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 :)
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.
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.
To report spam, the _easiest_ way is through spamcop.net. You signup (free) and they will send you an email address to forward your emails. So all you do is forward the email as an attachment which preserves all the headers. Spamcop will do the tedious work of hunging down the headers adn open relays abused and send a report to those automatically.
I have been using it for a week now, and absolutely love it. Give it a try. You'll be glad you did.
LinuxLover
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.