positive in every circumstance and put the good of a project above any personal concerns or artistic egos. By sustaining this attitude and conduct, we have achieved a high level of efficiency and quality in our work.
This crew-minded effort, combined with ingenuity and creativity, have helped us provide advanced solutions at highly competitive rates.
Based in Rancho Santa Fe, California (near San Diego), we provide excellent opportunity for advancement to a higher place. In fact all of our employees have recently been promoted.
We provide free clothing, Nike tennis shoes, pudding, apple sauce and vodka. You must supply your own Phenobarbital. Every employee is issued a large purple cloth, the purpose of which will become clear. Free haircuts too.
No experience is necessary. We will train you to work and think within our business model.
ID is required. Abduction experiences a plus.
We are looking for real team players.
Please send resumes to bunchowackos@highersource.com.
...but damnit, I know Bill Gates is sending me $1000 for forwarding that message!
I reciently received an unsolicited comercial bulk e-mail from Coca-Cola Korea. I have tried sending the offending spam to the usual addresses (abuse, postmaster, webmaster at coke.com & coca-cola.com) at Coca-Cola US, but all I have received back are bounces. I have also used their "send us e-mail" page, but no reply yet. If I do not get something thru to them soon, I am not sure what to do. Anybody got any clues?
So, in the end, I just added another rule to my spam filters...
No, NO NO!!! Don't do this!!! This means that every time you get a spam, the bandwith usage of the spam is multiplied by 45k. You are costing people a lot of money. This isn't good for anybody except maybe the stockholders of Cis... ummm... excuse me I need to log into etrade for a minute.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Anyone else find it amusing that a guy who devotes an entire article to how terrible spam email is places his email address in all its glory at the very top of the article for all human- and machine-grabbing spam companies to exploit/b>?
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Actually, there was someone a while ago who actually did go a whole month eating only Spam (the food, not the email crap). It was, of course, televised on Fox News and CNN.
When the month passed, he vowed never to eat spam again...he needed to go to a hospital to get liposuction because his arteries were filled up with spam (which is basically just pink-colored fat).
------------
------------
Tonight on Fox: Deadliest Executions Part XVII
Problem with that is, spammers either use
faked email addresses OR addresses belonging
to innocent third parties. Even addresses
belonging to spam-fighters, sometimes, to
get revenge.
This cannot be recommended, unless you've
taken great care to ensure the address
you spam really does belong to the spammer
and that the account won't simply be
trashed tomorrow when the inevitable
complaints to the ISP pour in. It would
probably work well only against spammers
who own their own servers.
The funniest one was one promising to send me a made to measure suit within a couple of hours of placing the order. Hmmm!
The term "spam" derives from a Monty Python skit in which a restaurant serves nothing but dishes loaded with Hormel's much-maligned luncheon meat. As a customer struggles to order a meal without Spam, a chorus of Vikings breaks into a repetitive song of "Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam," which drowns out every other conversation in the restaurant.
----
There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes. -- Dr. Who
Just a HUP about the Irish scam...er...offer. If you're ever in doubt about something regarding the ol' Republic of Ireland, just point, click and AskIreland. (The link is to http://www.askireland.com, for those of you in fear of the rash of trollish porno links hidden on /. these days).
The site is run as part of the Irish government website(which has finally undergone its much overdue facelift). They'll answer practically any query about the country with a pretty fast response time - the question of whether the University was legit or not would have been sorted in 2-3 days(from my experience).
8)
Concrete analysis...
Once I got my DSL, those annoying popups totally sucked--the faster connection also sped the rate at which popups could open. This sucked for about a week, until someone pointed out that Alt-F4 closes them faster than they can pop up. I'm sure I'm not the only one who had trouble figuring that one out alone, so I thought I'd pass that tidbit along.
The author got this mail:
So he rang them up, eventually got onto "Mr. Benson", and wrote up the whole adventure. I tell you, the Spamworld sounds like a parallel universe.
The article is at htt://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.10/spam.html.
You know, I've been trying similar techniques fo years, with little improvement. I guess I just need to step up my strict regiment.
Hmm. It works for me, but I find I have to do it almost constantly to preserve the gains I've made. Maybe you should lay off the saltpeter while you're at it.
--
Freeper Logic
He's referring to (I think they were called) Heaven's Gate. The UFO cult in San Diego who offed themselves. Remember the photos, the Nikes on the feet of those corpses in the beds?
I can't tell if this is OT or not, unless it's an obtuse commentary on the patheticness of the demographic audience spammers must believe is out there (and they are, sadly.) That's my guess, anyway.
--
Freeper Logic
Perhaps the most curious was the site promoting a program that would bring about a 2- to 6-inch growth in sexual endowment. "No pumps, pills or weights are used," it said. "The only tool--your hand."
You know, I've been trying similar techniques fo years, with little improvement. I guess I just need to step up my strict regiment.
Stupid like a fox!
Interestingly, abuse@ibm.com bounces for me. Strange, and not encouraging when you're a stockholder.
i used to do that, it DID cut down the volume of spam for a while, but it started taking so much time to reply to every single piece that i gave up. once i gave up i was spam free for about 3 weeks then it just came back in force.
Silly slashdot, sigs are for kids!
I will point out however that to seriously cut the amount of spam your mail servers see as a whole nothing beats mail-abuse.org..... The DUL blocks 33% of spam. The RBL blocks roughly 5% and using the RSS blocks 50% of the monthly spam. All three are well worth the time to install and use.
--
When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
>You all should try it before you complain about SPAM--
>You too will get a lot less...
Nah, it didn't do any good for me. I was on a spam reporting kick for awhile, and if anything, the volume of spam I got increased. Writing abuse@ just adds 10 minutes to the spammer's workday; it doesn't get you off any lists. Earthlink doesn't call up Joe Spammer and say "bob@some.com just complained about your spam. We're shutting you down. We advise that you remove bob@some.com from your list, so that you don't get reported next time."
Even when the abuse reports are effective (questionable in and of itself - effective for what, a few minutes, while the spammer makes a new account?), the spammer just gets cut off and moves on. He doesn't know who complained, and he doesn't know not to spam you again.
Reporting spam is a good thing in general, but there's no logical reason why it would reduce the amount you get.
Shaun
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
I replied to an email that was about a pamphlet that would make me rich! I ordered the pamphlet and they told me all I had to do was sell these pamphlets on how to sell these pamphlets. Now I make $7,000 a month and quit my job! ;)
When I don't get enough useless spam, I type in slashdot.org in my URL box.
It tides me over.
I use the email addresses of the spammers (the ones I determine are legitimate), and feed that to all the other spammers on my list.
-- 'What' ain't no country I've ever heard of. Do they speak English in 'what'?
It's been done, and it's hilarious.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
Can that process be automated? Forward a piece of mail to a program that strips out the domain and timestamps and sends a polite, automated message to abuse@domain for you? (That whole work smarter thing...)
I'm glad to see that some journalists are taking their responsibility to the public so seriously. What a sacrifice to make! And think of all the spammers who *really* have his number now.
:)
Of course, it's so disappointing to hear that all those pyramid schemes aren't 100% reliable paths to fortune and happiness. But at least I'm sure he found out how to get *billions* and *billions* of verified email addresses of proven customers ready to buy *your* product.
Snicker, snicker.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
107 emails in seven days?! 107 is the normal amount I get in a SINGLE day. I don't think I'd actually have the waking time to respond to them all.
I also have a very light load of spam, much less than my coworkers or fellow students. Besides luck, what seems to work for me is to enter fake addresses whenever I install programs, from web browsers to realplayer to word processors. Same goes for setting up online accounts; unless they send you a confirmation email that must be responded to, just make up an impossible address.
the carnation in my buttonhole / precedes me like a small / continuous explosion. -RS
That doesn't sound regular to me....
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
I've often toyed with the idea of trying to bring down a spammer by basically doing back to them what they do to us, sending them a million emails a second or DoSing their website until they crash. Is there any way to do this sort of thing? Yeah, there are ethical things to consider in this sort of technique, but I'm really starting to get fed up.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
They stuck me in an institution, said it was the only solution, to...protect me from the enemy, myself
If that does not work, I try admin@domain, and if that does not work, root@domain. If that does not work, I write the better business bureau....
You all should try it before you complain about SPAM-- You too will get a lot less...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
It seems to me that since we can seldom (if ever) actually contact said spammer thru email, there must be another way. By reading the article, it looks like most, if not all spam has some sort of phone number on it.
Now, if someone could only figure out a great way of DDoSing those SOB's phone numbers. Espically if its toll free, since they ususally pay for those lines by number of calls. I think that would really hit them where it hurts.
My $0.02
Jason
He's totally creeping out the Great One, eh...
You shouldn't forget you're also in that e-mail as the originating sender, and all failures could be sent right back to you, e.g. 45,000 non-delivery messages if the spam name happens to be fake (no really???).
I'm curious, has it ever happened?
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
I think the good stuff of the Internet, the things that attracted you to it, are still there. They're just buried under heaps of marketing crap, but if you get past the junk, there are still lots of great things there.
--Dan
--Dan
Web Tips
From: Subject: Just Released - "Millions Vol-16" E-Mail Address List Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 20:52:56 -0800 Reply-To: katwoman36@ematic.com The "Millions" Volume-16 E-Mail Address List CD is comprised of over 12 MILLION PREMIUM & SUPER clean email addresses - you can start mailing as soon as you receive the CD! Each file contains up to 20,000 email addresses. All addresses sorted by Internet domain (they cannot be sorted by any other criteria). NO "duplicate" addresses. ALL "dupes" filtered out. HERE'S HOW WE GET THE CLEANEST E-MAIL ADDRESSES AVAILABLE ANYWHERE!! 1. 200+ million lines of e-mail addresses were filtered and duplicates eliminated. 2. A filter list of 400+ words/phrases reduced the lists even more. No addresses with profane or inappropriate wording survived. 3. A special filter was used to eliminate most of the "web poisoned" e-mail addresses from our lists. Our EXCLUSIVE system reduced these "bogus" addresses to zero. 4. Next we used an exclusive database of anti-internet advertising extremists to clean our lists of every hacker/terrorist we could identify. 5. In addition, we maintain an updated database of those who have asked to be removed from our mailing lists.
Jooleem. Get Addicted.
Another trick that I have found is handy for tracking down spammers. It's prety easy to find the upstream provider they are on. (just look for the IP of the first "Received from: " in the headers.) However, many spammers are finding ISPs with IP addresses that have no DNS names, which makes it impossible to do an nslookup on them to find out who their provider is. Sure, you can tracert, but that's not usually very reliable. The best way to find out who to complain to is to go to ARIN and do a whois on their IP. That will tell you who actually owns the address, and will usually give you a good idea of who to contact.
Oh yeah, and make sure that you block anything sent to you via BCC. 90% of spam is sent blind CC, so you can get rid of a vast majority of it by taking this simple step with some email filters.
"The guide is definitive, reality is frequently inaccurate."
I'm reluctant to submit the trigger hotmail, because it's not very nice to crash people's e-mail servers unless they deserve it. However, it only takes a couple of hours to make one in hotmail. Just have20-30 accounts, all of which forward to each other, and send an e-mail to one with a note to CC to your target. There are elegant programs to do this, too, but I like the idea of using simple accounts.
My Karma is so good, I'm the Dalai Lama...or something.
A couple of my friends and I have used a novel, and, most system admins tell me, extremely annoying method to get rid of SPAM. We have set up a web of auto reply and auto forward accounts in our workplaces and free websites accross the net, so that all any one of us has to do is send a CC of the solicitation to a hotmail address, and set the chain in motion. hotmail forwards to a whole bunch of accounts, which auto reply and forward to each other, every time sending a carbon copy to the sender. Usually it stops when one of the accounts maxes out its disk space, which can take quite a while. checking server logs and account statistics, I'd guess that anyone that mails me gets a deluge of about 45,000 e-mails in a minute. odd, but the same place usually doesn't e-mail twice.....
My Karma is so good, I'm the Dalai Lama...or something.
It's not a scam see. What you do is, give them all of your credit card numbers, and they tell you if one is a winner.
It's the single factor which unites all of these kinds of spam, and which ties them together with junk mail/magazine ad/TV Preacher scams from time before time.
Sell them hope. They'll mortgage their homes to you for it.
All of those balding, poor, small-penile, halitosing, ear-hair growing, poorly educated, fat, insecure aging men with a burning desire to spy on people, order Russian brides around, and make a million dollars at the virtual slot machines and then hide it from the government MUST be out there, but I've certainly never met them.
What does this kind of spam say about the marketers perception of the internet demographic?
I actually got ordained by the ULC online, and married a couple of friends...er, rather, I officiated their ceremony. The ordination was free, though I did have to give the state of MN $5 to register myself as a reverend and make the marriage legal.
I haven't received any spam from the ULC, other than their single initial response explaining the exciting do-it-yourself spirituality kits they sell.
In short: it may be hokey, but it's quite legit, and highly recommended if you're looking for a wedding of the beaten path!
Rev. Paul
haha, x10 spam when opening this story
Hmmm, that was meant to be "sucker, er, customer"
It's 4.40am and I finish in 20 mins, so mistakes are excusable. Right?
I'm off home for a spam......no, a beer!
Mmmmmm beer
Rational thought is the only true freedom
That link is a classic! It should have been submitted as a story!
That's cheered me up no end!
Rational thought is the only true freedom
"This didn't work, but it was full of fiber and I was very regular!"
I take it that the "sucker, er, gusher" was not referring to spam then!
I reckon the dietary options were:
1. Spam
2. Egg, sausage and spam
3. Egg, sausage, spam, beans and spam
4. Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, beans and spam
5. Sausage, spam, spam, spam, eggs, beans and spam
6. Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam and spam
Rational thought is the only true freedom
Far more interesting and amusing are the "Spam Letters":
http://www.thespamletters.com/
Jon Land has been responding to spam for years now, and the site keeps getting funnier. Check 'em out.
~Jeff
Resopnding to EVERY spam letter could very well simulate a DoS attack...
Spam in a Can I sit here patiently I wonder why you don't eat me. To be quite honest, I've never known anyone who has eaten spam or purchased spam. I don't understand why it still exists. In addition, what kind of meat is spam? Its gotta make you wonder...