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Christmas Spam Level Skyrocketing
dbolger writes: "ZDNet has this brief, but interesting article about how the amount of spam we recieve in our inboxes has increased 650% since this time last year. Nice to know that that anti-spam legislation passed a while back is having an effect (not)." For PINE users, just remember the magic spell: "m s r f a."
I was laid off from a marketing/"branding"/ad firm in July, b/c they just weren't getting the web development business they once had. Banner ad rates have plummeted, and we are being assaulted by ever-more-maddening varieties of web ads (huge banners, popunders, clickthroughs, and now "shoshkeles"!?). Sites feel they have to give advertisers more for their money, simply in order to bring in the same revenue as during the dot-com boom.
When will this madness stop? Users may flee sites that harass them too strongly. Then again, the general level of advertising in our environment has been slowly but steadily increasing for decades. I doubt this trend will stop anytime soon.
Get your own back from SPAMMERS! Click the link and follow through to each of the SPAMMER's advertisments you wish to 'pay back' for their fine services. The cost to the SPAMMERS per click is displayed next to each advertisment. Only one click per day per person per advertisement is counted... http://www.overture.com/d/search/?type=home&Keywor ds=bulk+email
That's funny. I receive at most one or two SPAMs per month. (The handful that slip through onto the Debian mailing lists don't really count.) Maybe people are just becoming more stupid in how they give out their addresses. Oh yeah.. and then there are HTML tags that 'phone home,' supported by many popular mail clients. Of course, we can all thank MS for Hotmail: an endless supply of throw-away mail accounts.
For those who care to reduce spam and other online (and offline) annoyances, see Junkbusters web site, also home to the free (GPL) filtering proxy by the same name.
Despite more than 2/3 of the Internet-users beeing non-us-citizens, 90% of all spam originates in the US. This is most likely due to permissive legislature in the US. In Italy for example collecting (e-mail)addresses and other personal data is illegal, unless you have written permission from the user, or you have a business realationship (italian law #675/96, aka privacy law).
IMHO, stopping the increasing number of spam-mails is only possible with legislature forcing opt-in methods for advertisers and huge fines for those who don't conform.
Ciao,
ms
It doesn't help that companies like verio and level 3 are about to go under. There anything for a buck last grasp is making them spam friendly. I recently busted a site on verio http://128.242.238.85/ that was operating openly as a spam source. Verio didn't care.
I emailed 100 verio customers in that net block to explain to them how they would be blackholed and what that meant. They took down the site.
You can set up the very software spammers use to poach email addresses from sites in the same net block.
I fight fire with extreme fire. The only spammers I go after since you can rile people up on it, porn spammers, they don't care if they are sending to a kid or an adult, most of them even have pedophile or zoophile crap. Grab a name from the isp, any name. Contact them on the phone and tell them of the spam and give them 24 hours to have the site removed. If not, you are going to call everyone with their last name in the city the isp is located and let them know they are all for helping pedophiles etc. Does your mom know you send porn to minors?
It is very effective. Use infoseek or similar service, look for business by the ISP. Call the deli downstairs, the church in the neighborhood, then let the person at the ISP know who you talked to.
I am not posting my name since spammers have put me on their lists, they post my name as a spammer in newsgroups. They suck.
I have a job where filtering mail could mean not getting a clients mail, so it is not an option.
If everyone just took one piece of spam, traced it to the source or the host. Attacked that host, with legal threats. Do not make anything up, do not lie. When you call their biggest advertiser to explain how they support pedophiles, be clear, it is because they refuse to take action against pedophiles hosted on their site. That they allow one of their customers to send unsolicted porn to minors. Be very clear. And be very clear your group is about to announce who is helping these scums, since their company is an advertiser or client of the isp, you are going to list them. Don't like it? get another isp or get the isp to stop.
Shame is a great motivator. Use it. If we do not stand up to this crap, we are going to see legislation coming in, they are going to be heavy handed, they are going to snoop. Take back your box.
Do more than report a spammer today, those days are over. Attack,threaten and shame a host today.
My Yahoo mailbox has just filled with bounce messages, as a spammer forged my email address as From: and Reply-to:. I only saw a few hundred bounces before the inbox filled.
At least I gor a copy of the original message, so could trace the sender's IP address and their obfuscated web site address.
I dropped a note to abuse@ISP, who seems to have removed the spammer's web site now. Otherwise I might have asked the Slashdot community to test the spammer's offer (:-)
But what to do about reputational damage? Or going onto known spammer lists?
Andrew Yeomans
Spamcop takes the headers and fires off Abuse messages to every domain it finds in the trace of the spam.
The results? Well, I check my email and my wife's, and we used to get roughly identicle spams .. After using SpamCop for maybe 2 weeks, my spam count dropped off the map, while her email still gets hit.
I'd say I've gone from 20 spam/day to 1 spam/day.
It's kinda spooky. Don't know why it worked for me.