Slashdot Mirror
Distributed Spam Detection
A reader writes "There's an interesting project at SourceForge, called, "Vipul's Razor", that uses a gnutella like
system to let users exchange spam "signatures" to filter spam. I work at an ISP in Ottawa, we have been using it for last two weeks to stop bulk of spam coming to our POP3 accounts. More impressively, it hasn't tagged any valid mail as spam yet.
Here's
the scoop from its webpage:
"Vipul's Razor is a distributed, collaborative, spam detection and
filtering network. Razor establishes a distributed and constantly updating
catalogue of spam in propagation. This catalogue is used by clients to
filter out known spam. On receiving a spam, a Razor Reporting Agent (run
by an end-user or a troll box) calculates and submits a 20-character
unique identification of the spam (a SHA Digest) to its closest Razor
Catalogue Server. The Catalogue Server echos this signature to other
trusted servers after storing it in its database. Prior to manual
processing or transport-level reception, Razor Filtering Agents (end-users
and MTAs) check their incoming mail against a Catalogue Server and filter
out or deny transport in case of a signature match."" Cool idea. I'm up around 80% spam a day on my main mail account. Might be worth a try.
if only there were a service like this for junk snail mail.
90% of spam I get has a subject like:
"New pill reduces debt! 513456"
So, a message digest won't work.
I'm personally using SpamBouncer, a procmail-based spam filter. Works fine for me.
Just curious.. has anyone compiled a list of known spammers and their home addresses?
Rats would be more funny if they could fart.
This is a great use of p2p -- something that doesn't involve piracy. I wish I had heard of it before.
Are there any other innovative non-piracy p2p apps out there that we should know about?
...what stops this from being abused? Say I set up a box that automatically reports all mails on the most popular mailing lists as spam, effictively making the ISPs around the world start to filter out the mailing lists...
It's a great initiative, I really hope no troll out there takes my word on this and actually do this.
I read some of the documentation, but I can't find details on a couple of questions. Do the servers authenticate with each other? It was implied, but how deep is it? Are the SHA signatures signed to the originating server (or client/trollbox) too? I think this kind of model is great, but if you don't have some nifty authentication/accountability, it can be wide open for abuse. I'm sure anyone reading slashdot can imagine a vengeful spammer flooding the network with bogus or malicious hashes.
funny munging
The people who came up with this idea deserve to be considered heros! This is one of the coolest uses of technology I have seen. (Not to be too gushing: SPAM is a rich mans problem - I hope someone comes up with some cool technological solutions to some of humanities more basic problems.) I run a server which hosts mail for a number of domains. I haven't yet, cause I just heard of it, but this will be used! There might be some interesting extensions based on possible problems: certain kinds of spam interest certain people. Perhaps a categorization system would be useful so that spam can be filtered based on these categories (for example, some people might like receiving 100 MLM spam messages a day :-P ). Also, there is an (extremely) slim chance that a legit mail might be blocked based on match hashes. Although this is extremely unlikely, could it be fixed somehow? Finally, some spam comes with very slight differences but is essentially the same spam instance. Chain letters are in a grey area. It would be good to have some heuristic methods of filtering based on content too. I don't know the characteristics of the hashing algorthm used, but perhaps by doing three hashes: start of message, middle of message, and end of message, it may be possible to identify spam even if a small part has been change.
Anyway, just some random thoughts.
Kudos again to those who have built this!
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
That's quite interesting.
But the main question is, can it be abused?
I'd expect the senders of spam to be wanting this project to be rendered useless, by submitting garbage to the database.
In return, I guess it is possible to have some sort of moderating system on the submitters of the data, which can filter out most of the abusers.
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
They need 20 words to make the signature. What is some jerk submits a 'spam' signature that contains common words found in normal emails? Or what if these spam words can be used in a non-spam context?
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Nothing truly insightful here, just speculation from a convenience freak.
-
And the Angel said unto me, "These are the cries of the carrots! The cries of the carrots!"
could help the internet to be a better place. :)
Would an evil admin be able to report a "signature" as a source of spam, even if it's not? Probably.
This project has a great idea behind it, but how does it work? A lot of the mail I get is spam, but the line between spam and wanted mail is often not very distinct.
This project put a lot of trust to the admins as trusted and intelligent people. I hope this turns out well...
I'll post my usual public service announcements here:
SpamCop is a great service for reporting spam; just paste the spam message into the web form, and it'll automatically figure out where the smap came from and send complaints off to the appropriate people.
The Spam Bouncer is a procmail-based personal spam screening tool. It's got some interesting features, but I haven't used it in a long while.
The way I avoid spam is to have my mail client screen out any email which contains any of these phrases:
to be removed
to be permanently removed
to get removed
to get off the list
to get off this list
to be taken off
to remove yourself
removal instructions
remove in subject line
"remove" in subject line
remove in the subject
"remove" in the subject
'remove' in the subject
S.1618
S. 1618
This list by itself catches about 80% of the spam I get.
It seems as though using a digest algorithm it not only will be pretty much immune to deleting valid email, but also good at preventing DOS-type database poisoning by spammers (trying to put in a huge number of randomly-generated hashes would likely be detected).
Of course, it seems that simply randomly changing a few characters in each message could get around this. Suggestions, anyone?
Razor catalogs spam by hashing the entire text of the message. Later potential spam is "detected" by hashing entire texts of messages to see if the hash matches any of the existing hashes in the spam catalog.
To get around this all a spammer has to do is change/add at least one charachter to each spam. This would make all the hashes unique and no spams would be detected.
Subscribe to the kernel mailing list.
Woz
Don't forget about Intel's cancer-research P2P system - www.intel.com/cure
They also have info there about Stanford's protein-folding project (http://folding.stanford.edu)
Juiced? Or Not?
I love costing spammers real money just got to
http://goto.com
and do a search for "bulk email" each link you click will cost the scumbags that sell spam software or spamming services several dollars each
Also I love this new technology I wish all isp's would use it
and for more spam fighting ideas please check out
http://www.lenny.com/spam
http://Lenny.com
4 great justice!
As far as I can tell from a quick glance at this, it looks like the entire message body is being used to compute the signature. This isn't going to work very well -- over half of the spam I receive is "personalized", and that fraction is growing every day.
This could work very well, but we need some way of computing signatures which will be invariant across different copies of personalized spam for this to be effective.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I'm sorry, but this just doesn't seem all that useful. Is this going to stop spam coming to my Hotmail/ICQMail/other coprporately run webmail service, or even the e-mail address from my cable provider? Unfortunately, no. For it to be of any use to most people it would have to be implemented by the companies that are allowing spam through to its users in the first place.
It would be great if common email programs had a function for that - for example, right clicking on a spam mail, choosing "spam", the mail would be moved to a "spam folder" and the relevant info about that email would automatically be submitted to an anti-spam institiution of that kind. This would make handling spam a lot easier IMHO.
Although, i marvel at the theory and innovative use of peer to peer technology to achieve exemplary aims. I have some concerns about the possibilities of abuse, AFAIK the submission system for spam, is not moderated in any way. In fact only the hash is sent to the server and not a copy of the spam, i am therefore concerned that the system could possibly be abused by someone submitting the hash of a legitimate mail to the system that would then result in this email from being recieved by the other hosts. This could be done to prevent the circulation of bugtaq items, my a malicous user for instance. And as everyone has different personal opinions about SPAM and what constitues it, i think a set of clear guidelines is required and when submissions are made a copy of the mail is associated with it and a human being moderates the hashes being submitted. Although i have my doubts about the system, if these were put to rest i would have no hesistation in implementing a system like this.
Rob 'robster' Bradford
Debian Planet Guy
We are the apt. You will be packaged. Resistance is futile.
It does seem like a remarkably sensible system, just getting email clients to talk to each other about the emails they get.
You can tell if the same email has been sent to hundreds of people (and if you use hashes, you can do that without revealing the email)
You can click a "this is spam" button when you read an email, and anyone who trusts you (i.e. has your public key in their "trusted filtering friends" list) can look for similar messages and filter them.
But, there do seem to be a load of problems:
- Personalised email, as someone already mentioned
- Privacy problems with letting others into the secrets of your mailbox
- If you have the original of a message, you can calculate the hash, then see who else got the message (i.e. works for personal mail as well as spam)
- Relatively easy for malicious users to wrongly label someone as a spammer
Well worth investigating, though...
I found ifile - http://www.ai.mit.edu/%7Ejrennie/ifile/ - that learns how to recognize spam with statistics of word usage. I have written some scripts for using it with standard unix procmail and standard unix mailboxes. It recognize over 90% of incoming SPAM and 99% of corrects mails so it works very well for me. My scripts will be soon integrated in ifile package as said by ifile's author.
One question about this system that I hope the poster (or someone else using this system) will answer: what's it like on server load? Right now, at the ISP I work at, we're using procmail to filter for spam (check the graphs here: http://selenium.dowco.com/spam/spam.html). It's a good way of doing things, but there are some shortcomings: basically, since it runs on our mailserver, I can't run all the body searches I want; in fact, we had to cut out body searches recently because the load was getting too high and/or email was taking too long to get through. There's some workarounds that I haven't got around to putting in yet (body scanning only when 3k in size, etc), but you can see my point. Anyone?
Carousel is a lie!
This is probably a 'fuzzy' hash function that should ignore minute variations. However, it goes without saying that if this hash-based spam filter becomes widespread, then the spammers will simply figure out how to hash-bust their way past it.
To have any hope of working over the long term, this kind of an approach must include the ability to distribute not just the hashes themselves, but the hash function as well, so that the hash function itself can be adjusted, when needed.
To eliminate the situation where one person posts a lot of "incorrect" signatures, a ranking system could be applied.
./ moderation?
The thought goes like this.
A person submits a signature of "identified" spam mail to a "supernode" for ex. and the submission gets a ranking of 1. Each additional submission (by other users) increases the score by a number.
This way, there are several classifications which could be used to filter incoming mail. For the mail providers, they could opt for only removing mail matching signatures with a very high score (thus very likely these will be actual spam) or they could filter anything reported.
The purpose of allowing the use of classifications is that it will take longer time to get higher scores, since more people have to report the specific spam mail. Some people whish to eliminate things the least bit suspected, but mileage may vary.
Do you see a resemblance with the
In a society that believes in nothing, fear becomes the only agenda ~ Bill Durodié
Injecting random hashes into the network won't result in valid emails being tagged, but can flood/DOS the catalogue machines.
It would be possible to create hashes for a number of "probable" emails, but diversity in messages is so big, the chances are quite slim to actually stop a legitimate mail.
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
[Zappa]
You might be thinking of brightmail. I think that's what they do (to lazy to look it up)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Spammers will just modify their spamming programs to very slightly change each message so that they generate completely different hashes.
Cool idea but wont work. Sorry.
Official GOD FAQ.
I always figured that the major problem with a system like this was randomized messages. I figured a way around it would be try to make a 'conceptual' hash of the contents, that try to analyze the meaning of the text, not just the data.
:). But redistributing the hash function when spammers figure out the old one is an interesting idea as well. The big problem is with the more technically savvy spammers (yeh, I'm sure they're are some out there, unfortunately) who could reverse engineer the hash to figure out what makes it tick.
The big problem with that, is well, it's not easy
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I'm using Mailwasher it works well for me. Allows you to preview your message headers, delete,blacklist and 'bounce' anything you dont want to recieve. Works well on spam as well as email from your ex-girlfriend.
Don't Tread on Me
This wont work. All that will happen is that the spammers will just modify their spam programs to slightly modify each message they send out. This will result in each message having a COMPLETELY different SHA signature.
Cool idea but wont work. Sorry. Maybe some kind of AI algrorithm.
Official GOD FAQ.
for abusers who report bogus signatures is to count the number of times each signature is reported and only consider a report valid after the count exceeds a threshold value. Real spam mailings would be reported many times each from distinct nodes and would be easy to distinguish from bogus signatures, which wouldn't be as widely reported.
Easy, automatic testing for Perl.
Don't like Hotmail very much, but their
spam filter rocks. 100% of spam is binned.
Today in my unused Hotmail box, I see:
Inbox 0 (0 new)
Junk Mail 189 (189 new)
Why? If you set the option, Hotmail excludes
anyone not in your address book. In other words,
anything _NOT_ sent to someone in your address
book goes directly to the bin.
So unless you have simon.wong@bulkemail.ca
in your address book, you should be spam-free.
------
Outlook 2002's new rules manager does the same
thing. Does anyone know if Eudora, Calypso, or PINE can
filter by excluding those not in your address book?
i think i got a good idea to add to this.
seti@home can have abusers on their systems so they make a redundantcy. sending the same packet for analisis. when 1 doesn't go right, they'll resend the thing to 3 others.
why not have a requirement of a certain # of people sending in an address as spam before it's considered spam? (just an idea, i don't know alot on how it works or anything, just trying to contribute
blue tiger
Most spam I get these days have URLs with unique ID's encoded in them, so they know which email address brought in the user. You'd think this would screw up the hash.
I noticed that a lot of spam coming through my Yahoo account had been tagged with the header "X-YahooFilteredBulk". I added this to my Exim system filter and I've gone from 20+ spams a day in my inbox to 2 in a week. Thank you Yahoo!
Unfortunately, a lot anti-spam measures (including Exim 3's system filters) only take place after a message has been accepted for delivery. For me, this results in a lot of bounce messages frozen in the queue as they cannot be returned (Hotmail mailbox full, etc). I've switched on features like verifying the sender and the headers, but this doesn't catch them all, and in some cases might even stop some legitimate spam (one of my mailing lists uses incorrect syntax for the "RCPT TO:").
More effective anti-spam systems need to filter before the message has been accepted. If you wait until then, it is already too late and it is on your system. No, refusing accept delivery is much effective IMHO, and forces the MTA's further up the chain to deal with it. They shouldn't have accepted it in the first place! When you get spam, return 550 (or whatever the code is) and let the SMTP client deal with it. In an ideal world, ever provider (ISP, or free service like Yahoo) will implement stricter MTA's. If the spam rejection can be pushed far enough up the chain, life for everyone will easier.
BTW, according to Philip Hazel (a message I recieved to a question I posed on the Exim mailing list), Exim 4 will offer much more functionality along these lines, including the invocation of C funtions after the DATA phase of the SMTP input. I guess this would be the spot to plug in Vipul's Razor, although I don't know what kind performance hit that would lead to. Mr. Hazel also pointed out that some stupid clients are in contravention of the RFC and will continue to try and delivery a message if they recieved 5xx after the DATA phase... oh well: they'll be using my bandwidth but they won't be putting any crap on my server.
Couldn't this same program be used to keep a signature of new email viruses?
What stops the spammer from including a unique identifier in each e-mail (such as a count variable), changing the SHA for each e-mail that goes out?
Just a thought...
http://kered.org
I found a clever way to defeat most spam on the webpage of an avid cyclist; unfortunately I can't remember his name or enough information about him to run a Google search and give this method proper attribution. But here goes anyway:
The key to this method is to realize that most spam has a spoofed "To" address -- RARELY is it addressed directly to you. If you dig in the message headers, you'll usually found it was mailed (or CC'd) to a whole bunch of people at once, for obvious reasons. So you set up your mail filters thusly:
First, set up a filter allowing any "legal" mailing lists you're on to go to your Inbox.
Next, a filter to allow any mail sent directly to you (i.e. you@domain.com is in the To or CC lines) to go to your Inbox.
Finally, a filter that deletes everything else.
You'd be amazed how effective this is. Since setting this up, I only get maybe one spam message past this system every three or four months.
Mind you, I also have my email come in via Bigfoot, which has a pretty good spam filter itself. But this has nonetheless proven quite effective.
Wrong....look at the timestamp on THIS one
>> This wont work. All that will happen is that the spammers will just modify their spam programs to slightly modify each message they send out.
It will however require them to send each specific message separately rather than sending large cc's or using some sort of relay. That alone is a big step since right now most spammers can get away with sending a single email message and relying on an open relay to retransmit to a larger group.
Furthermore I have doubts that for the time being this project will concern spammers. Infact I am pretty sure spammers are not really interested in wasting their own time trying to spam people who consider spam a violation. It is more convenient to ignore those people (which is why they don't bother to check if you want spam or not before they send it to you).
DLG
To a degree, this can work. If the signatue was of the text itself. If it was based on long sentences being present within a mail, plus the origin of the mail (based on the connecting IP), this might have a chance.
Think of it, spammers would have to start hitting multiple mail servers which creates a lot of over head and is just silly, to get around this. That and spammers would have to use very very generic text to get by it. Like "Act now. We sell. Porn!. Natalie Portman!" vs "Come see our barely of age teens do really bad stuff."
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
This seems like it would be a great method for virus detection on a non-Windows machine. For those of you who run *nix mail servers which eventually filters down to Windows clients, having a mail tagged as viral would be nice to have it be immediately denied at the server. So I'm assuming all it would take is a smart admin to tag the email as spam, and then it will propagate around to the other servers (less than 1k would transfer!).
Let me make an ammendment, a common IP, not necessarily the IP of origin. Someone could be behind NAT :) But then again, the software to figure out the common IP shouldn't be hard...
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
I have the problem of many commercial pop3 accounts which supply techncal information for the use of end users of our products. Spam chokes up several accounts to such a great degree as to make them unusable. I searched Freshemeat and tried a program called "mailfilter". It goes out to pop3 accounts on the server and deletes mail based on your rules. Believe me, it rules! Spam problem for us is gone. Best wishes to you guys on the other side of the pop3 server with this new technology
It will however require them to send each specific message separately rather than sending large cc's or using some sort of relay. That alone is a big step since right now most spammers can get away with sending a single email message and relying on an open relay to retransmit to a larger group
:(
Most spam I get has my real name somewhere in the body of the message, so it doesn't seem like a problem for spammers
I spent the last few days hacking together a bulk mailer in perl. I did so with a lot of sensitivity and a bit of trepidation and a lot of social engineering to my employer who wanted to put together a way to send invitations to a party via email, rather than the very expensive snail mail method that we had been using.
This was emailed to our real customers - our 'A list'. These are the people who get invited to these parties each time - people who come and enjoy the food and drinks, no strings attached.
But, yet, technically, it *is* bulk email and this first time, unsolicited. A very large percentage of the people responded enthusiasticly that they want to remain on the list for this, but a few (8 out of 3500) asked to be removed from the list. One guy seemed annoyed and I typed him a personal apology. (In fact, I doubt that this guy read the email before sending off his remove request.)
What if that guy had submitted the email as spam to this system?
In that case, the rest would miss out on coming to a good party.
I hate spam as much as anyone on slashdot. I was asked to set up a bulk email and found that it could be done in a way that was not offensive in this case. Had it conflicted with my conscience, I would have refused.
Maybe the system needs some sort of moderation as a filter, too. At least that would allow valid bulk email to survive one trigger-happy end-user.
Ok, go ahead and tell me that I'm wrong in this...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
Well at least it *WILL* filter some of the bad content while leaving the good one clean, right now I receive 20 mails a day of spam in my hotmail inbox and the hotmail filter killed *VALID* messages! they keep junk for 2 weeks, I found that out 3 months later because my girlfriend posts would never reach me for the last few days.. and she's far from being a spammer.
:) ).
There's not perfect solution for spam (aside from killing every single individuals that dare spamming people, which unfortunately is still illegal
Legislation is too busy removing our civil rights right now than to make our lives better (as they should do). So right now, I'd say, ANY technology helping us to reduce spam should be welcomed and helped in a productive way instead of bashing on it without even giving it a try. It's an open project and it means that if you can contribute in a POSITIVE way, you should. Else, people, please don't discourage programmers working on something that could eventually come out as being a very good solution.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
For all those of us who use Mickeysoft products, we need such a database driven spam filter. One person says it is spam and the domain/user gets blacklisted, that way we all can help kill spam, not just you linux weenies.
I'll never get another "funny email" from my Mom again!
Many such tricks can be defeated by only hashing words that appear in some standard dictionary and discarding all else, such that
gets reduced to LIVE NAKED DRESSED GIRLS before hashing. Even then, the smart thing to do is not to block matching mail but to blackhole the sources of matching mail, preferably permanently. Humanity's more basic problems are the inability to cope with the concept of a world without scarcity. Would that technology fix that instead of providing the powerful with more ways to create unnatural scarcity.-jhp
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
A slight modification would fix that problem.
Hash short segments of the mail. Use higher
resolution at the beginning and at the end.
Anything within a certain hamming distance
matches.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
By filtering out mails that contain the phrase "this is not spam"
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
But I'm going to give this a shot too. This sounds seriously cool.
Tom Geller
For the many /.ers who:
a. Use Outlook secretly
b. Receive loads of foreign spam
c. Don't know any foreign languages
d. Don't have any foreign friends
e. Don't have any friends
This Outlook rule is for you!
Apply this rule after the message arrives
with
Ô or ¾ or Ç or or É or ½ or Í or ò or Ë or ® or Ä or ã or Ï or Ö or Ô in the subject or body
delete it
and stop processing more rules.
This blocks 99% of foreign spam. Sue Mosher wrote about other effective methods for killing spam in Outlook. Finally, before you reply saying "You dummy, that filter works in any client!" -- You're right.
I receive about 40 spam messages in my mail account each day and I run my own mail server (qmail). Someone told me about a very basic spam stopping method. Just remove the mail-account for a couple of weeks and then reconnect it again, you should less or no spam after that period.
I receive too much real messages in order to try this out and I think most spammers won't bother to actuall remove an email address from their database if it doesn't exist. But has someone else tried this with any luck?
This p2p spam sounds really nice and I'm going to give it a try asap. I already "lost" an other mail-account in the flood of spam I got on it, so now it forwards all messages to msnbill@microsoft.com (microsoft domain billing address).
everytime spam gets mentioned on slashdot, someone says this, and everytime i respond with the work i've been doing-
pattern matching spam
uses word counts and phrase counts from known spam and known good mail to match against incoming mail. requires a certain amount of known spam/not spam, but otherwise it has a good rate of matching spam/not spam and doesn't require the incoming mail to at all known beforehand.
-f
www.blackant.net
Let's say Slashdot sends out an email to its users telling them about something very important. The mail every user recieves is identical, and most of the users want't to recieve it.
Someone want's to abuse the system and reports the message as spam. Now none of the users using razor will recieve it.
Is this possible, or am I just not getting the big picture?
Wow - you're taking that to the extreme. Do you shut out people who approach you in a room to talk to you because you didn't give them permission first? Pretty much the same concept.
If I email my bills to clients, but they didn't request them first, does that mean it's 'spam' and they don't have to pay it?
This company had legitimate relationships with current customers. If you can't email a current customer with information about something about your current relationship, then there's something seriously wrong with that definition of 'spam'.
Hmmm... I guess I'm not allowed to send anyone ANY email ever unless the intended recipient requested it first. If the 'real world' operated like some people want email to operate, the world would be a mighty dull place...
creation science book
I'm in Ottawa and need a job (even contract) Can you help me out ?
Having fun right now piping my collection of thousands of spam messages to razor-report...
#!/bin/sh
files=`/bin/ls *`
for thefile in $files; do
cat $thefile | razor-report -d
done
http://ward.vandewege.net/blog/
I personally have never seen a single spam that has my real name. If I sign up on some website for something then certainly I can't be really suprised if folks from that website opt me in. Giving them my email and name and such is an invititation to recieving email unless they specifically state they will not send anything.
Much of the spam I do recieve is of the type where they are sending mail to all the DLG's out there for instance.
Also much of the spam I get comes through the email addresses that are on webpages... I infact will recieve the same spam several times a day. The only thing that might change is the subject name. (I have never understood why someone thinks that sending me 20 of the same exact advertisement overnight is wise..)
In any case, I don't know if this process will reduce all spam for all people, but considering that even with blackholes I still get a sizeable amount of spam, anything is worth trying...
DLG
In general, it seems that the prevailing opinion that this cant stop custom-spam is correct. I suppose that would require some other sorts of additional checks related to sender, etc.
Yet another boring subject..
This ad is produced and sent out by: AdAd Systems, NY, NY 1 1 2 2 2. To be r e m o v e d from our mailing list please email us at
harold02@musiclover.com.au with r e m o v e in the subject.
Note the spacing with the word "remove". I wonder if these guys read your post.
-- http://frobnosticate.com
I think you may have misunderstood what I consider spam. If I've given you my email address and have agreed to receive email from you, then of course it's not spam. The question was about unsolicited unexpected email, e.g. messages sent using a mailing list from a third-party source.
> I wonder if you have ever ran a business
Yes, I've run my own business since 1980. I've also done marketing, promotion, and support plans for businesses that use direct mail, so I'm familiar with the issues.
> email is a very effective way of keeping your customers in touch
> Most of my vendors...I also trust with my email address
Yes, indeed, email is a great way to keep vendors and customers in touch. But if your customers give you their email addresses and opt-in for mailings, it's not unsolicited email. I agree that this is a great use of technology.
The whole point of this thread was to discuss whether sending 'nice' spam to people who have not agreed to receive your email is still spam. In my opinion, there is no 'nice' spam.
> [What if] I sent you a nice, fancy invitation to my New Years party via snail mail...?
The point is that email is different from snail mail. You wouldn't spend the money to mail me an invitation unless you knew me, or there was some legit reason to invite me (e.g. we live on the same block). Email is swamped with spam -- in my case, 90% of what I receive is spam. Anybody adding to that burden is 'over the line' as far as I'm concerned. I didn't quite get your final comment about talkin' out my ass, but my point is that I follow a strict policy about spam and about telemarketing. I simply will not do business with any spammer, nor will I respond to any telemarketing offer. So no matter what wonderful party invitation might arrive by spam, I wouldn't consider it, as a matter of principle (not that Playboy mansion invitations would be sent via spam!).
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
I called him, and he was saying that it was un-American to stop spam. In my case, he He got the email address from a the prairielaw.com website, but it was too expensive for him to pay for advertising.
Maybe you'd like to discuss it with him.
Locators, Inc
888-595-9131 Toll Free
Fight Spammers!
The mail in question has already BEEN delivered. It has used up network bandwidth, and will use bandwidth to deliver the bounce. The failed bounce will waste the time of the postmaster.
Tis better to dump the connection right away. Me, I have a blanket reject, with a message pointing you to a web page. The web page has a click-thru contract letting you know you will be charged to mail analysis and that you accept the terms to be sued in local (to me) court.
If they agree, they get added to the 'ok' list. (just like the OK list has my mailing lists etc la)
Guess what? I don't get spam. Yet, ppl who REALLY want to use e-mail to talk to me can.
This works a whole lot better than any other 'system' to date.
The Sneakemail service is my favorite spam-fighting tool.
Log in to Sneakemail every time a website asks for your email address. They give you a unique address (@sneakemail.com) which you then give to the website. At the Sneakemail site, you can configure it to either forward, hold, or trash your mail.
For instance, you can tell it to trash mail sent to your "RealAudio" address and hold mail sent to your "Google" address. Each time someone sends mail to any of those addresses, it sets up a new filter rule, which you can later change: mail from CmdrTaco to your "Slashdot" address can go through, but j12h31j2hjh@hotmail.com mail to "Slashdot" can be trashed.
Certainly you can do this yourself if you run your own mailserver, but this is easiest for me.
> On the other hand, it's my responsibility to take them off those lists at their request
I forgot to comment on this very important point. Opting-out is not a valid mechanism, because as you know many spammers use opt-out responses as a way to maintain their lists of valid email addresses. So opting-out may work for a customer/vendor relationship (but opting-in is just as easy); but it will not work for bulk email received from an unknown party. And even with a known vendor, opting-out can be dangerous, because it would be easy to forge an opt-out mechanism with a legit business name for the purpose of collecting email addresses. "Do you want any more bulk pr0n emails from Microsoft? Click here to remove your name from our list." I've received these, by the way.
But just to clarify: I don't think these guys were being bad, I just think we need to have a very clear definition of spam that is not dependent on the spammer's intent. I thought that issue was at the heart of the original post.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
This issue gets argued both ways. I've seen lots of claims like yours, that bulk mail is the profit-maker. But I've also seen figures that show first-class mail to be subsidizing bulk mail. I think there's a lot of deliberate obfuscation here. (I've had direct professional involvement with the USPS and with direct marketers at various points, and so I'm talking about well-researched statistics, not the types of claims you'd find in The Onion.) As usual, a good clue is to see who is in the best position to influence the associated policy and laws. The direct marketers have a strong lobby and incredible influence on the postal service. First class mail is less and less important from a political standpoint. Therefore, I choose to believe the statistics that show first class mail to be the victim, because it's in a good position to be a victim.
But here's another way to look at it. If you got rid of all that bulk mail, you could do the postal service's job with 1/10th the resources. There's a reason that FedEx and UPS can make a profit: We don't mind paying for efficient delivery of the stuff we really want.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
The best option would be a word count histogram filter. Then the spammer would have to entirely alter their language or sales pitch, which isn't going to happen. Just like handwriting, it is hard to change unless you make a whosale effort at changing it. They're too lazy, too.
I've been working on a similar project but using additional factors that help identify spam such as violations of the mail RFC's, and other header indicators, in addition to NLP. I have a prototype that I'm using to score all of my inbox e-mail and am using that to tune the weight factors and add in new factors as I encounter them. It would be interesting to combine your approach with mine I think, since I hadn't thought of analyzing trigrams.
Anyway, if you are interested send me an e-mail and I'll give you my current perl code.
LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
I get a lot of email for Ass Hole, Fuck You, Die Spammer, and other such people I've never heard of.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
See also DCC, the distributed checksum clearinghouse. It uses a fuzzy hash so that bulk emails with minor differences are caught. I think the details differ a lot but the idea is more or less the same.
Open source philosophy at work, bravo :)
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Send an email to this address: photosport@yahoo.com
and check out the taunting reply
Recently, though, SpamCop switched to a heuristic spam-filter, which is quite leaky. Not only does spam get through, messages from well-known viruses come through. It stops maybe half the spam now.
So SpamCop is now no more effective than typical procmail filters. So there's no point in paying for SpamCop service any more.
Anyone know of a good challenge/response alternative to SpamCop?
you can find some scripts here
http://www.lenny.com/spam
http://Lenny.com
4 great justice!
I run all my mail through postfix, and utilize the header and body regex checks. My spam level has dropped from a few messages a day to 1 or 2 a week, and those typically come from list serves that I pick up via POP3, not ones that deliver right to my system. Toss in an inline AV filter, and procmail, and my life is pretty much junk free.
Same applies to my web browsing - Mozilla -> Proxomitron -> Junkbuster -> Squid -> World.
-- Sapere aude.
Some of you point out that Razor's use of SHA-1 signatures can be defeated by introducing randomness in the message. This is true; SHA-1 will eventually be phased out and replaced by a fuzzy hashing mechanism like nilsimsa in future. [http://lexx.shinn.net/cmeclax/nilsimsa.html] [http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/2539/2001/7/ 0/6173567/]
The protocol is structured to aid change of
hashing algorithms seamlessly, without breaking
the existing system.
Regarding the possibility of poisoning the database, we are working on a reputation system
that will assign credit to honest reporters.
Once we have a critical mass of users, it would
be hard for dishonest reporters to even join
the reporting network, much less be able to
mount a DOS attack.
Some of these issues have been discussed on the
razor-users mailing list. The list archives
are located at
[http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/2539/2001/]
best,
vipul.
The comment made in the submission states that Razor is gnutella-like. That is BS too; if anything, it's Napster-like. Razor is a centralized, collaborative filtering system. One could argue that Razor's master servers are distributed and that the entire system is therefore not fully centralized, but this will change shortly to a master/slave model, which will allow the introduction of a reputation management system.
Keep your eyes peeled.
--jordan
It will be very difficult to randomize spam to avoid getting two or three chunks of spam text into database, because you will never know HOW to align text and junk to avoid hashing, and you soon will be out of english words if you try to make different variants of spam with the help of some AI like pornolize.com. Of couse, you can insert random words into the text, but then it will be impossible to understand...
It does work, there's no debating that. The reason is because SPAMers are not yet up against mainstream technophile-type people; the mindless masses still aren't smart enough to use a procmail filter or anything else. In terms of numbers of people reached, the numbers are still in their favor to not even bother modifying their algorithms.
However, that will change, and so will Razor. Quite soon, in fact, Razor will have a real "fuzzy" match algorithm. Note, not like the bogus "fuzzy" match system that DCC employs, which isn't fuzzy at all but is rather a normalized MD5 (still unique).
--jordan
Yes, I want to be able to grant levels of trust to senders and have it happen at the transaction level when my MTA gets a connection from the sender.
Anyone I've dealt with myself gets whitelisted, and gets in every time, with no blocklist checks. In the case where someone is unknown to me, if there's a path back to their key from mine with sufficient trust, then I should also allow it in.
The trick here is that if I have no path back to someone and they're mailing my private address, I should be able to kick back a real-looking (but actually fake) "550 User unknown" to make them think I don't exist.
This has to happen at the transaction layer, since once you accept the mail, any attempts to bounce it from there (if it's spam) will probably double-bounce right back into your mailbox (you are the postmaster, right?) anyway.
If I could figure out a good way to convey this in the existing fields like the envelope sender, then it wouldn't be too hard to write as a milter plugin for sendmail. Hopefully someone else has already done this and I won't have to.
I wouldn't trust this too much -- none of the people working on this project appear to be regulars of NANAE. I'd go with DCC over this product -- they seem to do the same thing, and DCC is an already-established project.
------
If you have O2002, you can do something similar by whitelisting. "Whitelisting is the opposite of blacklisting. Whereas the latter bans messages from certain senders, whitelisting accepts mail from specific senders."
"The new feature is an additional Rules Wizard condition: "sender is in Address Book," where you choose the address book--I've chosen my Contacts folder. For a message from a sender found in my Contacts folder, the rule applies a "known sender" category and stops processing the message. The "stop processing" action ensures that the message stays in my Inbox. Another rule at the bottom of the list moves everything that previous rules didn't handle into my Junk Mail folder for later review."
How do you do this with PINE/procmail? I'd like to stop using Outlook.
I don't know how an ISP would accomplish this, but when a user sets it up, it's easy: filter your mailing lists first.
THEN filter the remaining mail.
The remaining mail SHOULD NOT contain any mailing lists, or other generic mail, just personal stuff.
Wait-- here's how an ISP sets it up: don't delete the suspected spam, just add a header. The user's client can filter it, hopefully after it handles mailing-list mail.
I occasionally stop to wonder, and think back to the pre-spam days of the internet, and then to the future... We are in the middle of quite an intense evolutionary arms race, the spammers versus the anti-spammers. Whenever the anti-spammers come up with a new trick, the spammers find another way around it.
What is this system going to look like in another 20 or 50 years? What percentage of general computational resources are going to be devoted to the spam/anti-spam war? Do any of you think any radical revolutionary changes will come along, or the battle will pretty much proceed as it is, just continuing the one-upmanship ad infinitum?
Let me elaborate a bit...
Taking a hash or SHA digest is bound to fail. One little character is off and the thing fails. That means customized emails, for example.
I'm working on a histogram based filter. You count the number of time a word occurrs in an email and you create a hash based upon the top twenty words and their occurance rate or so. If the spammer changes dear "bob" to dear "fred", bob and fred only occurr once or twice at most and are deemed insignificant by the algorithm and do not affect the hash. The more words you accept, the more accurate the fingerprint, although 20 or so seems to be accurate enough. Other configurable parts of the algorithm allow you to bump the word increment once if it occurs two times or three times instead of a one-to-one increment. Minute changes, therefore, will not affect the hash.
Furthermore, if an exact match is not made, you can keep compiling all histograms by sorting them into groups of like content, and then generate "master" general fingerprints, which can then be used with weights in a fuzzy algorithm to score a message for spammyness. Combined with a threshold (say 50% spamminess) you can decide whether or not you want to reject it. This again is only used if a direct match is not made. (If an exact fingerprint has not yet made it into the db).
This system still plays nice with distributed methods as you are still using a small hash code. If it were employed on one system, it would be easier to keep more detailed records of each hist; not just a hash.
Maybe one of these days I'll have a decent working prototype in python to share.
A better system would be to take random samples of several line groups, and then write a "signature" with the line numbers and the contents next to them. Then, if by some stroke of chance, the spammers random string is contained in one of those samples, one could do a diff between a message and the signature, and if it was pretty close, then it would still count as a match.
Well, I'm off to their project page on Sourceforge...
Is your company running tools written by ma
They aren't trying to answer the question "should this particular piece of e-mail be considered spam," but rather "is this particular piece of mail identical (to within some factor) to one that some human considers spam." So they don't need to train anything, they just store the hash-signatures of the spam that is currently making the rounds.
Even if someone mistakenly identifies a piece of mail as spam, it won't hurt anything; the odds are very low that it will ever match another piece of mail in the entire history of the cosmos.
-- MarkusQ
Yes! In fact, why not have many fuzzy hash functions floating around at once? That way, their task would be to come up with something that yielded a different hash against all of the hash functions at once, a much harder problem. If some spammer figures out a way to do it, an anti-spammer can devise a function (looking at lots of copies of the spam, which shouldn't be hard to come by) that would catch it, and now that trick won't work any more.
Distributing the functions with the hash (with a few safe guards, e.g. re: the halting problem) would make this darned near imposible to beat.
-- MarkusQ
Is the code on the web?
Why worry about the trolls when big ISPs are here for you? ATT would never use this to filter objectionable content would they? I mean who would want to block the local LUG? Not the MSN? No, everyone is nice enough to astroturf that kind of thing. Stephen Barktoo signs up for the local LUG then reports the mail as spam. Poof local LUG looses mail list. Then, when the ISP consolidation is over and ATT and MS own everything, they can block the LUGs webpage like they block incoming port80 now. Thanks for the insightful thought, there in return is the mechanism for email control and motive you fear with a bonus mal thought about web control.
End the last mile tyrany! Go wireless now.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
I had a thought about this a little while ago. What if you only accepted mail from people that included their PGP fingerprint, and then only the particular people that you want to accept mail from?
This turns your mailbox into a Opt-In situation. I realize that this would be hard to do, and that you would have to swap fingerprints off-line, but wouldn't you have to do that anyway? This would also require mail clients to allow you to set up a new X-Header (most will, won't they?) like PGP-Fingerprint or something.
It certainly would keep unwanted mail out of your mailbox. And if you decided that you didn't want any more mail from a particular person, just remove their fingerprint. This also gets around the problem of someone sending email from different addresses. I personally have 4 or 5 different email addresses that I use for various purposes.
KangarooBox - We make IT simple!
I use Mail::Audit and Mail::SpamAssassin in a Perl filter script now. Works great and I can add custom rules easily enough.
See link for details.
Sounds a bit like SpamAssassin, if I say so myself ;)
SA analyses mail headers, body, and uses RBL and Razor to come up with an aggregate spam/non-spam score, then filters appropriately. Most of its smarts is encapsulated in a Perl module, which means it can be run from virtually anywhere; a procmail filter, a spam-protection SMTP proxy server, a system-wide checking system, etc. (all 3 of those have been implemented). Its scores are generated using a GA and a large corpus of test mail, too. Hit rates nowadays are fantastic ;)
Disclaimer: I'm the maintainer.
I just wrote a Spam Victims Revange v0.01, it's a little Perl script which hits paid links found on Overture under "bulk email" queries etc. It acts like a real browser, in terms of HTTP_USER_AGENT and random "clicks" intervals, showing progress of total hits and total bucks. Enjoy.
> How do you do this with PINE/procmail? I'd like to stop using Outlook.
Easy enough:
:0:
* ? (formail -x From: -x Sender: -x Reply-To: -x Received: | fgrep -iqf ~/.src/procmail/whitelist)
Inbox
:0
/dev/null
And fill ~/.src/procmail/whitelist or whatever with patterns to match friends/ml's etc.
It's not hard to repeat this for multiple whitelists, produce blacklists, or have whitelisted stuff get processed further.
Giblet's procmail stuff is a nice place to start (http://www.linuxbrit.co.uk/procmail/)
But here's why I think this situation is black-and-white.
Bad spammers have swamped the medium. Therefore it doesn't matter that there may be good spammers; I can't opt out to *ANY* UCE, because there's no way that I can distinguish between the white hats and the black hats. Therefore opt-out does not help. If we could shut down the spoofers and list churners, and opt-out had a reasonable chance of working, then I'd be singing a different song. But so far we can't.
For the same reason, I don't equate catalogues and other unsolicited bulk snail mail with UCE. Those mailings are selective, because there's a substantial cost in sending it out. But UCE has been taken over by the bad guys. Therefore, in my opinion, a good guy sending UCE is actually contributing to the spam problem, by further muddying the water. I will NEVER reply to any UCE.
If we could cut out the anonymous and spoofed crap, and UCE always had a valid sender, opt-out mechanism, etc., I might become a UCE supporter. But at the moment the amount of spam I receive grows steadily each month, the amount of time I spend dealing with it grows accordingly, and the amount of virus-infected spam goes up as well.
So my view is that if you're not against UCE, then you're part of why we have a spam problem.
But again, this is just my opinion, and you've made one of the better cases for 'white hat' UCE that I've heard.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
You might arrange a voting system. Among the Reporters at each Catalogue Server, calculate the percentage who report a message as spam. Consider it spam if more than X percent report it as spam.
I think some sort of threshold will be necessary, because even Reporters with very high reputation scores will make occasional mistakes. Also, sometimes pranksters will subscribe people to legitimate list, making it look like spam.
With the right threshold value, this should give very reliable results.
You mention a reputation system. Voting can be combined with reputation scores. Each vote might get a higher or lower weight depending on a reputation score.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for one day. Teach him how to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime, all the while calling you a miser for not giving him your fish.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
Of course, you could use the methods I use. I set up mailboxes for all my accounts and rules that filter anything coming to any of those accounts into their own box. Then, my Inbox is usually the only place I get a lot of spam, because usually the To: does not contain any of my mail addresses, so they are dumped into my inbox. And really, all you need is your delete key anyway. It's not that big of a pain. I get hundreds of spams and I simply don't allow it to bother me.
Here's why you don't care about being able to intellegently identify spam:
1. I get a fair amount of real mail from friends of the form "check this out: http://x.y.z/"... I also get a LOT of spam that looks exactly the same.
2. You can catch spam the moment it comes out, by having honeypot-like mailboxes which are for no users at all, but you submit thier addresses to various places spammers look for such addresses.
Given these two, spam filters that don't look at real spam constantly are just hobbling themselves. Perhaps you intelligent filter should start off by running razor-check, and then thinking real hard if Razor says it's not spam...?
Good site too. (linuxbrit.co.uk/procmail)
So when I get spammed by some idiot advertising http://www.hot-spammer-teens.com, I can submit that URL, and (assuming enough people submit the same URL from unique IP addresses) others running the same system will get a popup message when they go to http://www.hot-spammer-teens.com, and they can vote their dislike of spam by putting their creditcard away and trying to find another pornsite.
This could also work for email addresses maybe, when the spammer is trying to get people to send creditcard numbers for some MAKEMONEYFAST! scheme.
This would have the advantage that you can also use it for spam that gets sent over ICQ too (which is where most of my spam comes from these days).
Zilch
I know it is off-topic, but don't forget the other war that will significantly effect the future of the net. The p2p vs *AA war. So far the *AA has won several battles already. I wonder if they can win them all, or will the infoanachists eventually triumph. Being an infoanarchist I hope we win, but I fear we, and the internet, will lose.
Keep coding infoanarchists, you are our only hope.
You also can check this idea which works also.
Basicly you have a bunch of trusted people which can add entries to the spam list. When they receive a spam they do forward it to a list, signing the message with pgp/gnupg. A perl engine will then verify the sign to know if the person is allowed to add/remove entries. Then it will fetch the From: header from the forwarded email, and add it to a file which is available on the net. You just have to write your script to fetch the file every 10min and add the content to your access list (postfix, sendmail, etc) with REJECT.
Scripts are available also for Gnus/Emacs so you hit F1 and it will send the mail the way it should, so announcing spam is one key away. It's important announcing spam doesn't take time, or you won't do it as you probably receive many per day.
You also can add [domain] in the subject line which will add the whole domain from the From: header. The [rbl:IP] will add it to a rbl table.
Take a look, it's cool.
Sending large amounts of individual messages wouldn't be an issue. A lot of the time, spammers don't use open relays, they run spamming programs on their own computers which contact the target MX directly. So let's say the person to recieve spam had an account @hotmail.com for example it would do a DNS lookup on hotmail.com and see what that domain's mail exchanger is. Then it would open a TCP connection to the MX on port 25 (SMTP) and send it the message and the mailbox it is destined for (this is what SMTP relays do for you, when you go through one).
:P
You can tell when you've been sent direct-to-MX spam, because there will only be one header that's been inserted by an SMTP server (each server that the mail goes through adds a message to say who it is, the time it got the message, and from where). That header will be the one your mailbox provider adds, for example
recieved from host-44-772-9.dialup.spammersisp.com by mail.spam-recipients-isp.com at 13:40 GMT 2/12/2001
Therefore... it would not be hard to set up a program to send as many individual messages as needed, using a mail-merge style where you have a basic template for a message and swap in the individual data each time. I'm sure programs exist to do this. I could do it in Perl in an hour or two at most! (Not that I'm going to)
If this system relies on spams being absolutely identical to work, then it won't, because each message is quite often different. If it took into account and compared the date, time, and originating IP address of the message, it might make it more reliable, perhaps...
No offense, hear me out a bit:
you could just as well have said this: "We wanted to send party invitations, so we hacked into each of our customers' servers and put a message on their home page.
No, actually, you're wrong. If you go to a restaurant and leave your business card, you are pretty much authorizing the restaurant to use the information to contact you. That's how business has been conducted for quite a long time. You have a reasonable expectation that the restaurant will not abuse your trust and in that regard, I don't think we have at all. As I said, all but a very few people welcomed these invitations. My company is quite well known for throwing a hell of a party.
Yet with this software, one person can have the ability to block a group announcement that is welcomed by 99 percent of the people.
Ever click a ThinkGeek banner on Slashdot? What if one reader had the ability to block the ads for everyone? I'd miss them, even though they are technically the same as most any other banner ad and in some people's minds, evil. ThinkGeek seems to be a clueful company that knows its audience and in that is a welcome addition to the community. The also pay the money that keeps the servers running.
Ever get a catalog in the mail that you actually thought was worthwhile? What if one person could decide that it was junkmail and should be blocked for everybody? That there was no way for you to 'opt-in', because there was no way for you to hear about it in the first place.
What I'm saying is that one guy who may not even recall opting in can block a perfectly valid email announcement. In that way, the system does have a flaw.
What if I was on the CERT advisory email list and decided to say that their latest announcement was spam? From my understanding of the system in question, I would have that ability.
I would love for there to be a good system for controlling the junk email that I get, but I don't think that this is there yet.
Cheers,
Jim
-- My Weblog.
> You're the guy that I'm worried about...No offense
Ha ha. Well, actually, I'm not that guy, and I basically agree with everything you've said in this post. I think I was answering a different question, maybe one that you didn't ask. I had concluded that your customer list had been randomly accumulated, with no opt-in process, and that your customers weren't necessarily expecting to hear from you except in response to their own messages. (Example: When I place an order with amazon.com, I don't want to start receiving ads, and I damn sure don't want them to sell my name to somebody else. An amazon.com party invitation? I think in that case, given the number of their customers and what a small part of their business I represent, it would be an inappropriate use of my address. There's no reasonable expectation that ordering a $10.95 book would somehow put me onto their A-list.) It sounds like you have a much closer relationship with your customers, and so it's not black-and-white. Well, again, as I said earlier, if it were black-and-white then it wouldn't be worth discussing.
To use your restaurant analogy, rather than collecting business cards I thought you were saving the telephone numbers left when people made reservations -- in that case, there's NO expectation that they'll start gettting telemarketing calls.
I totally agree that this spam blocking approach -- the one this thread is putatively about -- has real weaknesses, and that (depending on how it's implemented) one individual might have the ability to block legitimate mailings. I suppose one approach would be to withhold action until some number of complaints are received -- just like how your cable company won't send out a service truck until 3 calls come in.
But returning to my original post, I stand by my belief that a bulk mailing is spam unless there's a clear opt-in by the recipients. This opt-in could come from several means: via an explicit opt-in form; by the user manually submitting an email address; or as part of your published terms of service. (Given the abuses of list sharing, I feel that there should be NO way to resell an email address obtained from an outside source -- the only address that you should be able to share is one that you've been told first-hand can be shared. In fact, if this were done, and we got rid of the faked sender addresses etc., opt-out would have a better chance of working. But today, once you get on one list being distributed, you're screwed -- you can never stop the barrage.)
I hope my position doesn't sound as draconian as my original post made it. I was responding to the philosophical question of "What is spam?" rather than the practical questions "Is this spam blocker a good idea?" or "Were we good guys with this party mailing?" You were good guys; but if I were you, I'd institute procedures to maintain the customer list more carefully, so that NO customer could ever be surprised by an invitation in the future. They'll know whether or not such mailings are likely at the time they leave their email addresses. And that's good customer service.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
I'd like to start using this within qmail, but I'm unsure how to put it into my .qmail file.
Anyone have a recipe?
a. Use Outlook secretly
:'(
b. Receive loads of foreign spam
c. Don't know any foreign languages
d. Don't have any foreign friends
e. Don't have any friends
Foreign spam removal (Score:5, Informative)
May be better Funny, but Informative?
If some one do this to his email client is deleting all the foreign mails.
Bórrame por no ser de Estados Unidos.
This Comment moderation is racist.
Latinoamerica son todos los paises que fueron colonizados por paises con lenguas romances, esto es, descendientes del pais. Ese filtro cortaria una gran cantidad de paises americanos.
* Canada, por francofona.
* Toda hispanoamerica y claro:
- Muchas zonas de California.
- Muchas zonas de "la luisiana" francofonas.
- Muchos hispanohablantes de USA.
* Brasil, por el portugues.
Contando los que quedan dentro estan:
* Algunas personas de USA.
* Belice
1 saludo
Tei
Want to know how to hit the companies that provide the bulk email lists, and hit 'em hard? It's safe and legal!
Just go to your favorite pay-per-clickthrough search engine (like Goto.com), search on keyword phrases like:
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...and start clicking away on the paid listings! Some of these comapnies are paying as much as FIVE DOLLARS PER CLICKTHROUGH for their listing!
Can you imagine a million slahsdotters hitting these search engines? It would shut down most of these guys, and probably discourage future spammers.