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Spam Increases Make Things Tough For Companies
dosten sent us a link to a story running
on Cnet about the spam epidemic. My favorite stat is that by 2006, we'll be getting 1400 spam
a year. Of course, I already get that every week. Talks about
foreign spam relays, block lists, and so on. Decent piece explaining
a huge problem that's only getting worse.
The biggest offender for me? Resume bots. I post my resume to see if people are hiring, and I get 12 messages a day from OTHER resume posting sites trying to get me to go there and post again.
If they're smart enough to grab my email addy, why can't they harvest my resume too and leave me alone?
-skip
I recently sent a reply to a spam I recieved demanding $110 for my troubles. Maybe if everyone starts taking legal action against spammers, they'll get a clue, and stop bombarding us with this junk.
First "My favorite stat is that by 2006, we'll be getting 1400 spam a day." You KNOW that's not going to happen, and define we?? This is a very POOR appeal to statistics! Like you said, you get that in a week. So how many do I get in a week? Probably 2 pieces of spam, TOTAL. I definitely don't average one a day. Why? I don't know, I have a few email addresses, I just don't do stupid things with them! It's also why I barely get any junkmail in the real mail system!
Here is, what I believe to be, a better approach to fighting SPAM: Tagged Message Delivery Agent(TMDA)
--It's Pimptastic!--
Find your lawmakers home emails - city council, county council, city prosecuting attorney,state reps, governor, state attorney general, federal delegations ...
And change your settings to "reply to" the spamsters that send you spam with their info.
They'll fix it fast if it affects them. That's why we have some of our state's laws about credit reports - it directly affected my senator's daughter (he's retired from the senate now).
Nothing like making it personal.
[note - I am not advising you do this - just pointing out what will happen if some people did this - caveat emptor]
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--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
I noticed a massive increase in the amount of spam that I was getting. Fortunately I am running my own FreeBSD server for mail and I simply updated access lists for the frequent offenders. That blocked some, but I was still getting a great deal of mail coming in.
Finally I was told that I can identify countries by their IP block. Now that I block Korea, Russia and other countries I am not back down to my normal daily allowance of 2 pieces of spam a day.
I also have a spam blocking strategy others may want to use. Since I run my own domain I create an alias for every website which wants me to register. For example, here I have an alias for slashdot@offwhite.net which is posted along with my comments. I also have one for cdnow.com@offwhite.net, cnn.com@offwhite.net, etc. When I sign up for a newsletter or post comments I will know where the incoming spam originated. Unfortunately I found that my slashdot alias was the culprit for much of the mail. Spammers are obviously scraping this site.
After I put my spam blocking lists in place, in addition to the normal RBL features you can do with spam I am block tons of mail for me and all the users on my server. And in a single day the daily report that FreeBSD sends out shows that I blocked 111 pieces of mail just for my offwhite.net domain.
Perhaps eventually I can release some of these offending domains from my access/blocking list, but for now I am simply returning an obscure message that the user was not found. It is my hope that they simply remove my name from their lists. One can only hope.
Brennan Stehling - http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/
We are trying to cling to a system not designed with spammers in mind.
Instead of trying to make it illegal to send spam [which is not going to stop it anyways] why not just invent whole new protocols?
Primarily I'd add a hashcash payment system. Where in order for you to send me a message [that I would eventually see] you *must* do some work [e.g. find an N-bit collision].
The idea is simple and if implemented correctly will be a huge deterrent to sending spam. Specially if it takes you 2 seconds or so to prepare the email!
I think as a project I will implement a trivial version of this over TCP. In reality though it would be nice to see real professionals tackle something like this.
Face it SMTP is outdated and wholly inappropriate!
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
This has been mentioned before (but I'm too lazy to search for the artcile), but blacklists aren't the answer. As inconvenient as it sounds, whitelists are the way to go. If your e-mail address isn't on the whitelist, your message doesn't get delivered. When a message is received that isn't on the whitelist, an automated message is sent to the sender informing them that they can be added to the whitelist by replying to this e-mail with a provided hash/password. Once they reply to the notification e-mail, they are whitelisted and their original message is delivered. Anyone who wanted to maintain a whitelist could do so, those who didn't want to bother with it could deal with the spam.
And this goes beyond just making rules or blocking all spam - after all, I do want to know about the $120 round trip ticket offers for Myrtle Beach or the discounted digicam at ThinkGeek.
The AI can work the same way Tivo does in being sensitive to the kind of email you prefer to get and maybe even smart enough to unsubscribe you from lists that you don't want to belong to or to reply to emails in your place.
Give it a voice recognition program and it can be your phone receptionist, too.
Fight Spammers!
So long as AOL is giving out those "Free hours!" CDs, spam will never be too expensive to send.
Until all ISPs start charging 'clean up' fees for spam offenses, there's really no big incentive to keep folks from ever spamming. Sure, they'll lose their account that sent the spam, but the damage has already been done.
I think the spammers realize this as well. I'm getting more and more spam that tells me to call a phone number or write to some physical address for more information. This way, even if they lose their mail account (and they WILL lose it) there's still a chance one or two suckers will contact them.
This means even if they only make $1 from a spam run, that's all profit. Is it any wonder there's so much spam?
That's why spammers need to be fined by their ISP for deleting their account. If nothing else, it'll raise the price of spamming.
Yes, there are folks who keep rather detailed records of how much spam they receive.
Check google groups for news.admin.net-abuse.email for "spam stats" and you should find some information from various users. Of course, their amounts may be inflated, but the general trend is clear - the amount of spam is increasing quickly.
It is estimated that by this June, more spam will have been sent this year than ALL OF LAST YEAR. That's over 100% growth.
From what I'm seeing, this estimate is dead on target so far... I used to get ~10-20 a day. Now I'm getting 30-40+. Over half are blocked by my filters, but still, 20 spams at 10Kbyte each is a lot of email traffic that simply gets deleted.
I completely agree with this. The responses to SPAM are still coming from people who are relatively new to the Internet (say my Mom). Once Mom gets the idea that SPAM is crap she'll stop paying attention to it (she already has really... it doesn't take long). So it won't be long before the click rates fall through the floor... right now it's just the suckers (and there are a lot of 'em... but the number isn't infinite.)
And the ISPs are going to start lobbying congress soon because of all the zillions they're spending on bandwidth. Spamming is a 2002 problem at best, by 2004 I think it'll be taken care of. Seriously. Lawmakers get as much SPAM or more then we do and they're sick of it too.
As an aside, I feel like the parent when I have to say to Mom things like, "HOW many times have I told you not to respond to emails from strangers?!? Don't come running to me when you get a virus on your computer that erases everything and drains your bank account dry."
-Russ
Me
As a matter of fact, it is the most effective form of advertising.
Not in my house. I especially like the ads for pool cleaning, lawn care, and driveway repaving as I live in a condo. I taught my wife how to spot spam quickly in her Yahoo! inbox and luckily its carried over to our postal mail to. All our junk mail is a huge pain in the aishe and huge waste of time.
Intelligent Life on Earth