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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.
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If I want their business, I will go to them. Spam me, and you will never, ever, get my money.
I don't even know why spammers bother. Does anyone really fall for 'Have a bigger penis in 3 days' or 'Lose 50 pounds in 23.2 seconds' or any of the other common spams? I mean come on. I would not mind, actually I would WELCOME email advertising if it was only for things that I could use. I like working on cars, computers etc.. so if I were to recieve advertising based on those things,that actually came from a trackable source, with a reliable way of removing oneself from the list, I actually might be HAPPY about it, since I could find out about new products and places with good prices on them. Mass-email marketing COULD work, if anyone could actually trust the vendors, but of course we all know that we can't. I'd like to see legitimate vendors joining us in the anti-spam war, it could only be a positive for them. As it stands now, if I even WANT a product, I won't buy it if it comes as spam. Take the x-10 camera for example. I'd love one of those. I could think of 1000 things to do with it, and that doesnt even include the sneaky, spying on the 18yr old girl next door type ones. But guess what? I'll never, ever do business with them because of their aggressive, intrusive advertising methods.
Don't Tread on Me
I tend to agree that we probably don't need new laws. Laws already exist that can cover alot of the Internet sewage.
I think a set of bylaws should have been set forth quite some time ago. Bylaws to ban things such as spamming, massive pop-ups, etc. These bylawas could be set forth by a governing body(IETF maybe). If someone/something violated these bylaws then appropriate action could be taken.(account termination, blacklist, etc)
The Internet should be self regulating in itself and laws should be left for crimes in general regardless of the methods used to commit them.
just my 2 cents
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
An interesting thought came to me as to why I hate spam so much. It isn't just because there is too much spam, or it is annoying, or etc..
It's because they never, ever have sold a product that doesn't look like a scam, or porn to me. Every single spam I have gotten in my 7+ years on the internet has been for penis enlargers, aphrodisiacs, etc. It's like the snake-oil dealers of old have found a new home on the internet.
If I got coupons to the stores I frequent (or are in my area), or just adverts for legitimate, registered, good companies about products I might consider. It wouldn't bother me as much. But it's the fact that the spam I receive is pure, unadulterated, useless crap which explains why I hate spam so much, and don't feel too bad about junk mail I receive by post.
Just my thoughts on the issue.
~ kjrose
Because they fool around with the headers, that "remove and unsubscribe" email you sent goes nowhere. Unless of course your script is digging down into the body for the "real" email - but then in the spam I get it's mostly phone numbers "A Degree in 1 Day!" etc.
I'm surprised you haven't noticed the bounces in your inbox "User Doesn't Exist" etc.
Nice try, wish it worked for more than a small percentage of spam, but it won't. It may even _increase_ the amount of spam you get, as it verifies your address is "live".
Let's take a secomd and evaluate our "Mr. Roth," and determine if he is adding or subtracting value from the network.
.*@.*aol.com".
Martin Roth aka lumbercartel@hotmail.com
Martin Roth aims to solve the spam problem by educating spammers about proper e-mail marketing practices. But to educate them, he first has to find them.
Well, that sounds like a plan.
With practiced ease, Roth launches software tools with names such as "SpamCop," "SpamKiller" and "Sam Spade." These, along with multiple online accounts, help Roth comb through the junk e-mail pile for clues to the spammers' identity.
It's embarassing to use these tools because of the raw number of false positives they generate. Of course, for click and drool "d00dz, d3l3t3 yur spammer NOW!" people like Roth, that's a-ok. Of course, let's note that he belongs to a group that calls itself "Spam Wranglers Action Team," which by naming itself something stupid has demonstrated idocy.
But others, such as spam messages that appear to have been sent by an Internet newcomer, may present a better opportunity. A rookie spammer may fail to disguise headers and return addresses, create an amateurish sales pitch or promote a common multilevel marketing scheme.
So, go after new spammers because it's easy? Well, I guess they are easier to convince to change their ways, but if he really wanted to stop spam he'd be going after the mega-houses.
"Here's a guy maybe you can educate," Roth said, pointing to one such message among the scores before him.
What kind of education do you think this guy is going to get?
With that information in hand, Roth then reports the abuse and asks that the spammer be cut off. Many Internet providers will comply, since the sending of spam is usually prohibited by their own user policies. Providers that don't comply could face the prospect of being added to the blacklist of companies that support spamming.
Oh, that's some quality education there, sir.
As he speaks, Roth's computer erupts with the sound of gunfire once more. Roth
smiles broadly.
"Got another one," he said.
And that, my friends, is why these people do it. Because they enjoy the feeling of power that cutting people off the net gives them. They are like petty IRC dictators, typing "/kill
Martin Roth is doing nothing to help the spam problem, and he is a poor choice of people to profile. Martin Roth is yet anoter Maryanne Kehoe
I'm the best IRC client ever.
get maybe five spam messages a week, as opposed to the more than 100 per day!
No. You still get 100+ per day. You just don't see them in your mailbox. But the bandwidth and storage space have already been eaten, and that's really what's evil about spam.
I'm all for programs like Spamassassin, blackballing systems (run right), etc. But they put a thin veneer over the real problem - that boatloads of bandwidth and storage space is being sucked up by noise -- the vast majority of people don't want this stuff, and the cost of transporting it is being passed directly on to the consumer.
What, you think you don't pay for it? Has your internet service increased in price recently? Has the level of service on it remained the same for the past 3 years? Still able to download/upload stuff at the same rates you could 3 years ago?
I really, really hate to say it, but I'm increasingly convinced that the only way to stop spam is to do so through the legal system. The vast majority of spammers are within the US - either they source the mail from the US or they are US citizens using foreign resources. In either case prosecution under either current anti-fraud laws or (ick) new anti-spam laws could seriously reduce the flood of spam.
Yes, it would probably take some international cooperation on the legal front. But there's a helluva lot more of that then there is on the technical front. Sure, technical solutions (refusal of service, leaf node filtering, etc.) work in theory. In reality they've failed. Miserably.
Seeing the NY AG sue Monsterhut for fraud and violations of consumer rights statutes makes me happy. And I sincerely hope that it's just the tip of the iceberg on that kind of case.
Don't just delete it. Everybody deletes it and it does no one any good. LART it (read: report)! If you take a few minutes to look into the headers of the spam you'll find a wealth of information. Was the message sent through an open relay, was the message sent through a vulnerable formmail.cgi, was it a proxy, where the message actually originated from (usually but not always), etc.. Looking into the body of the message usually gives you links to the people that advertised through the spammers. LART everyone and send a copy to uce@ftc.gov. Report the open relays to the various DNS blacklist maintainers. Report repeat offenders to their upstream. Report the stock scams to the SEC. Report the penis enlargement pills to the FDA. Report the Nigerian Money scams to the Secret Service. Don't through the message away. Take a few minutes and do something with it. At the very least forward it to the FTC's dropbox. At the very least.
For what values of sense are we talking about? Take a look at GoogleGroups search of news.admin.net-abuse.sightings, and let me know how to your legitimate mystery shopper offer from all the others: URL from Hell Quite a lot of it, isn't there?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
You broke one of the most rudimentary anti-spam rules. By repsonding to the 'remove-me' link you are telling them that they sent a message to a real address of someone who opens and reads spam. That increases the value of your address by an order of magnitude. Instead, try responding with SpamCop and get them shut down.
I hear this 'advice' a lot, but I've always been slightly skeptical about it.
Most spam I get these days is HTML phone-home style. As soon as I read it, it's off requesting images from somewhere. It's pretty easy to customise each spam so it is identifiable to the image server. So, effectively, the bastards know I have read it anyway (well, I never actually read it, but...). Unless you turn off all of that HTML shit, which is sort of a good idea, but it is sort of giving in to the spammers.
The other reason I am skeptical is... Since when did spammers care if the address is valid or not? They are still going to spam it either way. As for selling it on, do you think they are that trustworthy? "All of these addresses are valid, honest! Would I lie to you?" And the idiots that buy the addresses... They don't care either, they are just sending spam to all of them, who cares if some of the addresses don't work?
If anything, the spammers should welcome remove requests, because that means one more anti-spammer off their backs. So, of course, if you are an anti-spammer, you should be attacking the cause of the problem, not the symptoms... So I agree that it's not worth clicking on unsubscribe links, but not for the reasons you (and many others) give.
No. You still get 100+ per day. You just don't see them in your mailbox. But the bandwidth and storage space have already been eaten, and that's really what's evil about spam.
Excellent point.
I really, really hate to say it, but I'm increasingly convinced that the only way to stop spam is to do so through the legal system.
Ironically, though, anti-spam measures only serve to hide the problem from the general public! Anti-spam measures keep your average internet user from getting so pissed off that they'll vote for politicians who promote legislation that would alleviate the problem.
I hate to say it, but the biggest problem with getting enough critical mass to force legislation through is the anti-spam community that is hiding the true magnitude of the problem from your average voter.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?