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SpamNet: Razor for the Masses
UCRowerG writes "From CNET News on Yahoo!: "Conceived by Napster co-founder Jordan Ritter and open-source developer Vipul Ved Prakash, the company is touting the benefits of democracy, networking and collaboration in the war against unscrupulous e-mail marketers." " Since Prakesh is
responsible for Razor, hopefully there will be Linux support as well, but
once again I gotta throw my props at Spamassassin which catches over a hundred
spam for me each day.
Kill 'em all. I hate SPAM.
...which catches over a hundred spam for me each day.
Is the plural of "spam" really "spam"?
Just as a curiousity, are these signatures just checksums, or are they a more complex algorithm?
I would be interested to learn how these signatures are generated. Since if they are checksums, it will be reasonably easy to defeat (just change one letter in each e-mail message), but if they are something more complex it might become more difficult.
As well, it might prevent good mail from coming through if these signatures are too simple.
Anyone know details at all?
~ kjrose
what if they got into the system and overloaded it while still small so as to promote their own links and to discredit the project? Just a wild thought, not that they would ever be that organized.
I am thinking of the recent Google ranking wars, for example.
for most folks using it, it would be enough to put them off their feed if the spammers polluted the data pool early and strongly enough. Presuming that the average user was not an expert user.
I see this as part of a larger problem of people pushing competing viewpoints on the web.
Alledged nasty group "A" against alledged heroic group "B" - gets messy when things like politics and religion get involved.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
My e-mail is currently hosted at SpamCop, who do a pretty good job of filtering out spam before it even reaches my mailbox. They shunt spam into a seperate folder using the excellent SpamCop blacklist, and can also optionally use additional blacklists including SPEWS, Osirusoft, ORDB, Spamhaus, Monkeys.com, etc. etc.
Combine that with POP3, IMAP, and web access, and also the ability to suck mail out of existing POP3 accounts and I think it's excellent value.
No, they're not paying me to say all that, I'm just an extremely happy customer. :)
This would be a welcome feature addition for Evolution.
Are client-side spam filters a good idea any more? It seems to me
that if I have to reject spam at the client end, the damage has already
been done, in that I have already paid for the spam coming through
the network.
Lately I've started actively finding the source of the spam and
alerting the postmaster that their server has been cracked. Am I
wasting my time, or should I just be deleting the stuff without
worrying about it?
Now for a commercial. Craig Hughes has formed a company to bring spamassassin to outlook users . And I'm setting up a hotmail like service at spamassassin.net to help users that don't have the time or ability to setup spamassassin themselves.
We implemented Spamassassin at our ISP and people actually called up complaining that they were not receiving their junk mail (yes, they wanted it).
So we took down the system-wide implementation and now protect domains and users on a customer-by-customer basis (when they ask for it).
Makes me wonder if some sick individuals out there love getting telemarketing calls? Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
Can Razor really avoid this? (I'll submit the email using different accounts if razor asks for more than one submission; I'll setup the accounts to bounce all spamassassin-filtered email to razor too, so that Razor thinks the accounts are serious spam-cops).
Or am I missing something?
There is another option. If you get your email from a POP3 mail server (chances are that you do, unless you use web-based email), try the Spam Tamer Proxy.
1. It will let all the spam through, but it will eliminate pictures, pop-up windows, web bugs, and other garbage. That makes the spam easier on you and your bandwidth.
2. It will never block legitimate mail. Pictures sent as attachments make it through. (Friends and family send pictures as attachments, but spammers never do.)
3. It doesn't confuse people who send you legitmate email.
So, it's not the same as a spam blocker, but if conventional filtering isn't the right choice for you, I suggest you give it a try.
The single best thing all of us who know how to run traceroute and whois can do is LART THE ISPS THAT HOST SPAMMERS!
I've been forwarding every spam I get that come from a Verio hosted site, or spamvertises a site hosted on Verio to Verio and their parent company, NTT. I'm using bitch-list.net to do so, since they have a bazillion email addresses for Verio. I make sure the email has the spam attached, and since Verio has claimed the cannot read attachments (***cough***BULLSHIT****cough***) I also paste the mail headers into the message, along with a WHOIS and traceroute showing it to be a Verio customer. When they complain, I tell them "MY message isn't spam - your customer contacted me, so a prior business relationship exists. You want it stopped, stop the spammer."
I won't say it is working, but if 10% of everybody who got these spams did as I do, then Verio's help desks would be so clogged that they couldn't HELP but see the damage on the bottom line.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I took a look at spamassassin a few months ago and also thought it looked like a great package.
However, it makes the assumption that the UNIX box it is running on is the final destination for the mail it tags.
My frustration is that I have postfix running on my Internet mail gateway, sending mail internally to our MS Exchange server. This is the Way of the Corporate World, and no amount of bitching and moaning will change it. It's nice to have postfix on the outside; I trust it. But Outlook/Exchange is the way I, my users, and most companies interface with email.
However, I've yet to find a good way to have spamassassin tag the mail on the way through the postfix server. Sounds relatively trivial, but nothing that was out there when I last looked was simple to configure or reliable.
This has *got* to be a common situation for many of us. Is there a Good Solution yet for those of us who'd love to use spamassassin but can't run it on the final mail server?
Apparently, whoever needs volume to achieve something goes the Microsoft way; in this case, Outlook users. The quickest way to achieve the critical mass required for their system to work would be to have an agreement with Hotmail, which is already probably using this technology and is self-sufficient for the task, given the volume they deal with.
Now, why do I still get spam in my hotmail box, and why does it always come from the same sources? Do they keep their eyes closed for some specific UCE suppliers?
have you been defaced today?