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FTC Encourages Consumers to Forward Them Spam
Burl Ives writes "See this CNN Article. 'The FTC encourages consumers to forward any spam they receive to the e-mail address uce@ftc.gov'. I'd say if they've posted their e-mail on the web, they are probably getting as much as the rest of us already, which isn't to say I'm not hoping to see some discussion of using the statistical spam sorters to auto forward a lot to them in encouragement..." I've been using SpamAssassin for some time now with excellent results. Perhaps now I need to have my spam folder auto-forward to the FTC as well.
And people continue to forward spam anyway, will they accuse those people of spamming them?
is a bad idea because you can send false positives... you should know that CouboiKneel!
Haha, I'd hate to be the guy who's job it is to count the spam.
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
I like the idea of forwarding the spam, but the question remains what will they do with it?
For instance, Yahoo Mail has a feature where you can forward Spam to their Yahoo! Customer Care department. Yet, you don't know what happens.
I don't know if this is a "feel good" attempt at showing that they are handling spam or they actually run some super secret program and change their spam variables.
I'd like to see what the FTC is doing with the spam sent to them. Are they going to start a black list? Will they take action against the spammers?
I'd say if they've posted their e-mail on the web, they are probably getting as much as the rest of us already
.gov e-mail address.
most spammers are smart enough not to spam a
my pet machine
Should I forward my spam even though I'm not American?
Heh, FTC slashdots self.
- SMJ - (It's not just a name: it's a bad aftertaste.)
The FTC encourages consumers to forward any spam they receive to the e-mail address uce@ftc.gov
Is it just me or does this sound just like one of those 'for every email that you forward, will donate $1 to ' emails.
...we find FTC commissioners have suddenly become very thin and rich with enourmous penises, we will know they got the spam.
To use with spamassasin username is "cartman"
.forward /usr/bin/procmail -f- || exit 75 #cartman"
.procmailrc
:0fw /home/cartman/SpamAssassin/spamassassin -P -c /home/cartman/SpamAssassin/rules
:0:
/dev/null
/cartman
bash-2.05$ cat
"|IFS=' ' && exec
bash-2.05$ cat
LOGFILE=/home/cartman/proc.log
|
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
Yeah and lets stay anonymous not to be a carma whore...
Wow!
Now I have somewhere to put that 100-200/day I always get but never know what to do with...
Sigs are for propeller heads.
My... those people at FTC aren't getting enough samples already? Maybe spammers don't like .gov addresses...
I'm using spampal for Windows with Outlook. i have the filters set up to forward it to the ftc and delete the email. Spampal is avalable here.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
i've been doing this for about a year now. can even remember where i read about it for the first time...
Acts@core.mailboks.com Acrux@core.mailboks.com Adam@core.mailboks.com Adar@core.mailboks.com Ada@core.mailboks.com
The question is, how much would you pay to have somebody delete a spam message? If it's 1 cent, and if the person could kill one every 5 seconds (which seems pretty reasonable ... I don't even read the whole subjectline before deleting most spam), then we are at about 7 dollars an hour. Given that this is not a high-skill task that could be done from the home (possibly in the third world, where $7/hour is a very high wage), we may have a new industry here.
For less than the price of a coffee per day, a user gets spam-free email, and somebody else gets to pay the rent.
Of course, there is a downside: somebody might pay the anti-spam folks money to look the other way on some messages. And there is a privacy concern.
So, am I nuts?
I'm sure the FTC won't act on singular items; however, if they get 5,000 of a single spam -- that's probably a pretty good indication that it is indeed spam and should be examined more closely.
Lets say you work for a large company, with say 10,000 people. 10,000 people * 10 spams a day (low number, but lets go with that for now) = 100,000 spam emails a day. Thats a lot of spam. Now, lets say that each spam is about 10kb. 10kb * 100,000 spams = 1000000kb, or (1000000/1024) 976 megabytes of spam. Almost a gig of spam a day.
.15 * 976 = $146.40. That may not sound that much, but over the course of a year that makes out to be about $53,436.
Now your company does not have a free pipeline to the internet. Lets assume for the sake of argument that they have to pay by the meg. Lets (wildly) assume that your company has to pay 15 cents per megabyte of traffic through their ISP.
Of course, thats just in internet feed charges. Assume that it takes the average person one second to read and delete a spam. With an average of 10 spams a day, thats ((10,000 * 10)/60) 1666.67 minutes per day, or 27.78 hours per day wasted on spam. Say the average person makes $20 dollars an hour, or about $40,000 a year. 27.78 * 20=$555.56 a day in lost time. Over a year, thats $202,777.78 in time lost to spam. Ouch.
So all those penis enlarger and diet spams are costing your company $256,000 a year. Multiply that by all the companies in the world that get spam, and you have a major financial burden
If that's what they want, that's what they'll get -- a daily helping of the contents of my Spam folder, courtesy of Cloudmark's SpamNet.
This is old news (26th April 2001).
Unselfish actions pay back better
Now that I use Sneakemail, I worry a lot less. So far, all those sites where I was worried they'd sell my address haven't done so. Occasionally one will crawl through Mozilla's Bugzilla, but not a lot so far. Just because the FTC is collecting Unsolicited Commercial Email doesn't mean they're going to do a lot about it. They're mostly going after the big cases of fraud and pyramid schemes. Its the people that are willing to pay $60 for a bottle of water that will cure all that ails them that are the problem.
echo "uce@ftc.gov" > ~/.forward
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
Would like a 'true' evolution plugin.
Just as deersoft.com has made for outlook. It works too!
still reading?
"Note - This is NOT Spam - you posted to one of our FFA sites or added yourself to the list. This is a one-time email transmission...no removal is necessary. Click Remove button to be removed: Remove"
LOL
Is this really necessary? Personally I'd think a much better approach would be to simply set up test accounts (not with .gov, but I mean on AOL, local ISPs, etc) and reference the email on a couple of webpages, and perhaps in a usenet posting. They will, without any doubt, very quickly get every spam that everyone else gets, without getting hundreds of thousands of duplicates of each and every spam. This idea of forwarding all spams, either a request or some people who have mentioned that they do this by default, is just a grotesque waste of internet resources, doubling or tripling the damage a spam does.
Having said that, spam is grotesquely out of control: My hotmail inbox now gets about 90 spams a day, and while Hotmail's spam filter catches most of them, I still have a noise floor as a dozen or so make it into my inbox every day (and conversely I have to go through the Junk Mail folder every week or so as real emails get stuck in there, particularly when associates or friends use subject lines like "BTW").
Heck, it even made it into a slashdot poll
The original message was received at Sat, 7 Sep 2002 22:01:38 +0700 from [203.144.69.6] ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors ----- (reason: 550 Host unknown) ----- Transcript of session follows ----- 550 5.1.2 ... Host unknown (Name server: ftc.gov': host not found)
I just recieved from SPAMCOP.NET what I suspect might be 'SHAKEDOWN Email.'
I own a domain but do not operate it. (I will not disclose the domain because that just makes me a target so you will forgive my lack of being specific on this.) My email server will recieve email for this domain, but there is no active use for it. My server has no open relays.
They sent me an email saying there has been or are complaints. This is the smaller part of the email. The rest of it is advertising services to me... SELLING ME THINGS and delivering propaganda.
When a bulk of the email contains advertisment of services and only a small portion of it delivers vague and unsupported information, I have to believe it's SPAM.
Is this a standard practice for SPAMCOP.NET?
The first link after the end of the artical as a request to join CNN's email list. Although not spam, who knows' if they don't sell your address or send you advertisements other than just news...
As much as I hate spam, I won't turn to the FTC or any other government agency to resolve the problem.
If you think the Net should be as autonomous as possible -- and that the government should not be allowed to restrict the free flow of information -- then you can't have it both ways and go running to the government when that flow of information is to your annoyance rather than to your benefit.
I just got one of those too. And every open relay tester I throw at it cant get one mail thru the box.
I think spamcop might be broken.
though i'm generally opposed to the death penalty, i wouldn't mind if it were only applied to spammers and virus-releasers.
Sorry, but it looks like someone beat you to the idea.
And a major financial incentive -- for your ISP. I'd happily pay a premium for an ISP that provides spam-filtering.
.
I'm not interested in perfect -- just cut down the bulk by 75% to 80% or so. False positives are bad, so avoid those.
This is NOT an issue where the government -- any government -- need to get involved.
Come ON people! You really want the same organizational paragon of efficiency that runs Amtrak and the U.S. Postal Service regulating e-mail? Are you, as a Slashdot reader, that inept that you can't properly configure a Junkbuster/Spamassassin Proxy?
If this costs so damn much money, then it is an opportunity for you to provide consulting services
With all the "let the government regulate it" talk, you'd think this was France and not the U.S.A.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
... the FCC starts looking into spam. The main problem isn't the shady business practices that spam often advertises, the problem is that spam happens. Period.
All the Federal Trade Commission can do is try to treat one of the symptoms, not the problem.
Couldn't they just have signed on for a few hotmail addresses?
Moderation: +4. Modded 70% Funny and 30% Overrated. 100% Saturated.
They just want my pr0n!
...we find FTC commissioners have suddenly become very horny and excited, we will know they got the spam.
...we find FTC commissioners have suddenly diverted all funds to Nigeria we know they've received the email.
Does this only apply to Americans, or does the FTC cover elsewhere/entire Internet/world?
What if your in America and the spam comes from China?
I use Spamcop a lot, however I wonder how successful it really is in stopping spam long term.
I thought one of the police jobs for the federal governemnt was investigating and arresting people for committing fraud. Why aren't they doing it to spam businesses?
Most people are pissed about spam because its unwanted email and the popular focus has been on limiting or controlling unwanted email. I think this is misguided, because the spammers (both the freelance mail senders and those who do their own sending for their own products) tend to join forces with the more legitimate direct marketing community and bring the debate about stopping spam to a standstill.
I think a better tactic would be to go after the products and services being sold via spam. IMHO nearly all (95%?) of them are fraudulent or illegal. If you eliminate the fraud businesses behind the spam, I think the spam itself will dramatically lighten up.
Going after the people that send the mail is also very difficult since you don't know where they are and many spams are impossible to track the origin. But in order to sell something you have to at least be reachable enough to be paid, and that should make it much easier and less resource intensive to find the fraudsters and put the screws to them.
While I like the idea that getting rid of the unsolicited email in and of itself, I think its also the least effective way to get rid of spam.
Here is my very effective (IMHO) Postfix spam filter to be added on /etc/postfix/main.cf file.
. txt
http://cs.stadia.fi/~pkoistin/postfix-spam-filter
NO WARRANTY!
You can forward email scams to them at the West African Fraud Letter address. The RCMP webmaster said "This is now a general account for all scam letters."
I do the same thing that Sneakmail does, just on my own domain. I caught somebody recently: Ticketmaster.
I ordered tickets on a Wednesday or Thursday for a concert on the Saturday. I received spam from a third party at the email address I'd provided on the following Monday or Tuesday. I Spamcop.net'ed them and deleted the email alias.
In future, I'm going to wander down to the actual venue box office if I can... it's just too bad that on the occasions that I can't, that the only alternative choice is Ticketmaster.
Their intergration of Spam Assassin into an Outlook component is great.
I use it at home and even bought licenses fr the office as well.
The software is well worth the money.
nuclear iraq bioweapon encryption cocaine korea terrorist
> I think I'd start [forwarding spam to Yahoo] if they
> sent me a summary monthly
I had exactly the opposite problem. Earthlink has an address where you can forward spam, and every time you do, they send you an acknowledgement message! I was diligently forwarding all of my spam to them, in the hope that it would eventually cut down on the number of unwanted messages that I receive... until I realized that I was effectively doubling the number of unwanted messages I received. One for the original spam, and one for the ack.
Then I carefully read their web page about forwarding. The only people they are going after are the ones that use Earthlink's own facilities to send spam. Like any significant spammer is going to do that in today's environment.
So I have come to the conclusion that ISPs sometimes provide a place to forward spam so they will appear to be doing something, and so that people can feel like they are doing something to eliminate spam.
The FTC may have similar motives -- it wouldn't be the first time that a U.S. government agency did something solely for the PR value -- but let's hope that's not the case.
One of the best Sapm-Blockers I've used is called "CloudMark SpamNet" found at http://www.cloudmark.net. They claim to catch 75% of spam. The interesting part is that it uses a P2P approach. If I get a spam that it doesn't catch, just hit "Block" and that email is blocked on everyone else's computer that is using the program. Supposedly it has some sort of reliability feature that lowers the credibility of those who block legitimate email (newsletters they have subscribed to but no longer want) so that that newsletter won't be blocked for anyone else. Seems to work great for me!
?SYNTAX ERROR IN SIG
READY.
This has already been done in France the email adress is spam@cnil.fr.
So many people did the forwards that the mailbox was Full almost everyday. They thought One person could deal with all the mails : they were wrong so they updated the mailbox and said they'll carry along with thos forwarded mails.
The results from these mails will permit to create a law to ban spamming in France, thus starting something in the EU, that would force a EU law for Spam.
none Yet.
It's a trick to get you to open and read your spam, to promote the US economy!!! Don't fall for it!!!
because its spam filter is really well done and catches almost all the spam I get into my 3 mailboxes. And I still post to usent with a valid adress.
All my Spam end in a special folder, every once in a while I slelect all my spam and forward it nto the french equivallent e-mail adresse.
none Yet.
That slightly modifies the argument, but makes no essential difference. Each employee spends a certain percentage of the time doing actual work and the rest in "down time" (resting, chatting, going to the can, etc). Spam does not magically increase an employee's percentage of "up time"; hence, if an employee spends (for example) 60% of the time up-and-working, the cost of spam in arkham6's argument can be multiplied by 60%.
Actually, it's worse than that, because spam selectively comes from "up time" -- that's when you check your mailbox.
The time spent typing smiley faces? There goes Luxemburg. =)
Bad analogy. Unless it is customary at your place of employment to include smiley faces in business communications, those come out of "down time", and hence cost nothing.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
I've been putting "uce@ftc.gov" into forms when sites make me register for no good reason for years now. Other addresses of note include "blarg@example.com", "postmaster@domain.name.of.site.making.me.registe
Um... and if you're a site admin, just ignore that last one...
-Denor
For me, the killer app for using Linux at home was fetchmail / IMAP / procmail / SpamAssassin. I was using POP3 to download email from several accounts, into mail clients at home and at work. I was tired of re-downloading the same messages, and of sorting the messages into folders in one place and having those changes not reflected other places.
So I set up my Linux server, which up to that point didn't do much except NAT, to fetchmail my messages from various accounts, run them through procmail and Spamassassin, and then publish the messages via IMAP. Now my email is accessible from anywhere, through an IMAP client or over the web (running IMP) or through ssh/pine. It's filtered for spam and sorted into folders, and I can back it up easily.
I wish Mozilla mail supported addressbooks stored in IMAP folders, but instead I have to run an LDAP server (way overkill) to manage contacts. IMP's address book component, Turba, is just about the only LDAP client which acts like a sensible contact manager and allows adding / editing entries.
I'm serious when I say this is a killer app for me. Before, I could have replaced my Linux server with a NAT router and not really missed it. Now it's essential to the way I work and communicate.
bought the shirt
I've found spamassassin to be mediocre with detecting spam. I get about 95% spam identification rate, but with about 10% false positives.
For example, I'm a quite active Usenet poster, using "[something]@expires-[year][month].[mydomain]" as my email address. "expires-200209" means the entire subdomain will be kicked after Sep 30. After that time, the spammer won't find a MX record for that subdomain and has no possibility to annoy me with his junk.
For legitimate correspondents, I'm telling them email adresses with a subdomain which will never expire or only very far in the future.
Running the risk of having my cute web server /.'d until it blows the whistle, here is a more detailed draft.
DocSnyder.
What do you mean, "only Americans"? China is as much a state in the United States of America as is Kentucky, Luxemburg, Texas, and Europe? The F in FTC (as in Federal...) makes sure it covers all states, from China to Alaska.
I don't understand this "different countries" stuff. It's like some people think American laws don't apply to them.
It's dated April 2002, so as previously pointed out, this isn't really hot news.
The document also lists some ways to reduce spam, but they are all pretty much common sense, such as this clever piece of advice:
"Try not to display your email address in public."
They are simply trying to enforce existing anti-fraud and consumer protection laws. Don't be so Pavlovian about the government.
You sent us 1385 spam messages. We had not seen 18 of them before. We prosecuted 58 of the spammers: 13 were shot 19 were beheaded 26 were forced to read spam in prison And a few seemed like good solutions to our impotence and small penis problems
-Cnik
As for what they are going to do with it--us not-so-paranoid people would expect them to use it to generate a "paper trail", a collection of evidence, for the location, apprehension, and prosecution of said spammer. We who are paranoid may worry about the government taking a sudden interest in us when they discover we exist, but I would tend to think that argument is well worn and a little unfounded anyway.
Nevertheless, it's always nice to see it happen when the public gets a startling revelation of what they really have at their disposal--lots of people simply don't know, and since they don't know, they can't very well take proper advantage of the tools afforded them as US citizens.
Now, if you go look at Spam Laws you'll see the US has been considering a few federal bills, but haven't gotten anywhere yet. But a lot of states do have laws in effect--whether these have had stood up in court is another question...
2002-03-19 15:07:13 spam uncle sam (articles,news) (rejected) i don't quite understand the submission process, perhaps some of us just don't matter to slashdot! sigh. :( ... ;)
The fallacy here is in assuming that every employee exists in a continual "on-and-working" state from the moment she sits down at her desk. Under such an assumption, 10 seconds spent doing something else equals 10 seconds of quantifiable production loss.
...
Ten seconds spent doing something else don't result in 10 seconds less of X.
No, not generically, but in the case of spam it does.
I spend a certain amount of time at work going through email. I have to. We use it for a lot of critical communications, and spam or no, it is more efficient for those purposes than phone, memo, or face to face.
So yeah, I will still blink, zone out, go to the bathroom, smoke 'n joke (or in my case, coca-cola and joke), whatever. But I will also waste time with spam. It is additive; it replaces time that I would be productively communicating.
Oh well, I bill all my time and it is a cost of doing business. My employer will save money if they can stop it.
I'm probably getting close to 150 UCEs a day, but I hardly see them. What is getting me upset is that folks are sending me email about UCEs that they get with a reply-to address that is my own. The forgeries are really getting out of hand, and some users can't seem to understand that no, the messages didn't come from me. Teaching them to read the headers is a pain. Tracing the source of some of these messages has typically taken me offshore to some fly-by-night operation that moves to another ISP 2x a week.
How many times do I have to opt out if a million businesses decide to take up spamming over the course of the next year or so. Sometimes I get over a dozen different copies of exactly the same spam from exactly the same sender, sent to a dozen different email addresses. These are legitimately different addresses because they have different roles. Of course a spammer won't know they go to the same person. But sending spam to them is essentially OFF TOPIC because their role isn't to respond to advertising.
Until the FTC (and this may require Congress to do this) adopts the principle that opting *IN* is required first, and that I should not have to go to the trouble to opt out if I never opted in in the first place, then as far as I'm concerned, any actions by the FTC is misguided and useless.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Hmmm... maybe we have all been going about this spam thing the wrong way.
Here's what I'm thinking: instead of avoiding the links in our spam, let's start visiting them.
All of us.
At the same time.
Let's create a slashbox in the front page called "SPAM LINK OF THE DAY", and have it be a duty of slashdot readers to visit this link as often as possible. With a vast army of disgruntled slashdot readers bent on their destruction, no spam web site will have a chance!
Snarkiness is inversely proportional to wisdom because it emphasizes feeling right rather than being right.
Logical moderation: +1 Funny. Have a nice day. =)
This sig no verb.
The flaw in this design is spammers will eventually figure it out. Three years ago I set up an email box on my own server with my own domain (so it would not be subject to an ISP or webmail provider giving it out). I never put the exact address online. Instead, I put a munged form of it online with things like "nospam" added. Guess what. It got spammed. Spammers figured out how to remove "nospam" from the address. That's now built in to spamware (some doesn't remove the "-" if I use name-nospam). It won't be long (maybe a year at most) after your method becomes popular for spammers to figure out how to detect and modify it to get through. And soon after that, the spamware will know how.
The only way to do this is with a scheme that makes it next to impossible to guess the base form, or an alternate form. For example, take the MD5 checksum of the date, along with a secret string you don't tell anyone, and use the first few characters as that email address. You can use it in the subdomain or the left-hand-side.
What will be needed will be a set of these pre-generated so the mail server already accepts them, and you store them in your PDA or other places where you can readily access them, and record who got which address.
The key is to provide no means for predicting what address can be used to bypass the filters.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
the ftc is interested in fraudulent solicitations, not simply spam. it would be nice to see some comprehension of the issues in the original post. when i have forwarded spam to the ftc and cc'd the sender, it has been remarkable how quickly the spam count drops. it seems that there are only a small number of lists for these spammers to chose from, and do you really want to solicit trouble?
I support this, and I would certainly click on such a link.
I wonder if taking it to the next level would work too. How about a P2P spam ddos-slammer? I don't mean a P2P blocker (like Cloudmark), but one that automatically slams Spam web sites at periodic, coordinated intervals?
To some extent, this would be annoying (and illegal?). But when "Swedish Penis Enlargers and University Diplomas Inc. vs. the People" gets to superior court, is a judge really going to side against the people?
I'd say if they've posted their e-mail on the web, they are probably getting as much as the rest of us already,
.gov and .mil domains from being collected by their bots, for obvious reasons.
Negative, most spammers block
and, not to forget all those teenage webcam links
i was doing this over four years ago
and gave up because I saw absolutely NO results.
this address seemed to be just a black hole. maybe with the additional press it will start working again.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
it's only fraud if they people selling the product KNOW they're lying. If they believe some pill or gadget really will make your dick 6 feet long, then no fraud. And how can you prove they DON'T believe that?
I'm the stranger...posting to
most spammers are smart enough not to spam a .gov e-mail address.
I really doubt this. You'd think they'd be smart enough to not send spam to any 'webmaster@' addresses, since whoever gets mail to that address has the greatest chances of being someone is willing and able to block their messages from getting to ALL the other users at that domain... however I see more email addressed to webmaster@domain than any other address that is forwarded to me. Presumably, because they know it will be a valid address at almost every domain, and/or they just spider them from web pages and put no further thought into it.
Although, I haven't seen much being sent to 'abuse@', so most of the spam software authors probably made some cursory filtering rules when they first started making their stuff, but I doubt '.gov' was in them. Only a very tiny percentage of .gov users would actually have the authority/ability to take action against spammers anyway, and there's bound to be some potential customers among the rest of them. That's the whole point of spam: not putting too much thought into the recipients. Gather hundreds of millions of addresses en mass, blast out millions of emails every day, a couple % of the recipients will buy the crap you're selling. Another couple % of the people will get downright pissed at receiving your junkmail, but they don't matter as long as you're making money. If you start getting too nitpicky about who you're sending to, then it starts to resemble real work and isn't as profitable...
If everyone forwarded every spam they received to their congressman, then that would get their attention. OTOH, maybe we don't want to shut down congress's mail server--it might be seen as an hostile act.
Most anti-Spam efforts seem to be defense-based
keyword filters, open relays, known Spam domains, etcetera.
My question: Where are the offensive strategies?
Example: Trace the Spam e-mail, not to the source, but to the destination:
Currently, sponsors encourage Spammers to sign-up for a revenue-generating system. Spammers must provide a tax number and personal information to be assigned a user identification (UID) number to add to the HTML script for Web pages. In return, a Spammer agrees to abide by the terms of use to get paid. If not, then the Spammer?s UID and the revenue generated for that UID will be lost.
Spammers have to give you the link to the pay/signup site with the Spammer?s UID number. You have everything you need to counter the Spam ? the UID number and the location of the site that at which the UID is used. A script can be written to parse a Spam message, snarf the Spammer and sponsor information, which then sends an e-mail complaint to the sponsor including the original e-mail and Spammer?s UID number.
As I see it, the sponsor and the Spammer are in a win-win situation right now.
Currently, by using the filter/block system whereby the Spammer's message does not reach it's intended recipient, the Spammer suffers no real consequences as there is no real penalty involved in filters and blocks. The other option of a recipient erasing the messages still does not hit
the Spammer where it hurts ? in the pocketbook.
However, if the Spammer?s account is terminated or the system generates a response back to the sponsor, the Spammer loses revenue (both in lost
sales and in lost time) on all of the work put into creating Web sites, sending the e-mails and has to start over with another account or company.
Spammer Losses:
o Revenue for that account
o All of the work that they has been done creating Web sites
o Sending e-mails (time lost)
o Has to start over with another account or company
Sponsor losses:
o Sponsor now has to process ALL of the replies generated by the Spamming
o Must cancel the account, pissing off the Spammer (NOTE: The sponsor does get to keep the money and customers created by the Spammer.)
Issues:
o Will the sponsor really cancel the account once the complaint has been filed?
o Can the sponsor be located? (Binary downloads)
o Would it be beneficial to maintain a central database of reported UID and sponsors?
o Maintaining the scripts will definitely be labor-intensive.
o A method would be needed to verify that reported UIDs are actually canceled.
and not email worms.
They have been doing this for years now.. It could be as long as 5 years uce@ftc.gov has been accepting spam. Talk about your old news. And all the slashdot drones eat it up like it's some kind of spam revolution.. "Wow, Uncle Sam will help us fight spam! Gee whiz!"
A P2P network that visits websites for any purpose! For example, if a popular web site does not get enough money with its banner ads and gets in danger of being shut down, just let this network simulate some clicks. Every user can decide which "site viewing" tasks he wants to support, and then, his client will make some page views for him...
Don't drink and su! antidisestablishmentariazationally
We herby declare war against any and all SPAMMERS and anyone who show support to them.
Whereas SPAM now composes 36% of e-mail today versus 8% a year ago.
Whereas SPAM is causing e-mail to become a useless medium through the increase of bullshit that has to be sorted through.
Whereas SPAMMERS are obnoxious assholes who show utter disrespect to private property by
0. Doing DoS attacks to anti-spamers through e-mail bombings,
1. using open e-mail relays to send their trash through and
2. bypassing spam filters set up by users who have no desire to receive such rubbish
Whereas products advertised by SPAMMER's are fraudulent.
Whereas SPAMMERs calls those people who oppose Unsolicited Commercial E-mail advertising terrorists.
Whereas SAPMMERS are lower than used car salesman, politicians.
Therefore, let it be resolved that SPAMMER's deserve to be put out of business by any legal means possible such as forcing them to lose accounts, be sued, boycotts and contacting the businesses that commercial e-mail pisses people off.
In addition, the SPAMMER's identified should have their personal contact information posted to encourage contact from people who desire NOT TO RECEIVE commercial advertising into their e-mail box.
It is time that the average Internet user be allowed to take control of their e-mail box. E-mail address are NOT f***ing public property belonging to the marketers, they are personal property belonging to the owners.
They originate a large portion of the spam. Block all yahoo addresses, along with hotmail, msn, aol, China, Taiwan, and South Korea.
Yahoo lets ANYONE set up a web page under false names. Keeeeeeeeerist, some nitwit set up one under a domain I'm responsible for, don't know how the confirm slipped through. Don't the nitwits at Yahoo know they can CHARGE for the distribution of porn? Don't the know about the Hustler business model?
really, it's comments like this that make those of us on the side of cleaning up the internet look just as bad if not _worse_.
Half your problem is M either makes you download all images, or forbids the loading of any image. Webbugs, anyone?
NS 4* let you disable downloading images, then either hit IMAGE on the toolbar, or right click on one specific image. Mozilla doesn't let you do that.
AOL is the pits, and so is their stillborn creation, Mozilla
I will forward all the naughty packets shutting down any of my work servers so that they can be better analyzed. MWUAHAHAHAHAHA
If you get SPAM for pyramid sales stuff where people want a $5 bill in the mail, and have put their address in the email. Report them to IRS for tax evasion, and then submit their details to one of those do you need help with your tax debt problem.
I use Win2K Pro and get my mail from a POP3 server with Opera's email client. I'm not willing to downgrade to Outhouse, which both cloudmark's SpamNet and Deersoft's SpamAssassin Pro require. Any suggestions for a general POP3 solution for the Win32 platform?
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE
The FTC just annouced plans for natural male enhancement, while planning to work at home making $7000 a week. This is followed later by annoucements of thousands of FTC employees who plan to send off for a credit card to pay for their new college diplomas.
| - | - |
I don't think we really need to be forwarding all of our spam to the FTC. They will just use it as statistical evidence further regulate things. I would prefer to keep governmental agencies out of my life and my e-mail whenever possible. If that means deleting some spam everyday then I am willing to do that. The best thing you can do is just not support businesses that spam and eventually they will decide it is not a good form of advertising.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
Another interesting part is that the only email client that they have working code for is MS Outlook, so I guess in a way Microsoft really is playing a part in killing spam just like some in this thread had hoped.
They also save the spam they receive in a database. If at some later date they discover or are granted new powers to prosecute, they already have a leg-up on evidence.
Note the bit about removal lists
From EmailMiners@excite.com
Reply-To EmailMiners12@excite.com
New email lists 9-1-02 - Plus removal data!
New Version Released 9-1-02
Bonus Removal Lists
New September Edition Just Released
Over 15 Million Fresh ACTIVE Email Addresses
We stress FRESH and NEW
FREE BULK EMAILING SOFTWARE INCLUDED
Requires multiple smtp's
Have you purchased email addresses in the past only to find that you always buy the same data from multiple companies?
You will not get that here. We are the prime source and weed out "CD Sellers" from our order. (We know who they are, at least most of them.)
We have spent WEEKS verifying, and testing all of the addresses on our New September Edition CD ROM which is fully loaded with over 15 million current and ACTIVE email addresses.
There will be a new verified version each month!
This CD is full of highly responsive individuals.
This NEW CD just hit the market and we are the prime source. We will only be selling 100 copies of the each new edition.
This is it! The best email address data in the world!
Bonus - Yes you will get some software! Not the high dollar software but software that can get mail out and it is called mailpusher!
Bonus 2 - Our HUGE removal database 25 Million Removes! We are adding as a bonus all of ouir removes from the past 3 years of mailing. You can wash you other lists with these removes!
Includes FLAMERS, HACKERS, AND MEAN ANTI SPAMMERS!
Get these people of of your list ASAP!
This CD is HOT and we are placing a limit on the orders so get your order in today!
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Fax Orders To 1-702-973-6667
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To rush order this "New September Email CD" simply
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Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
I report all my spam through SpamCop since I figure at least some of those ISPs out there will be depriving the spammers of their Internet access. I am waiting for the day when ISPs will see dumping spammers as a profit center and charge hefty cleanup deposits to those whom they allow to send more than N messages a day.
But for my own sanity, I pay SpamCop $30 a year to use their filtering service. I get fewer than 0.5 percent false positives, my real mail just comes through normally, and the spam is sitting there at SpamCop waiting for me to report it (checking for false positives, etc.).
Every time I make a report, I am contributing to the database tracking spam source IPs in the SpamCop Blocking List.
Does the goverment want to get in on the mass email game? "Dear Sir, were you running low on cash, we have a new plan and you'll make millions, just send $10 to IRS..."
Another possible reason (that will sit well with the black helicopter people) is that the their email recorders (they are reading YOUR email RIGHT NOW) is getting overloaded by the spam and they need a way to remove known spam to make looking at the other stuff easier.
Of course maybe they are looking into the spam problem are are attempting to fix it but remember this is the goverment and its a good thing we don't get all the goverment we pay for.
Dust up your french and read the details here.
By the way Spamgourmet is the ultimate weapon for giving a self-destructing address to websites that require one for registration without getting spammed in the process. It's tested and approved by yours truly.
http://www.somebaudy.com
what if someone sees one of your expired email addresses in an search of archived usenet articles, and trys to email you at it?
Damn. I knew Bush was a bad choice for president. Now he's gone and reimplemented segregation without telling anyone...
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
There are laws against stalking and harassment. Whether a computer is used or not does not matter at all. If you see him, you can make a citizens arrest yourself (check with a lawyer first for details, some states provide more protection from lawsuits than others).
SpamAssassin Pro makes the 50-100 spams I get each day to my dozen or so different addresses a NON-ISSUE !
A spam filter that works. Problem Solved.
The FTC encourages consumers to forward any spam they receive to the e-mail address uce@ftc.gov'. [Emphasis mine.]
NO. This is not true: They are prosecuting the chain mail sending people, and they sollicit forwarding of those types of SPAMs.
I bet the FTC is very happy about this SlashDot posting.....
Roger.
A larg precentage of spam is advertsing illegal services or scams.
:)
Examples: All those get rich quick scams especally the piramid scams that were done on-line and in e-mail long before the famous grean card spam.
Viagra with out prescription or with a rubber stamp prescription.
Etc.
The non-scam spam I get is:
Porn spam (Now if it was any good they wouldn't need to spam in the first place)
Printer toner spam
Windows software spam (However it's lower quality than whats already available for free for Windows anyway.. and usually compleatly useless to me, or occasionally piracy so it fits in the illegal catagory again)
And spam marketting (However they usually make false clames)
Even the lagit spam tends to make outragously false clames. When ever I try and verify a clammed business relationship I find the other party is absolutly denying it or in a few cases "Anyone who buys our products is a business partner including you"
Spam has proven to be far more expensive than it clames to be (Sorry but when people say "Good bye I'll never use your services again" it's a major loss...)
The advantage is the FTC dosen't watch spam for illegal stuff like scames, false advertising and outright illegal offers (Hay if people sold wepons grade plutonium today they'd be spamming Sadam Husain)
So my guess is the FTC is looking spam over for illegal stuff and going after them.
It's a good idea and will likely get an FTC report to congress saying "Well umm it's pritty much all illegal anyway" while halling all the spammers off to jail..
I don't actually exist.
Oh, and one more thing, telemarketing does not add to the GDP at all. If anything it takes away from it. There is no creation of value in telemarketing (or any marketing for that matter). If we don't spend the money on something the telemarketers are hawking on us, what do they think we're going to be doing with it? Burn it?
I won't be crying at all the day (not likely to ever happen for the very reasons you describe) they make telemarketing illegal. I will definitely be celebrating. Then I'll be worrying about the consequences of that stupid law.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars