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Jupiter Forecasts 50% Increase In Spam
Mr. Sketch writes "According to Yahoo, the amount of spam is expected to increase 50% in the next five years, meaning the average american will get over 3600 of them a year. The future of email is??"
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I don't have email, you insensitive clod!
Wow - talk about signal to noise ratio.
Thing is, I don't get anywhere near that. Maybe 1 or 2, if I'm unlucky..
Do people (excluding Taco) really get that many ?
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. - Dijkstra
That's the only way for legacy mail accounts.
Maybe something like Cloudmark is the solution?
Martin
The future of email will be just like the present of email - most people will complaint about getting spam and delete it, some people will do automated spam detection and deletion of some sort and a few will work to get rid of spammers.
I doubt anything will really change and i don't really see the great big problem. I get tonnes of spam and i spend (at most) a minute a day deleting it. I *really* don't care...
Well perhaps Yahoo should do more to stop people spamming from their own email services!
I get about 300 a day, currently.
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They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
http://spamassassin.org/
'cause they include clever spam filters.
I'm trying out POPfile (Naive Bayes text classifier and a POP3 proxy) these days, it's looking good so far.
-- From Denmark
Whitelisting. If you don't know what it means, you only specify who you want to receive email from, and don't receive any other mail.
That would be a start!
i didnt know astrology could predict when spam arrives
We played dungeons and dragons for 3 hours.....then i was slain by an elf
I think that ISPs might decide to fight back. They're providing all the bandwidth to send this junk, and if they have to raise rates to their customers to do it, people will leave, causing their revenues to drop. It makes sense for them to nip this thing before that happens. Legislation, software filters, whatever...
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
AOL should act now by adding to it's "You've got mail!" sound. Having the computer say "It's not Spam!" afterwards would indicate to their users that an email is important enough not to delete.
I get more "Enlarge your penis!!!" Emails than anything else right now in my inbox (*sigh* if only it were true...)
Here we have the ultimate triumph of the marketdroids. These people think we would buy their stuff for sure, if only we heard the sales pitch. Hmmm... how about "not."
I've got news for them... you CAN'T sell ice to eskimos. This kind of ridiculous crap makes the sellers look like a bunch of charlatans (if the shoe fits...), and annoys the audience.
When I get carpal tunnel from pressing Ctrl-D, somebody's going to suffer.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
It seems we have found a use for Astrology!
Since when can a planet perdict an increase in Spam, read the headline, it sounds just like Astrology!
"Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
But at least my penis will grow by an inch or two.
And it'll always be hard thanks to those free viagra trials.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
What happened to the stories of spammers' costs increasing?
Since, according to the article, spam is going global, even if we ban it in the U.S., people in other countries might get into the spam business. Instead of American spammers bouncing spam off servers in faraway countries, we'll see people in second and third-world countries spamming for [insert ridiculously cheap wage in USD equiv].
I think the best solution is to tell the governments in those countries to fix their servers (or be held partially accountable?) Is real-time blackholing still a bad thing (strong-arm tactics against legit businesses, etc)?
...I don't have a Hotmail account, and don't let anyone go near a MSN site on my computer. Rather simple really.
Meat is murder, I eat chicken.
... Wouldn't a moderate number of 'Western' countries (North America, the EU, and a few others who might want to tag along) banning the sending of unsolicited mail and the marketing of tools and lists with which to do it make a serious impact on the amount of spam recieved? Sure, a certain amount of it comes from abroad, but quite a lot is domestic, too, and quite a few countries in these areas are prepared to pay for it who might not be if it were banned.
There needs to be a mechanism for the governments to pick up the excess cost of people recieving spam, rather than Jo Punter paying for it in a few extra pennies every time he dials up to check his mail...
I went 100% cellular to (among other things like convenience) avoid the telemarketers. Haven't had one call since, and it's been a year. I think I could live without email as well if the spam gets to be too much. Web access is a must, but I don't really need an email account. That's one sure way to avoid the spam.
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
Thus concludes the 8 o'clock news.
And now for the Spam forecast for tomorrow we switch to our techie in the basement.
john?, John are you there?
Yes margret, we're here in the basement of one of our nations largest ISP's, are we're looking on the screen.
As you can see, most spam will be concentrated in the north-west, and will slowly decent into the more southern regions of the nation. We can expect particulary heavy downfall of explicit spam, so parents, keep your children away from their mailboxes tomorrow!
As for the rest of the week, I am sad to say that it doesnt look good. we're likely to see a further increase, as we have seen in the last 5 years in a row now.
This has been John Geek from the basement of the heart of the digital world, back to you margret...
Why are other peoples sig's always more witty ???
kudos to the spammers. my click-through rate will ALSO go up by 50%, all they way from epsilon to delta.
a.c.
Only ppl in you contact list will be able to actually reach you, all the rest will end in a catch-all folder automatically deleted periodically.
:) that is a single acct that gets up to 20 spams/day !!
Some online services already offer this due to the overwhelming ammount of spam you get. I have a Hotmail acct i use to sign up to stuff online since '95. It gets around 10~15 spam daily which is caught by the spam filter and around 4~5 that get thru "misterioulsy"
I estimate that I receive approximately 7.2k pieces of spam yearly. This number will likely increase as one of my addresses is sold to even more companies.
/dev/null, but there we are again - resources are still being consumed.
Do I care? It's annoying to download, but I don't use the account receiving the spam for anything but amusement. (I can get breast implants! Man, I'd never leave the house if I did!)
I could just have the account deleted, but what's the point? It may save me the trouble of laughing my arse off at some of the mails the account gets, but it wouldn't solve the problem.
The problem isn't that I get spam, it's the fact that network resources are being wasted on it. I could, for example, bounce spam. Pointless, as it would then take up twice the resources. (Travelling to me, and then back.) I could drop it into the dark abyss of
What we should do is make as many "fake" accounts as we can, and attempt to raise the amount of spam exponentially. I'm talking to the point where the entire 'net starts slowing down.
Then, and only then, will we have a chance at seeing proper anti-spam legislation.
Exactly! That would be a sad end to e-mail.
How would you apply for a job online? Would a propective employer call or snail mail every canidate that he was slightly interested in hiring? That would seem like a real waste. Might as well send the resume via snail mail.
"Set up a prompting system for new incoming addresses," you say. You mean like filtering with IM's? So now instead of having the spam in your box waiting for deletion, you have to respond to these prompters. More annoying to me. Even if a checkbox list was setup.
If you don't like this . . . MOD someone else up.
I've determined the best thing you can do to fight spam is to get "open relays" (which allow spammers to anonymously send mail through their computer) to fix their security problems, and if all else fails, send a report to the Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS) and get them put on the Realtime Blackhole List (RBL), basically a widely used realtime updated list that networks use to block spammers. Visit their web site, and to see steps you should take to get in touch with and educate an owner of an open relay on how to make it secure.
A new (secure) protocol?
What the hell does a big gaseous planet have to do with predicting internet trends?
I'm no programmer, but I'd say its damn time for an email client that links to a P2P spam classification network. Only 95% verbose matches would be moved to your trash can. And if it displayed headers without you having to jump through some hoops it'd be nice, that and real-time spell check. (al la outlook)
CE
It's because dummies like you keep responding to them! Stop encouraging them!!! They have no way of making you money, or giving you a horse-sized penis.
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
The problem currently is that there's so many people who are doing a very good job at blocking / stopping most of the spam that the average joe or public official doesn't realize just how much spam is sent to his mailbox every day (or at least would be if it weren't for the anti-spammers).
What if for a period of time, maybe a week or a month, a day isn't long enough, the anti-spammers just quit. All of them. Let the spammers have an internet-wide orgy. Let people see how much of a problem this is - let the lawmakers make better spam laws, and then have the law enforcement stop them.
Blocking the spam is counter-productive, it only encourages the spammers to come up with better ideas on how to get it into your mailbox. The spam needs to be stopped at the source.
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
I finally realised just how big the spam problem has become when Tupperware spammed me the other day!
The moon is strong in the earth signs: Microsoft shares will have a slight incline over the next sun-period.
Saturn returns! Internet companies will have a turn-around in the age of the newer economy!
Mars is ascending towards pluto in the fifth house, meaning that we will probably not see Duke Nukem Forever next year either.
"I tend to think of OS X as Linux with QA and Taste", James Gosling, creator of Java
I use MailArmory (www.mailarmory.com). It removes, literally, over 99% of the spam I get before I see it.
:D
Just a few of it's features:
-Bayes Filtering
-RBL (and other lists) Checking
-Personal Blacklist
-Personal Whitelist
-Virus Filtering
-Highly Configurable Spam Tolerances, Domain-wide or Single-user (uses a point-based system that looks at many, many factors)
I'm loving it.
It'd still be better to stop the spam at the source, but...
Anyone have recomendations for other services that work both for an entire domain and for individual users? I like many of the downloadable apps that do much of what's listed above, but teaching users how to adjust them (or even how to just leave them the way they've been set) is really a pain.
The ability to send unsolicited email to practically anyone has long been a valuable online tool for everything from online protests (like filling your Congressman's mailbox with anti-DMCA flames) to communicating with intriguing personalities. A good deal of anti-spam legislation can be interpreted in ways that infringe on this basic cyber-right. Worse, the anti-spam cause could also be used by authoritarian interests to crack down on all unsiolicited emails.
Likewise, anonymous remailers and open relays have been used by people to protect their privacy almost as long as email has existed. These valuable tools of freedom can also be targeted by the Ashcrofts of the world in their bid to tie back our liberites, all in the name of crushing "spam".
Let us hope that privacy-loving interests will continue to develop technological solutions to the problem of spam, thereby keeping the solution to the problem market- and freedom- based rather than relying on the "good graces" of the State to keep junk mail out of our inboxes
You know, I don't think I've gotten a single piece of spam since I was on AOL 5 years ago.
Is that a record?
Spamming is illegal throughout the European Union - I don't get hardly any spam from Europe (I get about 60 a day!), and if I get some, I am entitled to cash 250 Euros from the spammer... it works!
Unfortunately some third-world countries like Korea, China, Brasil and USA (!!!) still allow spam or are reluctant to fight spammers, so spam is still a big problem to the whole world.
Until those countries don't wake up and outlaw spam, the problem will persist
PS: I recently have put most of APNIC in my sendmail access-list - it eliminates 60% of the spam, but spam from USA is still an issue.
Greetings,
ms --
Same theory with spam. Except my amount of spam will increase 1000fold, and yours won't increase at all. I'm messing up the average. I should probably stop soliciting impotence advice from Dr. Spam-alot.
Sex - Find It
If I only had time to respond to all those fine offers from Nigeria, I would own 850,000,000 (eight hundred fifty million) bits of email already.
Im not sure why everyone gets so upset?
People spend more time trying to filter this than hit delete 9 times a day.
Are you really that lazy?
my first thought was how on Earth a planet can forecast 50% increase in spam?
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
Expand the definition!
Of course spam will increase 50% in the next five years, because the definition of spam has ballooned to include "any and all e-mail that does not originate from my bestest friends of many decades" and "any e-mail for which I do not recognize the return address."
There are those who will posit that *any* introductory e-mail, even business to business, is rotten, filthy, maggot-infested SPAM and the person daring to say "hello, my name is" to someone they don't know via e-mail is a rotten, filthy, stinking spammer.
They are wrong.
Business depends on the ability of people to communicate, often with those they don't know who work at other businesses. One-to-many commercial advertising "buy this product today" bulk mailed to a list of unknown addresses is spam. "Hello, my name is" to the marketing or press relations department at another business and similar correspondence is not.
Like it or not folks, as e-mail becomes more important, it will be used by business to do business. Hopefully they will refrain from jamming everyone's inbox with "buy buy buy," (something I do not support), but if businesses and professionals can't introduce themselves to one another, the economy stops. Period.
So let's return to the *original* definition of spam and stop screeching SPAMMER!! SPAMMER!! SPAMMER!! everytime we don't recognize the return e-mail address, shall we?
Wouldn't it be a good idea to reply to as much spam as possible with subject lines like "I am very interested" or "Please send me more information"? Or actual orders with faked names? I know, that would validate my actual email adress, but if VERY MANY people did that, I bet we could drive the spammers crazy since they couldn't find the one or two real orders in the sheer mass of faked orders. Maybe a little script that sends faked orders (with different text) from various faked adresses?
Motekye.8m.com ( Blog )
If you make spamming illegal here some spammer in Kryziafkigasistan will just set up a server farm and start blasting away.
American laws don't usually concern people in other countries; especially countries that aren't our tightest allies.
The Internet is global and it would be next to impossible to stop it once and for all. What's to stop somebody from popping up rogue servers for a day or so, blasting out spam, then taking their server down and moving it to a different IP address?
There are so many ways to evade the law in this area, and, ultimately, while we're fighting the "War on Terror" nobody is going to commit any real enforcement resoruces to chasing spammers.
Making it illegal would have a very small effect, in my opinion. Heck, those "Send a buck to each name on the list" scams are illegal but that doesn't stop them. So is the "I'm a Nigerian Prince with $20 Billion and I've chosen you, a broke college student, to help me get it out of the country" scam. Hasn't stopped.
Ultimately we're stuck with it until it becomes unprofitable to do it. Until that day comes better filters and a lot of [DELETE] are probably the best we can hope for.
-Coach-
Perhaps the world's greatest tragedy is that ignorance is not impotence.
Yahoo better mail all its subscribers and others to warn them about spam.... er oops.. that itself would constitute spam. oh well.
It's tough to avoid spam , and i guess it is impossible to completly block it out.. as you will always get unwanted mail from some pesky friend or relentless ma-in-law. It seems to be more of a problem of social engineering, rather than technology.
|/________
|\A|ALYS|
What I don't understand is why spammers try and defeat the filters - it seems like a waste of time to me. Those who filter their email don't want the spam and won't buy anything from a spammer - so why bother?
I've got so frustrated with the vast quantities of spam I receive that I installed SpamAssassin. It works surprisingly well.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Spam Forecasts 50% Increase In Jupiter
next thing you know we really will be having spam spam and spam with our eggs and ham.
A little calculation...
There are about 12 million businesses in the US alone. If one tenth of one percent of them sent you one email per year, it would amount to 1000 messages per month. Just a single, polite inquiry once a year by a tiny fraction of the legitimate businesses in the US, none of whom would suspect that they are causing a problem. As common as spam may seem, most businesses haven't discovered unsolicited email as a marketing tool.
That's the main reason we need anti-spam legislation. Not especially because of the aggressive efforts of a few assholes, but because of the clogging potential of even light usage by a vast number of businesses who mean no harm.
Perfect client side email filtering.
The more people blow this problem up, the more likely it is that legislators will try and tackle it.
And you know what that means; more bad "cyberlaw".
Much better to concentrate on solutions to a problem, rather than making repretitive and useless noises about the problem itself.
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
http://islandia.law.yale.edu/ayers/mprivacy.pdf
... this presumes marketdroids have imagination and are risk-takers.
Marketing Privacy: A Solution for the Blight of Telemarketing (and Spam and Junk Mail)
Ian Ayres and Matthew Funk
Naw
LL
more like 6 months
:-)
I see a Moore's Law for spam - spam power will double every 9 months
So if you want to get into a growing industry work for/found an anti-spam company.
as ever with a
The future of email is??
I'm no fortuneteller but a good start would be an email protocol that fucking authenticates the sender so that you could be guaranteed that every email in your inbox has a from header that doesn't lie. No more untracable spammers. No more viruses that claim to come from your friends. As an added bonus, this would stop the flood of emails from various postmasters warning you that an email you never sent was not able to go through.
Seriously, SMTP needs to be redone and the sooner the better. I know there are things like TLS and SMTP auth floating around, but they are not pervasive or mandatory, so they do no good at all.
I'll probably loose karma over this, but here goes anyway.
Of course spam is an important issue. And it's damn annoying too. But I simply don't believe all these stories about how email is going to become crippled by it.
There are spam filters. More importantly, the use of aggressive blacklists forces ISPs themselves to take a tough line.
The questioner asks what the future for email is. Well, it's simple: email is fine as long as the user is sensible. I have several accounts. I know that my hotmail account is entirely unusuable because of the level of spam it recieves. If I need to give my email address to someone I don't trust fully, I give them that.
I have a work address. This gets a little spam from time to time as the organisation gets targeted. I filter out these spams with my own spam filter.
Mailing lists tend to go to another address. So far, I haven't had too much spam from that quarter.
My personal address is known only to a few friends. So far, no spam.
The rule for keeping your address spam free is the same as it ever was: don't publish it.
Now, what about people who want to advertise their address for open source projects and the like? Well, put it in the source code, in the README files, wherever you like. Just not on your web page.
Since I moved my primary account 18 months ago, I have got no more than 1 spam mailout per month, which I just blackhole.
Thing is, if your address appears anywhere "visible", it'll end up on spammers' bulk mail address-list CDs - so they can spam you to offer spam-blocking software. Go figure.It's handy to have a few disposable free mail accounts...Ok, now if you wanted to send 100,000 messages of 2kB each, that would require from you to send 200MB + time to connect cost + DNS lookup cost + SMPT session cost == a couple of days.
Pretty impossible for one person don't you think?
So how is it done? Simply by SMPT server duplication and redirection of messages. A spammer only sends a few e-mails which are *exponentially* multiplicated in a hierartic tree of SMPT servers.
Theoretically that exists to reduce to load of mailing lists, etc.
So cut that feature down are DEMAND that everybody who wishes to send multiple copies of the same message to HAVE to do SO equal amount of times to each recipient respectively.
Maybe we should just start making fun of spammers, instead of lawyers and blondes. I have karma to burn, so here's a start. :D
A drug dealer, an axe murderer, and a spammer are traveling together. One night they stay in a small farmhouse near a barn. The house only has two beds, so it is agreed that the drug dealer will sleep in the barn, while the axe murderer and spammer sleep in the house. So they go to bed.
15 minutes later, the drug dealer comes in from the barn. "With all that hay and all those animals, my allergies are acting up. I can't sleep in the barn!" So the axe murderer agrees to go out there and gives the drug dealer his bed.
15 minutes later, the axe murderer comes in from the barn, saying, "Those animals are making too much noise! I can't sleep out there!" The spammer sighs, saying "Ok, ok, I can sleep through anything. I'll go out there."
A few minutes later, the cows, horses, and pigs all come in to the house, screaming "There's a spammer in the barn! We can't sleep with a spammer!"
Yahoo: some "war" against SPAM...
Is it really a war, when you have to manually delete crap out of your "bulk mail" mailbox, instead of having it automatically deleted?
I understand that this is done in order to drive up your total usage, to get you to pay for more disk space, but still...
-- Terry
A direct battle against spammers would be lost from the beginning; their forged addresses, dynamic IP dialups and worldwide anti-spam weak legislation makes hard to find and prosecute them.
Then "fight" who buys from them!
Do everything you can to inform people out there not to buy anything that was offered with unsolicited email, whatever the price. Explain them why to ignore and how and where they can report spam.
If somebody you know is going to sign a subscription with one ISP known to be spammer-friendly, explain him/her why he/she should choose another one.
In one sentence: make spammers and their friends make less and less money every day, and spam will stop. I don't see alternatives until spam will be outlawed worldwide. But don't expect this to happen soon.
It gives you the feeling that there are people out there who care enough to send you personalized, thoughtful solicitations. They wouldn't send it to you if they thought you didn't really, really be interested in the product they're selling.
Also, it's pink and tasty.
why run from Vincenzo?
see subject line
What is so bad about people receiving some of those?
Spam!
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
There's no way in hell we're going to be that lucky. A 50% increase in 5 years would make me jump with joy.
The truth is it's increasing at a much faster rate than that. Recent research has shown that it's going up about 400% per year!!! And my personal email account verifies that sort of increase.
I suspect Jupiter is going to be eating its own words. In 5 years I suspect we'll be seeing perhaps 50 times more spam, not 50% more.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
I would love to be able to filter U.S. Postal mail by sender and/or class. An uphill battle I'm sure. I think that past efforts to stop mass junk mailings were unsuccessful; something about it being illegal or unconstitutional to prevent senders from using the mail for legal purposes came to play.
But what if the issue were approached from the point that a recipient has the right to refuse mail? Refusal does not neccessarily have to take place at the door step. Current technology can easily be applied to preventing unwanted mail from ever leaving the post office. Any method currently used to block/filter/reject email spam can be applied to snail mail. Maybe its time for a grassroots movement along these lines?
Not only is less junk mail less annoying, but think about the potential decrease in paper waste. Yeah, recycling is probably what junk mail advocates would offer as a solution to waste issues, but not all cities on Earth recycle, and in the ones that do there is a cost to run such programs. Less junk mail could mean less paper production, lower recycling cost, and less pollution (fewer trucks needed to haul mail). And it would brighten USPS balance sheets - fewer low profit, large, bulky items to deliver.
I configured SpamAssasin on our incoming mail servers earlier this year. Whew! Was I a happy man! Not enough is said about the great work the SpamAssasin team has done. It just works, filtering out >95% of the spam I receive (about 30 to 40 per day). And what about my hotmail account? I can't be bothered to look through that load of garbage anymore.
Real men don't need signitures!!!
The golden age of advertising is here, and it's only just beginning. If you think that you're immersed in marketing noise right now, don't even think that it won't get much worse.
Surely we're all supportive of freedom in the marketplace, but we don't have to be such market fundamentalists that we can't talk about legislation that would tell advertisers where they *can* advertise, rather than where they *can't*. We could settle this question of whether or not money equals free speech once and for all. We could create forums for advertising, and the market could be more equitable.
Why take such a step? Advertising is taking over our lives, and it's displacing many of the more meaningful aspects of human culture that have been developed over millions of years. It's all going away...
Use your imagination to see 50 years into the future...the people who are pushing the desceptive ads of today are just trying to be competitive....they and their successors won't stop pushing advertising further and further into every moment of our lives because their competitors won't stop pushing advertising further and further into every moment of our lives.
Imagine...we could actually end this spiral that's quickly taking human civilization down the toilet.
If I sound like a radical to you, it's only because we're all so perfectly accustomed to it, and we have no idea what things might be like without so much of it. As I type this, I can see logos and slogans on my screen, to my left, to my right, behind me...just look around...it's everywhere!!! AAAUGHHH!!!
Your right to speak is not the same thing as you having a right to have me listen to you. There is no guarantee of an audience.
Next, you will be telling me that it's illegal for me to wear headphones and listen to music while you are speaking publically, because you have a right to have me hear you.
And then you'll tell me it's illegal to change channels when a commercial comes on.
That's just utter BS.
Commercial speech may be protected under the first ammendment, but I'll be damned if that means I have to listen to it.
-- Terry
Some of the mail that goes to you bulk mail box might actually be legitimate mail. (i.e. it was incorrectly flagged by the filter.)
Compare the inconvenience of potentially never receiving a crucial email with the inconvenience of having to "manually" delete the bulk mail box. (It does get deleted automatically periodically.)
I hate spam, and thus run my own mail server and employ various spam filtering / blocking techniques. The reason I do this is because I hate spam and for a long time had no other choice but to deal with it because of my long time email address with my local isp (been with them forever). I had asked about spam filtering and all I was told was "Configure outlook express to block senders. . ."
.
Now the average joe is not in the position to run a mail server and deal with spam in the many ways that some slashdotters can. . . Leading to my question. .
Would you or better your mother pay a small monthly fee to have an email account that was free or almost free from spam? Employing such techniques as spam assassin or better something like tmda (tmda works like this, you add people you want email from to a whitelist, those not on your list can email you but they get a message which they must respond to be added to your white list).
Would you be willing to pay $5 a month, $10? How concerned is the average person with spam? Or are they just use to it and are willing to click delete over and over again.
So can I as an individual get an injunction on the dozen or so USian citizens who are harassing me each day by sending me all that tripe? I could if they were physically present when doing it...
Client filtering will not solve the problem.
The reason it will not solve the problem is because it validates your address, when the email is not rejected by the destination server.
That means that your address is "in play": it gets added to lists, and passed around, until everyone has your address. A percentage of what these people send *will* get through to you: client filtering can only go so far, before it blocks everything.
Client filtering requires that you download the email -- paying for the priviledge, eitheir directly, or indirectly, in term of time and resources.
Client filtering means that any given SPAM can be pre-tested against any set filtering algorithm, and modified so that it does not trigger the filter, before it is ever sent to you directly, in order to get around the filter.
Client filtering is an idea that's appealing only to people who don't really understand email technology, or who are acting willfully ignorant because they have a secondary agenda.
Everyone who keeps suggesting client filtering has one or more of these attributes:
1) They sell client filtering software
2) They are an SMTP service provider, who does not want to burn compute cycles on their server by doing acceptance filtering, and rejecting the email
3) They have a broadband link, and thik that everyone else has one, too
4) They are a SPAMmer
-- Terry
An 8.5% p.a. rate of increase? I hope these estimates are correct - I'd expected it to be much worse.
Since secure anonymous digital cash is still a fantasy (and a "terrorist" fantasy I'm sure! so track my finances! please! I've got nothing to hide!</end mini-sarcastic-rant>), the better option is to simply callback the sender automatically--if he didn't forge his address like 99.9% of spammers do--and ask him to perform some computationaly expensive operation and return the result for verification. If-not-spam, then whitelist the address/signature so future communication is "free".
Of course filtering is easier as a bandaid solution until people get fed up enough to scrap the old naive protocol & clients..
--
Power to the Peaceful
I run a business and consider spam (defined as unsolicited bulk email and not as you incorrectly state as a sender that I don't recognize) as theft of my time and my resources. (I own a business).
Entities spamming me are blacklisted. I will never, ever consider doing business with them. If they are annoying enough I take the time to report them to their ISPs and (hopefully) have them kicked off the network.
If you want to advertise, then you better fucking pay for it. Otherwise (regardless of "introductary messages", which are as much spam as an invitation to park Ms. Abachas 70m $ on my bank account) you are stealing from me and my company.
It's as simple as that.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
this one works
personally i won't be in any more trouble than before, because i use spamassassin.
but what comes more and more to my attention:
spam is traffic, traffic costs money. who pays for all this?
Why not just become a hermit and accept only the e-mail from the addresses you know? It's not that hard to interface with a pop3.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
Now which country do we need to lobby...
P.
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
There are 11 kinds of people. Those that understand binary, and those that don't.
Sorry but I really don't get the anger some people feel towards spam. As far as I can see it's just another "geek issue", something that people like to get all high and mighty about. Maybe it has something to do with showing other people on who's side you are, I don't know. But I do think that people are greatly exaggerating the problem.
.. that refuse to disconnect anyone spamvertising yahoo store URLs? I'm surprised yahoo has the gall to carry the story.
I write as the postmaster for a consumer email service, who enforces a strict abuse policy to prevent abuse at source. I do not consider client level filtering as a viable solution, it is a temporary stop-gap.
It cures the symptoms not the cause, around 90% of all inbound traiffic to our email system is UCE and somebody has to pay for this, in both traffic charges and server capability. This is a hidden cost passed on all email users, ultimatly the consumer.
It is for this reason that client side filtering is not a long term cure, it addresses the symptom not the roor cause. The long term solution must be the introduction of a trust network. The technology to make to possible is readily available in public key cryptography, what is lacking is the WILL. A system like this need not compromise anonymity, there are cryptographic protocols that allow for the establishment of anonymous trust with virtual identities. These same system can also be used to ensure email is cryptographically secure.
This system requires the introduce of a core network of trusted directory servers as part of the MTA backbone, a network of authoritive MTA's which can and will vouch its users.
This system is also vastly superior to the current black lists, which are far too centralised, clique and arbitrary, and fundamentally ineffective.
This proposal does no even prevent commercial email, if anything it allows this to legitimise, punishing the fraudsters and crooks whilst rewarding the responsible. It is entirely feasible to choose to accept commercial/bulk email from their bank, or OSDN.
Given time this will also provide participants a two fold advantage reduced costs and superior service.
Spammers have web sites. And they live in homes. Cant we go and spam their homes, for example ring the bell at 3am in morning and ask them to pay licensing fee. U know I have put a notice board on my phone line that any unsolicited mail coming through this wire... which is my property has to pay me 100$. So how do I collect this fee?
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
A way to stop the spam from getting to the user in a clean, simple system. With no spam getting to the users, nobody can fall for the scams, making it more and more difficult to turn a profit.
Of course, implimenting such a system, is rather diffcult, with all the free mail providers, ISP's, and independant server operators providing e-mail acess.
What I'd like to see is a nice simple e-mail program that has at least 3 seperate spam identification systems built in (each of them a differnt but effective way of checking for spam) Have the program check the results, and if 2 of the 3 call it spam, toss it into a folder that gets periodically purged, just so those who want to look at spam, can look at it, and deliver te rest to the inbox.
Heck, there might even be software that does this, I don't know. I admitidly use Outlook Express for most of my POP3 mail, simply because I like how it handles multiple accounts, and I don't get much mail anyway (spam sticks out like a sore thumb, and is deleted, unread.)
Though, I only get, on average, maybe 4 spam e-mails a week.
How do I only get 1-2 a week? - I'm from Europe (probably not a good reason) - strictly separating work, private and junk email adresses - don't post any adress in newsgroups, web pages, ... (not literally, that is)
- choose names that are difficult to predict
As you see, all very logical tips.
A much better solution is one implemented by your ISP. For example, mine uses Brightmail, which screens out about 90% of my email before it gets near me (and not a single false positive). I suspect that ISP-level solution will become progressively more important as spam levels increase.
Of course, client-level screening will still work well as a supplement to ISP-level services.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
Are they just compensating for all of our spam filtering?
Spam Assasin, Moz, etc, all have great anti-spam features, are they just sending more to make up for what we're dropping?
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Until US Senators and Representatives actually read email, are at least have grandchildren that read email, there will be no change.
However, since things will transition directly from them all being 60 years old into life-extension technology that will enable them to never retire, things are just going to continue to get worse on the spam front.
Wouldn't it be a solution if the people who coordinate the web installed some new central servers, like the DNS servers, to check emailadresses for sending spam?
The DNS servers return an ip address for a given domainname. The spamcheck servers would return a value for a given emailaddress.
This value could be modded up by the number of people reporting this emailadress as spam and modded down in time when people stop reporting this address.
Your provider will check every received mail with the central servers and store their spam value.
Your mailclient will receive only mail from your provider with a lower value than the value you configured. The rest will be removed from server at that time or only the headers of the bad mails will be send to your mailclient and put in a spamfolder where you can approve or remove them manually.
why not just have ISPs disable outgoing SMTP traffic except to their own mail servers, and throttle users to 10 emails per day?
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
Basicly, you have a whitelist with anyone you want on it plus anyone you email could be added automaticly.
Also, places like web, message boards etc where the address goes also mention some unique "keyword" that they need to include in the email (one way to do it is to link to your PGP key and tell people to encrypt and/or sign stuff).
Any email that comes in that has the "keyword" is automaticly let through & whitelisted (you choose the keyword or whatever such that its not something thats likely to appear in spam)
All mails not containing the keyword or on the whitelist are bounced with a "if you want to contact me, include xxx in the email body somewhere to get past my spam filters"
... ok whatever ways of masquerading email addresses on sites just will not work. I know spammers are deemed rude and rather unintelligent, but surely they are gonna run some basic tests to clean lists up, like converting $'s to S's and removing nospam. What about choosing an email address that intentionally has nospam as part of the real address? then they are likely to filter it out :)
That's right, for a few billyun billybuks (used to be the other way around), the formerly dependabull retail giaNT, has determined, that having customers waiting for the bsod boxes to become uninfactdead, is worth IT, if IT means surviving the up&coming hard/DOWn times.
.asp for J. Public, just so bill&stevIE can .continue their softwar gangster "business" plan. yuk.
Another kick in the
take heart J., they caN'T doo IT much longer without yOUR $upport at their infactdead pourtolls. That's right J., vote with your wallet. doN'T buy any FraUDuleNT liesenses until MoSt ALL of those felonious FUDgePackers are in fuderoll prisms.
mod me UP robbIE, there's a real sh!tstorm of bad ?pr? going on DOWn here. carry on.
In 1970 there were 500 Elvis impersonators in America. Today there are 150,000.
It is expected that in the year 2020 one out of every three people will be an Elvis impersonator.
does anyone think that all this bogus "partnering" with phony payper liesense stock markup FraUDs, using the whoreabully infactdead BugWear(tm), from the kingdumb, has already, & is going to
does anyone think that "their" vote in the next BiG "election" may already have been cast/couNTdead? just a thought.
if any of you are still l00king for a "smoking gun", IT's probully poiNTdead at US right now. IT looks LIEk gov't. supported/sponsored domestic terrorism to US, & we'd know. strong language? pairannoyed? think about IT.
People shouldn't have to spend their time dealing with spam. Why should I have to? Why should I have to get multiple e-mail addresses because of spam? Why should my employer have to spend lots of money and resources on fighting spam, when it could have been spent elsewhere to improve performance rather than trying to prevent performance from deteriorating because of spam?
How does spam cripple e-mail communication, you ask? Again, you said it yourself. People have to start hiding their e-mail address. It will be harder to find a contact address to get in touch with them.
You are talking about spreading FUD. At the same time, you kind of contradict yourself by showing that yes, e-mail addresses can become unusable because of spam and yes, spam can cripple e-mail communication.
So where's the FUD? Spam is a serious problem to many, and you, as someone else I responded to, don't seem to understand this. You only seem to be able to see it from your own point of view. Maybe spam doesn't bother you. Well, I can inform you that it does bother me, my friends and my employer. A lot. It costs us money. It costs us time. This is not "gloom and FUD", it is reality.
Clever signature text goes here.
Vivid Video's opt-in "nice" spam list has only around 250,000 names on it. This list generates $2000-5000 a day. Mailing to this list takes 2 people a total of about an hour. If you were making that much money doing something that only took an hour a day and is legal why would you ever even consider stopping?
Perhaps I didn't make my point as clear as it could have been. Of course, as I said, Spam is a problem. But there are ways to try to prevent its impact being so damaging, and with this in mind users need continuous education about when to give out addresses. There may even be new laws soon, though I suspect that the legal route will not stop spam.
I did not mean to imply that spam is a problem which should be ignored. When I talked about FUD, what I meant was the flury of stories on the internet at the moment predicting the death of email as a useful system. *THAT*, I think, is unlikely.
Are there any legal responses to Spam? For instance, what if everyone who received Spam from a particular company called the 800 number they listed in the Spam, and simply wasted their time (and money)? A phone flame! Is that illegal? Other ideas? Are there web resources where responses to Spam are discussed or organized?
http://www.smileproject.com
Mercury Predicts: The sun will rise tomorrow.
Venus Predicts: A slashdot reader will not get laid tonight
Earth Predicts: You are here X
Mars Predicts: Continued fighting in the Middle East.
Saturn Predicts: More pictures will be taken of its rings.
Neptune Predicts: An unsinkable ship will eventualy sink.
Uranus Predicts: Someone will relpy to this post with a Goatse link.
Pluto Predicts: Disney characters will not enter the public domain any time soon.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Hash cash is the answer.
Ok I want to send letter M to person T, I find
h = HASH(M || T)
Now I have to find a random string R where HASH(R) matches h for the lower K bits [you choose K] this is called a "collision".
Now I send the message M, to person T along with R. They verify it.
This can be used initially just to sort email so you can prioritize it [e.g. hash cashed email and non].
The trick is the bulk of the time is on the sender and it really hinders. If it takes them a second or two to find a K bit collision then they obviously can't spam millions of people a second.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Those that can use VI know the following will stop 85% of the bull.
b l', `bl.spamcop.net', `"Spam blocked see: http://spamcop.net/bl.shtml?"$&{client_addr}') dnl
FEATURE(`dnsbl', `relays.ordb.org', `Rejected - see http://ordb.org/')dnl
FEATURE(dnsbl, `ipwhois.rfc-ignorant.org', `Rejected for bad WHOIS info on your IP - see http://www.rfc-ignorant.or
g/')dnl
FEATURE(`dns
It's a lost cause. Email is a dead duck in its current format and without a sender verification scheme will be gone before 5 years is up, IMNSHO.
:wq
Hi. That should be 'lose', not 'loose'.
Thanks,
'Lose', Not 'Loose' Guy
--thanks for the recent upmods! i'll be able to post again soon
My email address is http://www.daybologic.co.uk/mailddrp
It is impossible to get spam.
I agree with you that it is necessary to be careful and that spam forces us to take measures against it, such as using different e-mail addresses or obfuscating public addresses and so on. My point is that this shouldn't be necessary, but since we do this as a result of spam, spam makes e-mail less accessible to a certain extent. While e-mail won't disappear completely as a useful medium (my current work address is only used internally in the company and I do not receive any spam there), spam certainly makes it somewhat of a hassle to use sometimes. Especially since I have at least one address which I've had for several years - since before spam really became a serious issue to me. Back then I didn't consider it to be necessary to protect my e-mail address, being a newcomer to the net and perhaps somewhat naive.
I sorely regret that today. The sad thing is that I don't really want to drop this e-mail address either, since it's the one I've been giving out to friends for several years now.
Spam simply makes it more difficult to use e-mail since you have to, in a way, watch your back all the time. And even if you do, there's no guaranteeing that some fool (stronger language deleted) won't quote a mail from you in a public forum or similar and include your e-mail address. That has happened too, which is why I dropped my previous e-mail address at work. If you don't foul up yourself, you can be sure that someone else will do it for you...
Clever signature text goes here.
I've been seeing a marked increase in the number of articles claiming we're all going to be knee deep in spam any day now. Most of these stories seem to be based on information comming out of a press release from MessageLabs - who interestingly sell services to defeat spam.
So IMHO I think the story should really be...
FUD increases sales of SPAM related services by 50%
SPAM is annoying, it's true. However, filtering it out is not rocket science - but then most people pull out the cheque book before engaging their brain.
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
What you propose, trusted networks and directory servers, is a privacy nightmare. While I loathe spam, given the choice between giving up my privacy or receiving spam, I will receive and filter spam any day.
I think a much simpler solution would be to require any incoming message to contain an anonymous electronic cash stamp in the value of, say, five cents.
Of course, that will never happen because the US government hates cash--that's why we haven't gotten the electronic variety, and it's why the physical variety keeps getting less and less useful. Instead, spam, like terrorism and anything else, will be used as an excuse to introduce ever more intrusive identification and tracking mechanisms into the Internet.
Spam increases on weekends, usually Friday through Sunday I'm hit hardest.
Fraudulent spam usually arrives late afternoon on Fridays, (IMHO) due to weakest period of weak for customer support and access to policing agencies.
My volume, on average daily basis, has already doubled since September.
Purveyors of adult material are no longer coy about it, the subject lines are pretty clear about content.
If your phone rang as many times, or your postal mailbox were filled with the same daily content, government would do something about it, or heads would roll.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Get a mail client with a good spam filter, already. And if it's hurting your company, put a good spam filter on your server.
Since switching to Jaguar's Mail, I've seen almost no spam. (Maybe 2 out of a few hundred spam got through in the past week. I have no problem hitting the "Junk" button twice a week.) I wouldn't have even known if I hadn't opened up my Junk folder to check. And it's never junked a legit email.
This reminds me of people (I work with some) using 1990-era mail clients that can't handle HTML. Yeah, maybe HTML email is overused, but if you use a good client it's simply not a problem. Whining about it is getting old.
It's a solved problem. Now go do something useful.
Yeah, right. Tell that to Digicash and others who failed miserably as attempts to introduce "electronic cash". Their old site isn't even responding anymore. Anyone remember Mojo Nation? Look what's hosted there now (no, I didn't mis-type that, it redirects there... try typing the URL yourself to see).
These are two high profile companies that come to mind right away. It's pretty clear by this point that digital cash and micropayments have been a miserable failure. A lot can be said about what went wrong and why, but the ultimate unescapable conclusion is that a digital cash system with micropayment-level transactions is anything but a simple solution.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
In my experience, the main ways to get spam are to fill in your email address while signing up for some service, or using Apparently, the services you sign up for create additional revenue by selling your personal data. It's a price you pay, and a price I am willing to pay in many cases. I would rather receive another number of junk mails on my otherwise unused email account than have to shell out real money just to try a service. IMHO, spam can be a the lesser of two evils.
Yes, spam is a waste of banwidth and server space. Pr0n and warez use up even more bandwidth, and are among the main uses of the Internet, although some would argue they are a waste of bandwidth and server space. The good thing is that a large part of this bandwidth is wasted at the expense of providers, users, and those who make no or inadequate efforts to block it.
Alright, I'll take my medication and go back to bed now.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Are you referring to SPAM or the "product" that most spammers seem to be pushing?
Guns don't kill people -- people kill people.
But the guns seem to help a bit. (apologies to Eddie Izzard)
I get roughly 100-300 messages a day, and probably around 20 of those are actually for me and from people I know.
I have filters setup on the client side, but just haven't really bothered to set up server side stuff yet (procmail and the like).
normally I'm not all that patient, but I guess this is one area that doesn't really bug me that much.
I used to go through and unsubscribe to them all in the feeble hope that would help, but not sure it did much (many ignore it, others send you more or sign you up to more with that, and others have "broken" unsubscribe methods).
I think I get so many because I own a few URLs and spammers then assume I own companies (while technically that isn't entirely untrue - I am starting up a small financial consulting business, I'm not exactly a rich CEO at this point - yet those are the bulk of the e-mails I get).
from what I can tell, if you want to avoid spam - don't ever sign up at a gambling site, and have two e-mails - one that you give to friends, and one that you give to random things on the web.
obviously always click the "don't send me shit" button, but they frequently ignore that anyway.
and then setup your server (if you have one) and/or domain so that it only passes through the e-mails to addresses that exist (as opposed to anythingAtAll@mydomain.com).
I guess a lot of that is common sense to most.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
I have tried both http://www.mailcircuit.com and http://www.spamcop.net . Both are usable, neither is good enough yet for all. Mailcircuit ($20/year) will drive fellow email list users ape because it does not allow whitelisting, so its ping-pong email acceptance messages get thrown all over the place, i.e., adding its own spam population. Spamcop ($30/year) does not have ping-ponging, and so does allow three or four garbage messages per month through, but its reliability is excellent. I use Spamcop now, but will switch if I find something different which does everything I want. On the other hand, Spamcop is in heavy development (and it is nonetheless extremely reliable, I get tons of email every week), and their people reliably respond to email queries; whereas Mailcircuit told me they would solve the problems of which I spoke to them, and did not, and belatedly claimed that it was impossible (give me a break).
/dev/null instead of holding, and (d) the ability to do everything through SMTP/POP3, i.e., to never ever have to use webmail or web interaction, to do everything by automated email commands.
What is needed, in my opinion, is such a service with (a) whitelists, (b) ping-ponging, (c) blacklists which
J.E.B.
Joshua Corps
i get on average 4 people who pop up on my icq list every day pretenting to be a 19 year old girl from where ever wanting me to look at her 'sex pics'.. and she took them Juuuuuust for me!
MABASPLOOM!
Of course, the last thing the US government would want is to increase the use of untraceable monetary instruments, so hell will freeze over before that happens.
It won't work for the same reason that the RIAA killing Napster or trying to copy-protect new discs won't work. For every person out there who creates a new technology to stop someone from doing something "bad" there are ten people who will find a way to bypass it, either for fun or for profit.
I have the mental capacity to filter spam, thank you very much. I have a procmail blocklist that is over 1000 lines now (I prefer single-domain blocks, plus a VERY small number of "content" rules like dropping HTML without a charset, due to false positives)
Normally, I read my mail on a machine with good filtering on a cable modem connection.
Problem is, I'm not always reading my mail at home. Sometimes I'm mobile, and often using my cell phone as a modem. That's a 14.4 connection that I pay per-minute. Eventually I could upgrade to a 1xRTT solution, but even with something like the Sprint "Unlimited Vision" plans, those only average 40-50 kilobits/sec. Thanks to spam, I cannot afford to check my email from my phone, and even if I could, it would take a half hour to download all the shit in my mailbox.
There are also plenty of dialup users in this country. It's not an issue of not wanting broadband or not being able to afford it, it's an issue of simply NOT BEING ABLE TO GET IT EVEN IF THEY WANT IT. This was my case until last February or so.
Simply put, these people PAY to receive spam. Even over a cablemodem, you pay in the form of increased ISP rates to offset their bandwidth/server disk space costs due to spam.
In short, client-side filtering is NOT the answer.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Direct client-side bandwidth costs are too.
All you have to do is look at the data services offered by cellular providers - Spam could easily double or triple (maybe even more) your monthly cost with such services due to the bandwidth it consumes.
As a result of spam, I can't check email from my phone. My phone (Kyocera 6035, integrated PDA/phone) is more than capable of reading mail, but the 14.4 per-minute connection (And even the unlimited Vision connection if I sacrificed coverage and got a Treo 300 on Sprint) just can't handle the 50 or so messages I get a day, 95%+ of which are spam.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
CNN (Atlanta) reported that popular website Slashdot (www.slashdot.org) will have more and more dumb news stories for the years to come. As one avid reader "cOkErUlZ" put it, "I'm just seeing more crap on /." Another reader how did not want to use his screen name for fear of lossing karma put it, "I check /. every hour, sometimes I get up just to miss the LOTR ads on TV, and lately all I see is crap about spam, and fancy busness stuff. I mean get real, if I wanted to read shit like that I would goto cnn.com"
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
create a hotmail account, then enjoy a weekend away
check hotmail knowing that you haven't told anyone about it
Voila, enjoy your spam!
Profit ?
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
When I first saw that headline, I misread "Jupiter" as "Juniper".
Now that's a way to sell routers--although, to be honest, it wouldn't be a whole lot different from what security software manufacturers have been doing on their end.
"Buy an M160 or spammers will CRUSH YOUR NETWORK AND EAT YOUR CHILDREN!"
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
Try the Republican National Committee
Yes, I got election spam from rnc.org, encouraging me to vote Republican.
I usually voted Democrat, except in rare cases (If someone like Rudy Giuliani ran in an election I was involved with, I would've voted for him.) Now, I will NEVER vote Republican, no matter how sleazy or scummy the Democratic candidate is. (i.e. Bob Torricelli)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I have a Linux firewall / gateway that serves the several computers in my house. It uses fetchmail to pull mail from a company e-mail server (for personal use) and from Earthlink. Procmail has a filter to mangle dangerous file extension names to prevent virus-infected files from being clicked on accidently (by my kids). Earthlink e-mail gets dumped to /dev/null. I'm going to shut it down soon, because it gets nothing but Spam.
/dev/null, and I know who to blame, and who to quit doing business with.
m ail-security.html
It also pipes it to SpamAssassin, which works tremendously well. I've never gotten a false positive, and I may see one spam a month in my regular inbox.
The other thing I have (through my company) is a "vanity" domain name, that sends all the e-mail (except my wife and kids) to my inbox, no matter what the address. I hand out an address like "amazon@mydomain.com" to Amazon, etc, and if I receive spam on it, I pipe it to
This system has worked wonders for me!
dochood
File-name mangler procmail script:
ftp://ftp.rubyriver.com/pub/jhardin/antispam/proc
SpamAssassin:
http://www.spamassassin.org
Recently I stopped clearing out my "Spam" mailbox, as I want to run an analysis of which of my spam rules are hit the most and which are obsolete and can be deleted.
Last deletion (i.e. the first message in the box) is dated November 14
It's Dec. 3 - I have 748 messages in the box.
So after 30 days time the number should be around 1500 plus/minus a few hundred. But it's definately going to go over 1000.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I'm getting really ticked about this spam crap. This is something that the ISPs need to handle, and handle fast.
Why is it that they feel responsible to filter out Napster, Kazaa...filter out port 25...filter this, filter that, monitor this, monitor that....
Yet none of them can do something as simple as an opt-in spam guard. It's turned on by default..and you don't need some fancy enterprise edition. You need Exim, Exiscan and SpamAssassin. Done. Should take a half-competent fresh college grad admin about an hour to do.
Sure, some ISPs do it already. I remember when I was on Earthlink (2+ years ago) they had it...worked ok. How about everyone else? How about doing it FOR FREE?
You don't win the war on drugs by going after drug dealers or importers. You win the war on drugs by poisoning the drugs so noone wants them.
You don't win the war on spam by going after spammers or Asian servers. You win the war on spam by doing your part to educate end users and block it for them, thus removing the spammers' audience.
Corporate MS/RIAA/MPAA/FCC-like nonsense happening. When are these people going to wake up and do their part?
FYI, system stats to date for just my personal server at home:
SPAM caught to date: 4193 in 84,397,706 bytes
Viruses caught to date: 1018 in 277,420,970 bytes
Yes, I'm donating my spam collection to spamarchive.org.
http://www.cloudmark.com/ makes a really quite good spam filtering system for Outlook.
Even sets up it's own 'spam' folder so you can review what's been filtered before it's trashed (you do have the option of sending them straight to the delete file)
I haven't reached the 95% success rate that's bandied about, but I've only been running it 2 weeks. I suspect that after a couple of months of learning, it will come close. Very unobtrusive, and best yet I haven't seen it filter OUT something that's NOT spam.
I'm pretty impressed, and it's a free D/L.
-Styopa
This prediction could easily become true if popular news sources continue to publish articals about how rich people can get from sending spam.
Companies are paying people to send you spam.
Boycott those companies, and they'll eventually get the hint, or go out of business. Either way it'll be the end of spam.
__________________________________
Free your mind - Flush your toilet
Consider who is bringing you this information and take it with a grain of salt. Jupiter is in the business of consulting, and is on nearly every reporter's Rolodex as a source of that all-important statistic to anchor whatever tech story they're writing. So right off the bat they have a potential conflict of interest -- accuracy v. self-promotion as "the source" the data.
If you listen carefully, nearly every time a web usage statistic is cited it will be attributed to either Jupiter or Forrester Research -- another (surprise) consulting firm. Listen to the news for these names and you'll be impressed how lazy and naive reporters can be, they often do a lot less research than it appears.
Next, the NYT profiled them a couple of years ago in the Sunday Magazine. I don't have a link, but recommend you consider buying it (and I never do that!). Basically, it detailed how little experience the average analyst has; how difficult and unscientific it is to come up with data on things like banner ad clicks or to extrapolate tech trends; and quoted one analyst admitting that they were instructed, should the media call with a question they couldn't answer, they should make something up. Often they are spectacularly wrong, but who calls them on it? Again, the all-important goal is to get their name in the press, Jupiter is willing to give an opinion, it's free advertising. Note how Jupiter's name made it into even this short posting?
I hate to think of businesses making important decisions based on such loosely-derived bits of data. So when I see a spam prediction such as here, I know there's a fair chance it's either an uneducated guess or simply pulled out of someone's ass. Maybe they're right, but I'd like to hear about their methodology. If they say they just went to the Oracle at Delphi (don't those names sound familiar?) then get on with our lives. Spam will still be a problem either way; there are proven ways to fight it; realistically we will never allow it to get to such levels.
I encourage anyone interested not to believe me and do their own research. IMHO, this is one of the biggest scams this side of the pollsters and brokerage houses. I am deeply contemptuous of their work. Just a statement of opinion, not libel, no siree.
P.S. May I throw in that I don't like seeing spam victims blamed for their plight. I have been scrupulous with my email for years and still the spam is inexorably growing, largely because of some idiot who opted-in to a dozen things mistakenly typing in my email address instead of his. Now my address is burned into a CD somewhere. Fault is unnecessary; and regardless of fault, the blame lies with the spammer. Naive users do not "deserve" to have their email paralyzed, rather they deserve our sympathy and help.
OK, so according to some previous articles posted on slashdot, spammers send out 5 million e-mails for a single promotion. Tax them .1 cents per e-mail and it costs them $5000 dollars. This would seriously cut into their profits since they only expect a few percents of the e-mails to be responded to. The average user would only pay a few cents a month.
There's a difference between real spam and the shower of BS you typically see in your mailbox. Real spam is designed to actually sell something, and therefore has a real contact. The BS shower is designed to destroy email and a large portion of it has no real contact, product or anything.
Think about who would want to destroy email as a communications media and why they would spend money to do this. Comercial entities are despirarately trying to make the internet just like other media. They are working to erect barriers for entry so they can continue to sell their obsolete "services" the same way they always have, but with lower costs.
Your trust network that would "legitimise" comerical/bulk email from a bank, reeks of capitulation all around. My email box woould end up looking like my real mail box where the one or two pieces of real mail I get are easily lost in a sea of credit card offers and crap. New entrants, bannned to low bandwith and low trust server ghettos, have to compete with unfair disadvantages. You understand, of course, that your trust network would soon be extended to web and other services, don't you? You also understand that "anonymous trust with virtual identities" is an oxymoron. Either your system makes it so I don't "trust" someone, or it does not. So I get screwed and business returns to normal afrer a few high profile arrests and the infrastructure of the web is changed forever.
Rather than "legitimise" the transformance of a media that should remain pull into push, let's just outlaw spam and punish those who would destroy email. You can, and people have traced down the "spammers" before. Fines, big fines and jail time, for those caught, double when the "product" is not real.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Almost, but not quite true. Digital cash needs to be administered and backed by a BANK. In the case of the USA, the bank (the Federal Reserve BANK) is controlled by the government, but this was not always the case; historically, private banks issued paper currency backed by gold.
For a more current analogy, consider Visa/Mastercard/etc. These are NOT backed by a government; no one guarantees to merchants that swiping a digital stripe on a card means that they will eventually get money. The BANKS guarantee this.
Anyway, I would agree that until a major national institution with the finance to back up digital cash decides to do so, it won't go anywhere.
I got spam beat. I don't get much to begin with, but so far I've managed to absolutely block 492 of 493 spams with zero false positives out of 5500 emails
The idea is outlined here if you are interested in how it can be done so you don't have to keep wading through all the crud. I shouldn't take all the credit though. I just grabbed SpamAssassin and made it do the work for me. The concept is simple enough, the effects are awesome!
Sorry for sounding like spam myself, but this one's actually pretty cool. Code provided if you care to play with it. I won't promise it's perfect, but it's secure and effective.
http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/dcc/
Checksumming is a great solution today. It allows you to whitelist servers you do want, and it's possible to setup interfaces to allow individuals to control what's whitelisted, as well as tune the threshold of what's acceptable.
It allows you to choose which checksum provider(s) you want to trust. It allows you to contribute to the blockage of spam in a community architecture by providing checksums of external mail you recieve to other checksum providers.
--
othermark
(!wired)?(coffee++):(wired);
I suppose that we are far better predicting spam rates in 2007 than we were in 1997 at predicting 2002 spam rates.
Did our prediction accuracy increase when we could finally build a Quad 2GHz Xeon board?
C'mon people... in 2007 spam will take many other forms than just email.
Many broadband ISPs (such as Cox Communications) have started putting caps on traffic. If you are running close to those limits, the "tonnes[sic]" of spam you get might just put you over the cap for the last time, after which you might see your Internet access yanked.
What about people who pay for Internet access by the amount of traffic that they move? How about people who retrieve e-mail over long-distance phone connections when on travel? What about the ones who use their cell phones to retrieve e-mail, paying a per-minute charge?
That your ISP chooses not to itemize spam as a charge on your bill does not mean that it is free to you.
Spam costs businesses billions of dollars per year. That's money that could have been spent in salary increases, new office equipment, building renovation, R&D, development, production, or even office parties. All of it stolen by spammers.
I am so sick and tired of the short-sighted just-hit-delete response to spam. Why don't you give me your credit card number and let me use it to send you crap that you don't want? Then you can tell everyone that it's no problem because it doesn't take long to throw away the stuff I send.
"According to Yahoo, the amount of spam is expected to increase 50% in the next five years..." Are they intending to increase their spamming by 50% to make up for lost revenue?
Between the number of SPAMs my ISP blocks and the number that have gotten through to my mailbox, it seems like an increase of at least 50% per year would be more accurate.
Imminent Death Of The Net Predicted!
This sig no verb.
I have stayed remarkably spam-free with my current email address. How?
I read the privacy policies of ISPs before joining. I will not accept sharing of personal data - period. This has to be in black and white. Any ambiguities or pattern of changes to favor marketers, then the deal's off. Any sales pressure (offer expires in 10 days), then no deal.
Don't leave your email on greeting card sites. These are perfect targets for bots. I got hit with this on my previous addy.
When any paper/web application asks for your email, leave it blank
if the app won't accept blanks, use abuse@website.com
don't reply to ANY spam - even those that have an opt-out URL. The opt-out only tells the spammer that the email addy is a live one and you'll only get more spam. Leave it alone and it will go away on its own.
if I want to join a group but question the email abuse, then I'll use a throwaway email like Hotmail. This is a tactic getting less and less use, because there are fewer groups worth joining.
only subscribe to groups that lock down the subscriber list. Lists run by Majordomo are usually safe, although you should confirm with the list admin that the list is indeed locked down.
Tell your friends to distribute your email to no one. If someone contacts your friend looking for you, either forward the message to you directly or include you in the the reply in the BCC: field.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
... since I did the equivalent of call display. My filters (Mozilla) only allow trusted addresses into my Inbox. My trusted addresses are those on my personal address book. Everything else goes to Trash. I've added addresses _temporarily_ when consulting and that's it. For a while I was looking at the Trash , just in case, but in six months I never missed a thing that was important. So now no worries, no spam.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
there are people out there who care enough to send you personalized, thoughtful solicitations
Oh really? You must be lucky. I got one this morning literally entitled "[FIRSTNAME], 50% Off Vivitar Digital Camera!"
No, my first name is not FIRSTNAME -- that's more of a nickname.
They wouldn't send it to you if they thought you didn't really, really be interested in the product they're selling.
Yeah. A recurring favorite here is "NEW 3 Stooges Talking Wall Clock"
Also, it's pink and tasty.
If one really could eat email spam, what color and taste would it have? Nutritional value? I'm thinking something like pork rinds.
1 tonne=1000Kg=2200lb=0.982tons
The metric system has been around for longer than the USA.
SpamGourmet.com offers free disposable email addresses for registrations and other limited-use applications.
It's hard not to draw parallels between spam and viruses. Unwanted proliferation, performance hits, companies popping up all over the place to sell antivirus (antispam) products. Went to a link to unsubscribe from a newsletter a week ago (the newsletter was legit, so I was reasonably sure it won't simply result in me getting more spam), and I found it interesting to see that about half the page was a banner for some anti-spam program. A bit shameless really. But what is the main difference between a virus and spam? The Melissa writer got in serious trouble for that (don't remember whether it was jail or a hefty fine); other select virus writers have had their hands slapped. We still have viruses, yes, but at least because of these few examples people know that if they write a virus, release it in the wild and get caught, they're in trouble. Until something like that happens with spam, I see NO reason why spammers would stop, or do anything other than increase their efforts - especially since they can make money directly out of the spam, unlike virus writers.
ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
A 1997 Wired story early described how analysts get paid for being quoted (Forrester denies this, sort of).
:)
A 2000 Salon article.
NYT 12/1999 ($$$): The original magazine article titled "$6 Billion in Online Holiday Sales by the End of This Month! $24 Billion in Internet Ads by 2003! 2.3 Trillion E-Biz Predictions by 2010!".
NYT 5/2002 ($$$): Jupiter "crumbles" (uh-oh! better get some quotes out)
And yesterday the Times parroted the Reuters story.
Parenthetically the Jupiter founder Josh Harris went on to another interesting project you may have heard of. (Sadly, it's long since disbanded.)
I disagree completely. I've been using a whitelist for a while now and it works flawlessly. Here's the deal. I set up the initial whitelist based on my address book--people that I regularly send email to. Then, the procmail filter I use runs every email I receive against the whitelist. If the sender is on the list, it goes to INBOX. Otherwise, the email is held in a pending-message folder and they get an automatically generated reply that says something to the effect of "Hi, I haven't received your email yet because your email address hasn't been verified. Please reply to this email to verify that you are a real person and not a spammer and you will be automatically added to my whitelist."
Person replies, they get added to the whitelist, and the original email gets delivered. Spambots don't reply. Easy as pie.
The one saving grace of the system I use is that all email, spam included, gets put into a BULK folder. I periodically sift through the BULK folder to make sure I haven't missed anything important (like a message from my bank or airline or something) and delete all the spam.
I use a variation of this procmail script on my email system.
In fact, now that I've effectively killed spam on my email account, my email address has become MORE useful--I don't hesitate to publish it on my website or give it out to folks.
My other computer is your Windows box
Someone who knows about TMDA please answer this:
As a spammer it is trivial to forge the From address. I will send all my spam to you with your own email address in the From header. I will also try sending spam to you with (MAILER-DAEMON) in the From header.
You of course will have your own email address on your whitelist so you can send yourself notes (which everyone does every once in a while).
Doesn't this render TMDA useless against spam?
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Filtering is not a solution.
It's still wasting the bandwidth my company pays for.
On another note, spampal is a free solution for windows. Works like a champ!
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
One of the sites I own now was one of the first (1995) big Real Estate sites on the web. Email addresses were posted everywhere. I bought it two years ago. These addresses get SOOOO much spam. I finally turned off the catchall account but we still were getting easily 300-500 messages a day. I know it sounds like an exaggeration but it's not. It was sickening and ridiculous. So I finally started putting the biggest problem sites that I could trace into access with reject and that cut it down to about 30-50 a day. So I rely on filtering to keep them out of my face. Not a solution but a bandaid.
You should see all the Access Denied entries for azoogle.com in my log files. Those jerks, you'd think they'd take me off the lists after being denied so many times.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I don't want to pay for email.
I already pay my service provider to get me online. That should cover the bandwidth I use up as well. It shouldn't cover the bandwidth spammers use up.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Telemarketers which they call you at dinner time or while you are on the shitter
Spammers who are very insistent that you read their ad for some penis enlarger through deceptive subject and/or from lines
When you drive on the highway, billboards
On the back of sales receipts at the store
Pop up Web ads and its cousing, pop up instant messaging ad
Street SPAM (signs on T-phone poles, at intersections on work-at-home) which is as bad as litter.
One thing these have in common is they are obnoxious and very intrusive. I pissed off many telemarkters and in fact, had one cuss me out when I told him I wasn't interested. Marketing people and their insistent obnoxious demand that I pay attention to their pitch leaves me with a bad opinion of them.
On the issue of billboards, like street spam, twice a year, I travel cross country between Colorado and Indiana where family live at. One state, Missouri, has a lot of billboards along I-70. About a couple of years ago, one company put a bunch up such as 5 to 9 in a row. Thanks to marketing assholes, the scenery is ruined. Check out Scenic Missouri to get rid of the billboard blight.
I currently get spam at the rate of about 50,000 spams/year. And those are only the ones that my minimal spam filter doesn't catch. That's almost an order of magnitude more than the legitimate emails I get. It's so bad that I'm on the verge of enabling my by permission only email filter. I consider spam an absolute epidemic.
I think there needs to be some serious legislation against spam, but in the end I doubt it will help much. It will merely provide a somewhat satisfying method of impoverishing select spammers, but will do little to stem the tide. It's obvious we will all have to accept the fact that the good old days of email as we knew it are long gone. A new email paradigm will eventually have to come into being.
The "spam queen" was on NPR this morning (this link works but the audio's not available yet as I write this, and NPR might prefer you go thru npr.org, "audio archives" link).
She seems to be on a public relations campaign for spammers in general. She's not identifying a sponsor -- perhaps the the Direct Marketing Association (more here) -- but I doubt she'd deliberately attract so much attention without some reward. Maybe she's just drumming up more business this way. She made her usual claims that she never sends sex-related spam (i.e. porn or herbal viagra), never emails anyone without their permission, and advises listeners if they receive unwanted commercial email they can simply click the opt-out link included in each message. How very helpful.
Anyway, she reports there are more lawsuits in progress against anti-spam organizations, presumably including voluntary blackhole services. She identifies SpamCop as an unethical services because they allow anonymous reporting, and she argues she has the right to confront her accuser -- the interviewer, naive and non-confrontational, doesn't ask how she thought this right applied outside of a court trial, in a voluntary system (not to mention if "joe-jobs" are protected by the constitution). Actually he missed a lot of questions that would be obvious to the average /.-er.
Spammers are an organized, moneyed interest that is lobbying Congress in the US, and will presumably do the same in other countries where it serves them to do so. Spamming may be getting harder, but counteracting spam is also getting harder. ISP's in financial distress will tend to make business decisions to aid spammers in whatever way is still legal.
Email as we know it could become unworkable, and a new protocol may be necessary. As Aunt Tilly gets hooked by more email fraud, and receives more animated .GIF's of women having sex with farm animals, I think the incentive for most users to abandon traditional email will be there when the technology becomes available.
--- THIS IS AN AUTOMATED MESSAGE ---
Hey there,
Since I've been getting so much junk mail recently, I've had to put a new
system in to stop it. There is no record of you having sent me any e-mail from
this address in the past, so I need you to verify your e-mail. You can do that
by just replying to this message. Once you've done that, I'll get the message
you just sent me, and your address will be added to my list so that this
system will never bother you again.
If you couldn't be bothered reading that last bit then JUST SEND A REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE.
Oh, and when you reply, please don't change the subject line of the message. It
breaks things. Thanks.
Thanks
Jason
Bah!
Just my two bits - my wife and I finally got fed up with spending more time deleting idiotic noise from people who copied their neighbor's answers in school (read marketeerz) and subscribed to Spamcop. Best money I ever spent - now the mail in MY inbox is MY mail. I just wonder how long it's going to be until some bright someone starts a movement to get ALL advertising OUT of PRIVATELY PAID FOR CHANNELS. Like my email, my phone, my mailbox, etc. Really oughta be a law.
Most of my EU spam comes from Spain. I also get a lot from Wanadoo.fr, Austria, and Germany. Finland is interesting because privacy laws protect spammers there from having their name and contact information published on a whois server. Fortunately, the ISPs for most EU countries are often responsive and shut spammers down (unlike Asian countries, like Korea or China).
I know there's a fair chance it's either an uneducated guess or simply pulled out of someone's ass.
You are full of FUD. Jupiter is a partner of internet.com sites(millions of visitors a day) and sites like Thecounter.
and if you have time, those get sent to abuse@aol, etc. -not that they'll do anything, but it's good to annoy them
I don't know about AOL specifically, but I've had good results getting some spammers removed from similar services, namely Yahoo and Hotmail. Then again, most of the spam I get is from incredibly stupid bottom-feeders who've found my resume on some job board or other (one good reason not to go to a "whitelist" -- any device you could think of to make sure the legitimate recruitment e-mails came through would also allow some if not all of the others) and who want me to sign up to some multilevel marketing scam (hint: Primericatroids please FO&D!).
When they get slimy and underhanded enough to want to offer me a job where I pay them for the priveledge of having it, I get motivated and nasty enough to make sure they lose their e-mail addresses. I send a brief note plus the full text of what I've received from them, and usually the folks at the other end of abuse@ jump.
Then again, I don't get much other spam, so I occasionally do have time to pull out the big guns. (Also, as a first line of defense, I suggest using an e-mail handle that's not English...mine are Latin and Japanese...)
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
If no one sends spam, then no one will filter spam. Spam volume must eventually reach some equilibrium, but that will probably be at the point at which the spammers are earning around the minimum or subsistence wage.
Now & then someone proposes a fee on email to cut down spammers. Heck, if SnailMail advertisers had to pay first-class postage they'd shut down pretty quickly. Personally I'd be happy to pay, say, a tenth-cent per email ADDRESS (so a bulk mailing is charged per ultimate destination).
Or maybe the setup could allow the first thousand or so emails per month free, with charges after that.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
spam is not the only thing that ought to increase 50% in the coming years, right?
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
Trust networks?.. possible, but too time consuming, and as long as there's someone who'll profit from it, they'll sell out a trusted server to release spam.
The real answer-> kill all open relays and bounce back the spam to the origionator. DOS attacks on the origionators of the spam. Contact their ISP and block their ip addies. In fact, contact their providers and get them to cancel their service to the offending ISP.
It would be a relief to get back to that level. After about 15 years with the same email addresses, 3600 is about the monthly dose. Thanks to SpamAssassin i'm only seeing a small part of them. But if i had suddenly had as much money i could spend in my life, i would sit down and write Anti-Spam software or join an existing project.
Yours, Martin
I see the resurgence of the floppy disk, the demand for the USB dime drives, the flash memory cards!
As white lists and circles of trust emerge as the way to communicate in the future, we will often find ourselves needing to communicate with a friend from an unfamiliar location, one without our identifying marks [PGP key].
In steps the long forgotten floppy disk to save the day! A miraculous device that can hold all of our private keys and their corresponding identities, ready to be used from any location that is not your own PC, so that your friends might know it is in fact you sending that email.
Think of a floppy disk holding your personalities and private encryption keys as an unofficial digital ID card.
You go to the campus computer center, pick a terminal, pop in your disk, use the keys on it to send out your emails, remove the disk and walk away without a worry. Stuck using a co-worker's computer for a very urgent message? Use the disk! Without it you would be up a creek without a paddle, risking your email getting sent to their junk box, to hopefully be picked out of the 1000 spam mails it resides with.
The real irony? A lot of computers don't work well with floppy drives anymore, and it seems (to me at least) that most applications are turning away from architectures supporting removable media, in the assumption that the system is networked anyways so why would you have to tote information around on a floppy disk?
MarsFuck, I've been beating that for years!
What really pisses me off is that that my 'secret new address' somehow got leaked. Since then I've been using aliases whenever I sign up for anything (ie slashdot@autopr0n.com, ebay@autopr0n.com, etc, since I run my own mail server) but I've yet to get spam on any of those accounts. rrr.
Die spammers, DIE!!!!!!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Give them the $10 and you'll rarely get spam again. If you do you'll know exactly who sold your address.
I've gotten next to zero spams since using their email forwarding. It's a breaze to setup.
I got my first Internet account in November of 1993. There was NO spam. None. I got newsletters and product update information from companies that I had deliberatly signed up for. Now my email box gets 40 - 200 spams a day! Most of it HTML with cute little links back to servers trying to let momma know that the email address they are hitting is valid (which is why I use an email client that does not fetch ANYTHING in an HTML document). My inbox is useless.
I also remember when Usenet was spam free. I remember the firestorm that arose from the infamous Kantner and Seigle (sp?) "Green Card" usenet spam. Now Usenet is a festering sewer of spam. Most newsgroups are useless. Every on-topic post lost in a sea of feculent filth.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
I've got two choices for dealing with it:
- Pre-screen my email with my ISPs webmail:
- Use filters on my email client and download everything:
As for not publishing your email address - total bullshit. I resent like hell that I have to use a fubared email address here atThis stops me from having to download the megabytes of HTML and viruses, but it is slow and clunky.
Sorry, but downloading five MB of crap a day just to get the one or two emails that I actually want to read is not worth it. It adds to my monthly bandwidth consumption and it causes my anti-virus software to go insane.
Hiding is not the answer. Stopping them from abusing the system is the only answer.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Even paper cash was a mess until it was backed by the full faith and credit of the government, for analogous reasons.
The way I see it, there are several things wrong with the email services available today, and I'm seriously considering starting a company to provide a solution. 1) Limited spam filtering 2) Small file attachment limits 3) Lack of support for encryption 4) Insufficient storage space 5) Forced advertising 6) Excessive cost 7) Restricted access methods (I.E. HTML only) Here is my proposed solution service: 1) Unlimited whitelists, blacklists, and filter rules, along with a choice of RBLs. 2) An attachment limit of 10megs 3) A vendor committed to allow encryption including storage of keys if desired. 4) 20megs storage space with more on demand. 5) Zero advertising 6) Both HTML and POP3 access Would you anyone be willing to pay a dollar a month for such a service, and is there anything else you'd add to the list?
You could just send out a bunch of spam advertising your competitors' URLs. The exposure they'd get from the spam would be more than counteracted by the harm they'd suffer from having their site disconnected.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Email services as we know it must fundamentally change. The only workable solution that I see is white listing.
I know that there are great filtering programs out there but I end up going though all of the spam anyway to make sure that I don't flush an important message. The only difference is that instead of deleting spam from my inbox, I'm deleting it from my spam folder.
I ISP needs to implement white listing on there server and it needs to be made so that list maintenance is as easy as possible.
One idea is to put a disposable 'code' word as part of the email address. emails with the correct code word would pass directly through and the sender's email address would be added to the white list automatically. The code word part could be changed by the owner at any time.
Any mail received that didn't have the correct code word OR the sender's address wasn't already white listed would be put into a queue. The ISP's server would automatically reply to the sender with a message that basically says "You are not on this person's white list. If you are not a spammer and want to be added please reply to this message with a single line in the body: X2ke34Y."
The ISPs would want to vary the above message to make it difficult for a spammer to automate the reply. Maybe "Please reply with the second word from the third sentance and the forth word from the first sentance all in caps." Anyway, you get the idea.
If the person follows the instructions and replies the queued message is forwarded and the sender's email address is added to the white list. Most spammers use faked email addresses so they won't even get the instructions. Queued emails will be held for a predetermined time period before being sent to the bit bucket.
The ISP should provide an easy way for the user to deal with the few spammers who will actually provide a legitimate email address and follow the instructions to force their spam through.
This would be a big change and a bit more of a hassle but not nearly the hassle of wading through hundreds of 'Increase the size of your penis' spams each day!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
A correction, Mojo Nation's URL was always mojonation.net. Someone else is there now but it's a related company, another effort by MN founder Jim McCoy.
Failure to attach proper headers is no defense. Just because something lacks a "Precedence: bulk" doesn't mean it's not SPAM. Most SPAM I get does not have that header.
You seem to have bought into this whole "UCE redefinition" thing.
What you are really talking about is the ability to cold-call an individual vs. the ability to telephone solicit everyone on the planet in the middle of them having sex with their wives.
Excuse me, if I think there is a middle ground.
FWIW: You aren't going to get funded by sending business plans to a VC's home email address, particularly if you don't have a preexisting relationship.
-- Terry
As good as mail filters like SpamAssasin and Bayesian filters are getting, maybe it's time to take a super-hard-line stance against spam, false-positives be damned. I'm thinking something along the lines of:
1) Block all traffic (not just mail traffic) from offending IPs (open relays, or whatever).
2) If that doesn't stop the offending behavior, block the whole class C.
3) If they still don't shape up, block their entire provider until they cut them off.
4) If the provider is unwilling, cut off _their_ provider.
5) Repeat step 4 until satisfaction is achieved (i.e. you get to somebody who is willing to cut somebody off completely in order to restore the rest of their network to good standing).
If you get banned because one of your neighbors is a spammer, tough. Either switch to a non-spam-friendly ISP or complain until they shape up. That's the price to pay to stop spammers.
The hitch would be getting people to participate in the boycott. However, if everyone is given fair warning, more people would be willing to participate. If a widespread warning of "the following networks will implement a boycott spammy folks in a blackhole sort of way, possibly affecting their neighbors too", and listing the networks at risk (so people have time to bitch to their ISP or move), more people would say "hey, that's a good idea."
This is substantially different from the current RBL, Spamhaus, etc. because it's on a much wider scale and actually intends to disrupt legitimate traffic. If noone is inconvienienced by black holes, they have no incentive to change their ways. Also, extreemly aggressive boycotts like this should work quickly - the inconvienience for the "innocents" should not be long term.
Again, the difficulty would be getting enough of the interenet to participate in such a boycott. It might be impossible.
The whole reason the Internet works at all is because we've agreed on standards for protocols of communication and cooperate to pass around everyone's data. If enough people stop cooperating with spammers (and those who cooperate with spammers), the spammers will no longer be able to use the internet to peddle their crap.
... "Give me a woman who loves beer and I will conquer the w
Spam is to Email as Weeds are to Crops.
Depending on what you use your email for, the defnition of spam changes, just like the crops you are trying to grow define what a weed is. A weed is an unwanted plant. A spam is an unwanted email.
My personal email account is for communicating with my friends only. Any email to me, using my computer hardware, my electricity, my internet access, and my personal time which is not from one of my friends is a spam, BY DEFINITION!
Wow, and you're only rejecting email from like 50% of americans or so.
From someone stupid enough to think that *@hotmail.com spam is actualy sent from hotmail servers, it's not suprising.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
.25%! Thats better then CTR on most websites. Thats better then the CTR for autopr0n.com (which only has textads, though).
:(. Someone needs to take spammers out and shoot them in the street. Someone other then me.
That's depressing
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Yes, its much better to throw people in jail and stuff then it is to spend a few minutes setting up filters. I think the RBL is a bunch of crap, but trying to stop spammers using the law is like stop hackers with the law, rather then with firewalls and other security technology.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Look at the docs it seems that you have to check your 'pending messages' folder once in a while.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
this...
(...)average american will get over 3600 of them a year. The future of email is??"
just begs for re-writing it this way:
1. Send 3600 spam per American per year
2. ???
3. Profit!
Ironically, that's what the rough equation actually is....
Digital cash, like real cash, needs to be administered and backed by the government.
Umm, no. Digital cash needs to be issued by any party that you trust to redeem the value promised by the "cash". That may be a national government, or it may be an outfit like E-Gold, or some power company that promises to deliver a certain portion of a kilowatt-hour in exchange for the digital coin in question.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Spam will change with the times. The spam we see in five years will probably still bear a resemblance to the spam that we see today but a
certain percentage of it will be "improved" if for no other reason, so that it will get past the latest and greatest filtering technologies. I
would also suspect that some spam will become more welcomed by the masses because it will offer a real value to the recipient. Much like
we tolerate the coupons in the Sunday paper.
I would not be surprised to see spam start to arrive to targeted audiences in a manner similar to those local advertising circulars that
everyone gets on their doorstep. The targets may not live in a specific geograpical location but rather may share common interests. Perhaps
Ford owners will receive ciriculars advertising deals targeted to them, Chevy owners would have a similar but different circular that would
target them. Maybe people who like Coke products would get one ad but people who drink Pepsi, another.
I would hope that along with the spam, these targeted markets will receive information that both interests them and that they find valuable. In essence, it would be like a weekly paper. I would also hope that the advertizers would make much better use of the available technologies, perhaps personalizing each coupon, and making their ads an interactive experiece.
I do not want unsolicited commercial email to really succeed as a business model the way that it is today. That is not to say that I expect that it will fail. Business in the capitalist environment has a way of rewarding success and punnishing failure. That small percentage of spammers who are innovative enough and adaptable enough will succeed.
They are also the ones who will break the mold and make their product palatable to the masses.
In my book, the only way for spam to really succeed is to make it so applealing that people actually welcome it and look forward to both
receiving it and using it. Nearly half the viewers of the Superbowl watch the show for the commercials, that is where spam needs to get to
in order for it to succeed.
I know that these domains aren't actually sending the spam, but the most spammers set their from addresses to msn, hotmail or any free mailer.
Then you know that disallowing their server wont stop any Spam, so why do you do it, other then your own stupidity?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Here's the full text from a letter to PCWorld, printed in the October 2002 issue:
"If ISPs were really dedicated to stopping spam, they would file a class action lawsuit against the credit card conglomerates for allowing their customers to send unsolicited business e-mail. This would avoid government controls and First Amendment conflicts, and probably eliminate spam within days.
Allan Hytowitz, Norcross, Georgia"
OH NOES!!! IT APPEARS YUO DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH MONEY TO PAY FOR DIS HERE PIZZA! WAHT EVER ARE YOU GOING TO DO!?!?
Every mail server on the planet simply has refuse to relay messages from any untrusted hosts/PCs (ie: dialup clients) at a rate faster than one email per 5 seconds. At that rate a million emails will take 57.87 days to relay. No human fires out emails at a sustained rate faster than one every five seconds, so this will only catch automated bulk mailers.
... then complain about it.
:-) )
That's probably not feasible for those who receive 100s of SPAMs/day, but if you receive only three or four, complain about them.
If you receive a lot of SPAM, complain about the three or four most obnoxious.
I do an RDNS of the immediate sender's IP address, and, if I believe that they are valid (not forged), other IP addresses in the return-path trail.
I do a DNS of any domain in the SPAM body (and appropriate domains in the SPAM header), and an RDNS of the returned IP address (which, when it works, is often different from the original domain).
I do "whois"es of all of the above (both domains and IP addresses), and note all of the domains of the appropriate contact emails.
(Currently, SamSpade is helping me with all of these tasks, but I am writing an app that will do a lot of this automatically.)
I then send complaints to abuse@, admin@, hostmaster@, mail-abuse@, netadmin@, postmaster@, remove@, root@, sales@, spam@, spamcomplaints@, support@, sysadmin@, sysop@, and webmaster@ each of those domains and IP addresses (plus abuse@ any domain name that I believe was forged in the header, with advice that they take legal action against the SPAMmer, plus the contact of the registrar of any domain name in the SPAM body).
Eventually, people at these companies may become so tired of complaints about SPAM that they will actually do something about it.
This takes about a half-hour to an hour per day.
(I am currently under-employed, so this is not a big deal to me.)
(Encrypted SPAMs take a little longer (because I have to convert the JavaScript into Python), but are good excercise.
I usually send out between 20 and 50 complaints for each SPAM that I receive.
I have made such a nuisance of myself that many days I receive no SPAM at all.
If a large number of people were to take similar actions, then I believe that the quantity of SPAM would seriously diminish.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
For offices that don't want to install or manage spam assassin on individual clients workstations, nor bog down their existing servers you can run SpamAssassin as a content filter on your incoming mail relay. Info on a mail relay appliance that uses SpamAssassin can be found here
"Filtering does solve THAT problem."
You're right. I guess I bypass that problem all together and focus on the root of all evil which is the spammers themselves.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
as
Theonlyuse of monkeys is to testthings onthem.Some peoplemay say"Hey That'scruel!"and myresponse is"I don't like monkeys
sneakemail.com, sorry...