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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?"
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?
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.
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.
What you can do:
Go to war!
Sue!
And win!
or...
Join them!
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.)
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"?
They also post an article about spam every other day. This article had nothing new at all, but they posted it anyway.
- Have a picture
>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
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.
This isn't a good idea because it fosters meta-spam. The spammer can say "Look at all these responses I'm getting from my bulk emails!" and sell CDs of email addresses to people.
I get spam to email addresses that I have NEVER posted ANYWHERE. My ISP owns multiple domains, email sent to my name @ any of those domains comes to me. They take the domain name, combine it with a list of names, and spam the list. Some of them will be real addresses, some not. Often I get the same spam 2 or 3 times, sent to different addresses (but delivered to the same mailbox).
I used a spam bouncing program for a while to generate fake 'undeliverable' messages, and that helped a little bit. I stopped a few months ago, and it's starting to build up again.
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
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.
This is where I gloat a wee bit about living in the UK. We have a lovely service called the Telephone Preference Service. Anyone making unsolicited commercial calls must cleanse their lists against the TPS list, or be guilty of a criminal offence.
Since registering a year ago, we've maybe had five calls, all of whom hang up really quickly once you start asking them for their details to report them to the TPS.
The only thing you can accurately describe as "Scotch" is a sticky tape made by 3M. And it's
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."
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.
Only when spamming gets to a puppet master
It has.. Most consider e-mail as a useless novelty and refuse to use it as a total waste of time. They never see spam anymore. Don't believe me? E-mail someone and see if you get an inteligent response. Maybe, just maybe you will get some sort of generic reply from a flunkie in the office, but you won't get your congressman. I know I tried and only got bounced mail back. Box was full for several weeks. (David Woo from Oregon) I quit trying.
The truth shall set you free!
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.
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).
--
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..
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 :-).
"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.
It's already being done. If you're interested, run one yourself -- every spam message trapped by a honeypot is a spam message that doesn't get to its recipients. Brad Madison runs one on a university VAX machine and Michael Tokarev runs one in Russia. Both are fairly heavily trafficed by spammers.
See Brad's page Fighting Relay Spam for more information on running your own SMTP relay honeypot.
See posts like this one to see that these honeypots are working.
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
ROKSO is your friend.
Poke around groups.google.com in news.admin.net-abuse.email.sightings or news.admin.net-abuse.email to find out who your pet spammer is. Learn.
Punch your pet spammer's name into ROKSO. Learn more.
Many of these individuals have prior convictions for fraud. Some may still be on probation. Why the FTC has ignored them for so long is utterly beyond me.
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
Prison rapes are not rare. During a legislative internship in college I toured a maximum security prison. The head doctor of the prison said they sew up about 3-4 rectums every month, presumably from people raped badly enough to require stitches. Ouch.
And lets question the idea of consent. If I tell you you have a choice between being sodomized or beat to shit, how long until you "consent"? At least if you consent, you may get a chance to smear some lotion on to prevent a trip to the infirmary.
"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.
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
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Loneliness is a power that we possess to give or take away forever