Firm Pays 6.5 Million for Fax Spamming

Geopoliticus writes "This article over at the Chicago Tribune tells of a car dealership in St. Louis that will pay up to 6.5 million to people it sent junk faxes to. Now, if we could just get this kind of settlement for all the crap in my inbox I could stay unemployed forever." If I got a quarter for each piece of junkmail in my inbox, it would cover having a pizza delivered to my house every day, and still have enough left over to get a few comics to read each day while I ate!

Comments

www.junkfax.org

[Lancer]

See junkfax.org if you want in-depth info on how to get junk faxers to pay you as well :)

Well then ...

[Magus311X]

If I got a quarter for each piece of junkmail in my inbox, it would cover having a pizza delivered to my house every day, and still have enough left over to get a few comics to read each day while I ate!

Still to figure out sendmail.cf, Rob?

----

Registration required

[Ali Jenab]

So use this login to read the story:

user: 578929835
pass: 578929835

fishing for spam?

[CrazyDwarf]

If there was a precedent set for email spammers to have to pay, would you then go put your email address everywhere fishing for spam to get paid for?

At least with a fax number, it's not as easy to get spammed.

Fax prank

[SpelledBackwards]

Not quite fax spamming, but my brother read about a great way to get back at someone through their fax machine, especially if they have one of those machines with rolled paper, not individual sheets. Wait until night when the fax machine is unattended. Take about 4 sheets of paper (with lots of black on it if you're feeling particularly evil) and tape them together seamlessly. Insert it into your fax machine, and begin sending. As the first sheet comes through, tape it to the last sheet (which hasn't been fed in yet,) creating an endless loop that keeps cycling through like a multiple page fax. When the person comes to their fax machine the next morning, his toner and paper will have been all used up.

Re:Fax prank

[arivanov]

Even better, if it is one of the old thermal print faxes printing a roll of black paper can irreversibly damage it. Unfortunately on modern ink ones you just waste all the ink.

Re:Fax prank

[phalse phace]

Yeah, I read about this too. It was in an issue (can't remember which one) of Maxim magazine.

Re:Fax prank

[NanoGator]

If you wanted to be really bad, place your cat on a scanner and grab an image of it. Then, print that image so that it's life size on a laser printer. (color might be detectable..) Then, fax that through. If it works, you might be able to convince somebody you tried to fax your cat to them. ;)

(yes, I was inspired by Gary Larson.)

Re:Fax prank

[indiigo]

except most fax machines have a limit to their memory capacity, so this will work for maybe 10-20 minutes, at best?

Re:Fax prank

[gosand]

Take about 4 sheets of paper (with lots of black on it if you're feeling particularly evil) and tape them together seamlessly. Insert it into your fax machine, and begin sending. As the first sheet comes through, tape it to the last sheet (which hasn't been fed in yet,) creating an endless loop that keeps cycling through like a multiple page fax.

I used to work for a company that created a fax-over-IP server with inboxes and the whole deal. I was in QA, and that was actually one of our tests. We dubbed it the "mobius fax".

Although we created a service, our customers often used it for fax spamming because you could build distribution lists. Of course, distro lists were valid too, like sending a fax to everyone in a company. It was a pretty cool service, and we actually used it. Everyone had an account, and faxes would be queued up in your inbox, which could be delivered to your email account. You could also "print to fax machine" from any Windows app, which was nice too. When our investors pulled out due to the dot-com crash, Net2Phone bought up all our assets.

I know this service exists out there, but this was a couple of years ago, and the company started about 9 years ago before email came along and hammered the business of faxing.

Re:Fax prank

[Andrewkov]

I'm sure any serious fax spammer would be using computers to send their faxes, not old fashioned rolled-paper fax machines.

Re:Fax prank

[Cutriss]

So, that'd be recursive cat'ing, wouldn't it? :)

On the other hand, you could always recursively "cat tail"...

Re:Fax prank

[AntiNorm]

Don't even bother scanning your cat!

Hmmm...exacting revenge on junk faxers...might there actually be a good use for the goatse picture here?

Re:Fax prank

[chrisos]

About 10 years ago, my then boss was at a client site in Oz, when he ran into some config troubles with the software he was setting up.

He called me in the UK, and asked me to photocopy the whole manual (he needed about 4 pages! (yes, my boss was an arse)) and fax it to the hotel he was staying at.

Unfortunately, the manual was A6 and the paper was A4, so even copying two pages at a time, only half the page had text on it.

As I'm lazy (to say the least) I couldn't be bothered to close the photocopier between each photocopy (I'm a software engineer, not a photcopy boy). The end result was that half of the paper was pitch black, the other half had two small pages of text, with a lovely thick black border.

So with my 100 or so pages of paper, I set off to the fax machine, dialed the number for the hotel in Oz and started feeding in the pages one by one (back in the days before page feeders :)).

About 3/4 of the way through, the line was dropped and I couldn't get another connection. So I tried calling the reception desk at the hotel and there was no answer. I got bored trying and went home for the night.

The next day, I called the hotel and got my boss on the phone to see if he needed the rest of the manual.

Apparently, the reason for the line being dropped, was that the fax machine in Oz had burst into flames (remmember all those black borders & boxes?) due to it being a thermal printer and doing lots of black bits.

And the reason that I couldn't get through to the night porter on the reception desk at the hotel?

Well that would have been because the entire hotel was evacuated at 5AM.

Oh how I laughed.

I felt that it was poetic justice at all the photocopying and faxing done, when only 4 pages where required.

Apologies to any others staing at the hotel at the time :)

It IS getting out of hand

[IronTek]

Well, scratch that, it's been out of hand...I get many, many more junk emails to my inbox every day than legitimate emails...and I'm getting sick of it. Unfortunately, the email address is the one I've been using for years. This creates a dual problem. On one hand, everyone has it, so it would be a pain to tell everyone I've changed it. But also, since I've been using it for so long (6 years at least) it's been exposed to every single spammer on the planet.

What I want to know is where the hell are the lawmakers and the courts on this one? The senate's too busy going outside to say the pledge...get the hell back in the building and vote on some anti-spam laws!

Also, in an election year (such as this one...hey!), I'm still surprised an enterprising poltician hasn't brought this up in tech-heavy districts...I'd go out and vote if someone running for congress would at least make it sort of an issue...just give me something!

Re:It IS getting out of hand

[Anonymous Coward]

Same problem here: 60 junkmails a day. But I don't want lawyers to "fix" it for me. I'd rather delete them one by one (if we can't come up with a better solution) before I ask for people who don't know what they're dealing with to regulate email. What we need instead is a simple, scalable and unforgeable way of identifying the sender of an email. Anonymous mail should still be possible, but anybody can then decide if he wants to receive it or not.

Re:It IS getting out of hand

[silentbozo]

I dunno. Why don't you post your e-mail to slashdot, and we can find out... :)

To be fair, my addresses range from 6 to 8 years old. The oldest (my academic account) gets no spam, except a few scattered pieces from punk-ass morons in Hong Kong. My business address (about 6 yrs old) gets spam on a constant basis, so much so that I had to install SpamAssassin just to find and read my business e-mails!

Re:It IS getting out of hand

[Kallahar]

get spamassassin, catches 99% of the spam, and I've never had a false positive.

Travis

Re:It IS getting out of hand

[Cato]

You can run it on some webhosts that have a decent email setup, e.g. Dreamhost, who are pretty good for both web and email hosting. See http://donkin.org/bin/view/Main/SpamAssassin for some setup tips for Dreamhost. I can now get de-spammed email via a browser or via IMAP4 to Mozilla, mutt, Palm or mobile phone :-)

Re:It IS getting out of hand

[inkfox]

I dunno. Why don't you post your e-mail to slashdot, and we can find out... :)

I'll take you up on that one... I've setup uce@in-site.com.au to see how much spam a slashdot post can generate. I'll keep you updated...

That's not likely as effective as putting it in your user profile so it appears with every message you write.

For example, I've got my email address above, and I get well over a hundred pieces of spam a day. SpamAssassin tackles most of those, but I still have to tackle several per day.

Re:It IS getting out of hand

[Kallahar]

all free, linux only, spamassassin.org

Travis

Re:It IS getting out of hand

[Moonshadow]

Well, you could annoy your email address out of a spammer's DB.

I wrote a little script that uses a spammer's "remove" form against them. Provide a host, remove page, and the correct parameters, and it will generate a crapload of fake addresses and feed them to the spammer's "good list" database. Once you get a good half million or so into the DB, the data becomes worthless to the spammer, because he has such a little signal:noise ratio. He dumps the database.

Our complaint with spammers is that they force us to wade through crap to get to what we want. Do the same to them.

Get the source at http://tachyonsix.com/spamdeath.txt

Re:It IS getting out of hand

[Moonshadow]

I love SpamAssassin. However, it only treats the symptoms. It's doesn't address the cause.

What we really need is some tools that actively ATTACK spammers, their databases, and their means of mailing.

I've written a few such tools, and I'm sure there are others. What suprises me is that while it is quite possibly within our means to deal with spammers, we prefer to just filter them out and be done with it. I saw a stat earlier that about 30% of backbone traffic is spam-related. By ignoring spammers, we're just driving up the costs of net service.

It's time to fight back.

Re:It IS getting out of hand

[kwerle]

Someone suggested spamassassin, but I really like ASK

Re:It IS getting out of hand

[gad_zuki!]

How would a spammer know his signal to noise ratio anyway? Considering he's using an open relay (most likely) he's not the one stuck with the bouncebacks. His list gets bigger and probably is worth more to other spammers.

"Hey Joe, I just got 50000 maroons to 'opt-out.'"

"Hahahahahaha"

Email admins just get a bigger headache when the spam list triples. This is why legislation is needed, it worked for the fax problem it can work for the spam problem. I don't care how hot spamassassin or whatever is, there will still be resources wasted.

Imagine if the anti-spam fax people said no to legislation and installed a spamassasssin-like filter in their fax machines. Just more tied up phone lines and busy fax machines. Sure the end user may not have fax spam on his hands but that doesn't mean its not a problem.

Re:It IS getting out of hand

[Electrum]

Would you mind explaining how Spamcop works? I've been to the site, but I just don't "get it."

What exactly does it do, and how does sending a piece of spam you received to them help *you* get less spam?

It helps you because it automates sending abuse reports. Whether or not sending abuse reports actually helps cut back on the amount of spam is anyone's guess, but it keeps you from having to do it manually.

What indiigo was talking about is different than reporting spam to SpamCop. He purchased a filtered email account from them. For a small price ($30 a year) you can an account that is guaranteed to be virtually spam free. They either give you a new address, or if you can forward mail, then you can filter your mail through them. Not a bad deal, if spam really bothers you.

Re:It IS getting out of hand

[bluGill]

Hmm, so that just means I have to sneak in there my email address. Normally opt-out just puts on on the verified list, but this way I can opt out, and for a change I really am opted out!

Too bad it won't work that way. As the other guy said, the spammer is using an open relay, so they won't see the bounces.

Re:It IS getting out of hand

[Moonshadow]

True, but this only applies if they are recording remote IPs. I get the feeling that spammers aren't too thorough with their apps.

Even so, IPs can be spoofed. It's not like you need the data coming back, anyway.

Re:It IS getting out of hand

[gad_zuki!]

A couple points:

1. Lots of spam, an informal look at my spamcop reports, originate here.

2. Not all are from open relays.

For instance Bob the Spammer may get an AT&T cable modem and spam 10 million people before AT&T notices my complaints. It happens. It happens all the time. Legislation would could make him liable and fine him or even imprison him.

Lets say all the spammers move overseas to some very disruptable ISPs. Great, all the easier to filter them. Not to mention the US is something of a world leader in tech, if there is a strong anti-spam movement here with legislation and enforcement expect other countries with the same problems to follow suit.

Christ, Taco.

[Mike Schiraldi]

If I got a quarter for each piece of junkmail in my inbox, it would cover having a pizza delivered to my house every day, and still have enough left over to get a few comics to read each day while I ate!

Taco bitches about all his spam every time he posts a story.. "Ooh, i'm an internet old-timer, i'm tough enough to handle thousands of pieces of spam in my inbox every day."

Install SpamAssassin. I did, a few months ago, and all my spam is dropped in a special folder. False negatives are very rare, and i've never gotten a false positive.

Re:Christ, Taco.

[toby360]

SpamAssasin can be found Here in case anyone would like to look into it :)

Fax vs. Email spamming

[blazer1024]

I would think Fax spamming would be more costly to the receiver... You'd be using a peice of paper for every page they sent you... if you got tons, that could start costing you...

Junk email or snail mail doesn't cost you anything.. (except it uses a tiny portion of your bandwidth) So I doubt they'd ever make spammers pay you for receiving that.

Re:Fax vs. Email spamming

[silentbozo]

Tiny? You obviously don't do any network administration, at least nowhere important. Spam-related traffic has been estimated to upwards of 30+% on the backbones (I don't recall if this includes newsgroups - it probably does.) Spammers don't care that the addresses they send to don't exist, or that tons of bounce messages will go nowhere because they're using a false origination address. The upgrades necessary to handle this load are paid via peering fees. Your ISP pays a fee to peer, and guess who they pass the fees on to? That's right, you!

BTW, I already run SpamAssassin where I can, and it junks about 25 pieces of crap a day, which then get reported via Procmail to SpamCop. Lots and lots of traffic as automated spam and anti-spam systems duke it out...

Finally, I object to spammers wasting my time. It took me time to report the bastards before I got SpamAssassin, it took me time to configure SpamAssassin when the spam got way out of hand, and it takes me time to keep my filters current. My time is damn valuable, and I object to having it wasted by some low-life asshole with a dialup account and a copy of spamware (spamware authors are just as bad as worm and virus writers IMO.) And no, I'm not changing my e-mails cause that would take up even more of my time!

Re:Fax vs. Email spamming

[silentbozo]

Yes, spam sucks, but its not draining our economy or anything.

Actually, if you treat spam as an Inefficiency, you'll see that it's actually providing jobs (admins to handle spam complaints) and driving demand for equipment and services (more switches to handle increased traffic, spam-filtering programs and services). From that viewpoint, spam is actually a "good" thing for the economy, as we spend more money to overcome this Inefficiency in the way of doing business. It's sorta like lawsuits and lawyers driving business at Kinko's as shitloads of documents need to be copied, and document shredders as stuff needs to be destroyed.

However, this is an illusory effect - while the people who provide solutions get more business, everyone else's business suffers because they have to spend money to fix this problem, thereby lowering profits. Soon, people who use the internet for business will have the same overhead costs and profit margins as those who don't, at which there really won't be an incentive to use the internet...

Re:Fax vs. Email spamming

[bonius_rex]

Baloney.
If you backup your mail servers (you do backup your servers, right?) and take the tapes offsite for disaster recovery, having tapes full of bullshit costs real money. I need more tapes, bigger hard drives etc, etc for my mail servers.

SPAM is a serious problem.
I don't think a legislative solution will do any good, becuase the spammers will just move to Sealand or something.

I think the real problem is that it's too easy to forge email. This is just a pulled-out-of-my-ass solution, but could SMTP be changed such that it requires digital signatures on each message, from each server it passes though. That way, I can verify against a trusted certificate authority, and know where this message originated and how it got to my server.
Then, I know who to blacklist.

Or am I just talking arse?

Re:Fax vs. Email spamming

[Dimensio]

I think that the only solution is to legalize killing of spammers. It does not matter what methods are employed, it should be legal to kill any person who can be demonstratedly linked to a fax or e-mail spam run (so long as no one other than the spammer is harmed and no property is damaged apart from a minimum allowance of the spammer's property).

Re:Fax vs. Email spamming

[silentbozo]

Ok, maybe 30% is a bit high, but it can't be that far off:

[newsgroups make up] 11.5% of total Internet traffic www.library.ucsb.edu/untangle/mullin.html This was back in 1999? Unknown how much of that traffic was spam.

To get an idea of how much bandwidth is consumed by spam, America Online estimated that one-third of the 30 million daily email messages it transfers is spam., from http://www.nolo.com/lawcenter/ency/article.cfm/obj ectID/A6F26AE8-C831-469E-81157FC4252D98CB

One month's worth of mailings from one of the most nefarious bulk email outfits was estimated at over 134 gigabytes. Each message was sent over the email wires, consuming bandwidth. Then, each message was eitherstored locally or "bounced" back to the sender, taking up storage space and even more bandwidth., from http://www.more.net/security/presentations/spam/sl d005.htm

Hotmail, owned by Microsoft, is, by virtue of its 110 million users, among the world's biggest e-mail providers. It is, therefore, one of the world's biggest spam buckets. The number of messages it gets each day is closing in on two billion. Up to 80% are spam. (Sorry, it's a WSJ article "Hotmail Has Quite a Job to Save Its E-Mail Empire From Spam", from 7/8/2002)

Re:Fax vs. Email spamming

[silentbozo]

They can't move to Sealand. Sealand forbids spam. (yay! :)

cell spam?

[taernim]

This is interesting. I may be the only one, but I have recently received a lot of spam (via SMS messaging and email) on my cell phone.

Has anyone else had this happen to them?
Maybe I could be next getting a big payout? heh...

Re:cell spam?

[aallan]

This is interesting. I may be the only one, but I have recently received a lot of spam (via SMS messaging and email) on my cell phone.

I don't know where you're located, but this is actually getting fairly common in the UK. Rest easy that its costing the 5p (or more) per message and so (economically) it's probably going to go away eventually...

Al.

Re:cell spam?

[aallan]

...since many providers (Verizon, etc) charge like $0.05 per received message.

In the UK all the networks are "sender pays" so it doesn't really come up...

Al.

A quote from this website:

[Skreech]

"Junk faxes are not only an inconvenience to consumers, but they waste money, time and interfere with crucial businesses operations. In order to do business in today's world you need a fax machine. The intent of the machine is to communicate with friends, family, and business partners. It is not an open invitation for unscrupulous advertisers to block your phone lines, run up your operating budget, and waste paper."

- Dan Jacobson, Legislative Advocate, CALPIRG

If that doesn't make you want to buy Dan a beer, the terrorists have already won. ;) Although this quote pertains to faxes, it summarises my feelings about spam email if you replace "paper" with "bandwidth" and "phone lines" with "mail servers."

Story here

[sheepab]

A year or so ago I used to work in a place that used those little nextel phones. Well one day an automated spamfax machine kept dialing my bosses nextel phone number. At first he decided to ignore it but during the week it started happening more and more. So we figured out the fax number it was coming from, and sent them about 1500 faxes back telling them to not dial his number. Ahhh good times.

Being Slashdot...

[MongooseCN]

I figured someone would have gotten and estimate on the cost of pizza and comics in CmdrTaco's area and calculate the number of spams he recieves every day.


(Pizza + comics * 2) / 0.25 = # of spams.

Here's the text of the article....

[bedessen]

For those that wish not to fill in a number of required (!!) fields such as postal address, birth year, last name, etc., here is the text of the article -- all 15 or so lines of it.

Firm to Pay Up to $6.5M for Junk Fax
By Associated Press

July 10, 2002, 8:57 AM CDT

ST. LOUIS -- A car dealership agreed to pay up to $6.5 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over its unsolicited "junk fax" advertisements, which are barred by federal law, a lawyer said.

Promotions for Newbold Toyota-BMW of O'Fallon, Ill., were faxed to more than 33,000 businesses and homes in the 314 and 636 area codes around St. Louis in early 2001.

The dealership's owners did not know the practice was illegal when they hired a company to do the advertising, said lawyer Steven Katz, who filed the case last year.

If a judge approves the settlement after a September hearing, anyone who received a fax can claim as much as $500 for each advertisement received, the standard penalty under the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Katz said he did not expect everyone to file a claim.

A notice of the settlement was sent -- by fax -- to the 33,000 numbers turned over by the company that did the faxing for the dealership. That company, American Blast Fax of Dallas, is out of business, he said.

Copyright © 2002, The Associated Press

Re:Here's the text of the article....

[PhxBlue]

For those that wish not to fill in a number of required (!!) fields such as postal address, birth year, last name, etc. . .

Actually, I don't mind filling those out at all:

• Name: Dick Clark
• Postal Address: 10000 Pyramid Drive
• City, St.: Your Dreams, IN
• Zip: 10534
• Birth Year: 1901

Re:Here's the text of the article....

[Nonesuch]

A notice of the settlement was sent -- by fax -- to the 33,000 numbers turned over by the company that did the faxing for the dealership. That company, American Blast Fax of Dallas, is out of business, he said.

Anybody else see the irony in this?

Re:Here's the text of the article....

[dghcasp]

A notice of the settlement was sent -- by fax -- to the 33,000 numbers turned over by the company that did the faxing for the dealership. That company, American Blast Fax of Dallas, is out of business, he said.

Can they now sue the people who faxed them the settlement for another unsolicited fax (the settlement itself.)

I smell recursion, and it will make me a millionaire! Send me $5 to find out how :)

Re:Here's the text of the article....

[sweet reason]

For those that wish not to fill in a number of required (!!) fields such as postal address, birth year, last name, etc...

it accepted a birth year of 1776 from me.

This Just In!

[PhxBlue]

If I got a quarter for each piece of junkmail in my inbox, it would cover having a pizza delivered to my house every day, and still have enough left over to get a few comics to read each day while I ate!

News Flash - Over 90% of /.ers don't care about the spam in Taco's inbox, claim "He should install a fscking filter if he doesn't like spam."

Okay, so that's not really news. But then, neither is the state of Taco's inbox.

In other news, Microsoft still sucks and you're still stealing television content when you take a crap during the commercial break.

Re:NY times?

[PinkStainlessTail]

Anyone have a registration username/password?

Haven't tried this site, but I'm finding that the U/P combinations of "Slashdot/slashdot" or "metafilter/metafilter" work quite often.

ICQ

[Fuzzums]

The other day I got a spam with a ICQ-number in it. Well, what the heck, I thought and requested authorisation. To my surprise I got it. I even got the chance to talk with Mr. Spammer. It didn't get very technical.
He had 400.000.000 addresses and 30% were outdated blah blah. it took 7 5 hour days to spam all the addresses.
Well. all in all it was funny to talk the spammer, but it took him some time. He's wasting my time, i'll wase his.
I also love to call a spammer if possible. Ask where he got the addresses, ask what kind of product it is and after a while tell you're not interested :)

Registration free link

[zsazsa]

This is an AP story, so it's on the usual news sites.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/ 20020710/ap_on_bi_ge/brf_junk_faxes_settlement_1

(I'm capped, no karma whoring here, nosirree.)

Re:NY times?

[Patrick13]

I was trying to view an older article at Texas Monthly the other day, and it requires that you enter your subscriber information to read the articles... in other words if you don't subscribe, you can't view the site. But, ironically since their robots.txt doesn't have exclusions, google had it in their cache...

Prevent SPAM with TMDA

[infiniti99]

I highly recommend using TMDA on your mail server to defeat SPAM. It works by maintaining a whitelist of valid senders. If someone emails you and they are not in the whitelist, then they receive a confirmation request email. They must reply to it in order to be added to the whitelist (at which point, TMDA will deliver their original message, and allow all new ones to pass through). No having to report SPAMs, no worry of maintaining a never ending blacklist. TMDA does it all for you, putting a minor inconvenience on first-time senders.

The end result is that I get no SPAM. Zero, zlich, nada, not one -- with no effort on my part.

I believe there are other packages out there similar to TMDA that you may want to try. Regardless, I'm convinced that a whitelist-centric strategy is the way to beat SPAM.

SpamAssassin

[zarqman]

spamassassin is great. it does sort out out a lot of mail. but, it is possible to get a false positive out of it. it took me a few days to get some of the newsletters i receive on to the whitelist properly. and i have had a couple false positives on inbound personal emails. and that's after i set my threshold higher than the default. it does eliminate 90%+ of it though. in my case i've set it up with a dual threshold of sorts. the junk with a ton of points goes straight to /dev/null and what's in the middle goes to a special folder. still, i'd rather spam go away entirely or i'd like to have a quarter each. it really would add up quickly.

I was a Teenage Fax-Spammer!

[jeff.paulsen]

Well, kind of.

We had a company that did outsourced corporate training. We faxed a list of our upcoming classes to our former customers once a week. Our customer list grew, and I think that our marketing people started buying lists of fax numbers and adding them to the database.

This was accomplished with two two-line Hayes JT Fax boards, IIRC, installed in an old 386 (for reference, this was the early Pentium era). I built the box, I ran the cable (a single strand of 8-wire cat 3) and kluged up four-headed RJ11 ends for it. We bought some software that could watch a directory for instruction files and pump out faxes accordingly. We would make a series of sequentially numbered .GIF files, one per page of the fax (normally two pages), and then run a little utility that took a file of numbers to send to, a file of numbers to NEVER EVER send to, and the name of the first .GIF file. It made all the control files, and I would leave for the weekend. 4000 numbers, 8000 pages, 4 lines, no problem.

Further technical note: about once a month I would go into serious log analysis mode, and remove the 50 slowest fax machines from my list. Most fax machines at the time were 9600 baud, with some 14.4kbaud, and a dwindling minority of 4800, 2400, and some 300 baud horrors. We only sent on the weekend, so it was in our interest to only target fast recipients.

Every Monday, we'd have a pile of response faxes, normally just "take me off your fax list", often with no phone number to reference, but sometimes we would get counter-spam numbering in the dozens of pages. We were happy to add anyone who wanted to the NEVER EVER send list.

The punchline: In almost a year of doing this, we had two or three people take classes because of our faxes - not nearly enough to cover the cost of the fax server, let alone my time maintaining the whole system (never less than 2 hours a week, often more like 4).

Spam is bad. It doesn't work. I can't figure out why people keep doing it. Is the word not getting out there? IT DOESN'T WORK.

Re:I was a Teenage Fax-Spammer!

[dubl-u]

Spam is bad. It doesn't work. I can't figure out why people keep dping it. Is the word not getting out there? IT DOESN"T WORK.

Alas, I think the problem is that there are a lot of idiots out there. Note that people are still joining things like Herbalife, even though it appears to be a scam. Ditto for all the other MLMs. For some people, it seems to take a really long time to get TANSTAAFL.

Re:"Dime" solution

[nochops]

And naturally, this only works if everyone's honest.

Do you trust everyone....and I mean everyone you've ever sent email to? I sure don't. Say you're unemployed or otherwise need some dough...Just mark a bunch of email as spam and viola, instant cash.

Nice try, but I wouldn't use it.

Re:Man

[nochops]

This is all good and well, but you're missing the point.

Do you pay for junk snail mail? Nope. Not one cent. Do you pay for email? You bet. Every stinking peice of it, you pay for with your internet connection charges. Why should spammers be able to waste our bandwidth, which we have to pay for?

The Spam Difference

[porkface]

Spammers will always claim you opted in somewhere along the line. As hard as we try to read privacy policies, we're not all lawyers capable of proving we didn't.

My Consumer Responsive Anti-spam and Privacy Solution (CRAPS) proposal is that Spammers be required to show where you opted in or failed to opt out, and trace the legal transactions that landed your address in their possession. Such a law should require them to provide you with that information upon your request with reasonable frequency and delay. It won't stop Spam, but it will give American users a start at not only stopping unwanted Spam, but also limiting the propagation of your address (within the US).

Um... Can someone in Missouri explain this letter?

[Mustang Matt]

I recently complained about junk faxes being sent to my home telephone number at 2am in the morning and received this letter back.

http://pingalingadingdong.com/junkfax.jpg
(Pers onal Information Removed)

I was very disappointed to say the least. I'm not real sure what to do about it though.

Any ideas/suggestions?

If we got a deal like this for spam mail

[MoneyT]

Everyone would sign up for an AOL account. Sure you'd have to pay $20 a month, but the payments from the spam would more than make up for it.

This one looks genuine!

[markwelch]

If the article is correct that the company is required fax a notice of the settlement to all 33,000 fax numbers that the illegal faxes were sent to, then there is actually a reasonable chance that a large portion of those people will actually make claims (assuming that the list actually reflects fax numbers, and also assuming that there is no "proof" requirement imposed, which would eliminate all but a handful of claims since most folks throw junk faxes away).

I was particularly alarmed by the language "up to" $500 per fax -- it sounds like not everyone will get the statutory damages. Where is the actual text of the settlement? Where is the text of the "notice" fax? (If it turns out that people must "prove up" their damages, and only get a nickel or a dollar for making a claim based on lost paper and ink, then this is a fraud.)

But clearly, this should scare off a lot of the junk-faxers. I am now getting 8 to 10 junk faxes per week, most of which contain "opt-out" instructions that do not work. The stock-promotion-scam faxes never contain any valid contact information at all, and most of the others just have a voice mail box which promises but never actually makes a callback.

a quarter = 25c US?

[danny]

Damn it, if I got 25c for every piece of spam I received, I could retire now, on about twice my current income!

Danny.

Re:NY times?

[AntiNorm]

But, ironically since their robots.txt doesn't have exclusions, google had it in their cache...

So couldn't you just spoof your browser ID as that of a robot?

Re:"Dime" solution

[wadetemp]

I don't think Wessler's saying that the recipient gets to keep the 10 cents. I think it would be more like the famous "email tax," and it would go to something like the Post Office instead, until the tax charge was reversed by the recipient.

Attacking Spammers = becoming like them

[markwelch]

As tempting as it is to "attack" spammers, consider carefully whether it really makes sense to stoop to their level and engage in illegal activity yourself.

I remain upset that in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, we gave in and gave the terrorists exactly what they wanted: a less free society, in which armed guards are present in many public places, and where many more people are now afraid of people with brown skin or different beliefs. I'm also unhappy that we killed many more thousands of already-victimized civilians in an overkill campaign against Afghanistan. "Oh yeah? My trillion-dollar army can beat up your army of children with sticks."

Likewise, adopting the spammer's illegal attack strategies serves only to reduce us to their level. I am not a criminal, I am not someone who harasses other people, even people who engage in illegal harassment of me.

Certainly, do what's legal: call spammers and complain, send complaints to the ISP and backbone providers (and follow up when it appears an ISP has "dropped the ball"), and of course fax removal requests back to the junk faxers. If you want to yell or use profanity in your calls and emails and faxes, that's probably legal in most places.

But sending death threats, flooding spammers with millions of copies of their own spam, or launching DNS attacks on their servers. Don't become "one of them" because then there are more criminals and fewer good guys.

This all sank in (for me) back in 1996, during the absurd "Yuri Rutman" (Thinner hair, el cheepo, the first Joe-job) spam-then-harassment campaigns. At one point, I posted a web page (which I deleted several years ago) that listed all the information about Mr. Rutman (most of it gathered by others and posted in isolated bits in the net-abuse newsgroup). One of the items was his home address (in addition to his office address, which was probably a mail drop). When I actually got Mr. Rutman on the phone, he asked me to remove his home address, claiming that he had children and feared for their safety -- because he feared that people might engage in physical retribution in response to his repeated, irrational, illegal, and vicious retribution against joes.com and Hurricane Electric. I decided then and there that although I owed Mr. Rutman no courtesy or respect, I would not do anything to endanger any human being's physical safety, especially children (whether or not they really existed), and so I removed his home address (though it was still available in the newsgroups, where a diligent anti-spammer might find it -- but I didn't want the information on my web site where someone stupid and simple might use it to do something stupid and simple. (Though there was no publicity, for his actions, Mr. Rutman was charged and convicted of a crime in Illinois, just a slap on the wrist but worse than what happens 99.999% of spammers.)

Yes, spammers do some crazy and evil things -- like Sanford "Spamford" Wallace filing a frivolous lawsuit against me just to get publicity (he quickly abandoned it), thus scaring off a bidder for my former dot-com business "because we don't want to buy a lawsuit." The next offer for my business was $175,000 less, and I had to pay $5,000 in legal fees to respond before Wallace abandoned the suit. Did I feel like doing something stupid and simple? Of course. But I didn't do it, because I am NOT like these cretins. Life sucks, sometimes, but the solution is NOT to do more sucking.

Re:Attacking Spammers = becoming like them

[Moonshadow]

I never said we should do anything illegal - I simply stated that we need to take a more proactive stance against spammers, rather than just kinda ignoring them and hoping that they'll go away.

For example, it's perfectly legal to use a spammer's "remove me" form to pollute his database of "sucker" email addresses. Is it nice? No. Is it legal. Yeah.

Why not? You're not going to harm anyone. You're just going to make it harder for them to do business. Spam costs me money and time, both of which are too valuable to be wasting downloading and deleting adverts for magic pills that will increase my (male) breast size by a cup. Spammers send my 14-year old brother and 12-year old sister email with hardcore porn in it. I have missed important emails on occassion because my inbox was too flooded with crap for me to easily recognize important email. Spammers offer absolutely nothing of redeeming quality to the net, and are a pain, an annoyance, an intrusion, and occassionally, in the case of scams, criminally dangerous. I see absolutely no reason why we should not fight them, and a lot of reasons why we should use every (legal) tool at our disposal to rid the net of them. Make it cost them severe time, effort, and money to send spam.

Tools such as blacklists and SpamAssasin are a great start, but there need to be more such tools at our disposal. I'm not suggesting we DDOS a spammer or hax0r their servers or install trojans on their computers, simply that we use the means within our reach to fight back. What they are doing is legal, albeit unsavory. Why not turn their own tactics against them?

Re:Attacking Spammers = becoming like them

[Steve B]

When I actually got Mr. Rutman on the phone, he asked me to remove his home address, claiming that he had children and feared for their safety -- because he feared that people might engage in physical retribution in response to his repeated, irrational, illegal, and vicious retribution against joes.com and Hurricane Electric

Oh, puh-leeze. If a reporter finds out that some politician is on the take, should he refrain from identifying the crook because an enraged taxpayer might get medieval on him? Should we put a news blackout over the WorldCom mess because some wiped-out investor might snap and firebomb the CEO's house?

Re:Attacking Spammers = becoming like them

[markwelch]

This is not absurd. At about that same time, someone sent out a child-porn spam listing an address -- with the specific (successful) goal of creating intense harassment for the residents of that home. I don't see any reporters listing the home address for WorldCom's officers.

Re:sites with registration

[wadetemp]

I thought /. readers had quit complaining about that already, because it takes longer to write out a complaint message than to quickly sign up with bogus information if you like, or your own personal bio if you don't.

Not that it bothers me when people complain, because I usually complain about things myself.

Even worse: text message spam

[GooseKirk]

So who uses fax machines anymore? What I'm more concerned about is the spam from cash4school.com that I received on my cell phone the other day. Apparently, anyone can email my phone and it shows up as a text message... but the thing is, it costs me 10 cents every time I send or receive a text message. Once I was able to explain to the friendly Cingular customer service person what I was talking about, they credited me $5, but it still makes me nervous. Even if it were free, I'm going to throw my phone into a dumpster if I start getting spam on it all the time.

Anyone a geek at Cingular? Or know one? I'd sure like to talk to one about this...

Re: Irony of Faxing notices about unwanted faxes?

[markwelch]

Actually, I saw the irony but clearly this is the most efficient (and probably the only workable) method for notifying the class. It also provides a mechanism to cross-check the claimants -- make sure the claimant's fax number is on the list, confirm that the claimant owns that phone number (and isn't just an employee or passer-by or lucky guesser), and pay the money.

Any other method of notice would either be inadequate (newspaper ads, for example), or would be much more invasive of privacy (compelling the phone company to release the mailing addresses of the owners of these 33,000 phone numbers).

Paging Frederic Bastiat

[Steve B]

Actually, if you treat spam as an Inefficiency, you'll see that it's actually providing jobs (admins to handle spam complaints) and driving demand for equipment and services (more switches to handle increased traffic, spam-filtering programs and services). From that viewpoint, spam is actually a "good" thing for the economy, as we spend more money to overcome this Inefficiency in the way of doing business.

This is a classic example of Bastiat's Fallacy of the Broken Window. If every spammer on earth dropped dead, the effort and resources devoted to warding off their garbage could instead be diverted to productive uses rather than spent to merely hold the line.

What would happen if everyone ran it?

[Convergence]

Now, tell me what would happen if everyone ran that program?

Would mailing list posts get through automatically? Or would this thing post to the mailing list asking for confirmation? Or would each sender on the mailing list be asked to 'authenticate' their post? If answer to the first question is 'yes', then instant road for spam. If the answer to the second or third question is yes, then you'll be removed by any competent mailing list admin.

Also, how would you like to, every other time you sent an email, have to handle a braindead acknowledgement. Hell, in that case, I'd hack my outgoing queue to send a test message first, to confirm that the person doesn't have this sort of crap, and if they do, I'd not bother to contact them for any reason. If you want people to be helpful, answer a question, tell you your site is broken, or whatever else... making that inconvenient is the immediate way to drive them away.

I do not, can not, and refuse to accept that as a solution. Anyone who does use it (so far, nobody that I know), will be procmailed into the bitbucket without question.

Re:What would happen if everyone ran it?

[koreth]

Also, how would you like to, every other time you sent an email, have to handle a braindead acknowledgement.

Only if you never send mail to the same person twice. Once you're on someone's whitelist you don't see another acknowledgement request.

I use a similar setup (custom-written) and it does a wonderful job of cutting down on spam. I have yet to get a reply from someone who found it a significant inconvenience -- on the contrary, the most frequent comment I get about it is, "Wow, how can I do the same thing with *my* mail? I get way too much spam!"

To answer your question, mailing lists that I know I'm on get to bypass the acknowledgement filter, but their mail still gets run through other filters (Vipul's Razor, etc.) which catch most of the spam people send to them. Using qmail, I can also give people a unique private address that bypasses some or all of my filters but that I can shut off completely without affecting anyone else.

So in practice, just one more tool in the toolkit, but it catches a good 74 out of the ~75 spam messages I get each day, and as far as I can tell has yet to cost me a single legit message.

Re:What would happen if everyone ran it?

[kwerle]

Now, tell me what would happen if everyone ran that program?

"everyone" would read less spam.

Would mailing list posts get through automatically?

Essentially, yes.

Or would this thing post to the mailing list asking for confirmation? Or would each sender on the mailing list be asked to 'authenticate' their post?

Absolutely not.

Also, how would you like to, every other time you sent an email, have to handle a braindead acknowledgement.

If you reply to one of my email, and you include my footer, you'll automatically be whitelisted and never know I use ASK. If you send me mail once and confirm, you'll be whitelisted, and never see it again.

...Hell, in that case, I'd hack my outgoing queue to send a test message first, to confirm that the person doesn't have this sort of crap, and if they do, I'd not bother to contact them for any reason.

Tell you what -- why don't you do something a bit more helpful and write a procmail that automatically replies to an ASK challenge? Virtually all spammers supply a bogus (failing) address, so I'd be happy to see this.

I do not, can not, and refuse to accept that as a solution. Anyone who does use it (so far, nobody that I know), will be procmailed into the bitbucket without question.

I guess if "everyone" starts using ASK, you'll do a lot less email correspondence.

Re:What would happen if everyone ran it?

[Convergence]

Excellent, I forge my spam to appear to be coming from a mailing list. Abra-Cadabra, your filter is useless... If you don't and misconfigure ASK so that it does autoreply to mailing lists, then you deserve any blackholing you get.

Or, if everyone has procmail that auto-replies to ASK challenges, I forge my spam to appear to be coming from someone who uses ASK... You'll bounce a reply to them who'll autoreply back to you, and the spam goes through.

Thats why ASK won't work.. If too many use it, it'll either be worked around, or make email so much hassle that there's no point in using it.

And yes, if someone expects me to deal with crap like ASK. Well, I'll treat their words with the same respect they treat mine, and bitbucket them.

Re:What would happen if everyone ran it?

[Convergence]

Now, tell me why you're worth that hassle to me.. Why I shouldn't treat your words with the same respect you treat mine, and bitbucket them.

Here's an idea too.. If you run red lights, you can get around faster.. Of course, if everyone did that, everything would turn to crap..... Just because its cool and good for one person does not make it good if everyone uses it.

If everytime you sent an email reply or CC'ed someone on a mailing list reply, how'd you like to HAVE to deal with an autoreply.... On nearly every message? You'd come to the same conclusion I have: nobody's worth that much communicating to that they're worth dealing with crap like ASK.. Anyone that uses it has no respect for me or my words, so I shall have no respect for theirs.

Right now, I'm just happy that I've *NEVER* communicated with someone with such a setup... And hopefully never will.

Re:What would happen if everyone ran it?

[kwerle]

I forge my spam to appear to be coming from a mailing list. Abra-Cadabra, your filter is useless...

No, it lands in the Junk box, which is where mailing list mail goes unless you tell ASK about that list.

If you don't and misconfigure ASK so that it does autoreply to mailing lists...

ASK does not reply to mailing lists.

Or, if everyone has procmail that auto-replies to ASK challenges, I forge my spam to appear to be coming from someone who uses ASK... You'll bounce a reply to them who'll autoreply back to you, and the spam goes through.

I'll worry about that when it happens. Probably just cross-check for the References: tag and make sure the confirmation verification is from the same place as the confirmation was sent. Do you have any more suggestions?

Thats why ASK won't work..

Works great.

Well, I'll treat their words with the same respect they treat mine, and bitbucket them.

ASK doesn't bitbucket. It verifies the sender's intent.

Re:What would happen if everyone ran it?

[koreth]

Now, tell me why you're worth that hassle to me.. Why I shouldn't treat your words with the same respect you treat mine, and bitbucket them.

Not that I suspect there's any hope of either of us convincing the other here, but... I don't bitbucket your message. Your original mail gets saved and delivered when you reply to the autoresponse.

But that aside, I actually agree with you! Maybe I'm not worth the time it takes you to deal with my autoresponder. It all depends on what you were sending me and why. If someone who's not already on my whitelist sends me a message that's worth that little to them, chances are it won't be worth too much to me either.

I should note that they also won't get an autoresponse if their message scores low enough on my looks-like-spam tests, which in practice lets the majority of mail from unknown people through immediately. That was why I wrote my software, as an answer to the fact that it's impossible to aggressively detect spam without getting false positives. With the autoresponder, the cost of false positives is very low and I can afford to make my detection broad enough to catch just about all the spam I get. So if your initial message looks nothing like spam to my filters, you'll never know I have an autoresponder.

For what it's worth, I'd consider it a worthwhile tradeoff if everyone I communicated with were running this kind of software even without the passthrough for legit-looking messages. Certainly much less inconvenient and time-consuming than the spam it'd prevent -- more like everyone running yellow lights than red ones.

Re:What would happen if everyone ran it?

[Convergence]

Heh...

Its that I won't and refuse to be helpful at someone elses convenience.. And if its inconvenient enough, (and, that I'd consider your program inconvenient) I'll say fuck it and not bother to reply the autoresponder.. Or, I might, and then email a ''don't bother to reply, I'm adding you to a blackhole list.'' (which I'd make publically available to others. :)

At one level, I see that as, to avoid door-to-door salesmen, you have a burly security guy who kicks everyone they don't know on their ass.. Then lets them in if they try a second time.. Yes, it helps with salesmen, but it also discourages friendly neighbors, relatives, friends, hell, random people who've seen your blog. ETC.

Your solution seems free and painless, to you.. The problem is that it pushes much more effort onto everyone else.. Thats why I despise people who can't bother to trim and excerpt messages they're replying to on mailing lists.. Yes, it saves the send 30 seconds, but it costs each of a hundred readers 10 seconds each to try to figure out what crap in the message is and isn't new.

One thing you're perhaps not considering is that not everyone knows how to configure such a program. What happens if everyone uses it and only 10% make a mistake.. Post a message on a mailing list and 300 people all ask you to authenticate to them? No thanks!

I see you as another instance of that. Sure. Filter. Put messages with a moderate (not high) spam score from unknown senders into a seperate folder that you only check every few days.

My eventual plan is filtering, and manually deal with the rare stuff that gets through. That and laws...

Effective countermeasure

[MS]

I too am firmly convinced, that anti-spam laws are the only way out. But polititians are known to wake up late...

In the meantime we could take countermeasures like putting up a link to some spammers homepage on slashdot's homepage with the title "spammer of the day", or even "spammer of the hour". Every slashdot reader is sollicited to click on that link and reload the page a few times... the server will instantly get slashdottet!

But first make sure, the advertised link in the spam is really the spammers webserver, to not harm innocent webmaster's business. Maybe we could get fresh addresses of spemvertised websites from databases like spamcop...

This way, the spammers webserver will soon be down, and further (interested) readers cannot see or buy the advertised product.

Make the spammers loose their business!

ms

European directive treats email as fax machine

[caveman]

The European Commission has proposed that a directive be issued that updates member states' laws on email, privacy, and a number of other concerns. Various links from EuroCAUCE here

Of particular importance is the Proposal for a directive concerning the processing of personal data and the protection of privacy in the electronic communications sector (PDF) which says:

Moveover, electronic mail for direct marketing purposes other than at the request of a subscriber (so-called 'spam'), will be covered by the same type of protection as exists for faxes. This means that spamming will be prohibited except with respect to subscripers who have indicated that they want to receive unsolicited e-mails for direct marketing purposes.

As legislation goes, this document is remarkably clued-up, and also unusually readable. Everyone move to Europe, quick.

Ok, so it's still in the proposal stage, and won't become a directive until given a second reading by the full EU parliament. If you live in Europe, get onto your MEP's now and ask them to support this directive.

Re:No registration link to story

[WebMasterJoe]

I submited the story after going through the effort of finding a link that didn't require registration.

Like i said, it's an AP story

Perhaps it was rejected because your link gets redirected to a "choose your geographical area" page, after which you are dumped on a "local" newspaper's page (I put local in quotes because it is completely irrelevant). The AP uses a cookie to store that, so the second time you follow the link it pulls up the correct story. That could be why they rejected it, but who really cares? Karma isn't everything. Or anything, for that matter.