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

The Origin

[Erik Fish]

This AP article has been making the rounds. It's rather shoddy journalism in that it takes the words of the spammers completely at face value. Seeing as how Rule #1 is "spammers lie" you can imagine how well this approach works.

Quick and Simple

[Jobe_br]

Folks, if you haven't discovered SpamAssassin yet, do yourself a HUGE favor and at least look into it. If you're not running a Linux box and are relegated to Windows, talk to your ISP about it. If you're running Mac OS X, I believe you should have no problem getting SpamAssassin to filter your mail, if you route it through a local MTA.

It took me about 30 minutes to get SpamAssassin integrated properly with qmail, vpopmail, sqwebmail and I've been happy ever since. I get maybe one spam a week now that isn't caught by the assassin and about 35-40 a day get routed into my Trash automagically.

SpamAssassin has a huge set of heuristics it uses to detect spam as well as some auxiliary tools that it can use to check global databases for common SPAM - if someone else has gotten it and is providing SPAM information to these databases, it saves everyone else from having to check it, basically.

Bottom line: check out SpamAssassin - its by far the best tool I've found in blocking spam, far better than simply blocking yahoo.com and hotmail.com addresses! Take some time, check it out - you'll be quite happy you did, I assure you! Its configurability is pretty much unmatched out there as well.

This article is just part of a series

[WebMasterJoe]

A few carefully crafted google searches revealed the other two articles in the series (although the Arizona Star seems to think it's a four-part series- I guess we'll find out tomorrow):

Part 1: It's a war, and spam foes are losing

Part 3: Anti-spam tools more aggressive but frustrated by e-mail's 'dumb' nature

"Stalker's" website

[pbemfun]

The website of the so-called "stalker" is at http://www.toledocybercafe.com/ivtg/index.htm.

Growing a Spam Killing Community

[webword]

Growing a Spam Killing Community -- "The purpose of this article is to discuss how to eliminate spam through a community of spammer killers. Why take a passive role in spam elimination and why use up precious time and complex tools to track down one spammer? Instead, let's create a community of spammer hunters to track them down and wipe them out, using their own methods against them. Forget killing spam, let's kill the spammers."

Re:Mimes

[Overzeetop]

Oh, lighten up. It's not a commentary on free speech - just a simple observation on the human condition.

If you're gonna raise swine, don't bitch about the smell. We don't want to hear about it. If you're gonna shout advertisements on a street corner, don't complain when everybody walking by is wearing headphones or hearing protectors. If you're gonna send spam, don't complain about people using blocking software.

Re:lack of regulation

[Jucius Maximus]

"I have personal experience dealing with my local police. I called them once regarding a case of internet identity theft. Their response to me? Something like "we don't have any way to get at these cases, so why don't you just change your e-mail and other online identities?" How INCOMPETENT is that!"

A similar thing happenned to me. Someone had sent hundreds of threating e-mails to someone else and forged my address in the 'from' field. The municipal police in my area of Ontario, Canada interviewed me because they researched my domain name and I explained how the 'from' address meant nothing and that forgery of such things is common place.

The officer told me she did not know why they gave her this case and that she did not own a computer!

Re:Anti-spam law will not achieve much

[schon]

Any law against spamming can always be used against free speach

BULLSHI!

Spamming is not speech - regardless of how many spammers tell you otherwise... free speech is the right to say anything you want.. it is not the right to force people to listen to what you say, and it certainly isn't the right to force people to pay to listen to you.

Spamming has nothing to do with the first amendment.

Re:Basic math

[thefluxster]

I totally agree with what you said about the ISP/Hosting thing. The commpany I work for does hosting and we dummp about 5-6 spammers a day and although most have paid for a year or so in advance, none recieve a refund and are charged $500 for the headache. I can't believe people would risk that after reading the AUP posted on our sign up page... Oh well, it must be worth the risk to somebody cuz it still happens on a daily basis.

Detroit News Spammer Article

[nuxx]

On Sunday the Detroit News featured three articles about spammers, including a front page story. Take a look here: http://detnews.com/2002/technology/0208/04/index.h tm for the stories. (Scroll down a little past the headlines)

Re:He collects them...?

[GlassUser]

No, it leads to the question. It does not beg the question.

Spamford Wallace

[ergo98]

I'm surprized at how seldom he is mentioned, but one of the most prolific and notorious spammers, Mr. Sanford Wallace, AKA Spamford Wallace, was responsible for the vast majority of spam that cluttered inboxes about 5 years ago (ah, a lifetime in Internet time). This notorious individual was targetted by hackers, and he even floated a trial balloon that he'd start his own spam friendly backbone after getting chased from provider to provider.

Anyways, the legal system worked as Cyberpromotions was shut down by lawsuits. Sort of like crime, the reality was that it was only a few individuals who were responsible for the overwhelming majority of spam, and that was true in this case too: After Spamford was shut down, the amount of spam hitting inboxes literally slowed to a crawl.

ROFLMAO - You don't really still get spam do you?

[Moderation abuser]

I mean, really. Get a clue people.

Tell you what, I'll point you to the clues:

http://razor.sourceforge.net/
or
http://pyzor. sourceforge.net/
or
http://www.rhyolite.com/anti -spam/dcc/

And, no. The spammers can't get round them just by including random characters or personalising the mails.

The real deal

[stopbit]

Check out the reply of the so called "stalker"

http://www.toledocybercafe.com/ivtg/index.htm

Better links

[Futurepower(R)]

The spam articles are from the Associated Press and were published in the Houston Chronicle:

SPAMMED! PART I: A costly war of attrition

SPAMMED! Part II: Despite vigilantes, spammers keep e-mail flowing

SPAMMED! Part III: Anti-spam tools more aggressive but frustrated by e-mail's 'dumb' nature

Europe outlaws spam, but it keeps coming

The article complains about a "vigilante", but the woman, Karen Hoffmann, seems very reasonable: Karen Hoffman's website. She says fighting spam is her hobby.

Part 2 of 3

[The Llama King]

This is actually the second part of a 3-part series from the Associated Press. I submitted a story earlier in the week on part 1.

You can find the entire 3-part series here.

Re:And yet...

[jbolden]

reply to the email CCing postmaster@sony.com (or whatever the last part should be), abuse@sony, admin@sony, root@sony. Explain their webform doesn't work (provide http link) and you want to stop getting the emails.

Sony doesn't want to end up on the mail abuse list they will take you off.