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Spam Conference in Boston
bpfinn writes "Are you working on your own anti-spam solution? Would you like to compare notes with other coders? You'll get your chance at the
Spam Conference in Cambridge on January 17, 2003. Among the speakers are: Paul Graham (of "a plan for spam" fame), ESR, John Graham-Cumming (of "POPFile" fame), and Matt Sergeant from MessageLabs. According to the homepage, this conference will be very informal: "no fees, sponsorships, proceedings, luncheons, contests, etc. Just a series of quick, concentrated talks, and then we all go off and get Chinese food." Slashdotters who are peeved about spam can register here."
It appears that the only solution to eliminating SPAM is to develop a completely new architecture for handling email...
Not true. The simplest solution is economic. If raise the cost of sending e-mail by as little as one penny / thousand e-mails, most spam becomes uneconomical. Poof, the spammers go out of business.
I've heard this before, but I'm not convinced. Right now I use an old version of spamassassin which until recently filtered about 95% of all the spam I recieved with 2 false positives over the last 6 months. I just upgraded to the new cvs version with bayesian filtering and now expect even better results.
Maybe we should give filtering software another chance before we do something as drastic as uproot the entire email system.
I'm sure someone came up with this idea already. But these spammers have lists of E-mail adresses, mostly coming from automatic E-mail harvesters.
If everyone put a couple of pages with a few hundred thousand fake E-mail adresses (automatically generated) wouldn't that make these lists less valuable.
It would increase the amount of spam at first, but given enough fake adresses, it would come down in the end. It's a number game, to put someone who "owns" 1 million real E-mail adresses out of business, you would need to post some 100 million fake ones for him to harvest. That is no more than 2.5 Gb of HTML and some coordinated effort.
mmmm...
IANAL, but imagine a beowulf cluster of in Soviet Russia all your belong are base to us welcoming the new SCO overlords.
>And that means educating users to NOT FUCKING BUY ANYTHING SOLD THROUGH SPAM
Why the carrot and not the stick? Imagine spam honeypots luring the people who answer spam into giving up their credit cards and posting them publicly. Or listing names of people who visit honeypot sites like animalsexxxxxxx.com through a spam click. Make sure to report them to their employer if this is done during 9-5.
Then we'll see the obligatory news articles about hackers co-opting spam. Something tells me that all the spam marketers and companies that use spam won't be much of a problem when Joe Blow is worried about hackers and losing his job over spam.
According to the website, postini is a spam filtering company. Doesn't it seem a little bit strange that they'd host a spam relay? Exodus (postini's primary provider) doesn't seem to care too much, since postini is a well to do business. Postini sends an automated response that says "this message is only passing through postini's mailserver. it's not our problem". My first thought would be that postini is running open mail relays as a form of gaurilla advertising to spam busters, but it seems a little bit far fetched. I don't keep a list of addresses or domains, but postini is the only one that i've noticed for about a month that keeps reacuring.Is this sort of thing normal?
A good spam solution will have to work even if the spammers know how it works. I believe that Bayesian filtering, which is what a lot of the speakers at the conference will be talking about, is such a solution. Spammers can't outweight the incriminating words they need to use in their sales pitches with innocent words, because the very innocent words (names of friends, terms used in one's work, etc.) are unique to each user.
You don't get it. The product being sold by spam isn't Herbal Viagra or College Diplomas -- it's the spam itself.
It's a pyramid scheme. It's not about selling the product. It's about convincing people to pay you to sell their product through spam, to buy your address lists, or buy your spam software.
It's not about the people stupid enough to buy, it's about the people stupid enough to think "With all this spam, someone out there must be buying."
A large percentage of spam doesn't even have a valid contact address/url/phone. It's purely about claiming to prospective clients that you can deliver X messages or have Y valid addresses.
So, go ahead and convince grandma not to buy any spam prodcuts. Great. Meanwhile these guys are on a sales arms-race that will eventually render standard netmail useless.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.