Slashdot Mirror
The Continuing Rise of E-Mail Marketing
Mark Cantrell writes: "Yahoo is running a story from Reuters Internet Report that says that companies like Doubleclick are becoming more popular with online businesses because of the low price they charge. $25 for 1000 people spammed is the example given. They do mention that there is a threat that spam may get out of hand, however. May get? Obviously they haven't seen my mailbox or Usenet lately. My favorite quote from the article:
'I think spam is becoming a problem,' Bluefly's Seiff said. 'Any time you get clutter in your mailboxes, it is not beneficial to e-mail marketers like us.'" The article touches on true spam, but mostly talks about the much more benign stuff lumped under "direct marketing," like reminder updates from stores you cleared to send it to you.
"No Junk Mail"
Although it never worked for Real Estate Agents, the pricks. They never believe their advertising is junk mail.
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
Sadly, these days it's an effort to tell the good kids from the bad...
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
I got my own domain and run my own email server. I only use those email addresses for business communication and exchanges with trusted friends and family. In a year and a half, no spam. My roadrunner account? Yup, spam flows in and I used it the exact same way. Three other ISPs, same thing. Makes me think that bulk emailers have help gathering valid email lists.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
There is no good reason why its not illegal either. They restrict what telemarketers are legally allowed to do. They can't keep calling you over & over with the same pitch, but you can be spammed countless times.
I'm glad there are people out there making these spammers lives hell. More power to them :) Hopefully someone will have the balls to just start serial killing these spammers.
I get some 60+ spam emails a day in hotmail... well, lucky they alow you to block out EVERYONE not on a special list.
Double click must die, they are the nemesis.
It's free. It works. It catches all the spam, not "most". Grab it now, be happy.
I am trying this approach. Make spammers "agree" and subscribe for an "service" which gives them right to spam a spefic unique e-mail address. The subcription and agreement is done by sending an e-mail to this unique address. As the e-mail address is unique, and I got the webserver logs of who "agreed" on the terms. There might be some chance to nail them :)))
the only thing effectively being marketed by email marketing is... itself.
take the boulder pledge!
Go to http://www.overture.com and search for 'bulk email'. Then click on each of the links. Do this once every day. The amount this will cost each spammer is displayed on the search results page.
Okay, I know 99.9% of us here don't like Microsoft (myself included), but you have to admit spam is giving them unfair headaches. Their whole integrated Hotmail/MSN Messenger thing is being killed by spam; almost every 'new mail notification' is someone trying to sell you pr0n or even Chinese toothpaste (for crying out loud!). You can't excape it, it is a major time waster, any spam-filter catches mails it shouldn't and misses many it should, changing email address doesn't work as they use all sorts of fancy techniques to find your address within hours of registering it, lo - those who spam should be tracked down and caught. They can't work in 100% anoniminity; if there was a will, there is a way.
First, have a couple of universally available databases, one of email addresses which have expressed a wish not to receive any automated email, and another of sources which have been shown to violate this list.
If your email address is in the first database (and only you can put it there), your ISPs email system could be set to exclude any mail from the second list without affecting common carrier status.
The object is equivalent to blocking telemarketing numbers, but to be effective the consumer should be able to avoid having to block those spam sources one by one.
That's the basic idea. I'm sure the /. crowd can come up with a couple of dozen refinements in as many minutes.
Think of all those sociophobic nerds, like myself, among us! I for one am glad to get some mail in my inbox, not having any friends. Otherwise i could just close the box all together! And yes, i believe my penis could be much longer! but i never got aroused by looking at pictures of pills.
Why are other peoples sig's always more witty ???
1: Write free software
2: ?
3: Rise of e-mail marketing.
4: Profit!
I got a 3rd party spam a few weeks ago on behalf of a company that sells retail women's clothing. Needless to say, since I am not a woman there was no way I had signed up for mail from them. Just another spam, right? Well, it's a company that my mother is a huge fan of, and is actually on a friendly basis with the owners (though they're public now - she bought a healthy-sized chunk when they went public and has done nicely) going way back. So I mentioned it to her, and how I was disappointed that they had resorted to using a spamhaus.
A couple of days later, I got a very apologetic call at work from their head of marketing. It seems they really didn't understand the difference between opt-in mailing, self-managed lists, and spamhauses. We talked about how to manage a mail list for nearly an hour - I wound up answering a _lot_ of questions (I made some suggestions as well), and got a promise on her behalf that they would try to be good netizens going forward. We also talked about things like banner advertising, the best sites to do reciprocal banners as well as purchased ads, and a lot more.
The reason I'm bringing this up is that I really think there are companies out there that are clueless about electronic marketing in general. So they listen to a spammer who can sound like a legitimate businessman, look at the numbers that get handed to them, and say, "why not", without realizing the damage that can get done to their reputations.
Then again, a lot of folks who get this crap in their inboxes don't even realize that it's wrong. Unfortunately, folks are starting to get accustomed to tons of junk mail, and only a relative few of us are vocal about it.
One interesting point in the article - one mailer supposedly had statistics showing that 70% of their e-mails were opened. Well, that means they were using webbugs - proof that everyone should use mailer agents that either can disable network access or refuse to display HTML.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
The basic point I never seem to see mentioned is that SPAM does work.
How you ask? Quite simple, it's not supposed to make money for the people actually sending the email. It's supposed to make money for the people selling the mass email lists/services.
It's the same as the California Gold Rush days; the vast majority of people who made money were the ones selling shovels, not using them.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
I have found an increasing number of spammers are putting "ADV:" or something similar as a prefix on the subject line. I encourage this behavior as it makes it easy to block it, effectivly having a "No Junk Mail" sticker. Maybe if the spammers who did this were left alone, they could get on with sending to people who want it (and there are some out there!) without having to find new ways to circumvent blocks, while the rest of us get to live with an uncluttered mailbox. This would save time, money, and effort on both sides.
Why don't the headlines ever read 'Psychic wins lottery'
It wouldn't cost businesses much to hire bums to take a shit on my front doorstep, but does that mean it's good?! Who actually buys anything soliiticted to them via spam? The only result I've ever seen UCE deliver is anger.
We have a juridical system to prevent lynching. If the system doesn't work (spammers can go on undisturbed) lynching is acceptable.
They do mention that there is a threat that spam may get out of hand, however. May get?
I work for a college, and one of the professors I support recently began getting spam. He made the startling observation that if it were to ever climb above the three or four messages a week he's getting, it's very possible that legitimate mail could be lost in the noise.
Thanks, Doc. Welcome to 1996.
--saint
First of all, the doubleclick mail the article talks about is not SPAM, by my definition. It comes from 'legitimate' companies, and really is opt-in. It is plain old-fashioned direct marketing, and it's not going to go away.
SPAM on the other hand is the message I receved this morning "...because you have expressed an interest in making money with eBay and or on the Internet - Make $750 a day!"
It does raise an interesting point considering the declining effectiveness of e-mail marketing given the proliferation of SPAM. It is just another example of how spammers' indiscriminate activities are at the expense of other parties, and more measureable then ambiguous ISP and mail server resources - the marketing company's bottom-lines. Realizing this, could Doubleclick and other direct marketers *gulp* actually become our allies in fighting SPAM?
#include <sig.h>
Seiff says most are more than happy to hear about new shipments of Furla bags or Michael Kors cashmere sweaters.
I think I'll try some "direct marketing" of a bag full of marbles. I'm sure Mr. Seiff would be more than happy to have some sense beaten into him.
Remember kids, every generalization is wrong.
----------
I am an expert in electricity. My father held the chair of applied electricity at the state prision.
On the broader issue: I've felt for some time that what will eventually happen is that folks will simply go with mechanisms that require unknown senders to send a confirmation that they're legitimate. Much like some of the ones mentioned in response to the previous spam-related article.
Right now my spam load at home is running about 99% spam (discounting mailing list traffic) and at work: approx. 25% on weekdays and up to 95% on weekends and holidays. I have positively draconian anti-spam protections in place and *still* my end-users at work complain about spam. "Authenticated" senders will be, I think, the only way to a final solution. And I do believe that, if widely enough employed, that solution will drive a nail into the spam coffin.
Or is my newsfeed being pre-filtered, and nobody told me?
I used to run an ISP that went poof a couple years ago. I'm still running the mail server for myself and a few people who wanted to keep the address. The following is in the mail queue of bounced email on an account that hasn't existed for at least a couple years:
===
You are receiving this e-mail because you have opted-in to receive special offers from
Hi-Speed Media or one of it's marketing partners. If you feel you have received this e-mail in error or do not wish to receive additional special offers, please scroll down to unsubscribe.
===
I'd really like to know how an account that has not existed for at least 2 years could opt in to a marketing list. Isn't this false advertising? I should problaby complain to the NYS attorney general or maybe the FBI.
have a filter that denys ALL email if the sender is not in your address book...
Why don't the 'direct marketers' aka dogshit licking scum of satan's asshole, just engage in coupon printing? It seems to me that they could print out coupons on the receipt when you purchase something online and that would have at least the success rate of spam.
I have an SMTP honeypot on my computer. Last week it captured more than six million copies of the same spam mail. The spammer thought my computer would relay them, but it didn't. That is six million less spammails, yet there is a long way to go to get rid of them all.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
I've all but stopped using Internet email for anything important. Over 90% of the mail I receive is spam.
Filtering is great, but spam still gets thru (because I traditionally didn't want to loose messages due to overly-aggressive filtering).
Now, when you email me directly, you get a message telling you to call me if it's important.
Isn't curious that every ISP out there spouts off about how good their SPAM filtering is? Doesn't congress see this as a threat to business? Where is the president now? Off on a month-long vacation - clearly needed to clean up his own email box.
Spammers ruined any possible business benefits of email. At least for me.
PS - even my poor old Dad gets a ton of messages about teen sluts and crap like that. This just isn't right.
For the cost of $25 you get a great practical joke.
Create a true ad but bound to not be used(Selling packs of 25cent gum for $50 + $10 for shipping/handleing) and then use the address of the person you want to play the joke on as the address to send to. Then submit to one of theses companies and watch the anguish on the face of that person as the replys come in.
Besides the worst that could happen is that a few people send him the money and he gets a profit.
For the record, our company doesn't need services like this, so I just toss them in the trash. I wonder how many clueless management types will see this as just another marketing outlet, not realizing it's pretty much useless and antagonizes your clients.
For example, a couple of years ago Ameritech decided to spam a lot of it's customers with a 2MB movie file (.avi format, no less) which was an ad for their data services. Needless to say I was pissed, and after I placed some calls to their management we now won't do business with Ameritech anymore (does anyone)? I am also glad my company is in a position that I can tell suppliers I don't like to piss off, too. Not everyone has that luxury.
The key distinction here is between spam, and targeted email marketing.
I get a lot of targeted direct mail in my post box. This morning I got info from two banks (that we dont use) and a mail order service. 3
I get a lot of targeted direct email in my mail box from identifiable companies offering things that might be interesting. This morning I got stuff from Security, Project Management, a few games sites. 4
I get a lot of Spam. This morning I was offered a big knob, hot babes, viagra, hair, part time work, katie, investment opportunities... etc... 46
The first and last of these I hate. The first because of the wasted paper, the second because its a pain in the arse.
The middle one I don't have the slightest problem with. I can always unsubscribe and sometimes they are useful / interesting.
Most people have a good common sense idea what distinguishes FREE OFFER!!! from New at ComponentSource
This article is talking about to different things and then saying they are the same.
First are the direct marketing from honest companies that are truely opt-in with are send with thier name attached to them.
Theses types I don't really don't mind, since I have agreed to them, and in many cases are tailored to my interested. I do want to know if a favorite author has released a new book or if a place is having a sale on items I purchase.
The second type are SPAM, no details needed.
This article is just combining theses two and saying that SPAM is great because I like knowing about stuff I signed up for.
Opened??!! How the hell'd they know *that*? That sounds like a bogus claim right there. In fact, the whole article sounds dubious.
"Direct Marketing Finds Acceptance on the Net" - says who??
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
That's a terrific idea. I put this page as my startup page, and will acess it daily.
$25 for 1000 people seems incredibly expensive. Loads of those messages will never reach people because of spam filters, and how many actually respond out of a thousand? Must be pretty low.
With this ring you will get all the elf tang you
could ever possible imagine.
Imagine 4 spammers in a car looking for chicks "Hey guys, there's 4 girls in that car and there is 4 of us. We are gonna get LAID". Somehow, they never ask themselves why they never get laid. If they did, we wouldn't have mailboxes full of garbage.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
I wonder who are the people responding to Spam. In all the years I have received it, not once did I get a spam for something I needed, much less wanted.
/dev/nul unless you're on my cool list or have a particular unusual word in the subject line.
It doesn't matter anyway, anymore. Because of spam, I have Procmail set to send all email to
If Outlook Express users didn't insist on broadcasting the addresses of everyone they send an email to, rather than hiding everyone elses addresses by using BCC, an awful lot less of us will have our addresses on spam lists. I subscribe to a mailing list from my old school, and in conjunction with the "reply to all" option, everyone on the list had their address sent round the internet several times.
malice is usually the root of the problem.
For many people the web is still a new thing and just
like learning that TYPING EVERYTHING IN CAPS is
incredibly annoying maybe they don't realize that
sending out unsolicited email is just as annoying.
The obvious solution: make it illegal to use email for non-commercial purposes. I mean, if it's not commercial email, it's more likely to be a terrorist message, no?
For the Fatherland!
Spam marketers and the larger companies who help them have adopted the exact mindset used by the giants of direct mail marketing.
The president of one of these companies was once asked if he cared about all the junk mail being forced through a person's postbox. The response was "There's no such thing as junk mail. There is such a thing as a junk customer."
Getting your name pulled off 3 of the major lists in the US can drop the amount of credit card applications, free catalogs, and other junk mail by around 80%. Such a thing needs to exist in the spam world, rather than useless "unsubscribe here" links that fail to have any real affect.
-Barkeep, a draft of your most hazardous brew, for the world is slowly stepping into focus, and I don't like what I see.
its possible that he may know how many were opened.
by using HTML in the email to request an image, a 1x1 gif for example, from a server controlled by the spammer.
this image would be 'invisible' to the person who opens the email, but the spammer could possibly track the hits that the image recieves.
This appears to be describing legit, "Customer requested to be put on our mailing list" mailings, which IMO are not a problem - Such mailings CAN be nice. I'm subscribed to one, "Funtasia's internet deals", by choice because it keeps me updated on the most recent 'net deals. (Unfortunately, since the .com bubble burst, most of the deals are for stuff I don't care about, but Funtasia used to have the UPS guy coming to our house with cool stuff almost daily. :)
In fact, one of these "direct marketers" calls spam a problem, because the non-legit crap clogging our mailboxes distracts people from the useful commercial mailings they have asked for.
I guess the way to think of this is: Does ThinkGeek have a mailing list to notify customers of the latest kewl gadget? (They appear to have one, see following paste:
E-mail me occassional ThinkGeek updates and promotions!
Snail-mail me occassional ThinkGeek snail mail flyers or catalogs!
)
This is the sort of mailings they're talking about. I get these mailings occasionally, I don't mind them - I asked for them.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
this morning, advertising MCAfee's mail box despammer. Nice. Wankers.
under "direct marketing," like reminder updates from stores you cleared to send it to you.
So what about when you sign up for some service etc and there is some tiny checkbox you are supposed to "uncheck" to not sell your email address to every spammer in existance. Does that count as "Direct Marketing" since I "requested" that these companies contact me? Do I sound bitter? Yea probably.
The victim's address gets added to every spam block list out there, rendering him unable to communicate with a significant portion of the internet. Possibly, his ISP (or his job's ISP, if it's a work address) gets listed on an ultra-militant blackout list like SPEWS...further limiting his ability to communicate.
(Think I'm making this kind of shit up? It's happened before. Our office mail server got listed as a spam source once due to one employee clicking a "Tell a friend about this service..." link. Apparently the friend was very much not interested in said service.)
(Even though it's not related to the incident above, our ISP was (and probably still is) listed on SPEWS. I would just like to take a moment and say "fuck SPEWS, fuck the people who run it, and fuck their attitude...all with a jackhammer.")
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
Currently Spam results in more visits to a site, and the Spammer don't care if they piss off 100 people if they can get 1 person to click through. Domain Blocking Spammer sites would not only keep the Spam from working, but would also prevent other regular users of the site from visting it resulting in a loss of income for Spammers.
It won't stop all the spam, but it would get rid of click through spam.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
By making their cost rise (or advocating to) without wanting information from them, but only doing this to hinder them in their function or as ideological planning, you are openning yourself to liability, aren't you ?
INAL but I don't think abusing a paying informationnal service for the sake of sinking a firm may be seen as not quite legal, isn't it ?
It may even be seen as a sort of "DoS" attack in the sense that by rising their cost purposefully you hinder them doing legal buisness. You effectively deny service to normal paying client in the end.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
spam is email [newsgroup posting | IRC chatter] that I did not want to see that interferes with me seeing the things I did want to see.
I don't care whether someone can pull out a dusty database record that murkily indicates the "right" to send me crap -- it's still spam!!!Trying not to do an obvious plug here -- this was the definition that fueled the code for spamgourmet - the system aggressively deletes messages that don't conform to simple rules I specify at the time I give out a disposable address. That is, if I give a site an address that indicates I want to receive three messages, the first three messages they send are not spam, and the rest are spam (and deleted spam, at that). By this definition, almost 90% of the messages that reach spamgourmet are spam.
who's moderating the meta-moderators?
Having had one email addy for a very long time, I only use it now as a spam catcher.
But in the last few months, that email address has evidently been put in the reply-to of a BUNCH of spam. In addition to regular incoming spam, this one email address collects 50-100 bounce messages a day from all over the world. Some server in Italy "Sorry, we could not deliver to the following addresses". And then it lists 100 or so addresses that don't exist on their server. Korea, Japan, Earthlink, AOL, Sprint, etc, etc...
And they are not targeting YOU. ajones@earthlink.com, bjones@earthlink.com, cjones@earthlink.com...and on and on.
The spammers don't care. Replying back NEVER works, because either the repy-to is not the spammer anyway, or it just validates that a living person read the spam. They are ot sending it from their personal account, but rather someone elses. And not gathering any replies, either. Just hoping someone will click on whatever foolishness is in the html, and shell out a few $$.
Spammers need to die.
For those of us without the resources to run an mail server and create our own email addresses through it, sneakemail is a great resource to limit the amount of spam you get. If any of you haven't heard about sneakemail yet, it's a service that autogenerates email addresses for you (like asdoifu9832@sneakemail.com) which you can give to registration forms or list as a contact email and have forwarded to your real account. If it turns out that the registration form results in spam, you can get rid of that email address, and you also know which registration form it was which resulted in the spam. I really recommend sneakemail to anybody who hasn't tried it yet.
I get a very small amount of spam (3-5 messages each day). To keep it that way, I only give my real e-mail account to friends or REPUTABLE web sites. That way, if I start getting email notifications, I can always opt out or find some other way of getting them to stop, simply because they exist as an organization and can thus be contacted (unlike a634fhfg7a@hotmail.com.)
Move 'sig'. For great justice!
Since Americans can sue people in foreign countries in American courts, perhaps we could sue American companies for privacy invasion in European courts?
> You've gotta sin to get saved.
Make sure this database supports regular expressions. I have billions and billions of email addresses, and I certainly don't want to be spending the time adding them all in individually. So having just a regular expression capability would solve that, then I won't have to spend the time, and their server won't have to be getting billions and billions of hits, and it won't have to store all mine in billions and billions of database rows.
Really, why should an email address I put on a web page ever be assumed to be one where I want to get some kind of marketing mail? Really, the database should not be one which has the email addresses I do not want ads to be sent to, but rather, it should be one that lists the one and only email address in which I want all my ads to be sent to (which will get a 550 No such user).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
It is always mentioned in discussions about spam that the problem really is that it is cost-free for the spammers.
One way this could be altered, would be to change the way email is delivered.
I propose that SMTP only sends header information from sender's to reciever's SMTP server, and that the body of the mail remains on the sender's SMTP server until claimed by the receiver.
> Obviously they haven't seen my mailbox
What, you don't filter?
scripts and other ideas are HERE
http://Lenny.com
4 great justice!
This would require legislation obviously, but I think it would work... Just make a law that any automated email (IOW, any email not written by hand) must have any easily detected keyword in the subject...perhaps followed by the domain of the sender. This would have to effect both legitimate businesses *and* spammers, so there would have to be a way to differentiate between them.
So, if Barnes&Noble is sending out emails to customers, it would look like "Free shipping till December! [AUTO:bn.com]"
This way, you could easily implement filters in email programs to filter out all emails with the keyword in the subject to some "automated" folder, and could browse this folder at your leisure to read any of them that you would find useful...
my religion lies somewhere between buddhism and super monkey ball - pamphlet?
Compare it to old-fashioned junk mail via the US post office. Even at bulk rates they're still paying about $.20 JUST IN POSTAGE. Figure in printing costs, envelopes, labor, etc and you'll see that e-mail spam is about 90% cheaper... and has about the same response rate.
Then compare that to the cost of advertising via TV or Radio. What percentage of listeners are listening to the ad? What percentage respond to it? It's miniscule.
And not that many people use spam filters. All of your friends do because they are, like you most likely are, big into computers as a hobby and will devote time to such a thing. The average internet user is not. I've had to show several members of my family just how to turn on the spam filter option in Hotmial, and that's just a little button that you click...
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
I think we should be able to launch denial of service attacks against clients of spam senders.
It would go like this:
1) You get a spam for www.make-million-doing-nothin.com
Option 1)
2) It includes a way to remove yourself from the mailing list.
3) You notify them that you want to be removed.
4) You get another spam for www.make-million-doing-nothin.com
5) You launch a denial of service attack against www.make-million-doing-nothin.com
Option 2)
2) The spam does not include an opt out method.
3) Go directly to denial of service attack against www.make-million-doing-nothin.com
Something similar could be done against phone numbers. I can get my computer to call and hang up all day long.
You will have to pry my proprietary software $$$ from my cold dead hands!
was USENET now SPAMNET.
Hotmail is getting close to collapsing under the weight of spam, as far as I can tell. Try this- Do an MX query and go through the list of hotmail MTAs. You will notice that a lot of them won't respond, or respond very slowly.
After reading your post, I tried to find out if I could get this behavior with Mozilla (I don't want to switch!). It's not available as part of 1.0, but the 1.1 nightlies have it (not sure if it's in the official 1.1beta).
Go get the lastest nightly, open 'Mail and News', select View->Message Body As->Plain Text and no more annoying HTML. There's also a setting for 'Simple HTML', but I'm not sure what that is.
Mozilla rocks!
Never cease to be amazed at how shallow and pedantic Slashdot users can be. Don't any of you realize that SPAM can be incredibly useful for defeating the enemies of freedom? There are literally hundreds of JIHAD web sites around preaching the virtue of blowing up children in the name of martyrdom and glorying in the destruction of the WTC. These web sites routinely run propaganda from Osama and his Buddies, and many contain coded messages to sleeper cells and rogue operatives. Some have FLASH movies replaying over and over the airplanes crashing into the Twin Towers with a voiceover stream of anti-west vitriol. Many of these web sites also contain good old PERL and CGI scripts for "Sign me up for your mail list." Flood one or two of them with the e-mail addresses of every spammer in the world (you can find good ones on news.admin.net-abuse.sightings). Watch the site slow to a grinding stop in another week or two. One real nasty from not long ago (www.jehad.net) is now gone, and with it went one mirror of Osama's Streaming Real Video Picture Show.
I haven't had any spam since :)
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
From my own mailbox records, there was a huge jump in the amount of spam I got on a regular basis in 1999. That lasted for three years. Then there was another huge jump in spam volume last June.
The Spam Block Stats on my ISP's web site show similar data. From 1997-1999 they caught just a few thousand spams per day. In late 1999 it jumped to over 10,000 per day. Last May the count jumped ten-fold, and in June it jumped up another order of magnitude so since then they have been catching over a million spams every day!
I think that could pass. Great idea. Make sure there are real penalties for non-compliance. Like maybe $500 per email. Not that tough to figure out where this junk is coming from. Just tough to get anybody to do anything about it
If you don't say anything, you won't be called on to repeat it. -- Calvin Coolidge
There are lots of ways to authenticate, but they tend to not be very automatic and require too much work by users. An alternative approach is described in: http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/easy-email-sec.html
Here's the quote: "Sadly, you probably don't want to automatically authenticate every message. That's because spammers would set up bogus servers waiting for your program to authenticate the message (using a used-only-once sending email address), and add you to a ``valid email address'' list if you tried to authenticate it (and once on, you'll never come off the list no matter what they say)."
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
We have a great protocol SMTP but now we know that it leads to SPAM. Companys are always saying that it cost a lot of money for SPAM, so can?t we spend some money and get a conference to decide on a new spamless system?
I think the biggest thing is to eliminate open relays.
How about a new field such as AUTH-FROM: Bill.Gates@microsoft.com
Then receiving server can lookup domain and make sure that the ip sending mail is one of domains ip?s, (as in DNS lookup) (in this case Microsoft.com). That means that Microsoft.com and others will have to pay to register all ips that they want to send from.
Ok, if I can think of one lame idea, I know someone out there can think of a better one. Maybe I should "ask Slashdot".
Surprise, surprise! Most spam doesn't follow the convention. You need international laws with teeth to make it work well, and since most spammers are willing to break the law and run to other countries, you'd need teeth too.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Heheh after submitting that post it dawned on me that spammers would either 1. not follow the convention, or 2. be excempt from it (because they are overseas, etc)
;)
Are there other methods of "forcing" compliance? I am admittedly ignorant on a lot of this stuff - this is why I am asking... Is it possible for mail servers, or perhaps even Internet backbones, to "notice" when many emails are rapidly being sent out from a few sources, and automatically tag them in some way? That is why I would think something other than a "ADV" tag would work... Perhaps more along the lines of a "mass emailing" tag of some sort...
Ahhh the more I think about it, the more I think we will be getting spam forever...
my religion lies somewhere between buddhism and super monkey ball - pamphlet?
I know this is going to sound nasty, but I am genuinely curious. How are these spammers getting your email addy's? I had an email addy for over two years, and only gave it to family and friends, and a few forum sites, and received maybe ten spam mails the whole time. They were also fairly small in size, and text only, not the horror story 100k attachments.
I also have a public email addy that I use when I can for registering at various websites and when buying over the internet. That one averages about 5 or 6 spammails a week, all traceable to those businesses I have dealt with in the past. If I'm not interested in anything from them, I click a few times in specific areas and they are gone.
I also get some occasional porn email. Guess what it's because I had a previous relationship with them. If dear old dad is getting teenslut.com emails, there is an excellent chance he's already been there.
I am developing e-commerce components and one of them is an email component. The email component is useful for the end-users as it helps them track orders, reserve stuff and get reminders and coupons. It is an HTML mailer and it allows the marketing folks to attach their sales pitches to the outgoing mail. My concern is how do I go about writing an idiot-proof email component? Any suggestions!! How do I ensure that this mail is not mistaken for spam by ant-spam measures, even before the user gets the mail?
Any suggestions ?? Can we find a middleground ?
We are a defendant in several lawsuits alleging, among other things, that we unlawfully obtain and use Internet users' personal information and that our use of cookies violates various laws. We are the subject of an inquiry involving the attorneys general of several states relating to our practices in the collection, maintenance and use of information about, and our disclosure of these information practices to, Internet users. We may in the future receive additional regulatory inquiries and we intend to cooperate fully. Class action litigation and regulatory inquiries of these types are often expensive and time consuming and their outcome is uncertain. We cannot quantify the amount of monetary or human resources that we will be required to use to defend ourselves in these proceedings. We may need to spend significant amounts on our legal defense, senior management may be required to divert their attention from other portions of our business, new product launches may be deferred or canceled as a result of these proceedings, and we may be required to make changes to our present and planned products or services, any of which could materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations. If, as a result of any of these proceedings, a judgment is rendered or a decree is entered against us, it may materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations."
That's the reality behind the happy talk. As a company, DoubleClick is shrinking, losing money on operations, and their stockholders lost most of their investment.
Spamcrime does not pay.
but mostly talks about the much more benign stuff lumped under "direct marketing," like reminder updates from stores you cleared to send it to you.
"Hello, you are receiving this message because you selected to receive such messages on our website, one of our competitor's websites, or a completely unrelated website. If you do not wish to receive further messages of this type, please verify the validity of your email address by visiting the following address with a cookie-enabled browser. By removing your address from our list, you indicate your wish to receive similar messages of this type.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
open all your junk mail, seek out the postage-paid return envelope.
mail all the postage-paid return envelopes empty.
They have to pay the post office prior to receipt.
I used to put damaged electrical componnts in the envelopes, but the uni-bomber ruined that fun for me...
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I think it would be interesting to send out a spam message like all of the "make money now!" folks but for the purposes of finding out who replies to these things. Maybe 2 flavors, a porn one and a greed one. This would require committing spammage (is that a word?) but it would be in the name of sociological research. It could even be set to reply to responses with a slap-on-the-wrist message, "Don't be a fool and reply to spam!" or such.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I'm sure its been thought of before,
but why won't this at least help?
Imagine thousands of people running a script to generate webpages with thousands of generated ficticious e-mail addresses. Wouldn't this cost the spammers more money?
Of course, I'm making the assumption that they get their addresses from webpages, but why wouldn't it help?
I live in Washington state, and run several domains with my own mailserver. It seems to me that because the WHOIS information clearly identifies the registrant as being at a Washington address, anyone who sends email to those domains has reason to know its location. So, I should be able to sue them under Washington's anti-spam law, RCW 19.190.020. But is it worth it?
Sure, the $500 per offense will help offset the cost of my home computer lab. But I'm not sure I want to go down that road. Will I just become a bigger target? Will the time spent gradually spiral out of control, until I become known as the "guy who has no life, so he spends his time suing spammers"? You know, like the guys who sue places that offer free admission to women on Happy Hours nights?
Nuke them from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
From a source I can share, spam receipts (daily, flagged by SpamAssassin) are flat since May 1. At work, with a larger sample, I'm actually seeing about an 8% decline over the same interval -- ~55 intercepts daily to 40. Compare this to 2001, where receipts more than doubled over the course of the year. In both cases, I'm using well-known, or catch-all, addresses.
Related news indicates spammers are feeling the pinch of filtering, reporting, and retaliatory efforts. Spam's an economic activity, with low margins. If it can be made unprofitable, prevalence will drop markedly.
...and virus mail's quite another story -- daily intercepts have climbed from ~12/day (Jan - Apr, 2002) to 220+. Thank Klez, though SirCam's putting up a good showing.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
What do you think Javascript does? Peek at you and write down secret info?
And cookies are a tracking device, not a SPAM/e-mail collecting device.
Your advice is useless.
Worse, you proudly display your ignorance and for that, you get the Dumbass-Lou award.
Try to to hurt yourself with a shoelace today, okay dumbass?
I just did the "selective pop-3 email download" in Pegasus. The headers (only) of 30 messages were downloaded. I marked most of them for deletion, and had Pegasus "Make it So". What's left is mail I would want, and I'll use Netscape 4.79 to look at it. That's how I do it.
Rapidweather's Linux Screenshots.
If I had the power, I would require spammers to add an X header to their emails something to the effect of X-Is-A-Fuckin-Spam: yes Then it would be a simple task to choose between spam and no spam. Make spamers personally liable to victims if they do not follow this simple rule.
If religous zealots don't believe in Evolution, then why are they so worried about bird flu?
Is there any reasonably authoritative source on who is actually making spam worthwhile? Who is buying stuff that spammers are selling? Who is falling for the scams?
My problem with Spammers is that they pay huge amounts of money to specialists who come up with the perfect "everone will have to take a peek" Subject Line, like the one above. Now this Spam would not be so bad if what they were selling was "Temp. Services"...instead of Porn.