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Fighting The Spammers Down Under
An Anonymous Coward writes: "The Sydney Morning Herald is running an interesting article about fighting spammers. It mentions that "Most of today's email spam, however, comes from a handful of culprits, described by Barry and others as "known criminals"." Does anybody else wonder who these people are, and what are the odds of having them shut down for good?"
If they are "known criminals", why are they such a problem? or is that to say that the spam itself makes them known?
maybe the police are the "known criminals"
and we all know which europeans were originally sent down under
2^3 * 31 * 647
A good solution for spammers is to track them down, post their addresses for everyone to see, and hold spam bashing parties, in which many, many people make a roadtrip to 'encourage' the spammer not to spam anymore. Such encouragements could be things like, VX, a sock with a cueball in it, small rabid animals, and herpes.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
so I'll spam as first post just to make this ontopic
The spammers have won. They won five years ago. Heck, after putting my email up on Slashdot I got spammed in under 24 hours. :-)Click here spammers!
I have been visiting Slashdot for a probably a little over a year and I have never been online when they submitted and new story and I could be the first poster. Well when it happens I am not logged in and forgot my password. Grrrr... I saw my chance slip through my fingers.
www.spamhaus.org has a list of spammers and the ISPs supporting them. They also have some quite interesting articles on this topic.
In my humble opinion, the problem with spam block lists as they are today is that
1) they are not consolidated which means your network may end up being wrongfully isolated from one or two networks and you'll never know why your legitimate e-mail isn't reaching its destination and
2) if you get added to a list, some people aren't responsible enough to keep them updated. So if for example you had open-relaying on by accident (a common problem alleviated in the recent versions of sendmail) you may end up being "blacklisted" and if you try to contact the maintainers of those lists, you get no response and your domain is forever banished from the internet.
I heard the FCC (or one of those acronyms...maybe the FDA) is starting to create a national "blacklist" maintained by the government. I don't know if that's true, but that might actually not be a bad idea.
Just my US$0.02.. Hargun
Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door.
First with conventional weaponry, then with bombs and missiles.
---------
Get back to me when my brain starts working.
Everyone always goes on about SPAM and how bad it is and how we don't like to get it....... The real problem is that it must be profitable for some individuals to do it otherwise it wouldn't happen (save the handful of ppl who just like to do it for fun, similar to graffiti). I have a some contact with the advertising and marketing industries here in Aus and I can tell you that from the pure marketing point of view it does look attractive. The marketing ppl rarely consider the annoyance factor, they just want nice numbers... ie "so you can send this out to 1000s of people, Great! How much per person.... what's that, its a LOT cheaper then mail, WOW put me down for 50000"... and so the corporate world pays for what we hate. Sure there might be exceptions, but I bet that this is the norm, esp in cases when the marketing department has 0 exposure to technology and so doesn't suffer like the rest of us.
Spam is "spam" until registrations, licenses, warranty agreements, etc, require a valid email address and/or an opt-in to that company's "news". Then it becomes legit. i get plenty of unsolicited email from companies legitly possessing my addy, even email with opt-out links. if every company i interact with sends me just one of these, that's still a lot of undesirable, often image- and HTML-laden emails to have show up.
That's why i don't think spam will cease to be a problem for end-users, even if the signal-to-porn ratio improves.
Reports are that he died from complications resulting from "Homosexual Australian Linux Spammers". Truly an internet icon. He will be missed :(
What you can do:
Go to war!
Sue!
And win!
or...
Join them!
australia is part of the axis of evil!
Personally I feel a great need to boycott anyone who would support such rampant censorship. Even if it was a wise decision business wide, it does go against my base beleifs. That everyone should have free reign over what information they wish to observe and such.
Seems somewhat impractical though. I can't really tell all of my tcp/ip traffic to avoid any routers made by cisco now can I? Oh well, if I ever run a company I'll make sure not to buy cisco products. Unless they've fully established a monopoly by that time, in which case I'll have no choice. Which in turn will lead to an obligation to comit sepuku.
Yahoo on the other hand, that will be easy to boycott.
here is an interesting article about a network admins experience tracking (stalking) a spammmerl
http://belps.freewebsites.com/index.htm
Does anybody know what the odds are of having them drawn and quartered?
At least tarred and feathered!?
but i'd rather hit delete a few times per day (i don't get more than 10 spam mails a day) and know the internet is still relatively free. yes, they're sleaze, but if you're going to start blocking them, it's not that hard for a few other domains to be slipped in there. the potential for censorship seems too great to me *shrug*
so i'll continue deleting my 10 mails per day.
Kraada
They should be detained and then force-fed cans of SPAM(tm) for several weeks whilst being made to listen to Enya's Orinoco Flow over and over again.
Is it me or is every spammer I know filled with social problems? They're are always the type the can't find gfriends, get dumped, the uncool kids etc etc etc.
I hate spam as much as the next guy, and would love to see it done away with... but after stopping to think about it, I don't see it as really possible without consequences for everyone. In the long run, little annoyances like this that get complained about until the government or whoever does something about it, lead to more and more restrictions and more and more freedoms being taken away.
We need to stop and think, "Is it really worth it to give up more of our freedom just to get rid of a few emails that you can easily delete without ever having to read them?" Also, we need to ask ourselves if we think we can really eliminate this problem anyhow. How are we going to be able to determine exactly what constitutes spam? And what happens when some business receives an email from someone requesting information and sends them an email in reply about their products. It could be the case that person forgot they ever requested the info or that someone entirely different submitted the request under a fake name. How can it ever really be proved?
I just don't think it's worth pursuing...
later,
thundercatzlair
The biggest problem with spam, is that people get PAID for spamming. Companies offer people MONEY to spam you, then they innocently say that spammer didnt read the standard no-spam policy.
This is Bullshit. We need to go after the people who pay spammers.
-
Obviously crime pays, or there'd be no crime. - G. Gordon Liddy
Very good solution would be IAIA (Illegal advertising inhibition act - known as donkey law). Lets punish with severe penalties every company that is proven to knowingly order advertisement through illegal means (such as spam, tattooing childern and pop-under windows).
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Does anybody else wonder who these people are, and what are the odds of having them shut down for good?
I've been wondering who the "known criminals are for many years. If you know who these dastardly no-goods are, please respond to this message and put my mind at ease. Thank you.
Is the perspective from the most targeted customer: Someone very new to the Internet, generally. Ive seen them before and how they use it. Basically, there seems to be quite a pattern. That is, they follow the trail that is usually left by spammers who post the bait to who it is intended for. So the point is, "good" spammers leave a trail that follows the bait (spam) that reels them right in... Think of a porn advertiement. At firest its "Come see our site" followed by "horney girls will please you". Then followed by "Take a tour" then "see more by joinging our site". By now, the new user is primed and ready. Of course when this person reached the next stage, "Enter your credit card number", this "newbie" Internet user has met the goals of the spammer. So, I think it is important to note the effectivness here and set aside the bias that one who is not an effective spam target is likely to have.
Why can't unsolicited spammers be considered terrorists just like crackers?
Then again, Microsoft hasn't been hurt enough by spamming yet, for that to happen. Only when spamming gets to a puppet master will the puppets (aka Congress) do something about it.
The only thing that has a hope of reducing SPAM is punitive legislation. This would be legislation that imposes heavy fines on people who send out mass amounts of unsolicited commercial email. Unfortunately, Congress, at least this Congress, will never pass such laws. It's likely that no future Congress will either as the Direct Mail Marketers, close cousins to SPAMMERS, have too strong a lobby. Therefore, the best defenses will remain the technological ones: individual filters, procmail, products that intercept SPAM before users receive it, and anti SPAM forwarders like www.despammed.com.
The Direct Marketing Association has a national opt-out list. I'm on it, and that seems to turn off spam from legitimate US businesses. The remaining bozos probably won't get the message until the cops come knocking.
I think we're going to win this thing. There seem to be only a few hundred spammers left, most of whom are doing something that qualifies as fraud. Pushing for misdemeanor convictions on a few every year is probably enough to discourage them.
Recently I have learned quite a bit about spammers. The problem with shutting spammers down for good is either they go from ISP to ISP or they use open or blind relays in countries other than the US and Canada. They say that if you use an open/blind relay in Taiwan, for example, the violated party will not check the logs and report them. The two options that I have thought of so far are that ISPs in a particular region should cooperate and ban people who are known spammers (I will happily give the names of the ones I know) or have an international committee that mangages offenses and reports them to the offending ISP.
The other thing that could happen is the tech community could educate the rest of the email community. For example, you should not respond to any emails that have no links, only phone numbers. Also, do not respond to any emails that are asking for answers to a survey. This is how the spammers "clean up" their list. The real reason people keep spamming is because banner ads are not working, but email does. Of course, real opt-in lists are more expensive, so SPAM it is.
I believe that until ISPs or companies with mail servers start cooperating, SPAM will keep circulating the internet.
Hey, if you have a better idea, let me know.
And this is the point that I find most frustrating and difficult...
My Mom and my Wife believe me, but that's about it when it comes to handing out such advice (my kids are _forced_ to obey via artificial limits imposed upon them, locally). But how do you get the word out to other casual (non-tech/understanding/caring) individuals?
Otherwise intelligent folks (siblings, friends, co-workers, the sysadmin) often "take offense" when I cajole/warn/goad/request spam fighting action from them?! I've used the available form-letters (edited accordingly); I've used personalized polite appeals... but dammit, I'm starting to think that the bloody AOL "You've got mail" voice must be heavily laden with sub-liminal opiates!
They _like_ to read how large (with little or no effort) their income or penis can become!? They are addicted to junk email pleas for hair-brained monkey growing schemes?! They are lonely, oh, soooo lonely?! Bah.
--CL^2
Jeesh, screw it...
The best way to block spam is stop html email. Nobody I know sends html stuff, just quick txt notes. Now if only outlook could do that.(yes gotta use outlook at work, and yes i get spam at work)
this sig is a virus, take it and use it.
LinuxWorx
Spelling errors are intentional as are gramatical error
That's 2 stories in a row where you've had glaring errors in the text. Hello? You don't even have to _write_ this stuff, you just have to make sure its not mangled. Please pay a little attention, a hundred thousand people are watching.
Sure, spam is probably profitable: it transfers most of the cost of advertising to the (probably unwilling) receipiant, and nobody ever went broke underestimating the Good Taste of the American public.
The problem with spam is that the dirty details of spam disassociates it from market forces, unlike other, more conventional forms of advertising.
In just about every other form of ad (radio or Tee Vee commercial, newspaper ad, billboard, etc) the advertiser pays for the ad up front, before you make a decision to buy the advertised product or not. So, if the ad is particularly repulsive, ("Ring around the collar!") the consumer can make a decision to not buy the product. The advertiser is out the cost of the ad. Of course, the cost of any advertised product is higher than an unadvertised product, so the consumers who chose to buy an advertised product ultimately pay for a portion of the advertising.
Contrast this with a spammed ad: the consumer has paid for his or her network time to receive the ad, the disk space to store the ad and the CPU cycles it took to process the email ad before getting a chance to decide whether to buy the spamvertised product or not. No matter how repugnant, stupid, wasteful, or dumb the ad is, the consumer ends up paying for the spamertising. Only very weak market forces control spamvertising. That's the real problem with spam.
Email spamming is theft, plain and simple. Email spammers must be punished.
Everytime I see a thread pop up on /. regarding spamming or other email abuse, I find myself compelled to repeat my suggestion for how we can effectively battle against these forces which leech the life out of the 'Net.
My suggestion is quite simple: All SMTP servers should put in place policies which reject mail that is not digitally signed with a certificate trusted by a root authority. Personal email certs should be free, commercial (for marketing purposes) should cost a reasonable amount.
This would enforce accountability behind emails by guaranteeing the identity of the sender. Do this and things will clean up considerably, imho.
mje0w!!!1!
When I get spam, I report it on spamcop. It is a free service [with pay options, please pay and keep it going!] that will analyze your e-mail and headers looking for legitimate source IPs, open relays and websites mentioned in the spam and then look up the e-mail addresses to send anonymous reports on your behalf. You can also sign up for spam-free e-mail and buy a paid subscription to spamcop reporting. I can't say whether it has worked or not, but I feel better knowing open relays are being noted and that sysadmins are being notified! Link.
adam.
[snip torture involving force-feeding ham to UCE senders] whilst being made to listen to Enya's Orinoco Flow over and over again.
Don't knock Enya. Remember when she collaborated with Eminem for a remix of "The Real Slim Shady"? (Hear it here for a limited time.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
The reason spam exists in such vast quantity is because it's so cheap to send.
Suppose that every time someone wanted to send you an email, they had to "buy" a password token. Then, after you read the message, you could "return" the token if you think it's not spam. If tokens were a penny, it would stop most of the really annoying spam, but if you really hated spam, you could sell your tokens for a dollar.
-- What I really hate is people who ask you to surrender your freedom to stop spam.
Anyone can spam: from "a 6 year old guy", to "dr.evil" to "mr. good guy that is trying to solve world hunger". So you want different penalties: kill evil guy, warn good guy, educate kid.
Some of them, unknowing how bad spam is
People complain about spam. Yet, if they find it usefull, they use the service (contradiction)
Spam doesn't kill people or ruins lifes or fortunes
Spam is relative: what defines spam? a) everything unsolicited? (leads to: nobody can even contact you to ask you if they can contact you.). b) something that is sent to more than me and that is unsolicited? (leads to: how do you enforce/know that? Spammer could just program variations of the smap message).
There IS usefull spam and useless spam as well (99% useless ratio today). If we enforce "good smapping practices..." (ie: receive unsolicited email from good employers offering good salaries)
Spam is global (different legislations) and can move fast (from server to server).
Detecting spammer (physically) is: a) expensive, b) they usually don't have much money (what will you do to him? arrest him like Mitnik?).
Thouthan other reasons
So the bottom line is (my opinion):
Spam doesn't know black and white. There're shades of gray only, and difficult/expensive to block. At some point we should draw a line, beyond that line, prosecute spammers (law). Everything else would be client-side (ie: tools to block spam, blacklists, filters, etc.).
unfinished: (adj.)
Your post at +0 by default. which mostly everyone doesn't read. Suggestion: create a new account!
Finally, someone has come to recognized my preferred solution to fight spammers: kick them in the genitals.
Or did you mean something else by "Fighting The Spammers Down Under"?
"known criminals, what are those?
That site is great! The guy documented everything and posted it on the internet. Including pump-n-dump proof and a picture of her butt!! WTG
Lets slashdot a spamsite!
>commercial (for marketing purposes) should cost a reasonable amount.
actually, an UNreasonable amount would stop more spam.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
At least the NIX was up enough to reply with an error. BSOD does not provide that luxery to a remote user.
Posting AC as this is offtopic.
I've posted this before, it never got modded up though. If for every legitimate response a business gets to a spam, they also get 100 bogus responses, they will simply drown. So pretend you have a job opening for Bernard Shiffman. Call up that number about get-rich-quick scheme and hang up on them (or better yet write a little script and have your modem call it 1000 times). Make spammers sort through their responses wondering which ones are are real.
Anyone can spam: from "a 6 year old guy", to "dr.evil" to "mr. good guy that is trying to solve world hunger". So you want different penalties: kill evil guy, warn good guy, educate kid.
Dr. Evil should be executed, that much is certain. But let's look at the other ones.
The six year old shouldn't even be allowed to USE a computer at that age. Clearly by then he has been exposed to the filth and depravity that lurks in the black heart of the Internet, so he is a wasted life. Ergo, he should be executed. Also, his parents have shown their failings by not being able to bring the child up correctly, and should be executed as well, along with any other close relatives.
Finally, the so-called "good guy" MUST be executed. It would mean one less mouth to feed, after all, thus making a valuable contribution to solving world hunger. His carcass can then be processed, and his essential proteins extracted to feed others, "Soylent Green" style.
Clearly, 99% of the world's problems can be solved by giving over-caffeinated Aryans access to automatic weapons and a "Get out of Jail for Free" card.
Find a "smapper"? Shoot him. In the legs first, then in the hands, so he cannot type again. Then drag his filthy sub-breed family out of their trailer and shoot them in front of him. Kick him in the face until his tears of grief subside into silent, grim acceptance of his fate. Then make him watch, as you molest the bodies. Take a staple gun to his eyelids so he is obliged to see every orgasmic thrust.
Then tell him. "This is your fault. Spam caused this to happen. But you'll never learn will you?" So you walk over to him, cock proudly erect and glistening with the blood and other fluids of his beloved ones. And start to rub it, inches from his face. Then, at the "Vinegar Stroke", shoot him between the eyes.
It's the only way to be sure...
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
Spammer marketing agencies need to be systematically Spammed, Syn-flooded and DoS-ed in miscelany ways. Also those responsible for legal decisions on this, like European parliament, should be Spammed at least during the time they are about to decide about legality of Spamming. I'm sure those lobbying spammer bitches take a big care not to spam anybody important. The only problem is, that normal folks simply won't do that - it's just too fucking stupid.
I personally have never read any spam message - they are just too fucking obvious to spot just by the poor subject. Wasted energy, spammer poorheads...
and this lame OSDN application makes me nervous, because I can't decide if it's worse designed or coded...
that would be nice, but on the other hand, it would be illegal to stop the spam in that way in a short while, because ... but you know what ... those in government are our Gods. At least they feel so. And they were given neverending wisdom.
If the FTC is really serious about going after spam, then we need to give them our support. More than that, we need to make them do their job with this. If most spam is fraudulent, and if most spam is sent by a relatively small group of people, then it stands to reason that getting rid of these hard-core spammers will go a long way toward reducing the spam problem.
Now don't get me wrong here. I'm not naive enough to believe that this is going to be easy. Spammers are slippery little worms, and stopping them for good won't be easy. However, there's nothing like a court order to give someone an attitude adjustment.
So here's the deal. The FTC wants to receive spam at uce@ftc.gov, so send it. My guess is that they like getting all spam, but bear in mind that they don't have jurisdiction over spam per se, just spam selling fraudulent goods and services. This is something they can latch onto and run with because they are empowered to stop fraud. If you send, be sure to include full headers so messages can be tracked back to the source. That way, if a spammer hops from ISP to ISP, it may be possible to construct a pattern that can be used to find and nail him.
As I said, I don't count on this to work, but if the FTC really is serious, then let's give them the evidence they need to bust some balls.
That light you see at the end of the tunnel might be from an oncoming train.
Any idiot can purchase spamming software, and as long as there are open relays, there's no point in doing anything! With an open relay, I can completely mask my identity... why, you ask? Well, if the admin is incompetitent enough not to know how to close a relay, do you actually think that the same admin is checking logs?
:)
Some things to consider:
-a- most companies that are open relays are small companies with no admins
-b- if they are lucky enough to have an "admin", chances are, he's really the purchasing agent or acts as the entire accounting dept for the company
-c- any furry critter with an NT4 disk can setup a box.
-d- there are a lot of furry purchasing agents out there
"Just tell him ya did it! That's what he wants to hear anyway..."
I have been spammed more than I would like to admit. And, after running open lists for awhile, the spam level got to a point where we simply had to close it to subscribers only, limiting our potential audience/participants.
Okay, so that sucked. Big deal. Do you know what _really_ annoys me? The junk mail you get in the mailbox. Come on now.. if you can't get the postal service or the government to give you the right to say, I do NOT wish to receive ads/brochures/etc in my mail.. then you think that could be solved on the internet? Get real. Use a mail filtering system and do it yourself.
Another thing is telemarketing. You cannot get the phone company to force those companies to show their phone numbers on your caller-ID. They are forever hidden behind the 'Unknown name/Unknown number'. And these are the 'legit' people. Come on now.. I would rather get rid of the MCI guy telling me to switch my Long distance plan to them than worry about the couple emails that make it through my filters.
At least, you can CONTROL the amount of spam you get yourself in most cases. You have very little control over the other types of spam.
In addition to the usual anti-spam methods:
one can block IP addresses that attempt to spam on a regular basis. Tools such
- ipchains
- netfilter/iptables
- ipFilter
can be configured to block frequent spammer IP addresses from your SMTP ports.The following is a list of IP addresses that we have observed spamming on a regular basis. Blocking these sites won't solve your spam problem. On the other hand blocking common spam locations as part of an overall anti-spam system will help.
Sorry if your IP address is in the above list. If you are not a spammer then it could be that you happen to be using an ISP that tolerates spammers (or is unable/unwilling to block them), or you work for a company that spam, or you are near a poorly configured and poorly maintained site that is abused as an open relay.
chongo (was here)
The article mentions that some of these 'spam cops' are only contactable via a newsgroup, and that they hide their real identities in order to avoid being hassled by lawyers employed by the spammers. I understand this. I applaud what they are doing - I despise spam as much as the next person.
But by their anonymity, they make themselves unaccountable to anyone else. That means that there are no real controls. What happens if one of these spam cops ends up on some kind of ego trip, or perhaps just starts making mistakes? A breakdown in relationships or other pressures could result in a block list not being updated.
Much as it may be difficult, I think all efforts to control spam must be made out in the open, with full accountability to the rest of the internet community.
The Direct Marketing Association has this little checkbox on their page, which says "notify me when my listing expires".
EXPIRES? WHAT THE FUCK?
If I were naïve enough to belive that any of the sleazebags in the DMA would actually honor this list for *any* amount of time, I'd be pretty pissed off when the spam started flooding in when their database says my "leave me alone" notice has expired.
I trust these people about as far as I can throw them.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
this one is off topic, but who cares.
linux 2.5.4 bz2 has 24 megs, and couple of days old prepatch 2.5.5 has 4,5 megs. That system is not changing, that system is morphing!! Hey, is there any other kernel changing that fast?
The one ime we want Sen. Alston to do something and he won't. Sure we want the freedom to browse where we want, but there does need to be something to curb the spammers. I have my own domain with the domain mail directed to my mb. Sure, it means I get the worst case and I have seen it, i.e. a@somewhere.net, b@somewhere.net etc. but it also helps me track where the spam harvested my addy from. What I do is use different addy's for different companies i.e. slashdot@somewhere.net for all slashdot stuff. So if I start getting MMF to my slashdot addy I would know that it came from here ( and no, I haven't, just an example)
"I propose we leave math to the machines and go play outside" -- Calvin
A friend of mine here in the UK has recently suffered a nasty fate at the hands of some very active spammers... they faked a reply-to address in his domain (summerisle.demon.co.uk).
.com.
The result was that, for a period of about two and a half weeks in January, David was receiving over 1000 bounced emails a day, effectively mailbombing his account. With a pay-per-minute 56K modem as his only internet access, it wasn't a pretty sight.
The spammers that sends this stuff out, who identify themselves as 'Global Advertising Systems' and 'Universal Advertising Systems' claim to be based in Billings, MT. You may have seen some of their handiwork in your own mailbox with subjects like 'Increase energy levels', 'Become a Judgement Processing Professional', 'Child Support-Investigator'. They're very effective at covering their tracks - the only contact information is PO Box, telephone and fax numbers in the US, plus disposable eMail address and a snail-mail PO box in Aruba if you want to be 'removed'. All the mail originates in the Phillippines (with the obligatory faked additional headers added) then gets punted out through open relays around the world. Complaints to the ISPs in the Phillipines get no reply or bounced.
Fortunately, I'm lucky enough to have DSL, so I was able to filter the stuff out and forward it on to another account - OK if you've got the bandwidth, but not a proper solution.
The scary bit is that it seems like there's no other defence against this kind of activity. The ISP hosting the domain's POP box sympathised, but said they couldn't do anything to delete this incoming junk before it was delivered. UK & Billings, MT police and the FBI said no crime had been committed and taking private legal action across the Atlantic is a bit out of the reach of a one-man recording studio. My friend's frustrated reaction to another attack this week has been to dump the domain and move elsewhere with a new
If anyone else has any more information on these b*st*rds or ideas for wreaking revenge I'd be interested to hear.
Well, I think asking the government for help here is a little counterproductive. Given the Government Nature, the solution will be shortsighted, intrusive, expensive, and will exclude rational thought. In short, they'll probably:
Declare a national moratorium on e-mail while a congressional steering committee holds a conference to determine the nature and extent of the problem.
Industry and Community Leaders who have never actually sent or recieved an e-mail will be called in to consult, as well as a couple of Hollywood Celebrities.
A proposal will be made to Nationalize e-mail under the State Department.
Objections from Civil Liberties Profiteers Inc. will lead to a "compromise" proposal to place control of e-mail services with that well-known private organization, The Post Office.
New "Spam Free" e-mail will cost $0.34 each, and take 3-5 days to deliver, but you can pay $3.00 and have a guarantee of delivery... in 3-5 days.
A new congressional committee will congratulate the Post Office and themselves for eliminating SPAM!!! And hold hearings to examine the new problem of "unsolicited e-mail."
Okay, that's a _slight_ exaggeration.
But seriously, the obvious ways to help are:
1. Very Public Boycotts of companies that use Spam tactics.
2. Encourage use of Digitally Signed E-mail.
3. Encourage efforts by ISPs to block e-mail from "repeat offender" sites.
4. Encourage the "securing" of open relays.
None of these methods involve letting politicians write laws which include new taxes, new power, or new public swimming pools named after them.
And by the way, given the nature of Enya's music and Eminem's "anti-music," I imagine that if they were to actually meet, the resulting music-anti-music reaction could deafen an entire medium-sized city.
No matter who they are, fight them with razor! razor is a distributed, collaborative spam detection and filtering network, and it rocks. I hardly get any spam anymore, and if I get one, I can report it to the network, and other razor users won't see that email anymore.
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
What amazes me is how the Chinese can get their corporate lackeys to block any packets they don't like from entering their entire network, while we out here in the free world are drowning in spam because we can't keep a few hundred assholes with modems from pissing emails all over us.
http://belps.freewebsites.com/brutal.htm
1226 Cobblestone Lane
Clarksville, TN 37042
Now tell "Homeland Security" that there is an Al-Qaeda cell operaing out of that address.
End of problem.
are a complete fuckwit.
what a great website! Too bad more people didn't take the time to do things like this. I think personal information on the net is something most spammers would fear. Especially pictures of their sagging breasts!!! LMAO
All that pays do exist, both in Nature and Economy. The only way to solve the SPAM problem is to make SPAM stop paying. Can it be done without creating a bigger problem? Without hurting innocent people?
I don't know. Law enforcement helps but is largely ineffective. Reports to abuse addresses at ISPs doesn't work very well either. One-shot email addresses work sometimes, but that's not enough. Using fake addresses damage the legitimate owners of the domain one pretend to be. Filters are good, but they are more a surrender to the problem than a solution for it.
I think that the community needs an extra tool to fight SPAM. We need to set up a counter-attack, aiming at the right targets, not at innocent people. I propose to target the databases of email adresses used for SPAM, polluting them in such a way that almost every email address they have is a fake one.
How?
Many of these addresses are collected harvesting web pages for email addresses. Fine, so we just need to make "normal" web pages that say to people visiting them that they are fake, and place fake email addresses there. The fake addresses must be from existing, consenting sites.
Say for instance that the owner of somedomain.com wants to cooperate on attacking spammers' databases. First it builds a list of, say, 200 fake addresses like somename@somedomain.com, and arranges his email system in order to collect all the email send to these addresses in a special "SPAM-bag". Then it builds a dynamic page (cgi, whatever) with some text and images and a few email addresses. The email addresses are randomly collected from the list above. That page must be linked somewhere in order to be easily found by the harvesters.
Finally, in order to validate the fake addresses, the system must fake reading the emails collected in the SPAM-bag. Several spam systems send email with html with special marks, used to tell the sender that the email was readed. All those marks should be used (the links present in the message must be used to generate requests as if opened for reading).
If the owner of the domain somedomain.com makes, say, 100 fake adddresses for each valid address he has, the result can be that the spammers databases gather lots of garbage. Since databases and bandwidth are both finite, the result will be that the 150 million addresses that Mr. J. Random Spammer uses will turn into almost complete garbage.
Drawback: Bandwidth. If the domain has 100 fake addresses for each legitimate one, it will be exposed to 100 times more spam-mail than usual. I can't guess if this is a problem or not. I believe its not, at least not compared with the phisiological bandwith a human spends cleaning the spam out of his mailbox. The computer works harder, the spammers work harder, but the spam' victims don't. All accounted for, it seems to be a good thing.
Spam represents an incredible value for the money. It has very little cost, incurs little legal risk, and can reap great rewards. There are many business plans like that, but with the exception of spam, they're all RICO predicates (in the U.S.).
When things reach a certain level of profitability they become recognized as crimes and laws are passed criminalizing them. Spam is only legal because nobody's ever seen anything like it before. People easily confuse spam with a First Amendment issue, so it will take a couple years, but by the time the average email account receives 20,000 spams a day, public anger will eventually boil over, reaching a point at which one of several things will happen:
-SMTP and email in general will be supplanted by some more restrictive protocol that isn't as useful to the spammers for theft of services. (Hopefully this protocol will be open and not controlled by a ruthless monopoly.) Nobody will communicate via email anymore because all emails are assumed to be spam. As fewer people rely on it, more and more network paths will become closed to SMTP traffic until it reaches the point where most emails bounce once they leave their local network.
-Sending spam no longer means you lose your 30 days free trial and have to find another ISP serving your trailer park. Instead, your door is busted down by people with scary guns and flashlights and handcuffs, and you're held without bail in a real jail cell with real iron bars, maybe with a new roomate who's 581% happier now that you're there.
The solution will probably be technological rather than legal, just because of jurisdictional problems- even though the legal approach is obviously the one that socially makes the most sense. It's a real crime. But unless all the nations of the world sign a treaty to cooperate in investigating, catching, and prosecuting these idiots, they'll just keep finding more open relays in former Soviet republics.
Does this alledgedly page-widening post actually widen anybody's pages?
Page-widening must be rooted out. The line described by Klerck's penis going through CmderTaco's anus, rectum, colon, jejunum, ileum, duodenum, gaster, esophagus and mouth constitutes the REAL Axis of Evil!
Experience shows that blocking SPAM at source is impossible today. The fight should be directed at beneficiaries of spam (clients of spammers). And the only effective remedy is blocklists like SPEWS.
Your friend could fight the spam indirectly if he persuaded his ISP (demon.co.uk) to adopt SPEWS filter. That would block mosf of ISPs that host spam beneficiary sites from demon.co.uk. When ALL their clients lose access to this large European provider (demon) - then ISPs would definetely notice and take action against the spammers. If not too late for themselves... (check out this tearfull public apology from a spammer at news.admin.net-abuse.email).
--
The FTC does testify before Congress, and when they are asked how much spam is beyond their legal authority I would like them to have accurate statistics.
Titles of posts should start with "[email]". You can also mail to the automaton at nanas-sub@cybernothing.org from a throwaway address to avoid attracting more spam. You would not think spammers would bother scraping addresses from anti-spam newsgroups, but Rule 3 says "Spammers are stoopid".
Regardless of submission method, you probably want to obscure your email address within your contribution.
and
ht
provide automated implementations similar to the suggested techniques.
and beat the living shit out of them.
I got a spam message, that was advertising email lists. You had to apply by sending a dead tree letter to an address, which turned out to be just up the road from me. The address was a company that sold post boxes.
Someone who applied to work there, could get access to who paid for the particular mailbox.
Another spam had the address of a local melbourne company on it. That was far easier to find.
Once you find them, it's a simple decision of firebombing, chemical warefare, DoS attacks...
Okay, you get 10 spams a day. I get about 200 per day. I have pretty good filtering software and high bandwidth access. The problem is not that you aren't annoyed, the problem is that most people pay for internet access, and that a significant percentage of internet traffic and access fees are wasted delivering spam all over the network. Lets say I get more spam than normal and you get less. Then we can guess an average of about 100 spams a day... multiply that by (being conservative) 200 million email users, half of which use dial-up accounts. that makes 10 billion spams to dialup accounts. If each spam takes a second to download, costing about a penny per second, then spammers are stealing US$100 million per day, which is $36.5 billion per year, just from dialup users! This is the largest case of theft in the history of the world!!! To give you an example of what that number means, it is more than the annual US budget for Medicare and Social Security combined!!!!
Story is here:
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/15234
Let's Cappone the spammers by taxing spam at a rate of $1 per delivered message. That will finance the spameaters and sic the world's most tenacious dogs on their scent. The whole problem will be solved by April 16th.
Have you ever looked at the headers from a spam? There's a good chance it was bounced off an open relay in China. Take a look at the Spamcop weekly open relay statistics.
These are very hard to get fixed, mostly because of the language barrier. Still, if you're particularly evil, you can always email the administrator thanking them for providing such a valuable resource for Falun Gong/Free Tibet.
Well, it doesn't widen the pages, per se, but it adds a nasty orizontal scrollbar that you have to use to see past the first screen.
You see, mobile phones ring or vibrate when they get spammed. It's worse than ordinary spam because email addresses are usually the same as your phone number, giving an easy target to spam programs.
My friend has two phones registered with slightly different names, and they ring within 10 seconds of each other, about once an hour or so. His FOMA (3G, streaming video) phone is real special. It does a pirouette on his desk because it is vibrating so strongly.
Imagine it. Everyone who has these phones (millions) gets this ringing all the time, even in the middle of the night. DoCoMo recently offered custom mail addresses to combat it but still..
Aye, but that's the rub. The spammers were only advertising services available with a credit card by phone, fax, or occasionally by cheque to a PO Box in Montana. They never advertise anything online so there's no web hosting ISP to go after.
:-)
In other circumstances, I agree with you. Usually, when reporting a spammer, I'll focus my attention the web hosting provider rather than the outgoing mail provider as changing hosting companies is more hassle for a spammer than getting a new dial up account.
(Cybertect: Posting from somewhere else & I forgot my password
Every time I hear a Federal Prosecutor laughingly talk about turning a suspect into "someone's girlfriend," I wonder how the US dares call itself a free country.
(it's probably been though of before, but here goes:)
:-) But perhaps they could be implemented in ways as to foil such "tests".
Think of Schneier's honeynet project. What if we set up a "honey-relay" that from the users perspective looks excactly like an open mail relay, but actually it doesn't forward email, merely logs users?
What if there was hordes of these false relays out there?
Of course, spammers could test for this by spamming themselves first
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Actually, many of the folk in news.admin.net-abuse.email know just whom they are.
Not very good at this time. They are not breaking any laws in most places. (Making the falsifying of "From:" addresses a felony would fix that. Making use of open mail relays w/o permission a misdemeanor at least would help.) And they frequently move from dialup ISP to dialup ISP as needed. The bigger spammers get "pink" contracts (read: "we'll allow you to spam as long as the heat doesn't get too bad and nobody finds out about this contract") with big-name ISPs that many admins are unwilling to block (Qwest and Sprint are frequently at the top of The Spamhaus Project's "Top 10" list. Verio has received a lot of unfavourable mention in news.admin.net-abuse.email of late).
The best things you can do, in my opinion, are:
- Complain about every spam you receive. But make sure you're
complaining to the right places. Make the complaints civil, but
firm.
- Block spam as best you can. Yes, no blocking mechanism is
perfect. There will be some false hits. Learn to live with it.
I have. My bosses and cow-orkers have. The alternative is
unthinkable. Block it even if it means black-holing entire
/16
blocks of IPs. Even if it means black-holing entire ISPs. Or even
countries.
- Refuse to do business with spam-friendly ISPs. Check with the
good folk in news.admin.net-abuse.email and consult the "Top 10"
list at The Spamhaus Project. (We recently switched ISPs at one
site because our old ISP was becoming unbearably spam-friendly.)
No, there's not much that can be done to "shut them down for good," but you can make the effect of their spamming as ineffective as possible and make the ISPs that support spammers as unprofitable as possible.SPEWS, by the way (mentioned in the article), is having a tremendous effect on spam-friendly ISPs :-).
Under the computer misuse act in the UK, it could be argued that the spammer, by putting your friends email address in the mail has attempted unauthorised access to his computer.
We should be able to get said spammer extradited and get him five years to try and not drop the soap.
The police will not be keen on this as it hasn't been done before against hackers. Once it has been done in one juristiction, then it can be used by people in other juristictions as a lever on their local police departments to get spammers rounded up and beaten like the dogs they are.
Here is a solution, let them spam themselves, find out about e-mail addresses of the advertising companies, put those email addys into various sources for spam (aka porn mailing lists, opt out lists of doubtable origins etc... ) and let the harvesters find the mail addresses and let them have their load of daily spam!
Here's an interesting idea... it turns out that it's relatively easy to make life difficult for companies that create spam software. Specifically, drive up their cost of business by costing them cash in pay per click search engines. The process is described here:
www.spambattle.com"FTC Names Its Dirty Dozen: 12 Scams Most Likely to Arrive Via Bulk E-mail"
Business Opportunity Scams
Making Money By Sending Bulk E-Mailings
Chain Letters
Work-At-Home Schemes
Health And Diet Scams
Easy Money
Get Something Free
Investment Opportunities
Cable Descrambler Kits
Guaranteed Loans or Credit, On Easy Terms
Credit Repair Scams
Vacation Prize Promotions
It works.
My brother did the exact thing to some businesses that have fucked with him, over money.
& guess what? They stopped fucking with him. Mind you the looping faxes were only a small part of a whole military style operation.
where mail messages are stored on the sender's computer until the recipient retrieves it. This would mean that recipients don't pay for
disk space or bandwidth, senders do, and getting a spammer's account
pulled would result in all their spammed e-mail disappearing.
But good luck getting everyone to adopt a new mail protocol...
......I think most of the companies that get sold on the idea of utilising a spam agency don't make anything out of it either.
They're like popups - no one clicks popups & they annoy the fuck out of everyone, but corporate marketeers assume they work because they assume people wouldn't hire popup agencies unless they do work, so they jump on the bandwagon & sign on with some popup agency too. But I very much doubt that they add to the bottom line the vast majority of the companies paying for the popups. Mind you the agencies might make a bit of dosh out of it.
That's why the bottom fell out of the banner add market - the corporate world relised that on average banner adds just don't add to the bottom line (ie they generally don't increase turnover, turnover of tangable products that is), consequently what many websites get for each banner add is less than 1% of what they were getting just 18 months ago.
Hi,
I'm not SURE about the DMA's email opt out list, but I do know for a fact that their snail mail out out list _IS_ legit!
My wife works for one of the larger junk mail companies out there in names selection, and trust me, the watch that list, and even if you would be "perfect", they pull your name from the mailing! (Ditto if you contact them directly)
They have 4 reasons for this:
1)If you went through the effort to opt out, they KNOW you mean it
2)People who opt out don't buy (see profit motive)
3)It costs quite a bit to do those snail mail mailings, so they don't want to spend money sending mail to folks who won't buy (see #2)
4)The DMA insists on it! The DMA is NOT kidding when they say they will drop members for abusing this
The problem is, most of the fly by nights (and most email spammers are fly by nights compared to the big junk mail houses) don't belong to the DMA, or even care!
I'd bet that if you got spammed by American Family Publishers - the Ed McMahon folks - now out of the sweepstakes business - and asked to be removed, you would be! Ditto a Sears, Lillian Vernon, etc (all large catlog companies). They are used to dealing with opt out, and have procedures to deal with it. It doesn't always work (yes, database cleanups have caused problems, and fines have been issued)
The problem is the scammers and small shops that don't care
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
The US Government should tax domestic spam and put an import duty on foreign spam. Then, the President should offer to pay a finder's fee of 50% of the collected penalties to anyone who helps them catch a spammer who owes back-taxes. Let the same folks who shut down Al Capone can spam.
I don't want the government to bust spammers for me. They don't need to bust spammers. It's a waste of law enforcement's time and money. Why use FedGov to take care of a problem that can be solved simply by banning a particular domain, IP or Email address? Remember this: When you get FedGov involved in something the chances of getting them back out is astronomical at best.
Now, obviously we want them to bust scammers, but scamming has always been illegal. There's nothing special about internet ripoffs. The net just provides scam artists a new communications mode with which to operate. Let FedGov take care of these folks and I'll deal with the Amazon.com book offers by myself.
A common drug/ prostitution strategy is to go after the users. Not that I want to go after people responding to SPAM, but I would be interested in knowing who they are.
One can make an arguement that if no one ever responded to Attack Mail, it would never be sent. But if indeed no one is responding, then that makes the whole "arrest the Johns" arguement used by the police rather weak.
Is anyone else getting bombed by this screensaver email? It's got an attached .scr file, which isn't detected as a virus. I've gotten it 3 times to a Hotmail account I've got, and about 7 times to my regular address. It seems really suspicious, but maybe I'm just paranoid.
Subject is: Melt the Heart of your Valentine with this beautiful Screen saver
And guess where all of the messaged have originated from (so far as I can tell): China. Too bad that firewall doesn't keep all the garbage IN.
Often in Error, Never in Doubt.
They're not that serious about the spam issues.
They are against civil recovery laws in the states.
They do not care about spam unless it's promoting illegal items.
They do NOT want all your spam - if you start forwarding all your spam (especially if you're an ISP) they willo block you.
They want representative samples, however their PR people then say "we get 15k forwarded messages per day" and then neglect to mention that that's only the samples.
My small ISP (1000 users) was getting in excess of 20k pieces of junkmail per day. Most never got past the filters. If the FTC really wanted it, I would forward it - however when asked if they wanted this stuff forwarded, the FTC informed us in no uncertain terms that if we did, we would be firewalled for DoSing them.
I maintain an anti-spam resource for the qmail community, which I will now shamelessly plug: http://www.summersault.com/chris/techno/qmail/qmai l-antispam.html
Trusted certificate authorities generally charge £20 per year for any sort of certificate/service. Anyone trying to use Outlook Express' encryption will find that it costs money.
Most people don't want to pay £20 per year for an electronic signature. That's why they use GPG or PGP. Of course, this is a peer-to-peer system, and has no "central trusted person"
If email required the use of certificates generated by some monopoly company free to charge what they like, many people will confuse these signed certificates with encryption keys, and it could well delay the common adoption of email encryption, which is A Bad Thing (tm)
Of course, if personal certificates "ought to be free", you're welcome to spend your time checking national insurance numbers and postcodes, signing people's certificates, and revoking them each time they get stolen by a spammer.
Anyone has a collection of e-mail addresses of important people from MS, AOL, etc? :-)
Webmasters should use them to be harvested by spammers and get the legislation out for us
Disconnecting a spammers connection won't stop him, he'll just find another one.
I propose that we track down the spammers to where they actually live and follow them KGB style for a few days. When you get an opportunity grab them, tie them up and bring them somewhere secluded.
Here is where it gets fun. Pull out a 9mm with silencer. Proclaim loadly "For crimes against humanity in regards to SPAM I sentence you to death!" Then have them write out a letter which you tell him you will deliver to his family, and that he should right down all of his regrets and last words onto it.
By this point, he will be a crying, blabbering mess. Aim the gun at his head, and pull the trigger. After about a minute, he will realize the gun was empty (or fake). Then tell him that this was a warning. If he SPAMS anyone again, the bullets will be real next time.
Poof! No more spam.
BTW: If you didn't read the entire message BEFORE putting this plan into action, then you probably have a dead SPAMMER lying out in the middle of nowhere with a bullet hole in his head. Either way, this prevents SPAM, but now you are screwed too!
"Most of today's email spam, however, comes from a handful of culprits, described by Barry and others as "known criminals"."
Well I can't speak for anyone else, but the SPAM that lands in my email box every day is largely from large corporations, chain letters (you know the ones that want you to send money to people on a list), and the rest I have no clue about as I can't read Kanji.
I honestly don't mind a bit of SPAM, but what really gets my goat is when they either claim that I asked for it "here are the results of your feedback form" or such like, or they cite some law from some country I don't live in and claim that this gives them the right to send me mail about whatever rubbish they are peddling. And lets face it - if they're intentions are so honourable, why is the return address always a non-existent hotmail/yahoo account? Then there's the "removeal"options - yeah sure I'm gonna go to some web page and type in my email address - so the spammers can know it's a real email address. Some of them even have the cheek to ask for a receipt!
The 3rd most prevalent type of SPAM in my mailbox is the laughable fraud attempts - you know the ones typed in CAPITALS usually puporting to be from some dude (usually in Nigeria) in some country's government who has some scam going whereby he needs your bank details to dump several million dollars US into it. I love those ones - they've been around on paper for donkey's years.
The Herald's reporter must have been out in the sun too long - the world's spam sent by a handful of chavvies - my arse.
Change your MX record of your domain name to point to a mail.domainname.com that points to a A record of 127.0.0.1
No one will be able to mail you anything and your other sub-domains, such as www.domainname.com will still be open, which will allow you to post a message and give your real customers a 2ndary email address to email you at (that doesn't end in @yourdomain.com)
Well, this is where government regulation is necessary.
The Internet is quickly becoming a public resource and should be regulated just the same (well, hopefully better than) other public resources.
Enforcing digital signatures would be a great way to a) fix the spam and trojan abuse while b) maintaining personal privacy.
There are trusted authorities where you can get free private certs, I thought -- doesn't Thawte (hey I made a pun!) give free certs for personal email use?
That doesn't matter anyway because government regulation would (should) provide it for the people for a nominal fee (like they do a driver's license or passport)
mje0w!!!1!
This whole sickening item proves one thing to me: The only thing big business will ever care about is the almighty dollar. Morals and ethics literally fly out the window in the face of big bucks.
I question whether Cisco and it's ilk would have someone killed to make a million bucks? Probably...if they could get away with it!
This article is right above another SlashDot article about Internet censorship. I think it is safe to assume that we all hate spam here. However, if we force these people to be silenced, are we not censoring them as well?
"Jesus saves, but everyone else in a 10 foot radius takes full damage from the fireball."
I have no idea if this would really matter or not, but I look at the headers of the spam I get and the majority are from free email accounts; Yahoo, Hotmail,...
/. collective.
If there were no free email accounts, wouldn't it be harder for spammers to find the accounts to send out the inital emails? Yes, there would still be many mail servers out there to reroute the emails.
But, wouldn't this make it so that the spammers have to get actually ISP accounts to get the email addresses?
I don't know how true this all would be. Just thinking out loud as part of the
hand
The only effective way to combat spam is down at their level. They burn our resources, so we have to burn 'em back.
how fucking hillarious
the number one most exploited mail server in the world with open relay issues remains and always has been sendmail - its been a bug ridden piece of shit and it remains one (new implementations are getting slightly better) and it requires a level of intelligence most users dont have to set up correctly - and most ISP's run on it NOT exchange which is a corporate messaging system.
Stop mindlessly throwing off at MS products, ive met plenty of Furry Critters who can setup linux boxes too - hell ive exploited more than one of them and let me tell you they are a shitload easier to attack.
Any OS that lets you commit suicide with a command isnt much of an OS to start with
A friend of mine was the victim of repeated junk faxes from a telemarketing business. After several failed requests to be removed from their list he resorted to one that actually worked. Yes, he faxed them an entire roll of paper towel. It may have been a computer on the other end (saving them the expense of toner and paper) but it did at least block their telephone line for a significant period of time. He then told them that the next time he received a fax he would tape a sheet of paper into an endless loop and transmit all night long....
A pattern I've noticed the last few months is that I'll go a few hours without getting spam, then 4 or 5 will come in at once (from different IPs and apparent origins), then I'll get nothing for maybe a couple hours. Often there are days when it just kind of comes in one at a time randomly, but then the majority of a day will go by when it's just in groups. The mail server hasn't been down, so it's not from queue scheduling at the last hop. I've started suspecting that there is a small group of spammers who are doing 99% of the "go forth and multiply" orders several times a day on the Internet.
For those of you who are real conspiracy theorists, here's another disquieting thing I've noticed: About a quarter of the time, I seem to get single items or pairs of spam within a minute or two of sending out e-mail-- it doesn't seem to matter who my e-mail is to. I'm still fairly confident that it's just coincidence so far, but...
It sounds like your friend, and people in similar circumstances, really needs to get a Unix mail system. If he's got a Unix account at his ISP, then he can use Procmail or similar preprocessing scripts to trash the mail message before putting it in his mailbox, so he doesn't have to download it over a slow link. Alternatively, since he's using a POP mail client, he should retrieve his mail in a headers-only mode, trash the messages that are obviously spambounce, and limit his full downloading to the real messages. A number of mail clients can do that, or again, if he's running Unix at home, he can hack something if there's nothing that does quite the right job.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yea the spamers are an annoying crew. I think that you should hold the company they are spamming for responsible. Think about it, who is really to gain from a spamer? The company that is selling the product that the spamers are endorsing...
The best way to get anti-spam legislation through congress is to post the email addresses of every senator and congressman (and all of their staff) to as many newsgroups, bulletin boards, etc, as possible. When there offices are completely overwhelmed with the inevitable onslaught of spam, perhaps they will finally do something about it. Only when spam has inflicted enough damage to them personally to offset the $$$ that spammers are lining their pockets with will they be inclined to act.
Spammers also try to spam their critics into submission. Early on, in '94 or '95, I would email spammers directly. This was before they became so "proficient" at hiding their own email address. I got a number of threats from spammers that they would just sign me up for more and more spam if I complained.
I only bring this up because I finally got my first piece of spam that I can track to my email address being harvested from Slashdot. I got a 69,376 byte hunk of crap from one "Daniel Barnard" addressed to "Philbert Desenex", my Slashdot nick. Daniel "Pig Intercourse" Barnard, of 3367 Eastern NE, Grand Rapids, MI, promotes a 5-level pyramid scheme. My guess is that some hairy, rat-molesting spammer harvested email addresses from Slashdot postings in anti-spam follow-ups, and has distributed those addresses as part of some "opt-in" list full of people who really don't want to opt-in.
And yes, email spam is theft plain and simple. Also, email spammers have incestuous relations with pigs. We must punish email spammers.
The protocols in email allow for the sending address to be spoofed, so email can be compleatly anonymous. I don't know if this is a downfall, really. Lots of people get paid to harvest email addresses. I even get spam advertising lists of email addresses (with those of hackers removed). Anybody can run a email server off their mechine. The real way to catch spamers is to find out where they want you to send money (overtly stated in each message) or to which web page they want you to visit. And then you can haxor them or what not.
MAKE YOUR TIME
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