Meet the Spammers

DaveAtFraud writes: "It took a little digging to find an on-line copy of this article that I first saw in my treeware daily newspaper. Thanks to the Salt Lake City Tribune for having it on-line. According to the Spamhaus project, a handful of people are responsible for 90% of the spam that clogs you in box. This is your chace to hear from them and what they have to say is quite interesting. If you don't think the filters and blacklists work, one spammer whines, "My operating costs have gone up 1,000 percent this year, just so I can figure out how to get around all these filters." Stopping spam is simply a matter of economics. When its uneconomical to send spam, people will stop sending it."

Comments

SpamCop does more harm than good.

[Nonesuch]

MeNeXT writes:

Yesterday I received a funny email that one of my clients was spamming. This email seemed to come from spamcop.net. What was starnge it was close to but not exeactly the warning typically sent by spamcop. So I sent them an email and here is the reply:

I've had no end of trouble from Spamcop.

"SpamCop" does not project a professional image -- the email they send to the target of complaints itself looks a lot like SPAM, complete with bogus-looking "Received" headers.

Spamcop makes no real efforts to check out the validity of the complaints they receive before sending a form letter to the accused spammer. I've received numerous messages from them regarding spam that were obvious, incompetent forgeries -- for example, a spammer forging one of my domain names in the 'From'. The least bit of cursory examination would show that while that domain "looks cute" to spammers, it is never is used to send or receive email, with the only DNS entry in the zone being for the 'www' address (no A record for the domain, no MX records at all).

Julian Haight needs to get his act together.

Right, And this part truly makes my blood boil!

[Snork Asaurus]

Legally speaking, sending a 7-year-old an e-mail advertising hardcore pornography might be a nuisance, but it's not a crime, said Timothy Healy, chief of the FBI's Internet Fraud Complaint Center, based in Fairmont, W.Va. "There's not much we can do," he said. Why the hell isn't it illegal? Our elected officials should take 5 minutes off from passing all the legislation to protect the **AA's (and their other big businesses customers) to pass a law with very stiff penalties.

It should take about 5 minutes to pass - I can't imagine anyone hoping to get re-elected opposing it. Something like: the penalty for the first offence is 50 years without parole. Second offence gets the chair. The onus would be on the spammers to ensure that they didn't do it - that should put a crimp in their style.

Re:oh yes?

[mosch]

The spam crawlers are more likely to notice bbalan@surenet.net when it's in a proper mailto tag, so don't do that.