Slashdot Mirror
SpamArchive.org Launched
An anonymous reader writes "SpamArchive.org has just been launched. SpamArchive.org is a community resource that provides a database of known spam to be used for testing, developing, and benchmarking anti-spam tools. The goal of this project is to provide a large repository of spam that can be used by researchers and tool developers. In the past, there were a few small personal spam archives that were used. There was no large set of spam that could be used to test new anti-spam algorithms. Thus, developers could not sufficiently test their techniques across a range of messages. Also, the lack of a "standard" sample of spam made it difficult to effectively benchmark anti-spam tools."
Do they have a mailing list I can sign up for if I want to get updated by e-mail?
Whoever wrote this obviously doesn't have a Hotmail account.
Even I know how to buy a domain name and write a few paragraphs of text on a white background. There is nothing about this archive to hint at its origin or credibility. This is a /. worthy story?
Can't researchers just set up their own hotmail account?
Seems cheaper.
Now that spam is so collectable, someone should start a service to let people trade it?
What will someone give me for my rare "Help fund the freedom fighters in Chechnya!" complete with numbered bank accounts to send donations to?
I think that they should send email out to everybody describing this great service!
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Dude, i could have registered a simlar domain and put up a comparable web page within a matter of hours. I hope they really exist.
Wouldnt it be great if the submit email address was forwarded to someone's ex girlfriend? Thats the ultimate form of revenge...
1) Register domain name.
2) Put up web page advertising some kind of anti-spam database.
3) Forward all email sent to the submit address to someone you dont like.
4) Get slashdotted.
The end result is that three million people send 100 spams the first hour to the submit address. Within a short amount of time, your foe has 300 million emails in his/her mailbox. Now that's spam.
Kan jeg få en pils, vær så snill?
NANAS, or the newsgoup news.admin.net-abuse.sightings does just this. It is a public archive of spam which can be searched e.g. with Google Groups:
http://groups.google.com/groups?group=news.admin.n et-abuse.sightings
Why reinvent the wheel? Or does this new spam archive have any new functionality to offer?
Well, there is already a pretty large Email and USENET Spam archive at the NANAS (news.admin.net-abuse.sightings) newsgroup.
You can check the Google Groups archive
You can read the NANAS charter at http://www.killfile.org/~tskirvin/nana/charter/nan as.html
says:
Domain Name: SPAMARCHIVE.ORG
Owner, Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Billing Contact:
Guru Rajan (ID00024772)
11475 Great Oak Way
Suite 210
Alpharetta, GA 30022
us
Phone: +1.6789699399
Email: guru.rajan@ciphertrust.com
http://www.ciphertrust.com introduces itself as:
Protect Your Email Gateway
Anti-spam and email security for the enterprise
CipherTrust has integrated defenses for all email application-level threats into one, comprehensive device. Our IronMail appliance protects enterprise email systems such as Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and Novell GroupWise against viruses, spam, and intruders, and provides message privacy and policy enforcement.
Exactly the opposite is needed for work on mail filters.
Spam is really easy to find, everyone knows that, create a hotmail account fill out some web forms, post to some newsgroups, put a mailto: on a web page. Wait a little while. Bingo, lots of spam.
However, non-spam email is harder to find. Using your own makes techniques that work with your particular type of email and not other people's.
Non-spam is harder to collect. Since email is often private in nature. Removing identifiers from the headers is easy enough, but the body also can contain things like addresses, emails, phone numbers, comparisons of the boss to bacteria, etc.
A collection of real emails, from which personal information has been replaced with fake data would be of great use. A few people I know are working on creating such a data set of email. It is aimed at more general email filtering though, not just spam detection, and hence requires categorisation. And is from academia and hence will probably lose the race with the heat death of universe for completion.
I do note they have a 'non-spam' heading on the very sparse web page which is encouraging.
Would spammers try to "anti-spam" the spam archive by submitting billions of perfectly normal emails?
Ian
...spammers use the anti-spam tools to create spam that doesn't trigger the automatic spam filters.
The archive could give them a lot of valid email addresses...
Consider this one: You forward a spam to submit@spamarchive.org. The forwarded mail is now a part of the archive. Spammers snoop the archive for email addresses.
His page of graphs shows the exponential growth of spam over the past few years.
This isn't like Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse or some other spam *solution*. It's intended to test to see what percentage right antispam tools get right -- false positives and negatives. It's useless (at least directly) to end users.
So unless your antispam tool breaks on some names in personalized letters, I would think that it's okay.
May we never see th
It's a trap!!!
1) Set up story about new site accepting spam to assist in creating better anti-spam tools.
2) accept all the submissions from the teeming millions(tm) at a popular tech site or two.
3) cull all the email addresses from those duped to forward spam to you.
4) sell said email addresses to spammers.
5) PROFIT!!!!
If you were a spammer and wanted to collect a large number of valid email addresses, how about this as an idea...
1) Produce a website pretending to be antispam.
2) Ask people to send their spam emails to the site (generally including a valid from address of course)
3) Publish on slashdot so as to get lots of interest.
4) ???
5) Profit!
(Unfortunately, we all know what stage 4 is for spammers...)
wot no sig
What's the point of testing a filter against a database of known spam if you can't test it against a database of nonspam?
Anybody can write a filter for bulk mail. How do you differentiate between solicited and unsolicited bulk mail?
How does this work, you ask? I create a new email address each time I give out my email address. We have a sendmail setup that allows you to make "username+foo@example.com" go to "username@example.com" where "foo" is any arbitrary string.
So, amazon.com thinks I'm "username+amazon@example.com", securityfocus thinks I'm "username+bugtraq@example.com" and so on. Once I receive spam on one of the addresses, it's trivial to write a filter that matches with near 100% confidence ("username+bugtraq@example.com" should only receive messages originating from securityfocus, etc.). Most times, if an address receives a spam, I can just procmail all mail to the address to /dev/null (eg, no complex rules like for the bugtraq example). This also allows me to track where spammers get their lists.
We use sendmail. Equivalently, qmail allows "username-foo@example.com" and if you own your own domain, just use "foo@example.com".
I find this advanced filtering stuff fascinating, from a completely academic point of view. I, of course, can't apply any of it since I don't receive any spam, but it's interesting nonetheless. I just read through how the Bayesian filter works. It is very simple: it only filters based on word (token) probabilities. So, it would assign a value to "make," "money" and "fast," but not "make money fast". Seems like you could get much better results if you do something more advanced like Markov chains or a neural net. There's lots of research out there on textual matching, and I'm not sure why people would start out with such a simple algorithm when there may be better things available (where "better" is measured not only by accuracy, but also by training time).
According to WHOIS, "spamarchive.org" was registered by one Guru Rajan, who has an email address at "ciphertrust.com". Also according to WHOIS, "ciphertrust.com" has the same person as technical contact and if you check the website you find they are the vendors of "IronMail: The Secure Internet Email Gateway", an established if not well known product.
In short, yes, it seem legit, and it probably took me less time to find that out than the time taken by the myriad people asking "is it legit" took to post the question. ;)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
In order to counter the rising tide of spam I recently installed a spamblocker, even though I'm wary of such beasts because of the danger of false positives.
:(
Sure enough, I have received false positives. But only from one source: my filter traps the Network Solutions email asking for confirmation to proceed with the transfer away of a domain to another registrar. Net$ol changed the format of these emails a while back: they now start off by talking about a "special offer" and it's only towards the end that the real purpose of the message is revealed. My suspicious mind wonders whether these emails are intentionally designed to look like spam to reduce the number of successful transfers... sneaky
... and I receive zero spam
...
Once I receive spam on one of the addresses...
I also advertise the email address widely
So, you receive no spam, but when you do receive spam, you edit procmail. Which is it?
Also, you widely advertise your email address, but you don't actually use your email address, but made-up aliases. Which is it?
You're simply masking the problem, and going thru a moderate amount of gyrations (which most average joe 'net users won't/can't go through) to do so.
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