AOL Awarded Millions in Spam Case

c.derby writes "MSNBC.com is running a story that says: " A Virginia federal court awarded America Online nearly $7 million in damages as part of the Internet service providers' legal victory over a junk e-mail operation, AOL said Monday." The company said the legal decision should send a warning to junk e-mailers. "This is an important legal victory in the fight against spam," Randall Boe, AOL general counsel, said in a statement. "It sends a clear, distinct message to spammers: AOL is prepared to use all of the legal and technological tools available to shut down spammers." " 145 pieces of spam so far today. Can I have a piece of the 7 million? (oops, duplicate. Oh well. It's still good ;)

Comments

Re:Question:

[realdpk]

it probably costs AOL a lot more to handle spam than it does their customers, even collectively. they're hardly "doing nothing" for their users to handle spam. at the very least, they have to install a lot of mail servers to process incoming mail.

How to fight back

[Brian Kendig]

I'm going to take advantage of a duplicate article, shamelessly grab a place near the top of the replies, and tell y'all how to fight back against spam.

1. Get a cheap discarded PC and install Linux on it. Get one of those 'always-on' net connections to your home, like DSL or a cable modem. You'll need a service plan that gives you a static IP address. Register a domain name of your very own, and use dyndns.org to point your domain name at your PC. This has the added benefit of letting you host your own web site on your own domain name if you want to.

2. Download the Exim mail server and install it on your PC, and set it up to accept email for you. You'll also want to set up an IMAP server so that you can fetch your email from the PC. Now you can make up any address you want on your new domain, and have mail sent to it reach you. This is great for when you need a one-time throwaway address for something.

3. Install SpamAssassin, and also install SA-Exim to link SpamAssassin with the Exim mail server. This will let the mail server identify and reject spam instead of only dealing with it after it's been accepted.

Once you run this for a while to make sure it's doing a good job of identifying spam, turn on Sa-Exim's teergrube ('tarpit') feature. Now, when someone tries to send you spam, your mail server will hold the spammer's connection open indefinitely by sending it occasional 'keepalive' messages without ever sending an accept or a reject. Once the spammer stumbles across enough teergrubes, the mail relay he's using will hit a process limit and be unable to continue sending spam until the spammer notices and resets it or moves on to another relay.

Teergrubing is a passive way of tying up a spammer's resources, or the resources of an open relay that's being abused by spammers. It has a negligible hit on your own resources. The more teergrubes (and honeypot web pages which feed spamtrap addresses to address harvesters) pop up out there, the harder it will be for a spammer to simply spam millions of people with the touch of a button.

Re:How to fight back

[Brian Kendig]

Yes... BUT: :-)

If the spammers start bailing after a short time, like 30 seconds, then all you've got to do is set your own mail server to delay that long before it accepts legitimate email. The spammers will bail out after half a minute, you accept the email if the sender sticks around for 45 seconds and never have to worry about those spammers.

Imposing a delay on all incoming mail connections will have a much more devastating effect on someone who sends out a million messages a day than it will on someone who sends out a dozen messages a day.

Adding a delay like this wouldn't work for a large mail server which accepts a lot of email, but for a personal mail server which accepts less than a hundred messages a day, you can easily afford the hit.

BBC Report

[jt007]

Here is the BBC's slant on things.

Re:I never thought I'd say this...

[galaxy300]

I would agree to the parent. I have three Hotmail accounts. One address I give out when I'm signing up for anything public, and the other two I keep pretty quiet. I get no spam on one, next to none (maybe one or two a week?) on the other, and tons and tons on the one I have been giving out for 5 years. I don't think Microsoft has given out the addresses, or I would be getting tons of spam in the other accounts as well.

Re:Can we moderate stories now?

[MadFarmAnimalz]

Fair enough; the post made it to newsforge, so if you'll pardon me (little weary) I'll link to it there... In the meanwhile, we have a volunteer in the legal profession doing a write-up in english of the piece of legislation and its ramifications.

Thanks for your interest; I know grousing about submission rejections is poor form, but this one really smarts...