Slashdot Mirror
The Measured Effectiveness of Blocking Asian Spam
fadden writes: "I recently started blocking IP addresses in China and Korea that were sending me spam. Instead of a blanket ban, I only blocked the subnets from which spam was being sent. After my first week of scanning and banning, I wrote up
a report on the effectiveness of the blocks." In related news, SSKennel adds that: "The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has discovered (prepare to be amazed!) that revealing your email address in chat rooms can get you spammed. It claims to have taken action against spammers who harvest email addresses and use them to send fraudulent spam." Shocker!
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has discovered (prepare to be amazed!) that revealing your email address in chat rooms can get you spammed. It claims to have taken action against spammers who harvest email addresses and use them to send fraudulent spam. Was Al Gore in that commission?
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
...so it was a bad idea to take a common word, use it as an AOL email address, then post it on every message board, chat room and newsgroup I've ever used -- particularly pr0n ones? I never would have guessed.
Danish != nationality
In other, vital, important news
Sticking your finger in an electrical socket MAY cause electrocution.
Smoking MAY cause cancer.
That "woman" you were cybering with in that chat room where you gave out your email was a spammer.
She was an underage spammer, at that. (ha ha)
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Yes, there is a difference between regular spam and the fraudulent variety. Normal spam is sent by well known "bulk mailers" (as they call themselves, in a pitiful attempt to legitimize their business) on a contract-for-hire basis.
They send email directly from their own systems to your mailbox. They do not fake their headers, use open relays, hijacked proxies or root'ed boxes of other people to send out their messages. They generally have contracts with their ISPs to not cancel their connectivity as long as they have some type of proof, no matter how vague, that the mail *might* be considered opt-in (and as long as the complaints aren't too frequent. These people do listwash their own lists, if only to stop spamming people who actually complain about it, and also to show to their ISPs that they have an effective opt-out system. Their spam is annoying, but currently legal.
Fraudulent spam, on the other hand, is completely different. These are the people that hijack other people's machines to do the dirty work, rape open relays and consume all of their bandwidth during spam runs, actively probe for open relays and proxies, forge everything they can in the headers, study SpamAssassin and other filters in an attempt to craft messages that don't "look" like spam. These are the people that use their opt-out lists as a source of revenue (by selling the names to other spammers), and will frequently joe-job spam activists and others who complain too loudly and to the wrong people...
The first type of spammer sends out insurance offers, cell phones ads, inkjet ads and such. The second type sends out virus/trojan laden messages, porno by the bucketload, ads for illegal drugs, etc.
Both types of spam are annoying, but the "fraudulent" type is much more so because of its immoral content (and anyone who thinks that sending pornographic images to children isn't immoral should quietly remove themselves from the gene pool) and also because of the theft of services (bandwidth, hard drive space, etc.) from the relays and proxies that they abuse.
It's legalese, "fraudulent" being defined as anything that's demonstrably false -- get-rich-quick etc. This leaves all the "non-fraudulent" enter-now-to-win and marketing crap perfectly legal (but no less annoying). As long as people keep biting and buying stuff marketed through spam, it's not going to stop. There's some useful info on the various legal resources to spam here. The definition differs continent to continent, country to country and state to state.