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Exposing Spammers For All They're Worth
llywrch points out this interesting story at Art & Farces in which a "guy fights spammers by occasionally sending an email telling the spammer to leave him alone or he'll bill for time & services. Some take him off their mailing list, some pay the bill, but most don't respond . . . except one guy who was so incensed at receiving this invoice he had his lawyers send a threatening note. Makes it easier for Fraase to collect on his invoice."
Legislation is not what we need to stop spammers. The real problem is that spammers actually make money off of spamming us. There are enough dumb people out there that actually buy crap from the spammers. Just quietly delete all of you spam, and when spammers stop making money then they will eventually stop. Or if you don't want spam, just don't use email.
What help will it be if we the "smart people" don't buy from spammers? We already don't but the "dumb people" do so the money flow will remain unchanged.
I'd prefer legislation against spam so that marketers can still sell to "dumb people" through classic methods like infomercials, home shopping networks, and advertisements in tabloid magazines.
I hate spam, but I don't really think the government should be getting involved. They take enough liberties away from us. If they make more crap illegal then it'll be turned around and used against otherwise normal activity and pretty soon we'll have tons of law telling us what we can and can not do with the internet.
The only law that I think should be allowed concerns the requirement of those doing business on the net do so with full disclosure. If someone is going to mass e-mail they should not be allowed to misrepresent their e-mail address or host of origin. I consider that forgery and it should be punished as such.
Not only does it make finding those guilty of the forgery difficult to act against, but it also makes it hard to trust them enough to do business with them. It's for this reason that I do not do business with spammers. It's not enough that the products they are trying to sell to people are about totally worthless, but if you add to that the fact that they can't even tell you who they really are then one can only wonder who the hell WOULD want to do business with them in the first place.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Actually if you look at Snail mail and Email, it costs a lot more to send a snail mail (print it out onto flyers, use envelopes, put appropriate postage on the envelope (so that the whole deal looks appealing), and create mailing lables to send the whole thing to.
With Email, it just has to be addressed to a mailing list (or a spam software given a list of addresses) and the *ENTIRE* message is put out. The whole thing turns out to be at least 100 times chepaer (in terms of efficiency, money, everything).
Email spam is just more efficient, and therefore more far reaching.
US is now divided as the "Red" and "blue" states. Red States = communist countries. Coincidence? I think not
Actually I suspect the decision to title it "Bin Laden Captured" worked quite well. You opened it didn't you?
Not that makes it ethical. (Now that said, wouldn't it be great to be able to tell Mr Bin that there is *PORN* with , like , chicks with no veils on *AND MORE!* being marketed under his name. *And yet the west STILL doesn't apreciate him!* The look on the guys face would be priceless. (grr infidels! etc)
Ahem.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I think it'd be a big step backwards if we went to court and somehow got laws against this stuff. It's fun to mess with these guys, who are obviously assholes, but I don't think it's a good idea to encourage legislative regulation of the internet. Think: CDA I, II, DMCA,
Spam is just not that bad! If you set up your e-mail client properly and don't publish your e-mail address, it's hardly noticeable. Still, I'd rather press 'd' six times per day than have my email regulated by the government.
"I'm sort of amused by this, I bet it cost them at least $100 to have thier lawyers tell me off."
If everybody did what you did it might cost them some real money. Especially if you replied and argued your case. You could have argued that the spam you got was not covered by your agreement and that they indeed owed you money. Imagine if a thousand people did this?
War is necrophilia.
This might be true for you, as a private entity. For me, running a business this is no option. I do have a website and the whole idea is to publish my contact information, with as little hassle as possible for prospects.
Do I publish my cell-phone # ? Sure as hell, no! But I make damn sure, that if you dial the business # published on the site is routed to my cell phone, if nobody is in the office with the caller not even noticing.
This is not so easy with an e-mail address: customer.FUCKOFFDIMMWITT.care@YESTHATMEANSYOUdomai n.ASSHOLE.com, doesn't really sound too professional, now does it ?
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
I'm on a personal anti-SPAMMER crusade. I'm just ticked that hackers waste their time launching DDOS attacking on corporate websites and writing virii. Maybe they should use their skills for a noble purpose, like pounding SPAMMERS. Just create a throw-away email account, post a few messages to USENET, and plenty of targets for DDOS or hacking. Redirect the SPAMMER's webpage to point to SPAMCop or suespammers.org. I posted a single message to USENET with my real email address 5 years ago, and I still get 5-10 SPAMs per day. Hackers and crackers, do the world a favor, go after SPAMMERs. Find their real names and expose them for the world to see.
... with their provider's contact persons.
.*\.spammer\.com
.*\.carelessisp\.net
... <message" >&2
Usage in procmail:
:0
* From
* Received:
| spam-forward -s 'Oops, they did it again' \
postmaster@carelessisp.net
Here's the script itself:
#!/bin/bash
#
# Procmail helper to redirect spam messages.
#
[ "$SENDMAIL" = "" ] && SENDMAIL=/usr/sbin/sendmail
[ "$SENDMAILFLAGS" = "" ] && SENDMAILFLAGS=-oi
subject='[SPAM ALERT]'
while getopts s: opt; do
subject="$OPTARG"
done
shift $(( $OPTIND - 1 ))
dest="$*"
if [ -z "$dest" ]; then
echo "Usage: $0 [-s subject] recipient
exit 1
fi
to_line="${*/%/,}"
to_line="${to_line%,}"
( cat <<EOF
From: $LOGNAME
To: $to_line
Subject: $subject
X-BeenThere: $LOGNAME@$HOST
Precedence: bulk
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Hello,
This is an automatically generated spam alert.
Feel free to contact me if you have any issues related to this.
The (partial) listing of the message that triggered it
is included below.
EOF
head -n 100
) | $SENDMAIL $SENDMAILFLAGS $dest
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
I'm getting sick of the geek-ass loud mouths who exhibit their psuedo-bravado in their quest to rid the world of this evil force called spam. For the love of all humanity, we ALL hate getting junk e-mail, but just DELETE it, FILTER it, and just shut the hell up about it.
I can see the veins in your forehead pumping blood faster and faster as you read this. Just take a deep breath, calm down, look in the mirror and say to yourself, I need therapy. Things are okay. I'm not sure what I dislike more -- anti-spam fundamentalists or getting spam. Hell, I may just book that trip to Vegas, send a guy in Sudan my bank account number and pray that he'll deposit the $25M and not drain my checking balance, pick up a zero percent interest Visa, and open up a THIRD merchant account, just to side with the bad guys.
Actually, in the US, that may not be too far from reality. I do remember reading about an anti-terrorist law in the works that would categorize any sort of computer attack as "terrorism." I don't think it would be too far of a streach to classify spamming as a "distributed denial of service" attack under this law...
You're missing the point, Mr anonymous coward.
I'm on a dial-up account. That means that every minute I spend connected is costing me money. Now, if I have to spend time connected to download a long HTML message with images in it, that is costing me money, albeit a small amount for a single message. Let's say it cost me 0.03 Thalers. If I now get 100 of these in a month, it's just cost me 3 Thalers.
You suggest filtering... but that happens after I've downloaded the messages, so doesn't lower the cost. It's not a realistic option.
And this is before I start factoring in costs for
Hmm... that makes for a low cost per spam mail received. But, like most companies, I'm going to set a "minimum invoice charge" to cover fixed costs associated with drawing up each invoice and chasing up payment. Lets say 30 Thalers. And now, we factor in a percentage for "bad payers". Let's double it.
All in all, I feel quite justified in billing for 60 Thalers per spam received.
Thanks. I think you're helping me make my point (and supporting the original poster).
Still, it's hard to tell, since I think it was I who introduced the word "extremism" in this thread, and I used it to describe someone calling what I considered to be a defense of liberty "anti-government hate-mongering".
So, if you meant to agree that our defense of liberty, in the sense of warning against excessive regulation by government, is wise, great.
If you were trying to rebut my use of the word "extremism", your use of the Goldwater quote was off the mark, since it justifies a specific form of extremism, but certainly not the form I was identifying.
I.e. Goldwater emphatically did not say "Extremism in defense of excessive government regulation is no vice", at least not in that quote!
Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful.
We still get junk faxes, despite the laws. Most laws passed by the U.S. legislature aren't worth the effort that they take to pass.
You know the old joke? "If con is the opposite of pro, then what's the opposite of progress?"
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
Actually in some instances it is getting harder to identify spam. I have received many e-mails where the spammer has purposely used a misleading subject line to make the e-mail appear important. I generally receive at least two e-mails a day with the subject line starting with RE: (generally used when replying to an e-mail). What is worse is some will have "RE: IMPORTANT: The information you requested" as a subject line. Unless my dog has learned how to use my computer I cannot fathom how I requested information on breast enhancement surgery. I am male and I am single and I'm pretty sure if I had a girlfriend she wouldn't be happy if I suggested breast enhancement surgery. So exactly how is this information important or something I would request?
I can't figure out who to open a discussion with about this, but I have this simple idea that should at least eliminate the anonymous/spoofed spam, which is all I get.
You simply modify the mail servers to query the sending server whether a received mail actually came from that server. The query is a key based on the contents of the message and a key included with the message, which is itself based on the same contents and a private key of the sending server. If the sending server has been upgraded with this feature, it can validate, or not, the message. If it's not validated, the message is bounced. For backwards compatibility, if the sending server hasn't been upgraded, the message always goes through. But as more servers are upgraded, fewer and fewer servers will be able to be used as scapegoats for spoofed spam, and pressure will mount to upgrade these servers as well.
Eventually, the only spam you will get will be from a valid return address, which can be handled more effectively in more conventional ways. In fact, adding manual bouncing at this stage might be helpful as well, since now it really will bounce back to the sender.
I realize I've glossed over some details here, and someone much more experienced in mail servers will have to massage this approach to make it practical, but I think the germ of a very simple but effective idea is here.
Xesdeeni