Dutch Court: Bothered by SPAM? Get A New Email Address

Brenno de Winter writes: "The earlier mentioned ruling on XS4ALL has been analyzed by Linux Journal in this article. The ruling states that it's easy to change e-mail addresses, so don't worry about SPAM too much. Yeah right! RFC's don't apply to the Direct Marketeers since they were not involved in the standarization. Neither in our consitution, btw .."

Comments

Drug Dealers...

[stefanlasiewski]

Are the drug dealers on your street harassing you?

Don't fight, quit complaining, JUST MOVE OUT OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD.

Re:Drug Dealers...

[Tosta Dojen]

From the article, a better analogy:

If You Don't Like the Way I Drive, Get Off the Sidewalk

This is a more accurate representation of spammers' attitudes.

I hate spam

[Apreche]

as much as the next guy. I mean when someone uses bots to collect tons of e-mail addresses and send them porn ads 100 times a day, its just not right. However, I don't get spam. No, I don't use a filtering program. No, I don't sue everyone who spams me. I'm just not careless with my e-mail address. I have a yahoo address I never check which I use on suspicious websites. Otherwise I just doublecheck to make sure when I fill out a form that I have all the checkboxes set to "don't send me crap".

I'd be lying if I said I never got any spam. I got on piece of it a few weeks ago. Before that, I can't remember.

Spammers are bad, but if your mailbox is full of it its more likely your carelesness with your e-mail address than it is spammers out to get you.

Re:I hate spam

[armchairlinguist]

Goody for you, but spam is still a problem for the many people whose addresses must be posted publicly for business or technical reasons -- the same ones the Dutch court apparently doesn't care about, since they also can't change their addresses easily.

Re:I hate spam

[Khazunga]

Along the same logic: My car never got stolen. Not once. I always park on bright, accessible locations, near active streets. People who get their car stolen are guilty, 'cause they park in back-alleys near gangster groups.

Only that my car stereo was stolen at 4PM on a busy street on a working day last week...

Ask any sysadmin of a large email domain. You'll be surprised at the kind of attacks they see. And at the costs of bandwidth they pay because of spam. Bots aren't nearly the only way to send spam.

easy to change email addresses..

[martin]

yeah right.

let me see I've on 12 mailing lists that I know of right now (plus others that mail less han one a month).

Plus all those register sites(like /.) that mailmy my passwd etc when I forget...

Not to mention all my 'internet' buddies that drop a line once a year or so, to check if I'm still alive...

no it's not easy to change addr's for people that actually rely on email quite heavily like I do..

Like virus's, put the solution where the problem is . For virus's it's the windows desktop so you need a solution there beside gateways etc. For spammers it's the 'sender'. There needs to be a body that has legal powers to track them down and prosecute - a UN agency for policing the internet perhaps?

Right now I'm trapping approx 50% of all incoming email at work with my anti-spam tools. Now thats just a small company with 200 email addresses, God only knows the length and resoources the IBM's of this world must be apply to the problem.

Sounds fair to me.

[acceleriter]

Could someone please post the email addresses of the judge(s) responsible? I understand that there is a great untapped market among Dutch jurists for at-home college degrees and penis enlargment machines, and these would be helpful to mining that.

Re:Sounds fair to me.

[huberj]

I believe this article on the penis enlargment lobby is relevant.

ChoiceMail

[climber]

Bob Mossberg reviewed ChoiceMail from DigiPortal in a recent column, and said his spam dropped to zero as a result of using the product. It's a permissions-based e-mail software package. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks interesting.

Legislation

[Cardhore]

All (some of) you people sit here and moan and bitch about patent legislation, addendums to the copyright laws (like the DMCA), the FCC adding no-copy flags to TV broadcasts, and region coding. But when it comes to spam you all scream "Legislation!" "Put and end to spam!" "I can't take another spam e-mail!" "Spam isn't freedom of speech, it's abuse of network resources!" "I have to pay for this shit!" Many of you would be entirely happy to see spammers behind bars. Am I the only one who sees how hypocritical this bullshit is? Folks, there are technological solutions to this technological problem. Let's not sink down to the RIAA's level, please.

Re:Legislation

[DustMagnet]

There are technological solutions to this technological problem.

My problem is when spamsters use technological solutions to get around my solution. The most common example is using open relays. Another is adding garbage text onto the subject or body of the spam. Both of these constitute deception or fraud in my book.

Me, I know right from wrong. Using tricks to avoid spam filters is wrong, region coding is wrong, and the DMCA is morally bankrupt. I'm not opposed to laws, just stupid laws that are designed to protect big business monopolies.

Re:Legislation

[Mawbid]

Most of what you're seeing is not really hypocrisy at all. First of all, the anti-legislation posts (on DMCA etc.) and the pro-legislation posts (on spam etc.) are largely from separate groups of people.

Some people belong to both groups, but that's not necessarily hypocrisy either. It can be if you oppose legislation in general or wherever technological measures could be used instead. But people may have other criteria such as being against legislation that's bad for them and for legislation that's good for them. Nothing wrong with that.

How often would we need to change addresses?

[leastsquares]

A couple of months ago I signed up for a Road-runner cable connection. At the time I hadn't finished putting my new PC together so I didn't connect for about the first 4 days. Guess what I saw when I did check my road-runner POP account for the first time... ...that's right, two emails offering me the chance of earning a degree, now, based on work-experience. Hmmm.

Needless to say, I've never have, nor will, use that email address. I dread to think how much junk has collected in that inbox so far.

Re:How often would we need to change addresses?

[Khazunga]

Your ISP didn't necessarily sell his user list. It may have been exposed to brute-force discovery bots, that go through the address space trying to find users.

Large email domains all have this problem.

Re:How often would we need to change addresses?

[leastsquares]

Yes, I agree. In fact it is much more likely that brute-force email address detection was used than AOL TW (owner of road-runner) selling the user list.

(Besides the fact that any decent ISP should be able to detect and block this type of probing...) It means that changing email addresses will not help in eliminating spam from your inbox. That judge has probably smoked too much weed ;)

yeah right indeed....

[jeffy124]

Most people have email addresses assigned by work/school -- firstname.lastname@company.com, fl##@company.com, flastname@company, etc, and they can't change that without changing their name in the courts.

Also, the same theory could apply to changing my phone number to avoid telemarketers. Let's see the general populous react to that.

Likewise, avoiding junk mail by changing snail mail addresses.

Great inconveniences on both changing snail mail and phone numbers. Gotta notify friends, family, work, the state (get new DL for snail mail), the IRS (or other applicable tax collection agency), my bank, etc.

As one person mentioned, what's the judge's email address? I bet it falls into the category of work-assigned addresses.

Warning to all hotmail users!

[YeeHaW_Jelte]

All hotmail users complaining about spam will be executed summarily and on the spot. Non-hotmail emailers, proceed commenting.

Re:Warning to all hotmail users!

[YeeHaW_Jelte]

I have the opposite experience, having had email accounts for about 10 years and hardly ever receiving anything, till I opened a hotmail account. I just checked it and had about 200 spams, gathered in maybe two weeks. I never use the account for anything else, so I'm not bothered, but I like your way of dealing with spammers very much and maybe I'll indulge if I'm in a bad mood =)

Here are their emails

[www.sorehands.com]

This is the email from the spammers. It is located in their form.

• Algemene Informatie
• E-commerce
• Telecommerce
• Strategie & communicatie
• Direct Mail
• Fondsenwerving
• Antwoordnummers informatie
• Bibliotheek
• Juridische zaken
• Lidmaatschap
• Research en Educatie
• Persberichten

Now, don't spam them. :)

As long as there is recourse, spammers dont give a

[t0qer]

fuck. No I'm seroius! I met a spammer in person! I reposted "Spamming for Dumbasses" on several spam related stories so do a search if you want some more detail.

Basically from the spammer I saw and met, they completely take the argument of network resources out of the argument. If its on purpose or not, they play completely dumb to the problem of cloggin up mail servers.

Right now, spamming IS and WILL be a legitimate business until proper legislation is made. As the spammer I talked to said, "Spamcop is interferring with my AMERICAN right to do business" Not that I agree with him, I was a sysadmin for 7 years so I know what damage he does to the systems out there. Funny thing is though, he's right! As anoying as it is, as much as I hate to admit it, spamming isn't really illegal anywhere yet.

Another problem is with the laws that are created. One such law states something along the lines of, you must remove someone from your mailing list if they ask you. My spammers way around that was to keep a master list which he never touched, and just remove people from the sub list. I.e.

His company was Company X
He spammed for and from Company Y
He gets a remove from list for company Y, but not X
and the spam just keeps on comin.

I made another +5 post about the Italians deleting that guys web site hosted in america. If we really want to put an end to this problem we would not allow spammers to look for loopholes like the one I explained above. Anyone that tries to find loopholes in the laws has no respect for them at all. Last time I checked all our laws are written in english, I may not have a law degree but I can follow the books well enough. Why does our goverment allow loopholes and circumvention to laws to be legal? Maybe we SHOULD take a hint from italy.

You live somewhere, you follow the laws, simple as that. Be it real world or internet. People that circumvent those laws are scum.

--toq

Solution: get your own domain name

[cpeterso]

One solution to this problem is to get your domain name and create a secret "catch all" email account. Then use a different email address for EVERY web account or mailing list. For example, someone might use cmdrtaco-slashdot@slashdot.org for Slashdot, cmdrtaco-amazon@slashdot.org for Amazon orders, and cmdrtaco-anime@slashdot.org for an anime mailing list.

If you later receive spam for penis enlargers at cmdrtaco-amazon@slashdot.org, then you know that Amazon sold your email address to the powerful penis-enlargement lobby. You can then choose to stop using Amazon or choose a new Amazon email address, while creating an email rule to automatically kill email to your old cmdrtaco-amazon@slashdot.org email address.

Only if you see things in black and white

[Valdrax]

It's only hypocrisy if you can only see things in a black-and-white view that people must be anarchists or totalitarians to be consistent. Most normal people believe in the concepts of "good legislation" and "bad legislation." You might be surprised to know that most people consider SPAM and copyright to be two completely seperate issues.

Copyright law is about putting limits on ideas and concepts and selling them. I'm not 100% opposed to copyright, but I believe that current trends in legislation are destroying the balance between copyright owners and customers that makes copyright work properly. The issue here is whether or not people can take or do something with works someone else created without compensating them.

SPAM is about the ultimate expression of our crass commercial society where businesses now treat people as consumers instead of customers. It's about shoving ads down people's throat and putting the burden of the cost on them. As far as spammers are concerned, we exist just to consume advertisting from them, and we should shut up, pay the costs, and like it. The thing is, they're not providing me with a service that I want in exchange for my added cost of living. The issue here is whether or not someone can create something and force people to have to bear the costs for it when they didn't want it in the first place.

However, copyright protection and spam do share one important thing in common. Technological solutions are all useless without forcing people to adopt them. The question is whether or not we should support the "injured" party in either case. In the case of copyright, I don't believe we should. That's a matter of corporate welfare to protect an industry against technology that makes it obsolete. In the case of spam, I do believe we should. It's a matter of forcing someone to pay costs for a product he didn't want.

Spam the judge

[alanjstr]

If that judge has an email account, spam it. Send lots of faxes. Send lots of snail mail. Show them what it really feels like.

Re:As long as there is recourse, spammers dont giv

[ShaunC]

Funny thing is though, he's right! As anoying as it is, as much as I hate to admit it, spamming isn't really illegal anywhere yet.

There's a hole in this argument. In fact, there are twenty-five holes in the US alone, making it nearly impossible to send spam to a list of any size without violating the law somewhere. Half of our 50 states have laws which either prohibit spam outright or require some/all types of spam to conform to specific rules. In several states it's even illegal to create or distribute spamming software.

Spamming is illegal in quite a few places. The problem is that in most of those places, the remedy available to victims is too small for individuals to bother pursuing, and the laws are never used by state AGs to initiate criminal proceedings. In my state I'm entitled to collect $10 for every spam I receive which violates the law (no forged headers, must have valid contact information, must be properly labeled, etc). I get hundreds of such spams every week; if it were really possible to collect any money from the spammers, I'd be retired.

I wish the laws worked. They don't, and I'm not sure that they ever will; even if all 50 states had them, and even if a federal law were enacted. The pro spammers will move (as in physically expatriate) to China, Korea, or any number of other countries where their ill-gotten gains could buy them an extravagant lifestyle, and resume operations outside the reach of spam laws.

Shaun

Re:As long as there is recourse, spammers dont giv

[DJerman]

I have no problem at all with spam... you heard me. My beef is with falsified email addresses, falsified domain names, and hijacking unsuspecting mailservers for spam relay.

If this guy invests in his own T1, and puts his own servers up, and finds a net provider willing let him send advertising email, more power to ya! I'll just filter it out if I don't want it, and he can go down in flames when all the clients foolish enough to use him find out that no-one is listening.

If folks had to bear the cost of their traffic and had to be identifiable (and so prosecutable and filterable), 50% of spam would dry up in the first 3 months (when the internet bill is 60 days past due). The rest would be advertising the finest in adult entertainment, but apparently there's a market for that...

Bmilter - Filter program for use with Sendmail

[SAFH]

Bmilter

Bmilter - Filter program for use with Sendmail
July 5th, 2002

Bmilter is written in C and uses the Sendmail Milter library. Bmilter is intended to be the most capable mail filter for sendmail in existence. Every means I can find that is an effective and sensible method for filtering spam will get plugged into Bmilter. There will be some exceptions naturally...I don't intend to support any perl type of plugin or scripting and I don't intend to weigh down the process in a CPU intensive heuristics or genetic anomaly detection routine.

Until Bmilter reaches a stable production quality with message archiving, Bmilter will remain an advisory filter only. This means that Bmilter will NOT do any actual rejecting or dropping of mails. You may use your email client's built in filtering tools or if you have the option, using procmail. Bmilter inserts headers starting with X-Bmilter. Bmilter will insert a header stating the messages was fully processed by all filter methods only if the message has been scanned by all filters. Sendmail may abort Bmilter at any time, the milter program (Bmilter) has no control over this. This means that the email may have only been scanned partially or not at all.

Example:

* X-Bmilter: Message fully processed with Bmilter version xxx; timestamp
* X-Bmilter: DNSBL=True; Sender IP 200.24.71.150 found at bl.spamcop.net
* X-Bmilter: Failed Sender Verification=True; The mail server for the sender's domain doesn't support the email address that purportedly sent this email.

What Bmilter does so far.

Bmilter database
Bmilter uses SQL (Postgres) to hold all the configuration, referred to from now on as the registry. Since I do everything very simple and standard with SQL, it should be a snap for anyone to add mysql etc. I personally won't do it because I don't have mysql installed and I don't want to. I'll happily apply patches sent to me however.DNS Blacklists
Looks up the IP of the inbound connection against all the DNS blacklists in the Bmilter registrySMTP callback
Verifies the following:

* RFC 821, MAIL FROM:

You are required to support a NULL return path according to RFC 821. Some people disable this either because they think it's cute or because they're trying to disable spam sent with a NULL return path. Irregardless, it's broken.
* RFC 822, RCPT TO:

Sites without Postmaster accounts are simply due to admin laziness or misconfiguration. According to RFC 822, you are required to accept mail for a few specific accounts, this is one of them.
* RCPT TO:

If the sender is unknown on the machine that answers for the domain used by the sender, then either a) the site is misconfigured or b) in all probability this is a spoofed email address and the email content is spam.

Checks for a few random textual strings
Right now Bmilter tests for the California ADV prefix in the Subject line. This is in preparation for regular expression implementations.Prelimiary Statistics
Currently I'm cataloging the number of connections sent to Bmilter, the number of emails processed, and the number of aborts. Stats will develop for each individual filter for pass/fail/undetermined.

User preferences

* Authenticated Sender (key=auth); default action: accept; alternate action: continue;
* DNS Blacklist (key=dnsbl); default action: tag; alternate actions: (remove from rcpt list|bounce);
* SMTP Callback (key=smtpcallback); default action: tag; alternate action: reject;