Slashdot Mirror
Crazy Stats on Spam
gtaylor writes "An article in the Korea Times says that market research firm Emforce has established that South Korean internet users average about 1600 pieces of spam annually, summing to around 39 billion pieces of spam per year. According to the same story, Americans receive about 2500 pieces of spam per year." I figured that I get somewhere around 30-40,000 pieces of
spam annually. Lucky me... I get *this* statistic to be on the other
side of the bell curve :)
first spam post
What I think would be an interesting addition to this would be to look at how much spam finds it's way onto newsgroups and weblogs such as this. My guess would be several orders of magnitude more, quite a waste of time and energy.
If they were typing randomly odds are one of them should have produced the next Hamlet by now.
-Space for rent
But the email said it was an exclusive deal just for me!
--
Don't sweat the petty things, and don't pet the sweaty things.
To get the word out on how big of a problem spam is, the paper mass mailed the article to all users with a .edu, .com, or .org e-mail address.
I get between 20-30 messages daily, sometimes spiking up to 40+. I have had the same email address for 9 1/2 years but the problem only really began about 2 years ago. Then the network effect [URL?] must have taken effect and it skyrocketed. I subscibe to the usual privacy measures and don't give it out in newsgroups, return emails etc. but it is out there and they won't leave me alone. Waa!
There can't be more than one spammer per spam, right? Track them down and jail them. Give them lots of reading material to keep them happy.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
So are we assuming that this includes free webmail services as well? I know before I had hotmail throw away the junk mail immediately I was in the .5K per month section.
I'd like to see the stats on those services. Particularly johndoe@hotmail.com. Who else has sent that guy some subscribes from a website?
----- - The beatings will continue until morale improves
South Korean internet users [receive] average about 1600 pieces of spam annually, summing to around 39 billion pieces of spam per year. According to the same story, Americans receive about 2500 pieces of spam per year.
The average computer user never uses a fake e-mail address (or at least a scrambled one) when they're asked for their email address during registration or similar processes. Furthermore, they forget to point out that they don't want to receive e-mails by the company responsible for the registration (I'm not even talking about companies who sell their customer db's to other companies).
Finally, millions of people have a hotmail account. And there, they forget to point out that they don't want to be listed in the so-called White Pages, a main source for spammers.
why am I so lucky that I recieve almost no spam? In the past year I have recieved less than 25 pieces of e-mail spam.
I know that I don't advertise my email address on the web all that much and I don't use a free-web based service but that doesn't seem like great protection against spamming.
I am just lucky I guess.
since I really would like some free porn, email me at: garcia@localhost
It's pretty annoying how pretty much nothing can be done about spam (I know there are the usual methods, register the domain in one of the spam registries, install a filter, etc, etc).
One would think that spam should be tracable back to the source. Email server keeping track of the IP and time, server giving out the IP keeping track of who used the IP at the time. Then it would be likely that people could complain and get the IP to block said person.
Of course, there are many complications for this.
Die spam die!! Until then, I guess I just have to get used to using the delete key.
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
What is spam? Unsolicited emails for unknown people? Unsolicited emails from companies you once did business with? Unsolicited email from companies you still do business with? Unsolicited email from relatives? How do you measure spam if you can't even define it?
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Average Internet User Receives 1,613 Spam e-Mails Per Year
By Kim Deok-hyun
Staff Reporter
An average Internet user is receiving a yearly average of 1,613 unsolicited e-mail advertisements, or spam, a local Internet marketing solution developer reported yesterday.
According to Emforce, some 24.12 million domestic Internet users receive 38.9 billion occupational ad e-mails for such things as weight-loss schemes, lures to pornographic sites or other marketing efforts.
On a daily basis, an average Internet user was found to have gotten 4.4 advertisement e-mails of some sort, the report said.
For instance, Daum Communications, the country's biggest free e-mail service operator, estimated that around 40 percent of the e-mails going to its subscribers are unsolicited ads.
Last year, International Data Corp., a global market research firm, said that the average daily volume of e-mail around the world was some 10 billion, and will explode to 35 billion by 2005.
In comparison with the U.S., believed to have some 11.52 million Internet users, the volume of unsolicited ad e-mails this year was around 289 billion, and an average American Internet user receives some 2,509 spam per year, the report said.
``This year, e-mail marketing is poised as an advertising tool for both online and offline companies,'' the company pointed out.
However, it added that consumers are nervous about the flood of unsolicited e-mail, and some are now fighting back with a campaign to halt the unsolicited ads. The company said more accurate customer information is needed to avoid such setbacks.
kdh@koreatimes.co.kr
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Let me guess - Adequacy rejected this one, right?
Does anyone have any figures for how effective spam is? Have any
I would like to see the back of it all, because there are only so many times that your boss will believe that the dirty emails dropping into your mailbox every hour is spam ;-)
You said you get 30,000-40,000 SPAM messages a year??!! That is about 80-110 a day!! Man, you gotta stay away from the porn! "gtaylor" must type with one hand.
apache is a web server, not a browser!
get your facts straight!
If Korea's only consuming 39 billion pieces of spam a year, they must be running an enviable spam surplus. Half the spam I get bounces off a .kr server.
Please donate your spare CPU cycles to help fight cancer and other diseases
The posters mention of being on the "far side of the bell curve" raises an interesting question - how is Spam distributed? Obviously, it's not a bell curve; a significant number of people are getting as much Spam at the submitter, and a significant number of people are getting none. If 5% of "users" (do they mean user/person or user/address?) are getting as much Spam as the submitter, and everyone else is getting next to none, than Spam is not nearly as much of a problem as this article indicates.
For example, as a person, I get a lot of spam. But almost all of it is going to my old account at the university of california (when I left I started giving the address to anybody who wanted one, for any reason.) However, the addresses I actually use get none.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
The U.S. is where the money is
or
The U.S. is where the stupid people are
It would be nice to see some stats on what concentrations there are in other countries. My main problem is that I've had the same email address for ~5 years. If I still had my college account or any of my other old addresses then I'd probably get more than the ~11,000 annual pieces I get now.
Missing, but important info, "How often does the average Korean change email addresses Vs. U.S. netizens?"
Imagine having one email address for life, for a child born in 1995. By the time they reached 70 years old they'd need a T1 just to download it all.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I've got so fed up of spam over the festive season that I finally got off my butt and installed Razor as featured on /. the other day. I've always been kind of against the complete black-hole idea, so Razor was very attractive.
So far I'm quite impressed. Easy to install (a couple of lines in procmailrc) and it's picked up about 50% of the spam I've received so far - importantly it hasn't flagged any legitimate messages as spam. Of course, I reported the other 50%, so that hopefully others won't have to endure them. The nice thing about the systems is that the more people that use it, the more effective it gets. It's not perfect, but in this mean 'ole spam-filled world, it's a good place to start.
You have to figure that is the average person is receiving 2500 spam emails a year, then the spammers must be getting enough feedback to make it worthwhile. If you think about it, you don't need a high rate, or even moderate rate, of responses from mass mailings since a small percentage could cover your spamming costs. What we need to do is find the small percentage that is responding to this mail and whack them over the head, otherwise it will never end.
I just forwad all my spam to...
root@localhost
That'll show'em...
By checking my logs for the last 24 hours, I have killed over 800 SPAMs for my 100+ users. If this is a 'typical day' in the life of my e-mail server (though I am seeing more around Christmas than ever), I am killing ~3,000 SPAMs per year per user. Not only does blocking SPAM give me a deep sense of personal satisfaction it gives me more time during my work day to do more important duties (like reading Slashdot) because I don't have users calling me to complain about the sex ads, mortgage offers and fly by night investment opportunities in their e-mail box.
I would love to see the US Congress require all e-mail marketeers to be opt-in instead of opt-out (with the Death Penalty for violators). However, I don't know if this would be effective as most of the SPAM coming in is from foreign servers (mainly Asian nations).
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I figured that I get somewhere around 30-40,000 pieces of spam annually. Lucky me... I get *this* statistic to be on the other side of the bell curve :)
The normal distribution, aka the "bell curve", has absolutely nothing to do with the distribution of the number of pieces of spam received annually. If anything, I would guess that the distribution has a long right tail: most people receive somewhere around the median amount of spam, but a relatively few users (such as slashdot readers) receive a much larger amount.
In general, numbers of anything do not just happen to be normally distributed. Central limit theory discusses the asymptotic normal distribution of sample means under suitable conditions, but generally very little can be said about the underlying population's distribution. Please refrain from talking about something having a particular distribution unless you know (or can test statistically) that it does. It's usually a sign of ignorance.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Wow, I've been reading so much spam latly, that I honestly read the headline as, "Crazy Sluts on Spam" at first!
I get something in the neighborhood of 300 Spam mails per day. The client side filters are crap, mostly because Outlook is crap. Now I'm no dummy, I know I shouldn't be using Outlook, unfortunately my company's mail server is Exchange. Is there an alternative Win32 Client that can talk to MS Exchange server? One that has better rules that can actually handle the load of 400 - 500 emails/day?
hmm, lets see, you receive 40k pieces of spam per year, that comes down to about 110 a day. So what you're saying is, you can run /., but dont have the skillset to just set up an smtp proxy to filter all that crap? If your gonna be lazy about it just get a Firebox and let it do it for you
...is about the penis enlargement spam.
I mean, how did they know to send it to me?
I Heart Sorting Networks
is about 3650 pieces of spam per year. ~10/day * 365!
There's no "I" in Linux.. err..
which it is not, you would have to agree that the programmers of linux, no matter what they may have titled their programs, have made linux available to people all over the world by making it open source. by making linux free, even black people can afford it!
I can see why for somehoe with an email address shown on slashdot might get tons of spam, but the far majority of regular users could easily not get spam anymore. Here are the steps i did to not get spam EVER.
1. don't use your isp's email address. I don't know why, but those always get lots of spam. I think its because the isp gives you webspace, in a folder named from your username. So a spambot just needs to go to aol.com/users/ read all the folder names and tack on @aol.com.
2. have 2 email addresses, one which is for actual usage, such as communicating with friends. The other is just for all the things where you have to give a valid email address to sign up.
Thats all i did, and it works great for me. I guess a possible third step is that, if you get any spam, to ALWAYS hunt it down. look in the headers of the email, find where it came from (for example, aol.com) and forward the spam to abuse@aol.com, if that doesn't exist, forward it to webmaster@aol.com, root@aol.com, admin@aol.com, administrator@aol.com and any other names you can think of.
Only dead fish swim with the stream...
In the last three months, I've begun to get LOCAL spam, from stupid & amp; clueless companies that think that mailing spam equals "to be on the Internet" (equals making huge profits [yeah, I know better]). Now I'm getting around THIRTY daily spams, besides the pr0n I already get.
(10+30)*365 = 14600 spams per year.
Sigh...
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
The net will also die like the universe. The latter one is moving inexorably towards a "heat death" when all of the temperature differences in the universe have evened out and neither heat engines nor anything else can continue to operate for lack of available energy supplies. The former will die because all useful information has been drowned in the "enthropy", that is, spam.
Anyone noticed a HUGE influx of ICQ spam lately? I get an average of 10-15 spams from people I don't know every day, be in viagra, how to enlarge your penis, or "real live girls and goat herders want your sweaty wang now!" stuff. Added on to the spam emails I get that's gotta be around 10,000/yr :(
He's supposed to be watching Lord of the Rings, or so he said at the end of an earlier article. I've been waiting for Taco's review, which will probably go something like this:
I laughed
I cried
I drove back home to get my wallet
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Ironically, I've recently started getting spam *from* Korea, mostly adult-oriented. Unfortunately, since it is all written in Hangul (Korean language), there seems to be no way to opt out of it, since I can't read any opt-out instructions.
Anybody else have this problem? Any suggestions?
2500 ANUALLY ?!?!
I wish that was my problem,
I have accounts I closed years ago only to reopen them for a NSI transfer or lost password submit to find they were still getting 200+ messages a day, all JUNK, The account I used for Usenet posting for the last 2 years get 350-400 a day......
4 or five a day isnt anything, I mean Id rather get 4 pices of spam a day than 4 worthless paper flyers. Kill a tree, waste some electrons...hmm....No Im not a tree hugger, and yes I understandd electicity generation pollutes too but, really, paper spam or e spam ?
Il take crap I dont have to put in a Hefty CInch sack anyday....
I probably fill a 30 gal bag a month with useless flyers. THAT does take effort, clicking delete takes nearly none.
Sheezh
According to my Hotmail accounti spam myself with emails to porn ads several tiems a day... Odd though i dont remember sending them. one of these days i will catch my self. Them do i sue myself?
"All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil."-Lp.org
How can spam possibly work for the spammer? Who is unsophisticated enough to think that any spammer can deliver what they promise? Especially when there are hundreds of messges all alike: how would a hypothetical idiot who believes in spam know which message to respond to? Am I taking crazy pills or something?
- Have a picture
I get most of my spam _from_ Korea. Most of it from the korean telecom. It's a pity that I can't even read the cool offers in these messages..
j.
Use spamcop. Use it for a while, and your spamcount will shrink.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
It somtimes amazes me that politicians would pass up such an excellent opportunity to please the electorate at so little political cost to themselves - why not just ban spam? All of the ingredients are there:
1) Issue affects better educated citizens who are more likely to vote
2) No one likes spam. No one at all. Except for the spammers, that is
3) It's a magnet for all kinds of illegal activity
4) Unsolicited faxes are already prohibited - the technical and legal parallels are clear as day
And yet every time spam bills appear, they disappear, or are neutered, with lightning speed. Then I remember. This is America.
With the exception of what I have heard politicians refer to as "hot button" issues (abortion, gun control, school prayer), the sad reality is that almost nothing gets through congress unless someone is paying for it.
Congressionals and members of the executive are so deluged with paying customers that they seldom have time to worry about the real world. The rest of the time, rivals routinely block each others' attempts to pass any legislation as a matter of principle or habit or a continuous cycle of revenge, usually across party lines.
We're on the road to Tycho.
I know someone who is working on a site whose sole purpose is to allow entry of someone's e-mail address that you hate, and upon pressing the submit button, it subscribes that person's email address to over one thousand e-mail lists.
like, for example, a Spam Busting FAQ. Then you could link to it in the article, and users wouldn't feel compelled to post comments about Postfix, Spamcop, Razor, etc.
- Have a picture
I'm at about 20,000. 50 a day adds up quick... Most of it is duplicates too. Fortunately, about 90% are courtieous enough to put "unsubscribe" in the body so they get easily filtered.
Travis
Score 1 part of the problem.
Is this in order to be nice or avoid tripping the automated spam detectors? The later I think.
I think I'm prepared to give up some privacy for fewer and better targeted ads, but am skeptical of ever seeing less spam. In the ideal world, the only spam I get, will just be news and ads for stuff that interests me but I didn't know existed. Unfortunately, given the cost structures and unenforcibilty of global regulations on the net being the way they are, I don't see less spam becoming a reality.
Based on the e-mails I get, it would seem the advertising community has me pegged as a debt-ridden pervert with a small unit, sexual dysfunction, no education, and a penchant for get rich quick schemes.
I wonder how they know that. I must be an open book.
With the last article about spam that ran on Slashdot. I saw someone mention spamcop. I knew of the service, but never really checked it out before.
After reading most everything on their site, I figured I'd sign up for their pay filter service. Not really to stop the spam (that is just a nice added benifit), but just for ease of reporting the spammers.
Since signing up spamcop has probally stopped around 50 spams to me a day. Still about 5 a day slip through (and perhaps 1 false positive a day). I have reported all of the spam. I think I've recieved about 8 responces total to my reports, and I keep getting spam from the same places.
I'm pretty impressed with the service. At $0.50 a megabyte it isn't too expencive (but I shouldn't have to pay to not recieve e-mail). They are planning on going to a flat rate of $3 a month (which will be good for me as they estimate I'll be paying about $7 a month at my current rate).
Anyway, check it out if you haven't before, www.spamcop.net. At least report some of the spam you get using their free service to help build a bigger data base of open relays and other bad Internet company.
i've been using spamcop.net for about a year now and i'm really impressed. there are a few unobscured links to my email floating around the net which i still can't seem to get rid of, but after having the same email account for about 6 years, i average less than one spam posting a day. there is something very satisfying about forwarding a message to spamcop, knowing (from experience) that it has a good chance of getting me off that particular list.
:)
i imagine at the beginning that it would be a real pain if you are getting 100 or so spam mailings. but maybe if you just report the ones that really annoy you for some reason (this is how i started), then it will slowly start to drop. it's a better protest than just hitting the delete key "harder"
How much paper spam is distributed by the world's postal systems? I know my box is stuffed three times a week with crap I'll never buy. Is there a corelation between the cost/paperspam/volume and the cost/emailspam/volume?
Travis
So a year is now split into 2.4 million annual parts?
Follow me
(/local/home/curiosity)-#who -u|grep thecat|cut -c 44-49|xargs kill -9
Would someone please explain SPAM to me? I've never quite understood this whole concept. It is in the same bucket as tele-marketing for me.
I, and everyone I talk to absolutely loathe telemarketers and SPAM. No one I talked to has ever BOUGHT anything from a tele-marketer or from a SPAM email.
These have to be making them SOME kind of money for them to keep sending it out? Who the hell is buying all this crap? I understand name recognition, but I also understand pissing people off. I used to buy X10 stuff, after I've seen 8,000 of their ads I now refuse to shop there ever again.
I saw an ad on CNET that ate the text and I had to click a little close button before I could read an article. I no longer read CNET for anything.
The bottom line is that someone must be buying stuff from tele-marketers and giving money to sites that SPAM them. If we kill those people off, do you think these companies will eventually realize they're just wasting resources?
I mean are you going to continue to shop in a store where the salesman continually nags you and gets in your face? Not me, I'll crack him in the jaw and walk out.
Who are these people buying this crap? Why does this cycle continue?!
not a problem. i can give you many examples. here is one. also, this guy told me he used linux. and last but not least i use linux. any more proof needed?
Also banner ads on websites, instant messanging clients, and just about any online medium are full of spam - I've seen a lot of banners going like "If this banner is blinking, you won!" lately. Now, why isn't this simply illegal? Yes, "support free speech" and everything, but these people are simply making false claims, invading our privacy and getting on our nerves!
That's not only true for the internet, though - I get spam-fax almost everyday, too, promising me idiotic stuff or writing in such a way that it is impossible to undertsand how much the product they want you to buy actually costs. I hate it! Why isn't that shit criminalized?
I get spam everyday from this thing called 'slashdot'.. must account for about 355 a year. :)
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Spam sucks. Spam is a problem. Spam is a BadThing.
But don't push for SpamLaws. It is just an invitation for them to pass other stupid net-laws. Laws are regional, the internet is not. It won't work. The treatment will be worse than the disease.
Lawmakers do not understand the internet. Tell them to keep their hands off.
We are better off working out our own solutions - blackhole lists, filtering software, etc.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
...and I have almost 2400 pieces of spam. That's since Jan. 1 of this year. This is at work alone. I probably get more than half that at my personal account. So I'm averaging over 3600 pieces of spam a year.
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
Jesus, I won't mod you offtopic, but I will call you a pedantic asshole. I mean, Christ, just about everyone knows what a bell curve is, and saying you're on one end or the other is a cute, pseudo-scientific way of saying "wow, I'm really different from others!"
Are you the kind of jackhole who corrects grammatical errors in other peoples' spoken conversations as well? Did you wait to have your Y2K party until 12/31/2000? Does it burn your ass when someone says "foot pounds" instead of "pound feet?" Do you obsess about it when someone talks about watts, when they really mean energy and not power?
Let up a little, you overwrought geek.
Millions have email addresses
Write a convincing pitch "Send $5 or we'll shoot this dog", "Fire your boss and make $5,000/week", "Wipe out debt"
Send spam
If 1%, or even 1/100% respond, you made money, you're encouraged to do it again
or
Write javascript/hyperlink/redirection in HTML email which launches scads of pr0n pages which open more upon closing. Eventually dupes see a picture that intrigues them and are reeled in.
IMHO, you must be full-bore stupid if you respond to anything which comes from an email address which looks like garbage (i.e. fjds8984@hotmail.com)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I now get SPAM on how to stop Spam. I wish these dickless wonders would get a job.
Fucking towelheads
By the police?
2500 spam per week
mind you, I filter it off my lists so it doesn't get in, and all the email redirects on the websites, so that might be why.
and I don't even read all the Korean and Chinese spam I get - I just delete it.
-
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Its interesting to note that most spammers get their email addresses by looking for them on web pages or through news groups. Well now Kim Deok-hyun will get more since he so kindly left his email address at the bottom of the article for the spam spiders to pick up.
If you are in states with so-called "anti-spam" laws, you can start taking legal action against spammers. Check out:
Sorry for the Washington-heavy links; it's my home state.
REAlly. Check it. ;) Just signed up at hotmail. Send me something, i wanna see who reads this crap.!!!!
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Unsolicited mass emails are never going to go away 100%. It frustrates me that so much time and energy and print/webspace is given to studies and articles that don't include what I would think to be the most important indicator of spam's level of infiltration - Signal to Noise Ratio. Sure, the "average" user gets xxx Spam per day/year/minute, but on what amount of traffic? If the "average" user gets 1600 spam out of 1700 emails, that's obviously very bad, but 1600 on 170,000 emails a year is a lot better. The poster's comment about being on the wrong side of the bell curve doesn't neccesarily mean he's getting more spam than most people as a ratio of spam-to-legit-emails. I would be most interested in studies that analyze the SNR, for in doing so I think we'll see (even more clearly!!) that there is indeed a spam problem that must be dealt with through enforceable legislation and/or international agreements.
As a side note, I have taken to giving out different email addresses for every place I'm asked for one, and using a "catch-all" from my domain, for example my email address here is slashdot@theoretica.net, but it might be goatpornmailinglist@theoretica.net or vic20overclockerslist@theoretica.net for other places. That way not only can I see what spammers got my email address from where, but I can also block a given address once its been overcome with spam - you know those places where you are asked for an email address and you just *know* you are going to get spammed senseless for providing it, but you must to get a login or pwd or whatever?
I also have OE move everything that's been BCC'd to me into a spam folder, mark it as read, and review it once a week.
-- "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." (Charles Darwin)
They must have averaged in people with no e-mail address.
To begin with, let me say that I understand spam is a problem and it causes problems for many people by filling their inboxes'(?). However, I for one have never had a spam problem. I use a single Yahoo! Mail account for personal and a domain one for corporate use, I have over the years signed up and used many, many free resources on the web (i.e. hosting, services, newsletters, etc.) I have used the same email for all and I also subscribe to Bugtraq, Focus IDS, and Pen-Test among other lists yet I see maybe one piece of "spam" but that usually turns out to be from somewhere I wanted it to come from. So, spam doesn't seem to be a big problem with me. Maybe I am just lucky?
Is a Sig really an expression of the person behind the post or just random nonsense?
Samba's are also an awasome soccer shoe and they are black. That seems pretty racially positive to me :)
If you can't be good, be good at it!
No, he meant "forwad." Why would he forward spam to himself? What are you, some kind of ignorant mud person?
- Have a picture
Spam is better described as UBE : Unsolicited Bulk Email.
Unsolicited : you have not opted in to receive that kind of information or never had a contact with the sender. The problem is when you have had a previous relationship with a company and that company sends you advertisement. My opinion is that they should be allowed to send you ONE ad and make the removal of your email in their database easy with that ad.
Bulk : email is sent in large quantities, to many people. The question is, how did they get your email ? Selling email lists should be illegal (except opt-in lists), but if your email is public (web, news) then no one can be forbidden to send you an email !
Note that all UBE is not commercial, it could be a virus or a bad joke.
Considering annoying emails from friends and relatives, that is a very different problem, I think, that should not be mixed with UBE.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
lol, that's funny but Al Jolson was white.
Producer: NEXT!!
Ralph Wiggum: Chicken necks
What I think would be an interesting addition to this would be to look at how much spam finds it's way onto newsgroups and weblogs such as this. My guess would be several orders of magnitude more, quite a waste of time and energy.
Oh, no, very little.
And you'll get absolutely none if you act now and buy my new SlashdotSpamBeGone, for just $9.95.
-Waldo Jaquith
Whack my grandmother at your peril, it's never going to end.
The ultimate fools are those who buy your logic and pour money into advertising. This works just as well for the suckers who buy "harvester" software as it does for folks who buy billboards. All it buys the purchaser is customer anoyance. The more advertised something is, the less likely I am to buy it. Unfortunatly there's a sucker born every minute who thinks "brand recongition" can be earned in some way other than solid performance, positive reviews and customer satisfaction.
Never trust someone who connives.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Judging by the amount of spam I get *from* .kr addresses, do those statistics include spam they send out?
The issue is, to many, a bit more complicated than that. Legislating away the powers of business can, and often does, have consequences far beyond what people initially understand. Granted, if the fly-by-night operators others have mentioned (selling investment opportunity, porn, and such - often on shaky legal ground) dissapeared, they won't be missed. But do you want to act in an irrational manner that would genuinely hurt legitamte business, in that one powerful tool of communication would be denied to them if the proposed law wasn't clear or too harsh?
If such a law were to be proposed, it would have to respect not only the rights of the individual, but the ability for the business to conduct itself in a fair and efficient manner. Many here have brought up some excellent points, involving opt-in only, always having a valid return adress and so on. Under a fair set of guidelines "spam" can be both containable and beneficial to us. Banning it all outright seems a bit overkill when we've actually done little (federally at least) to try to solve this problem, though I agree with you the attempts haven't gotten us far.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -Voltaire
I receive approximately 5,460 spam messages a year - no exaggeration. On a per day basis, I receive about 15 spams (many of them repeats).
What I'd really like is a way to simulate a server "invalid address" bounced-back message from my side of the POP/IMAP server. I know that with falsified routing info that doesn't do much, but it'd at least get someone's attention.
All my spam is currently being automatically forwarded via scripting to the Spam Recycling Center (http://chooseyourmail.com) although I don't know how much good it does.
Maybe the current govt crack down is targeted at the wrong set of Internet wrong doers.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
It uses genetic algorithms to assign scores to it's ruleset, it supports RBL and Razor, is highly cusomizable (you can add your own rules, change the current ones, set how sensitive you want it to be and how it should tag messages), and it comes with a daemon for high volume environments.
goto
http://www.goto.com and search for "bulk e-mail".
Click on some of the links.
There are countless examples of companies buying lists that are supposed to be users who have opted-in to receive, only to discover that the list is nothing of the sort (the recent Sainsburys spam incident, for example). I am very sceptical that real lists of opt-ins even exist, despite the bold claims of the spam^H^H^H^H marketers.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
I don't exactly love yahoo for various reasons, but I will be honest and commend them on their spam filter. It really does pick up a lot. One thing though, is that if you turn on POP3 redirection it directs the spams to you as well, but you can kill them with a procmail recipe like this
:0:
* ^X-YahooFilteredBulk:.*
/dev/null
Since about 30% of the spam my filters reject is sent from machines in Korea, I find this number to be pretty believable. If each internet-connected person in S. Korea send 1600 spams per year, that's a lot of spam!
Oh wait. They're saying people in Korea GET a lot of spam?
...but, have there yet been studies seeking to find out where the most spam comes from? My mail accounts have always had a minor problem (and one, a not-so-minor) with dot-com spam, but I've recently noticed an upswing in spam from .cn and .jp domains. (Incidentally, how DO you spell 'abuse@' in Kanji?)
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
I just did a quick calculation on the 4 months of spam I have saved. I get about 1530 pieces of spam a year. Even at that rate, I'm debating using the service by SpamCop.net. Although, you have to wonder if it is worth $50 per year just to get rid of those messages...
I live in Missouri which apparently has pretty good SPAM legislation - they define SPAM as any commercial or bulk email that doesnt include removal options (either an 800 number or a human-monitored email address!). I'm working on a system to cut down on my SPAM by using email aliases such as slashdot.dbc001@mydomain.com . If I start getting too much SPAM from one alias, just remove it.
I'm still getting SPAM from a domain that I registered 3 years ago, and it expired more than a year ago. I like the ones that say "I saw your website" - even though I no longer have one.
Anyway has anyone had any legal experience with SPAM in Missouri? I'd like to start sending subpoenas to these bastards just to cut into their profit margin and damage their real-world reputation! I've read all the recent Slashdot posts about suing Spammers, but I'm wondering if anyone has any personal experience?
-dbc
When asked for an email address in any form on any webpage registration form, I always put 'info@microsoft.com' or 'support@microsoft.com' and then select ALL of the available spamming options, i.e. - 'Would you like to receive our daily naked butthole surfer email in HTML or Text?'
Makes me feel better.
Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny.
Also somewhat off-topic, but a common approach to dealing with 'noise' in electrical systems is to place an extra, signalless wire near one carrying a desired signal so that the same noise appears on each, giving the extra wire a pure 'noise signal' that can be subtracted from the other channel (variations of this approach are used with UTP network cable). Can a similar tactic be used to filter spam by placing 2 addresses, one real and one a spam-catcher, on public Web pages where a contact address is required?
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
In my 4 accounts, my 2 hotmail accounts almost always get the same spam, and my other 2 get 1/month max. The hotmail spam all comes from the same guy i think, and despite reporting all of it (i use ricochet to auto-trace it) is still get spam almost every day. I also have a deticated spam account. attoparsecs@hotmail.com is rigged to automaticly trace the headers of incoming mail and send off reports of spam. Please use this address in usenet posts.
abuse.net
cauce
Updates to this list are in my journal.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
I can just see the next generation of Denial of Service attacks on the big webmail houses. The new IIS worms will start "joining up" to hotmail, msn, yahoo, etc. Then, they'll wander around any place where they can just so happen to "drop" the email address for the sniffing spambots!
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Ya know, I got sick of telemarketers in college one semester and had a rather odd friend who was quite good at talking about odd topics for long periods of time, so I decided to let him talk to the next telemarker I got when he was in my room. He talked to the telemarketer for half an hour about jello and fish. The telemarketer (a credit card company) kept trying to change the subject to the offer, and he'd change it back to fish or jello. My roommate and I were rolling on the floor trying not to laugh out loud. The telemarketer actually had to stop the conversation and hang up. I didn't receive another call from a telemarketer all year.
:)
Probably wouldn't work on spammers though. The very technology that allows us to get rid of spam easily (IE filters) would be able to be used by the spammers. Assuming they knew how.
Khyron
Even in comments.. guys with 50 spam mails per day? Don't u guys unsubscribe anything? If there is no unsubscribe option find operator's address and mail them. Always mention that you will contact CERT if they don't remove you from mailing list. (works every time)
I'm getting no more than 1 spam email per MONTH and have absolutely no filters installed. Of course i never use my real email or name when needed for downloading various shareware. If they send you reg code or smtg on mail... simply create new mail on hotmail or smtg and use that address.
Well.. those who get 50 spam emails per day.. you're watching too much porn. They need your email to check that you are really 18!? Come on.. you're not really falling for that one?
I might have written the post you are thinking of. I just want to reiterate, that Spamcop.net (the free version) definately worked for me. I went from 10-20 spams/day to perhaps 1-3/day. It's as simple as signing up for a free account, and forwarding your spam to them for processing .. they send out Abuse@domain.com letters to whoever they find in the header.
It's easy and slick. Seems to have worked for me. Plus it helps get the spammers busted.
It's gotten so bad for me (running my own little sendmail) that I finally had to write an active spam filter. One spamming site connected to my server around 85,000 times in 3 days trying to dump their load... after 18 days of uptime this filter has accepted 434 messages and rejected 359,330 connection attempts by spammers. They don't seem to be getting the message...
Hopefully I can get this filter into a release ready state some time early in the new year.
As many of you /.'ers have said, going to goto.com and searching "bulk e-mail" and clicking on the first 5 can help. But, as a side project, I am thinking about making a program that automaticly does that (all the searching and clicking) and put it in cron and making it run maybe 20 times a day... anyone else out there feeling the same way and might want to help?
Add to the the list of companies you respect - Microsoft.
:-)
Last night I upgraded to Money 2002 (Money is a fantastic product) and there were three unchecked boxes which, if checked, would have allowed me to opt-in to marketing from Microsoft and their partners.
I did not opt-in, but was at least impressed that I was given the appearance of an option.
I reconfigured our mail server a month or so ago, and, well, misconfigured it, so that it was an open mail relay on our DSL line. It took the bad guys about 2 weeks to notice; at which point we all of a sudden started getting hit with tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of relays through our server per day.
I'm only a part-time sysadmin, so I didn't realize what was wrong for a couple of days, just noticed that the mail server was slow...during that time perhaps half-a-million messages were forwarded by my machine. Unforgivable, I know. I didn't realize the threat; and most of it happened over a weekend.
On Monday, I spent a few hours finding out what was going on, and madly tried to cancel the messages by hand from the mail queue, before I did the right thing and installed the latest version of sendmail -- which by default doesn't relay.
For the next several weeks, I've been petitioning the various spam reporting lists to take us off of their blacklists. I have to say that everybody was reasonable in this respect. It took some time to hunt them all down, but I think I have them all. If you are doing this yourself, http://relays.osirusoft.com has a great resource for checking what lists your server is blacklisted with.
The only good thing to come out of this is that during the cleanup phase, spammers continued to try to relay spam through my site, and I was able to get several of those accounts cancelled by calling up the various email abuse departments at their ISPs. (My favorite was worldcom, I called them and they answered "Abuse!" I told them that I really wanted an argument...) The biggest disappointment was @home, who required a 1-week waiting period before shutting down a really high-volume spamming operation.
I was surprised how quickly my open relay was discovered, and then how quickly that information was distributed among quite a few (at least 40) spammers. Perhaps they watch incoming spam to see where it is relayed from; and harvest those to run their own spam.
Anyway -- my apologies to the community. It won't happen again.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Unsolicited bible stories from your relatives.
Argh! And it's impossible to explain to them you don't want to read them.
...that this comes from Korea since .kr servers are being used for a large portion of the SPAM that floats around. (READ: Korea needs to fix their open relay problem) Simpatico in Canada is a problem network too.
MK.
Kornet.net?
Thrunet.net?
Dreamx.net?
Hananet.net?
I've SpamCoped everyone of these, complained to every address I could think of (abuse@, root@, help@, etc.), all to no avail. If I have to carbon copy 5000 e-mail addresses at kornet.net on each spam complaint to get them to stop spamming, I'm willing to do it...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Is I get a ton of JUNK MAIL because of my domain name registrations (you know the type- low cost web hosting, etc....).
I especially hate the spam that doesn't even contain my address as the addressee... like it is to: asdflksdfou80@hotmail.com and it is full of fake headers.
My new work email address was full of spam before I even configured the account- on an address that had never been used. I don't get it.
Those that suggest you "dance like no one is watching" really want to see you make a complete fool of yourself.
Spam is wonderful thing. I personally benefit by many thousands of dollars every month because of spam. Next month I will be adding an additional 4 billion e-mail messages to the total so look for that annual average to raise. Spam isn't such a bad thing. Its no different than TV advertising.
What, exactly, is "fair" about companies using my resources to tell me what they're selling?
If I'm interested in what they're selling, I'll seek it out. They have absolutely no right to send me unwanted ads. I already pay for my DSL connection, my ISP, and the phone lines the data travel over. If these spamming assholes want to play "fair" they'll reimburse me for the use of resources I pay for. Otherwise they can go fuck themselves.
-Legion
Your response is well considered and a pleasure to read, but I must disagree with you that it is a complicated issue for anyone. Unlike many other regulations our country has lately considered, there is no gray area, and no real consitutional complexities. It is utterly simple.
It is trivial to determine when a communication is unsolicited: the test is whether you had prior direct, 1st party contact with the sender, in which you requested the message. Then, to my mind:
* If the receiver pays for the communication, communication must be solicited by the receiver!
* If the sender pays for the communication, then let the sender go to town - it's their nickle.
Yes, it is cheaper for me to receive email than to receive a fax or a cell phone call. But it is not free!
Of course, I am all for compromises such as federally enforced "universal opt-out" lists, federally enforced uniform header/subject identification, or any other method by which I can effortlessly, and with a single action, no longer receive any unsolicited commercial email. But anything less than that (i.e. opt-out) is nothing at all.
We're on the road to Tycho.
It's amazing how many people fail to understand how simple this is. HINT: Unsolicited faxes are already illegal. This is the only reason anyone has any fax paper left in the tray.
Unlike many other regulations our country has lately considered, there is no gray area, and no real consitutional complexities.
It is trivial to determine when a communication is unsolicited: the test is whether you had prior direct, 1st party contact with the sender, in which you requested the message. Then, to my mind:
* If the receiver pays for the communication, communication must be solicited by the receiver!
* If the sender pays for the communication, then let the sender go to town - it's their nickle.
Yes, it is cheaper for me to receive email than to receive a fax or a cell phone call. But it is not free!
Of course, I am all for compromises such as federally enforced "universal opt-out" lists, federally enforced uniform header/subject identification, or any other method by which I can effortlessly, and with a single action, no longer receive any unsolicited commercial email. But anything less than that (i.e. opt-out) is nothing at all.
We're on the road to Tycho.
Some spam will inevitably get into the MUA, after all, the end user is the one who has to initially identify spam.
Here is my proposal: Run Away. How? There is a new, but improperly implemented (so far) email addressing standard called plus addressing, where your address is like "user+box@host" where the "+box" part is supposed to be ignored yet passed on from the MTAs and MDAs to the MUA.
Unfortunately, some ISPs still bounce this kind of addressing as unrecognized, even if "user@host" is a valid email address. If you think of the plus addressing part ("+box") as a personality (in Eudora parliance) then your email address now can be filtered into as many pieces as you need.
Now, when I asked a couple of ISPs why my envelope recipient (RCPT TO: part of the SMTP protocol) isn't in any of the headers on a BCC email, I got an answer like "well, if it got to your mailbox, it's for you," but with this new addressing paradigm there remains the question of which me? i.e. which personality does the email belong to? so that argument needs to be thrown out the window.
I have read that some ISPs have recompiled their MDAs to include a header like "Envelope-to" or "Delivered-To" or "Envelope-to" or "rcpt-to" (all optionally preceeded with an (X-") but not mine, of course. If my plus address were included in a header like this, I could easily filter all bcc email to personalities I want, and then force the spammers to use it.
A really good ISP would allow me to upload a list of plus addresses that were allowed, and block everything else at the RCPT TO stage of the SMTP protocol (it might also provide end users with some Eudora, etc. plug ins to better manage personalities, signatures, addresses and filters as a personal information management (PIM) with one personality per contact.)
If the spammers guessed one, I could simply give another one to the person who communicates to that personality, and turn off (or send to bitbucket, or report as spam) all future communications to the compromised personality.
I found one through another post here on slashdot that pretty much allows me to do this: I filter every contact based on the Envelope filter, which they make available via their web interface, at fastmail(DOT)fm.
They're still working on the PIM idea, but what they have works; I can even get their Sieve filter to bounce my "user@host" address and still let all my plus addressing through.
I still think in the SMTP protocol, you could let an end user let SMPT refuse a RCPT TO their user@host address and accept RCPT TO to an end user defined list of user+box@host addresses. Why not!?
This is a case where more laws are necessary, but it's not clear reasonable ones will get passed soon. One hope - lawmakers are increasingly having to deal with spam themselves.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
I get about 25 pieces of spam anally
Hello MEDCALF,
I saw your lovely website at http://www.caerdroia.org/~medcalf
You too can get rich quick!
Love,
Spammer
Note unique subject and body - only sent to one person, but it is still spam.
how many people have blocked all of Korea's IP addresses at their router?
This has come up seriously in our organisation a couple of times as we host mail for 8,000 users and see a great deal of spam coming from there.
Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment ... like the body or the subject!)
You know of course that your email address is in every reply to an administrator. So if the administrator also happens to be the Spammer (very common, in terms of percent of spam sent), you've just verified your email address. Your spamcop complaints are never read -- his bots rip emails from the complaints and spams them. Spamcop is no threat to spammers such as those on the ROKSO (spamhaus.org).
Also, avoid "third-party email removal services" like removeyou.com. These are supposed to take in spammer's lists to be "washed." I tried with a test address that averages 30 spams a day, and there was a slight initial drop off, but the spam has just catapulted in the last two weeks, to 45-60 spams per day, and with worse ones than usual (penis enlargement pills, etc.)
Many of the spams mention they belong to removeyou.com, so how come they are still spamming an address registered on removeyou.com.
Additionally, I believe they are sending their raw lists in to get "washed," and then simply comparing the washed lists with what comes back. The missing addresses are live.
I advocate taking unilateral corrective action - call their 1-800 numbers, send form replies full of gibberish (non-email of course), and whatever else that annoys and harrasses the spammer. I even modify their order pages (remove MAXLENGTH arguments) to send form responses as big as their server can take. Only 12 1/2 meg replies will fill up his free Yahoo! account. You can shut him down by yourself and he can't say a god damned thing!
Frankly, I've never been bothered by spam as much as the fanatical people that make everyone else miserable while trying to get rid of spam.
The problem is that there's a lot of *idiots* making everyone's life totally impossible by trying to circumvent spam. Christ, I hate these people.
Let me give an example. At home, I use dial-up Earthlink. At college, I use the Ethernet. So whenever I move, because each one disallows relaying, I have to freaking remember to switch the mail gateway. Every year I forget and a bunch of mail fails to go out piles up in root's mailbox until I look at it, usually a week later.
Okay, so I decide to just not use a mail gateway. Fine. I have sendmail do delivery itself on my box (no, it's *not* a goddamn open relay, and it pisses me off how people try banning smtp servers on dialup...but I'll get to that). So, everything's fine. Until this year. Earthlink decides that it would be really cool to block *all* outgoing accesses to port 25 other than to their mail server. This is awful. I expect transparent proxies and firewalling from AOL and cable ISPs, not Earthlink. I'm on the *'Net*. I'm a *peer*. I wanna be able to run servers if I want to. Besides the convenience I had while running my server, there wasn't a security issue (Makes things even easier for Carnivore if everything gets plonked into a centrail mail server at the ISP).
Back when I could run my own server, I had a friend, another guy in computer science, go to work at Compaq for a summer. I tried emailing him from my own mail server. Compaq bounced the mail. Basically, it looks like they look at a list called the DUL, which is a list of dial up addresses, and ban all mail coming from them. Makes things totally impossible for people like me to send legitimate mail, but hell, any important mail *should* be coming from a complete technophobe, who'd never have a mail server, right? I hate the DUL. If I could push a button to squish every person at it, I'd do so in a second.
Now, Earthlink's decided that, after forcing you to use their mail gateway, that instead of returning an error when attempts to relay go through (like when I go back to college and still have my mail gateway set to mail.earthlink.net), it accepts the mail with no error and promptly deletes it. This wiped out a bunch of my mail again this year.
I fucking hate anti-spam people, and I hate ISPs that cater to the tech illiterati. One day, every ISP is going to *only* allow port 8000 and port 25 outbound from your node, and port 25 is going to have to go to their mail server, and port 8000 to their http proxy, and that is what *everyone will have to use*. No inbound connections will be accepted. Why? Because the masses of people out there use the Web, email, and don't care or know how either works...and they'll pay for it. The few of us that don't like don't form nearly enough of a market to support *good* ISPs.
A number of people are starting to sue spammers for theft of services. I've been sending "contract proposals" to several large spam outfits with the agreement mechanism being "send me an e-mail". Two of the three stopped sending me anything immediately and my e-mail dropped in half. The third hasn't stopped; so, I get to try sending them a bill and see what happens. The service I provide them is "wasted time" and I value it at $10,000 per incident (hopefully, it's high enough to get a lawyer interested in helping collect it).
u d
For more on the topic, see:
http://law.spamcon.org/
http://law.spamcon.org/articles/index.shtml#fra
The artical on the web site contract by Nima Taradji is especially intriguing.
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
How many porn sites do you have to register to in order to get that much spam? Can we all have you bookmarks file?
OK - That was two questions... I lied.
I'm glad you find my one man offensive against spam mail entertaining, I enjoy replying to people that spam me and reporting it to their isp's. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.
My war on spam begins with all Spammers, but it does not end there. It will not end until every spamming group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.
These spamists spam not merely to waste bandwidth, but to disrupt and end a way of life. With every piece of unsolicited mail, they hope that genuine e-mailers grow fearful, retreating from cyber space and forsaking news groups. They stand against me, because I stand in their way.
I am not deceived by their pretenses to piety. I have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the spamist ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing bandwidth to serve their advertising visions -- by abandoning every value except the will to power -- they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history's unmarked grave of discarded trash cans.
My response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated replies.
I should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic e-mails to ISP's, visible to News groups, and covert operations, secret even in success. I will starve spamists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from ISP to ISP, until there is no refuge or no rest. And I will pursue ISP's that provide aid or safe haven to spammers. Every ISP, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with me, or you are with the spamists.
From this day forward, any ISP that continues to harbor or support spamists will be regarded by me as a hostile regime.
if you have any questions
please contact me on:
mobile: oooo oooooo
phone : (07)oooo oooo
Fax : (07) oooo oooo
e-mail: o.oooo@ooo.oo.ooo.oo
Thank you
David oooooo
IT Officer
School of oooooo oooooo
The University of oooooo oooooooool School
oooooooooo oooooooooo oooooooooooo ooooo
Brisbane, Queensland 4006 Australia
Web:http://ooo.oo.ooo.oo
-----Original Message-----
From: valis2001 [ospamero@spam.com]
Sent: Thursday, 20 December 2001 6:17 AM
To: news@ooo.ooo.ooo.oo.oo
Subject: Had to laugh.....
I heard about you, and couldn't help but laugh.
Sorry that you are the way that you are. LOL
-----Original Message-----
From: ooooo, David [mailto:o.oooo@ooo.oo.ooo.oo]
Sent: Wednesday, 19 December 2001 3:45 PM
To: oSpammero@spam.com postmaster@ospamhosterso.com
Subject: REMOVE ME NOW
If i get more spam on this address (news@oooo.ooo.oo.ooo.oo) i will hunt you down and make you pay!
Remove this email address from everywhere you have it in any form that it may be in. I do not want to receive email from you, people who work with/for/around you, people you know even vaguely or even have heard of, people you communicate in any form to, people who look like you.
From now on, I want to never know you, or any product/service/person/etc that you know of.
Given that you're a spammer who thinks they aren't a spammer, you may have found the above too vague. Ergo: please piss off.
I did not subscribed to any opt-in list!
You are a spammer and you, your site and your family will pay dearly if you send anymore mail to this address!
DO NOT MESS WITH ME!
-Yours aggressively with intent
if you have any questions
please contact me on:
mobile: oooo oooooo
phone : (07)oooo oooo
Fax : (07) oooo oooo
e-mail: o.oooo@ooo.oo.ooo.oo
Thank you
David oooooo
IT Officer
School of oooooo oooooo
The University of oooooo oooooooool School
oooooooooo oooooooooo oooooooooooo ooooo
Brisbane, Queensland 4006 Australia
Web:http://ooo.oo.ooo.oo
-----Original Message-----
From: Rene [ospammero@spamhost.com]
Sent: Wednesday, 18 December 2001 8:33 PM
To: news@oooo.oooo.ooo
Subject: Don't worry about it.....
I found out how to erase bad credit regardless of past credit history.....even
if you have a bankrupcy, charge off, collection accounts etc. It only takes
30days. You can get a fresh start immediately.
Let me know if you're interested
ospamero@spamhost.com
All speling, factual, tact, and/or grametical errers be the result of netwerk interpherance or# transmition ererrs.
You will have noticed by now there are two types of spam: 1) Product and Service Sales and 2) Information Gathering.
Type 1 spam usually fails as the spam victims complain- then their websites succumb to ddos, are TOS'ed, etc. Often, the spammer is a clueless 1-st time marketer who thought spamming was supposed to be effective.
Type 2 is far more profitable to the spammers. Have you noticed how persistent the Mortgage Loan, Debt Consolidation, and Travel Sweepstakes type spams are? The spammer does not sell anything TO you, and ppl are willing to fill out the form for a "FREE" chance of winning.
However, when the information is entered he has a lead he can sell to a third party. Typical payout for a valid lead is $25 US. One well-designed YUO HAVE WON!!! SWEEPSTAEKS ENTRY FORM!!! spam to AOLers can gather literally hundreds of leads that check out.
Someone needs to write a program to fill out their entry forms with realistic, but false, information.
Bulk : email is sent in large quantities, to many people. The question is, how did they get your email ? Selling email lists should be illegal (except opt-in lists), but if your email is public (web, news) then no one can be forbidden to send you an email !
Spam/UBE is difficult to define. Really.
There are people who look at my site and then send me an Email: "I've looked at your site, and I think it would benefit from being listed in more searchengines". I've checked: They indeed looked at my site. Once. One page.
They are sending this to lots of people. This was sent to a publicly listed Email address. Is that desirable to be "allowed"?
Roger
A pathetically low percentage of spam winds up in actual peoples mailboxes, most of it is undeliverable (mailboxes that I discontinued in 1995 are still on the spammers "Verified! All Fresh! 10 Million addresses" CD-ROMs).
Then, of course, even if a sufficiently gullible person is reached by the spam, that person has to feel a need for the product or service. TV Shopping Channels are surprisingly effective, but not effective enough to turn every person watching it into a buyer. Spam is no different in that respect.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
This is targeted advertising and if the email is on your site then I think it's legitimate ...
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
OH DEAR ... and to think all this time I've been nothing but an unwilling pawn in the racist machine by wearing a sensible, not-overpriced, non-child-labor produced shoe. Oh what am I to do. :)
If you can't be good, be good at it!
Here's a link to the download on CNET and to the HomePage.
I have been using this for about 2 months, and even put it on my own mother's machine.
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
anyone else notice this? once in awhile I'll check my 'blocked' box and I'll find email from micorosoft in there like 'your mail box is too full' haha !
Chris Lee
lee@mediawaveonline.com
perhaps half-a-million messages were forwarded by my machine.
Interesting. Could you tell how many protest from the spammed were addressed to you? Were they polite?
I ask because sometimes I think I am the only one who complains (politely) to the open relay. I received a nice apology once.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu