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Spam Archive opening FTP service December 4
Saint Aardvark writes "The FTP archives for spamarchive.org will be opening on December 4, according to this Wired article. But there already appear to be some archives available." I tried saving my spam for awhile just for giggles, but seeing that file grow to 100+ megs made me so angry I had to delete it. Currently getting ~200 spam every day, and now often they attach images so they are 100k+. Yay Internet!
Wouldn't this spam archive be a form of free advertising?
who actually gets loads of spam every day?
I get about 3 per day (3 too many!)
You always hear about these poor suckers getting 200 or so a day, but how many of us actrually have to put up with that much stuff? If I got that much, I'd just switch email accounts, cos I just wouldn't put up with it.
I'm not defending spam here, but I'm just kinda curious how much people actually do get on average.
Really, all you need to do is manage your address properly from the beginning, don't do obvious spam-lure tactics with it, use sneakemail/other aliasing and you're set.
Seriously ... in the last year, maybe 3 total spams have come to my main address. (They're all the same spam too. Something about skin care. Weird.)
I think the idea behind their site is nice, but I also think that more and more, people are realizing that the only way to really effectively block spam is to use whitelists -- no fancy schmancy algorithm is going to block spam for long.
It's a shame, because I'm pretty sure that ceaseless, unrelenting, brutal torture of known spammers would be equally effective, but is unfortunately illegal.
evil adrian
Maybe we'll get some of the more creative spamers to run a "best of spam" series. coming to a mailbox near you this holiday season.
I think they should just go ahead and provide a subscription email service. That way, people can get the spam right in their inbox, instead of having to download it through ftp.
"I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy"
Awww. CmdrTaco has finally installed a filter.
First they get rid of Jon Katz, now CmdrTaco is filtering his emails - as soon as Timothy starts checking for dupes we'll have to start finding new ways to take the piss :o)
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
The email to the fake account can be discarded in any case, so you don't get more junk email this way.
I get that much on my PERSONAL account, and i also 'manage' spam for a 10K user base..
Somedays, ALL I get done is dealing with spam.
Too bad we cant bill them back for my salary, and lost network resources, like we can do for un-requested faxes.
And arrest them for sending porn with out verifying a person's age. Around here, you would be either fined ( bookstore ) or arrested ( individual ) for trying such a stunt in 'real life'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I have hundreds to spare..
Is this to provide a amusement to future anthropologists and social historians?
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
SpamAssassin is rule based and doesn't as yet use this new, dubios, spamarchive. It can use Vipul's Razor, however, as well as SPEWS, SpamCop, etc.
dave
This is no dupe, it's a followup on a previous story
"Currently getting ~200 spam every day, and now often they attach images so they are 100k+. Yay Internet!"
:-)
Nope thats actualy whats known as a Pr0n mailing list
SpamAssassin is rule based and doesn't as yet use this new, dubios, spamarchive. It can use Vipul's Razor, however, as well as SPEWS, SpamCop, etc.
But, err, SpamAssassin also uses Vipul's Razor to filter inbound mail if you ask it to...!?
Al.The Daily ACK - Eclectic posts by yet another hacker
Burt "Out of my mind back in 5 minutes"
(Raises hand)
I do. Let's check. This morning I have:
30 spams that are not directly addressed to me,
130 spams that are directly addressed to my Verio email address,
5 spams addressed directly to my personal address.
Hmmm so I think I know what the problem is.
Verio sold my email address to every spam-merchant in the world.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
I also manage email for 10,000+ users. And I do a lot more than that; it simply does not take that much time if you handle things properly.
For corporate-wide spam blocking, sendmail has some great spam filtering features via DNS Black Lists (dnsbl). I use spamhaus.org and relays.osirusoft.com.
Add these lines to your sendmail.mc:
FEATURE(dnsbl, `sbl.spamhaus.org', `"550 Mail from " $&{client_addr} " rejected, see http://www.spamhaus.org/"')dnl
FEATURE(dnsbl, `relays.osirusoft.com', `"550 Mail from " $&{client_addr} " rejected, see http://relays.osirusoft.com"')dnl
There goes 90+% of the problem. After that, spamassassin handles the 10% that trickles through quite nicely.
If you don't use sendmail, all other modern mail relays can handle this problem in similar ways.
If people are going to use this archive to automatically induce rules for recognising junk mail (e.g. using naive bayes or ripper), then they will also need at least as many examples of legitimate mail.
Of course it could be useful for evaluating classifiers built using smaller corpora.
At this point, I think that in the last 2 days over 70% of the COMMENTS have been "oh this is a dup".
Now does this make EVERY email you receive spam?
Regardless, it works. I have never received spam through their service.
Of course a blacklist like this will be better than an algorithm for the one reason that if everyone has access to this algorithm to filter their mail, then spammers could possibly just keep sending an e-mail to themself and having it be filtered by all of the different filter algorithms and changing it a bit each time until he/she has custom-tailored that spam to get through all of the filters
Close the world.
"I'm pretty sure that ceaseless, unrelenting, brutal torture of known spammers would be equally effective, but is unfortunately illegal."
...Remember - most of these spammers base their operations out of China. So what we could do is somehow convice them to go there (offer them something they cannot refuse - a week's worth of unlimited serverfarm and bandwidth usage or something like that). Once they are there, we can inform the government that several dozen Falun Gong supports are in country trying to insight rebellion. Then you will get your wish.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
What about all the Foreign spam out there that doesn't use standard ascii like the archive seems to contain?
Almost all of my spam is from taiwan or china and sadly enough yahoo mail doesn't provide any good way to filter this out when the messages have fake headers. If I could simply filter on something in the Received path then it would help, but all they allow you to do is the From address as far as where the message came from.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
It's not the net's fault. Blame (or shoot) the spammer's.
:)
Well, some people ask for it by using their personal email account for signing up on sites, posting on usenet etc. Use an email account for these purposes, and the personal email account for friends and family. I don't receive any spam on my personal email account.
- wget spamarchive
- grep emailaddresses spamarchive
- mail emailaddresses
- ???
You know the rest...Some of us have been on Usenet since long before that meant we were "asking for it". That damage can't be undone.
Intelligent Life on Earth
google your verio address.
Are you sure you investigated exactly
what osirusoft does?
I fint it unfortunate that so many
administrators seem to put in osirusoft
as a blacklist without examing what it
does. Osirusoft combines the blackhole
listing of many many other blackhole
listings, one of which is unfortunately,
SPEWS. SPEWS in my opinion is
overzealous with blacklisting and it
is unfortunate that osirusoft includes
them in its list. To read more about
the problem, read this posting
here
here is a relavent quote...
ii. a grep on osirusoft - which yields about 1/2 the messages -
but.. when there's a false positive, there's a really good chance that
it's in this group - and of this class of false positives, there's a close
to 100% liklihood that it's SPEWS that's given the false positive
You can alos check out antispews.
patent this idea: authoring of commercially-oriented unsolicited email specifically formatted to defeat X antispam measure (like spamassassin say).
Another idea might be to protect spam utilities using the DMCA -- if you use it, you're not allowed to figure out how it works, and you're not allowed to circumvent its spam protection.
Thought I doubt either would work, it'd be ironic to use stupid laws for protection for a change.
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
Well, some people ask for it by using their personal email account for signing up on sites, posting on usenet etc.
Yeah, like those rape victims that were asking for it by wearing short skirts.
Nobody 'asked for it'. Don't you even resent the fact that spammers have made it impossible to post on Usenet with a legitimate e-mail address? Doesn't it piss you off that you have to be paranoid if some less-computer-savvy friend tells some web site to mail an article to you or sends you an online greeting card? Don't you get annoyed that every e-mail address that you post, no matter for what reason, get spammed?
Blame the criminals, not the victims.
hehe, I repeat. I use yahoo mail. Maybe that's my problem right there.
I did like it when I was using unix based mail and could procmail everything. *sigh*
When/if I get a newsystem maybe I'll leave my current one up as a permanent dedicated mail client.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
A message in the archive would have the following structure
Where I have replaced every name before a @ with SSS-PRIVATE. What do you think ?
I wouldn't give my spam archive if my emails privacy was not protected.
Note this message is not a spam.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
Which is what I said. Do you have problems reading?
dave
Just another use for spam (jaufs)
Sex - Find It
I'm sure much leakage is because of underhanded ISPs, companies selling email, and the like.
But in my case--and many people's--the main problem is that I am a public personality. I do things where there is good reason to disclose my email address to strangers (in my case, because I am a writer). A lot of those strangers write me for very legitimate reasons, but obviously once an email is made public you cannot keep it to only the good guys.
It doesn't apply so much to me personally, but a similar situation is where email addresses are listed in directories--company, organizations, and so on. In those cases also, you need to publish your email to let legitimate correspondence contact you.
I've always been a little puzzled by the (somewhat naive) folks who think to answer the spam problem by hiding their email from everywhere it might leak. There are various tricks for doing this, false addresses, complex usernames, different accounts, etc. That only really works for people--typically college kids or younger--who never need to DO anything in the world. For the rest of us, hiding an email address would be like hiding our snailmail address from business contacts, because we might get junk mail from releasing it.
Buy Text Processing in Python
This might be very slightly offtopic, given that we're talking about a spam archive here and not about the mechanics of spam itself, but I'm curious.
This story is about someone who tried a little experiment: she wanted to see if the "click here to unsubscribe" link in most spams REALLY worked. So she tried the link and got INUNDATED with MORE spam.
Anyone have experience with this? A friend of mine agrees--she says that hitting the "Unsubscribe" link just verifies that your address is in fact a real and active one.
I always thought that was bullshit, because spammers don't seem to care whether addresses work or not (see The Story of Nadine. Any comments?
--Theresa
Angry IT woman in big clompy boots. And talking lint!.
I found this script on the SpamAssassin mailing list. It's been pretty interesting to use.
/var/log/mail are fucking SPAM!!!
/etc/postfix/main.cf all running.
I ran the script a few minutes ago on a machine that I host for a friend (web counter service, her websites/etc - she's been on the net for many years with her own domain/etc)
Total Messages...: 14950
Clean Messages...: 6413
Spam Messages....: 8537
Spam Percentage..: 57 percent
57% of the email out of nearly 15,000 emails in
That is *ridiculous*
This is with SpamAssassin, Razor, Pyzor, and several RBL lists in
The spam still gets through. It sucks up bandwidth. It sucks up resources. It's really offensive sometimes. Spammers know there's no federal legislation in place to block them, so they go on their spammy ways.
Spammers are scum. They *do not care* that you don't want their spam.