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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."
This has probably been said before, but why are we getting pissed off at spammers? It's the companies we need to "educate" as to the evils of unsolicited e-mail.
Not exactly. You won't see well established companies sending spam (ever received spam from IBM?). Spam is most of the times for fraudulent/make money quick products. If 1/10000 people fall for it these companies still make a profit and they don't care if they piss off the other 99.99% since they wouldn't be buying anyway.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
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:
Spamcop spam is forged
Starting appoximately 12 noon EST 06 Aug 2002, spam purporting to be from spamcop (abuse@julianhaight.com) began being sent in an attempt to 'get spamcop in trouble'. This is a standard spammer tactic (joe job).
These messages were not sent by spamcop, and the claims made in them are false. Please disregard the email and/or block the originating IP address - 206.161.21.66 (cais.net). This IP has been blocked by SpamCop's blacklist since June. It appears cais.net is not responsive to complaints - their phone number (877-427-3368) leads to a computerized system with no attendant. It *may* be safe to block all of cais netspace: 206.161/16.
Please do not block mail from julianhaight.com or spamcop.net. If you cannot block by IP address, it is safe to block the origin email addresses, ( 'abuse@julianhaight.com', 'webmaster@julianhaight.com', 'webmaster@spamcop.net', 'abuse@spamcop.net') as no legitimate mail should be sent from these.
If you would like to contact someone at spamcop about this, you can send email to deputies@admin.spamcop.net. But please refrain from doing so. We are aware of the problem, and we are doing what we can to limit the damage. Unfortunately, since we're not responsible for sending it, there is little we can do to stop it.
More information on this career spammer is available from spamhaus.org
- SpamCop mgmt.
As you can see at least one spammer seems to be fighting back. You can also fing this on the web at http://www.julianhaight.com/forgery.shtml (I did not link directly to the site for obvious reasons. Maybe I should not even put this up?)
Mabey we should teach them a lesson and start refusing any connection from those IPs....
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
Another telling quote:
Relentless anti-spam vigilantes have hounded the 35-year-old head of Empire Towers Inc., plastering Cowles' home address and phone number all over the Web. Spam recipients call to tell Cowles how they feel.
"These people will go to the lowest depths," said Cowles, of Bowling Green, Ohio. "I have some phone clips that would make you sick."
Ahem...
You want to talk about going to the 'lowest depths'?
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