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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 $7,000 a month within two years of getting out of prison.' And the bogus weight-loss plan that caused one sucker, er, customer, to gush, "This didn't work, but it was full of fiber and I was very regular!"" And at this very moment, some hot babes who have been clamoring to meet me electronically are finally at the door -- hallelujah!
Check out the little "$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?"
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.
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
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 $10 gig. One of these days I'll sign over the stock to someone like greenpeace.
I wish I could find the orignal spam... I would build a nice web page about this kind of "deal"
The guy from the so-called Glencullen University was named Danny Ramalotti. I thought I'd heard that name before. My wife reports that it is a character on the daytime soap Days of our Lives (verified with a web search). You'd think he could have picked an interesting pseudonym, at least.
We shouldn't know this factoid, of course, but that's what you get for working from home.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
You can automate this process by using spamcop.net.
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
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.
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"?
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.
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!
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)"
It's been done, and it's hilarious.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
That doesn't sound regular to me....
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
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
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.
Resopnding to EVERY spam letter could very well simulate a DoS attack...