Slashdot Mirror
Anti-Spammers Wage E-War
ncstockguy writes "To its credit the Hartford Courant followed up with a second article this time from the perspective of an anti-spammer." The first story was about the life and times of a spam king.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Until this war against spammers is won, I will continue to use Mailwasher.
Spamassassin
Okay, so that's more like 6 words, but still it's great. A guy I work with turned me onto it and I love it. And adding a `spamassassin -r` in my procmailrc for known_spam gives me the feeling that I'm actually doing my part in preventing SPAM.
Click here or here.
Ahhh! That's the worst thing to do. All of the ones that DON'T come back undeliverable now know your email address is being checked and read. Not only are you telling them to send out more stuff to you, but they can sell your address to others for a greater amount of money. Never ever ask to unsubscribe. It's better to just right a filter that deletes it immediately.
sin(6cos(r)+5A)
Several ISPs, such as Verio, UUNET, Qwest, etc. host many spammers, and are willfully ignorant WRT the activities of the spammers - they do a fine Sgt. Schultz "I know NOTHING, NOTHING" when confronted with the evidence.
First, I suggest EVERYBODY use Spamcop or a similar reporting service when the get SPAM (disclaimer - I am in no way associated with SC other than using their free reporting service).
Second, if you get a spam from a server hosted by one of these ISPs, you use www.bitch-list.net to turn the crapflood back on the ISP - make it cost them more in support calls than the spammer is paying them.
Third, if any of you HAVE servers hosted by these ISPs and you ever get shut down for TOS violations, you sue the ISP, claiming discrimination - "They didn't TOS these spammers, why are the TOSing me?"
Make it cost the ISPs more to host the spammers than the spammers pay, and they will drop the spammers. Remember, both Verio and Worldcom/UUNET are hurting for money right now - pink contracts must look pretty good to them ("See, the spammers will pay DOUBLE for bandwidth!"). Turn the pink contracts into red ink, and they will cease.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Make sure that you either (a) Don't use Outlook Express, (b) failing that, TURN OFF PREVIEW, and only look at strange emails with Properties/Details/Message Source.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Indeed this sounds like a noble and fair approach, but it's much more of an ideal-typical fantasy; one of the big problem of the so-called "opt-in" lists is that once you are on one, you can never get off; largely because the "companies" (read: spammers) that gather these addresses, sell them to others. This is why they do it in the first place.
I still suffer from mistakes of four years ago, wherein I foolishly opted into some technology-related mailing lists, hoping I might find some valuable information in this way. Though I long ago removed myself from the original source, my address lives on in the second, third and nth generations of sold addresses. I still receive upwards of 200+ spams a day.... it's at the point where I have often lost real messages because it's buried in a sea of UCE. I have filters set up which catch approximately 2/3 of the spam, but I still must filter through some 50+ pieces of crap twice a day just to see if I've received an email from an old friend.
I'm finding it's actually easier to filter the real mail into separate folders than to filter out the spam!
I can't believe it's not lard!
Did a Google search for "spamjamr", an anti-spammer group or individual listed in the story and was directed to an Angelfire member site. Of course Angelfire member sites contain the one thing that rivals spam in annoyance levels -- multiple pop-up windows.
It's actually quite a long time ago (little over a year I think)
h tml
The spam company they used was recently in a legal battle with dutch internet provider xs4all about wether or not the spammer was allowed to send spam to xs4all members (spammer lost) But I can't remember the name of the spam company and I can't find anything english (or dutch) right now. I'll look into it and post here this evening.
right... I'm back (co workers know everything)
the paper was called NRC (www.nrc.nl, dutch)
spam company was called abfab (www.abfab.nl I guess) Turns out it happened around the 20th of october 2001.
this is the only link in English I can find right now
http://www.xs4all.nl/uk/news/overview/abfab.
a search on google.nl for nrc spam returns a few usefull links but they're all in dutch.
If you are planning on doing something illegal YOU DONT BROADCAST IT TO THE PUBLIC! Dipshit!
If you want to feel frustrated, ignored, and almost powerless, try fighting spam...
... ineffectively. If you want to actually have an effect and contribute to the Internet community, then do something effective.
Shutting down spammers is a small part of being effective. You want to make a tiny effort to shut them down, because it will help a bit. It won't help much against the big spammers who use Chinese or Korean servers to send their spam, but it'll help a bit. But don't waste your time at it. Find some automated tool to send off the reports. I use Spamcop, because it's dead easy; I imagine lots of Spamcop complaints get ignored, but you need to put so little effort into them, that it's no big loss.
The big advantage of using Spamcop to complain is that it improves the Spamcop blacklist. Sites that originate spam are blacklisted when sufficient traffic from them over the last week is reported as spam. Other sites can use the Spamcop blacklist as an indicator that an email is coming from a recent spam source, and block it (or use this information in a scoring scheme to help decide whether to block).
You can also sign up with Spamcop for email filtering. I'd estimate that it catches about 95% of incoming spam, with a very low (0.01%, maybe) false positive rate. For me, this is sufficient: I get just 2 or 3 spams per week. Others may want more powerful filters.
There are other community efforts to build spam filters, such as Vipul's Razor and SpamAssassin.
Contribute to any of these, and you'll have a big effect on your own spam load. Publicize them, and you'll get more systems to incorporate them into their mail servers, making spam less of a problem on every system.
I have been using SPAMCOP to report SPAM. You can sign up (free) and then start reporting the spam you receive.
Advantage is that you don't have to do all the traceroutes etc yourself; they check the headers, report to appropriate admin accounts, abuse accounts etc.
There is even a tiny 'plugin thing' for MS Outlook that is really nice; plugs all relevant info into an email or to the clipboard.
Highly recommended!
It provides (among other things):
DeanT