Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.)
...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...
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.
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?
This is old news (26th April 2001).
Unselfish actions pay back better
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
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?
Sorry, but it looks like someone beat you to the idea.
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. Problem is, most white-color jobs are task based: I need to get X done today, where X equals a presentation, a subroutine, a sales call to Duluth -- whatever. Ten seconds spent doing something else don't result in 10 seconds less of X.
The only place where these efficiencies would truly come into play is repetitive (and, might I add, borderline inhumane) assembly line work like meatpacking. And I'm assuming most meatpackers are less concerned about getting spam than making it.
Heck, given the original argument, we could calculate astronomical amounts of monetary loss for just about everything. Employee time spent blinking could bankrupt a third world country. The time spent typing smiley faces? There goes Luxemburg. =)
Please allow me to gratuitously quote myself:Spam isn't about the "free flow of information." It is the equivalent of graffiti. You are free to say whatever the hell you want, just don't use my e-mail account space.
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.
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."
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!!!
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.
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.
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...
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
Imagine, say, the outcry if you regularly got sales calls at work from telemarketers. Even if you were able to hang these calls up in a second or two, they would still be a completely unwarranted disturbance to your working routine, and heads would undoubtedly roll.
Why is spam any different? Your argument about yawning, etc, is totally spurious as this time is already factored in. In effect, the company PAYS you to be comfortable at work (ie. breathe in and out, shift in your chair, etc.) so you can be maximally productive. They DO NOT pay you to read advertisements for penile enlargement products, throw the paper version of such advertisements in the wastepaper basket, hang up the phone on such telemarketed advertisements, or delete the same email advertisements from your inbox.
I've never heard anybody who wanted to keep their job say they were going to miss any project meeting, by the way, but I have certainly heard people wish they had, say, another 10 productive minutes at a crucial time of the day, so they could go to that meeting more prepared.
Spam costs individuals time. Time they do not chose to spend - and that's the key. After all, time is money as we all know.
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!"
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!
What address are you sending it to? Spam originating outside Earthlink's network may be sent to junkmail@earthlink.net. This mailbox does not send an auto-response. You will get an auto-response if you send mail to abuse@earthlink.net (or variations, ie, abuse@corp.earthlink.net, etc), but you should only send mail to abuse if it originated on Earthlink's network.
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.
This is correct if you are referring to mail sent to abuse. What can Earthlink do about spam from a MSN (for example) user?
Mail sent to the junkmail address, on the other hand, is forwarded on to Brightmail who runs Earthlink's Spaminator. They will consider it for inclusion in their incoming mail filters. So this mail is being looked at, and something is being done with it (albiet not by Earthlink directly).
I like my women like my coffee... pale and bitter.
I don't think the simpleminded "But I didn't know it wouldn't work" excuse really carries any legal water. It might get a 5 year old out of a spanking for taking cookies from the cookie jar, but I don't think it allows someone to feign ignorance to sell magic pixie dust.
Nope -- a given person works about the same percentage of the time on average. Being put under the gun will push the percentage up for a while; getting ahead of schedule and having the boss on vacation will let the percentage down for a while -- but in the long run it stays more or less constant.
Someone deprived of his usual downtime one day will make it up later, one way or another, to blow off the stress. (If anything, the annoyance of being spammed is likely to raise the overall percentage of "down time" by adding just a bit more grind to each day.)
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.