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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.
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
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 $100 to have thier lawyers tell me off."
If everybody did what you did it might cost them some real money. Especially if you replied and argued your case. You could have argued that the spam you got was not covered by your agreement and that they indeed owed you money. Imagine if a thousand people did this?
War is necrophilia.
I'm on a personal anti-SPAMMER crusade. I'm just ticked that hackers waste their time launching DDOS attacking on corporate websites and writing virii. Maybe they should use their skills for a noble purpose, like pounding SPAMMERS. Just create a throw-away email account, post a few messages to USENET, and plenty of targets for DDOS or hacking. Redirect the SPAMMER's webpage to point to SPAMCop or suespammers.org. I posted a single message to USENET with my real email address 5 years ago, and I still get 5-10 SPAMs per day. Hackers and crackers, do the world a favor, go after SPAMMERs. Find their real names and expose them for the world to see.
... with their provider's contact persons.
.*\.spammer\.com
.*\.carelessisp\.net
... <message" >&2
Usage in procmail:
:0
* From
* Received:
| spam-forward -s 'Oops, they did it again' \
postmaster@carelessisp.net
Here's the script itself:
#!/bin/bash
#
# Procmail helper to redirect spam messages.
#
[ "$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.