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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."
How does this compare against the overall growth of the internet, though?
The growth in the number of people connecting to the net should be much higher....
The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. (Marx)
Main menu
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But this doesn't work unless you know what to look for in spam...and none are alike
Mutilate Spam Right Fucking Away.
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
I use a yahoo address for my email, and have it forward to my local server's mailbox. Yahoo adds a header "X-Rocket-Spam" to mail tagged as spam, and I use procmail to filter these out. While their spam detection still works pretty well, ever since the economy went to shits their filtering has progressively gotten worse. I suspect that they are letting certain spam slip for a fee. It used to catch everything, but now I get at least 10 messages a day getting through.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
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
Looked at the headline and thought "Hmmm, I haven't gotten that much more spam...". Spam seems to be a bit of a misnomer here. Sure, there is some increase in holiday advertising and such, but spam (i.e. unsolicited e-mail) isn't what they are really complaining about here.
In the body of the article, they describe how jokes, animations, and greeting cards are clogging the system. Well, duh! Ask the USPS. They get clogged with lots of this stuff at this time of year; they're called Christmas cards.
This isn't really spam per se. It generally comes from people you know, even if you only hear from them once a year. Somehow the mailman and my mailbox cope with the onslaught every year. If your corporate infrastructure can't handle it, well what will you do if there is a legitimate boost in business traffic?
I guess these people will just crack the whip on corporate use policies again. Fat lot of good that seems to do.
All this trumpeting about %650 increased spam is an alarmist waste. (Not that I really want any more of the tons of weight-loss pills; credit fixing programs; appeals from Nigerian humanitarian organizations looking for my bank account number, promising free money for my help.)
Sig?
Sigue Sigue Sputnik!!!
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.
Exceptions:
list of trusted sites/people.
Things specificly sent just to me.
It was amazing just what it did filter - I went from 10 spams a day to 1 a week. (mostly due to timing issue of spam pre-filter to fetchmail d/l)
It whacked almost 300+ spams from my 'public' e-mail account in one go. I also have it log the from/Subject - just in case)
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
The only thing I hate more than the professional spam are emails from "friends" (non-geeks) that need to inform me of that latest virus, chainmail or that there is a new update that I should download. People are simply CC'ing their entire address-book whenever they receive something that looks interesting, and thereby creating spam :-(
And don't get me started on stupid christmas chain mails !!
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
Mandrake Linux has recently opened a new site called MandrakeSecure which is focused on securing a mandrake box.
A recent article posted on MandrakeForum talks about ways to handle SPAM using postfix and qmail. Maybe this can be useful to the larger slashdot crowd?
Use the Z-modem protocol between Information Superhighway routers to compress the plaintext. ~LordOfYourPants
So, a company selling email filtering software say that email filtering is ever so important? What they actually said was:But their job is to build up a database of junk, so it's not really surprising - it's just saying that their database is up to date (or that their database was very out-of-date last year).
I've just tried SpamAssassin this WE and it works great :
...the best thing is that you don't have to perpetually update black lists of well know spammers
it is just based on content detection of spams (subject in CAPITALS; lots of exclamation marks, sp sammer X-Mailer etc.)
and it really works well
What surprises me is how the major players who stand to benefit from universal internet use have ignored the threat of spam to the internet as a whole.
To the ordinary user receiving a daily mailbox of sexually-explicit advertising is a major turn-off. I know several ordinary people who just stopped using email because of this sort of thing, and just use their cellphones to make calls and leave voicemail instead. No telephone company would survive for a second if its voicemail customers got bombarded by the same sort of sexually-explicit advertising that internet users get by email.
Spam filtering is not a viable solution for average non-technical users. The industry needs to clean up its act or it will suffer major consequences.
If the present trends continue it would not surprise me if email actually drops out of mainstream existence and is only used by a geek subculture, being replaced by other messaging solutions that provide a safe environment.
I'd venture to say the majority of mail you get from @aol.com never really originated from there (the spammers used a fake reply-to address). How do I know this? Because AOL has installed software similar to Slashdot's lameness filter that catches spammers and QUICKLY terminates their account. (AOL members can read about this at Keyword: Rate Limiting.) AOL used to have a really bad problem with child porn and warez, a quick visit into a few empty private rooms reveals this is no longer the case. If you exceed the preset number of outgoing e-mails in a given amount of time, *poof* your AOL account does a disappearing act right before your eyes.
So WHY are you getting e-mails with a forged @aol.com reply-to? It's simple! Many spammers simply believe that AOLers are more trusting of familiar-looking e-mail addresses, so they want their spam to appear as if it came from another member of the service. Ironically, inter-service e-mail on AOL has NO @ address on it!
Next time you see spam from @aol.com, check the originating server in the headers, you might be surprised.
---
Siggy, siggy, siggy, can't you see? Sometimes your puns just irritate me.
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.
I send you this coal in your stocking in order to have your grimace. No thanks, bye.
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
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
I wonder if the increase in the use of filters is related to the increase in spam.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
What, pratel, is the anti-spam legislation that has been passed in the US?
what, pray tell, is "pratel"?
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
I hadn't been forwarding my ISP mail to my account for awhile. I was AMAZED at the amount of crap that came into it when I decided to check it the other day! SHEESH! 60+ mails a day on that account, ALL SPAM. MOSTLY PORNO. This on an account that I have NEVER used, let alone advertised! Of course the lack of security of the ISP probably didn't help (default web pages as the user's account id, for example)!
The reason a lot of geeks receive SPAM is the same reason I do ... registration of a domain. A live email address on a domain registrar is excuse to have every cheap SPAM cannon leveled at you.
Also, folks seem a bit confused. THERE IS NO NATIONAL SPAM LEGISLATION. It never passed. Not at all. The reason a lot of spammers want to say they are in compliance with opt-out legislation is that it legitimizes their existance. Let's not forget that SPAM is STEALING. You pay for the junk mail that shows up.
Check it out here...
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.
Lies lies and more lies heh
There is no law that they happen to be "complying with".
The propossed bill that they keep quoting not pass even if it had it required a valid return address wich they don't happen to supply. It's just a lame attempt at keeping you from taking action.
But yea go ahead and filter anything with that block of text.
I filter spam based off of numerous DNS blacklists. I also have an extensive list of spamming domains and spam supporting providers that I blacklist. Last week I rejected 95,837 pieces of mail from just one of my servers that I deemed to be spam. If people didn't report that spam to the maintainers of the DNS blacklists, I would have to rely on my own access lists to reject spam. This colaborative effort really works.
The spammer's ideal email list would include every email address on the planet with the exception of those who are inclined to take action against spam. The spammer doesn't mind the vast majority of people who "just hit delete". If automatic filtering means that those inclined to complain about the spam don't see the spam, then filtering actually helps the spammer.
So set your filter to forward each spam to your congressman. B-) Say, with a nice form-letter about how this showed up in your inbox today and you'd really like the law against unsolicited faxes to be expanded to include spam, with only "opt-in" allowed.
And re-tune it periodically as the congresscritters change their email addresses.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Fortunately, there was an easy solution. I just added Pine filters for these words in the "from" address: deal, offer, bargain, save, money, and winner. That cut it down from ~20 an hour to maybe 3 random e-mails a day that slip through. :P
Mozilla's a nice operating system, but it needs a better browser.