As the Spam Turns

Anonymous writes "The SBL has added Verio's corporate mail servers to its blocklist which protects nearly 100 million mailboxes, because of the number of spam gangs on the Verio network. Verio also provides connectivity to AS26212, a collection of 9 of the most notorious spammers netblocks. AS26212 - the new spambone? - is also connected to he.net and bbnplanet.net."

Comments

Congratulations!

[Anonymous Coward]

As with the UDP, all that ridiculous overreactions like this result in is an increase in those who find the cure nych worse than the sickness.

I used to subscribe to a few filter lists on my mail servers, but the operators are such assholes about things that the lists are now useless, filtering out more valid email than bad (when you consider that a few intelligent local filters can eliminate 90% of spam).

Spam to spammers

[razmaspaz]

Do you think the people who send out all this spam get annoyed at all the spam in their mailbox or are they proud of the work they do?

Is that why spam in my Hotmail account has dropped

[dustpuppy]

Hmmm ... i don't know if it cooincidence, but the spam in my Hotmail account has significantly dropped off ... from 30 to 100 spam a day down to 10-20 max ...

Re:Is that why spam in my Hotmail account has drop

[BrookHarty]

Mine also, and I asked a couple friends who run ISPs, one in Japan, they also noticed a drop in spam. Could this "Mike and Andrew" health labs really be doing 50% of the spam in the USA?

There ought to be a law...

[cperciva]

We really need a law which requires Internet service providers to publicly disclose their terms of service -- that is, publicly disclose what terms of service they actually enforce.

After all, it's really just a consumer protection issue: Verio claims to have an active abuse department, and is thereby misleading people who assume that spammers on Verio's network will be shut down.

Spammers

[Ninja Master Gara]

I've had to shut down two mail accounts because of the enormous volume of spam they get. Enough to make even using spam filters a bandwidth problem on my dial up. They were unfortunate enough to be linked with mailto: on a medium traffic site before the harvesting craze began and within a couple weeks were effectively unusable.

ISPs need to realise that if they're not going to do anything about it, they'll be blocked. This happened to us years ago when the ORDB started, and we fixed the problem immediately. We didn't think they were being nasty to us, we realised we had a problem, and we set about fixing it. When ISPs get globally klined from IRC networks, their customers want to know why, and put pressure on the ISP. They listen and respond.

This is no different. If yer gonna be a spammy host, prepare to be blacklisted. Reponsible, rigid, no nonsense, targetted policies are the only thing that will have ANY effect, and even they won't STOP all spam. But it sure helps.

Re:This is depressing...

[Ilgaz]

I don't believe a single word of you. Your URL, which is some sort of affilate ID makes me think different stuff than the thing you said.

What is "your site", if its "your site", you are CEO of Reozone.com? If thats true, do you affilate with them?

Let me tell the real story. You had some sort of an innocent mailing list, than you sent that reozone.com URL with your affilate link to them.

Oh blocking Yahoo.com? gmx.de blocks them, Novell Myrealbox blocks their mailing list service because of non-serious abuse policy (even they are a potential huge customer). Also, when a yahoo mail user spams you, I have a record like, 2 hours later his account has been deleted.

SO EVERYONE CLICKS ON YOUR REFERER ID'ED URL ON SLASHDOT GIVES YOU MONEY?

bleh

Re:Is that why spam in my Hotmail account has drop

[MillionthMonkey]

Same here. The spam noise level on Hotmail is so intense that instead of checking individual items to delete, it's easier to set your hotmail preferences to display only 25 emails at a time, and then when checking mail just always click on the "check all" box to tag EVERYTHING for deletion. Then quickly scan down the list and maybe uncheck the one piece of email that is worth reading. I've saved my index finger from carpal tunnel this way.

Anyway, I used to plow through at LEAST three screenfuls of garbage at a time this way on Hotmail, but in the past few days, I've been doing only one screenload and getting all of it. So maybe something has happened.

Of course, it's going to come back very soon, so don't get too used to this. It's strange how we've sort of come full circle from being an agricultural economy and shoveling horseshit all day, to having an industrial revolution, and then computers, and worldwide computer networks, and after all this we end up still having to shovel mountains of horseshit around on a daily basis.

Re:Spam comes from unlikely places...

[loraksus]

passport?
adobe [trialware registration] or buy.com sells your addy to porn spammers. I've never actually gotten a nigerian money scam email, my dad is like "I get them all the time". Of course filtering html email and filtering the word "unsubscribe" in the body to trash tends to work really well for keeping yahoo free of spam.

About theft of service

[coolgeek]

I'll probably get tagged as a troll for this one, but...

I support and believe the position that spammers or other unauthorized users of a system that I own are stealing services from me. I further believe it is OK to block their traffic from crossing my equipment.

Now, let's look at this from the telemarketing perspective...My phone at home is one of those models that has a wall wart. I believe when the phone rings, or is in use, it draws more current. So, when a telemarketer makes an unsolicited (and unauthorized) call to my phone, does that mean they're stealing my electricity? What about my most valuable resource, my time? Are they stealing my time?

I hate spam just as much as the next guy. And I don't believe ignoring people who cause a nuisance infringes their right to free speech. I do however believe the "telemarketing" lens will be used by the Judicial System when examining these issues. Sooner or later, these spammers will mount a constitutional challenge to anti-spam legislation. Well, if they are making that much money, anyway. They may not even need the money for such a battle, it seems the EFF just might take up their cause.

Re:Good

[_Sprocket_]

I define commercial use as trying to sell a product on the Internet and communicate with customers. You send one single email to an unconfirmed email address and you can be blocked for days. Do that enough and you are out of business.

And what would it have taken to confirm that address? Perhapse ensure that you weren't opening yourself, and some unwitting third party, to abuse?

loosen the floodgates

[akb]

'member when Usenet admins stopped filtering spam to get some attention to the problem? That sure as shooting got people to pay attention, what with all the servers that went up in flames from the load. Maybe that's what we need with email, it feels like we're building to that kind of standoff.

Bet we'd see some real legislation and enforcement then, eh?

Lower-level solution: A new protocal

[Lord Bitman]

not that any of this will happen, but I see a lot of posts mentioning ideas like adding a new standard, a "SPAM" flag to the standard SMTP headers. What about something even lower than that? tcp/ip has plenty of bits left for "future expansion", why not an "Advert" bit? how about a couple different ones- "Main", "Advert", "Stream", just as bits? You know, things that can be knocked out with very little proccessing by routers?
That could speed things up a lot.

And now a future timeline:
-Terrorist groups note that many routers are dropping "advert" spam before they reach the mail servers, start sending messages with the "advert" bit set, thus avoiding detection by bugs in mail servers
-Government catches on, starts paying close attention to posts with the "advert" bit set
-Advertising is outlawed after Bush calls the advert bit "evil"

Re:Hrm, isn't that John Gilmore's ISP?

[billstewart]

Actually, you've hit a major irony, because Verio refuses to continue selling John Gilmore internet access. John was one of the members of The Little Garden internet access co-op (back before ISPs were common), which was businessified, then bought by Best, which was bought by Verio, which was bought by NTT.

But they will sell to spammers.

Some things

[Sycraft-fu]

First, your phone doesn't draw any more power to ring, or at least it shouldn't. The power necessary to ring is sent down the line. Have you never seen a phone that plugs only to the line? I have one sitting right next to me.

As to your time, well, all sorts of things "steal" your time and and thus far that's not something that you have any recourse for. Besides, you waste plenty of people's time too, it's just how things go.

The big difference between telemarketing and spam is who pays the cost. When a telemarketer calls me, I don't pay a thing, even if I do choose to answer the phone. They pay all associated long distance charges, my line costs me the same amount no matter how many calls I recieve. With SPAM, it is other peopel that foot the bill. The spammers order mail servers to send out thousands of messages, which uses tons of bandwidth on their ISP, and all the recieving ISPs. I work at a university and the amount of bandwidth used to SPAM is not trivial.

This is why telemarketing is not allowed to a cellphone (in the US), you have to pay for all calls including those you didn't initate, so people aren't allowed to make sales calls that would cost you money.

Also telemarketers tend to be much less persistant and much less fraudlent than spammers. Every time I've asked to be placed on a do not call list, the telemarketers have complied (because I can sue them if they don't). Also, all the sales calls I get are really offering me a legit service. When Sprint calls me selling long distance, they will make good on the offer if I want. At least 40% of the SPAM I recieve is totally fraudlent, and spammers don't know when to quit. I have recieved over 10 SPAMs per day for the same thing, form the same company. The only telemarketer I know that tried that receantly is the Miss Cleo service, and they got shut down and fined millions for it.

HE.net included? Surprised!

[markwelch]

I was also surprised to see he.net included in a blocklist. I hosted with them for a year (until moving my server home to my DSL connection due to budget constraints) because they have consistently had one of the strongest anti-spam responses, dating back to the "Joes.com/Yuri Rutman/thinning hair/el cheepo" forged-spam attack.

I do know that one of their employees handling spam complaints did give me a reason to pause once -- she initially accepted a spammer's response, but that action was reversed as soon as I challenged it, and the customer was terminated, and I was sent an apology making clear that this was a mistake, not a new spam-tolerant policy at the company. Later complaints were promptly and properly handled.

I believe that at least three he.net customers were terminated in the past year due to complaints I submitted. (And I was a lowly $200-per-month colo customer, and at least one of the terminated customers was much bigger.)

If he.net is leaving the door open to spam-cartels, despite warnings, then of course they should be blacklisted. I just find that harder to believe. In contrast, my experience has been than Verio is extremely spam-tolerant, even balking at terminating Spamford Wallace (they finally relented and cut him off, which resulted in his filing a frivolous lawsuit against me, costing me $5,000 to get the suit dismissed). All my more recent spam complaints to Verio have gone unanswered, and I know I have several Verio IP blocks already on my filter list, though I haven't blocked all their IP addresses.