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Ask ISP Owner Barry Shein About the Spam Wars
Spam sucks. But it's worse for ISPs than for the rest of us, because they get bounces and complaints and other behind-the-scenes spam-caused messes the rest of us don't see. AOL talks of spam as "public enemy number one." Barry Shein, who started (and still runs) the world's first full-service dialup ISP, likens spammers to organized criminals, and calls spam "an organized, vicious, sociopathic thing" in this article, which spurred an interesting Slashdot discussion. So what should we do about spam? Ask Barry. One question per post, please. We'll post his answers to 10 of the highest-moderated questions sometime in the next week or so.
What is your e-mail address? I promise I will not sell it to third parties.
One of the greatest problems with spam-prevention techniques has to do with collateral damage. Can you see any solution to spam that either prevents or minimizes the damage to innocent bystanders, such as other users of a spammer's ISP?
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
Tried it? Like it? Have problems with it?
I use Popfile at home. It seems like the perfect answer to spam. What's your take on Popfile and other Bayesian filtering methods?
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
What is the best way to discourage spammers from spamming? (Aside from Dave Barry's idea of a hunting season and selling tags)
If you could meet a spammer, what would you say? What would you do? What caliber would you use? Would you want someone to do it for you? Is $10,000 a head too much?
Would you like to consolidate your student loans while watching my 18 year old roomate take a shower, and then purchase some long distance phone cards?
Obviously the best step towards eliminating spam would be to make it a crime or easily punishable, but the nature of SMTP makes accurately tracking down the responsible spammer difficult at best and often time impossible.
What kind of changes would you make to the way email is handled to facilitate the elimination of spam?
Do you think that we can fight spam efficiently by still relying on the outdated STMP for mail delivery?
What do you think should enhance/replace it?
have you been defaced today?
Do you have any thoughts on these laws? I know that, as a non-lawyer, you probably can't do much for the actual wording, but what content would you have if it were totally up to you?
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
What would be your actual dollar cost of spam, if you didn't spend much time and effort fighting it?
Let me explain...
I sometimes hear that spam has significant costs in bandwidth and storage but I don't believe it. As far as I can tell, SMTP traffic is at most 2-5% of net traffic. And a quick calculation shows that an ISP's costs for storing its users' spam are fractions of pennies on the dollar. (*)
You've likened spam to a DDoS attack on your mail servers. Stories about being flooded with traffic sound impressive but computers are so fast now, it's hard to put anecdotes into context. So I'm looking for dollar amounts. For a customers paying b dollars per unit time, an ISP like yours has to spend c dollars per unit time on servers that can handle those customers' incoming SMTP traffic. If this is significant, I'm looking for c over a times b :)
Obviously admins to run the servers are an important cost. But for purposes of this question, suppose you wanted to do the bare minimum. Say you set up the SMTP servers to use just a few of the less-intrusive DNSBL lists, like sbl.spamhaus, relays.ordb, or list.dsbl, and then ignored them as much as possible.
The next most common argument I hear is that customers will abandon ISPs that don't fight spam. But every ISP has the same problem, so this is really a competitive advantage issue except for the small percentage of users who are actually driven off the internet by spam.
Then there's outgoing spam but I don't imagine that's too hard to recognize and stop quickly.
Let me know what I'm missing...
(*) Thumbnail calculations of spam storage follow. Let's say J. Average ISP Customer gets 20 spams a day at 10K each, and deletes them only every 30 days. That's an average of 20*10K*15 = 3 MB of storage. If the ISP replaces hard drives every two years on average and its total storage costs are ten times the actual medium costs (for labor, backup, redundancy, downtime), then at today's hard drive prices, that spam storage will cost the ISP 0.003 * 10 / 2 dollars, or about a penny and a half. Over that same year, J. Customer pays the ISP $100+.
Thank you for participating
One of the few measures that can be taken against spam is the use of blacklists (for instance via DNS). There are a lot of pro's and con's for the use of DNSBL's. How do you feel about these? Should DNSBL's be governmentally regulated? Do you use any DNSBL? Should an ISP enforce certain RBL's (let say, of open relay's) on its customers?
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
Pollution and nuclear waste at least have some benefit to society. Pollution at least means that either someone got to where they needed to go, or some useful product was created. Nuclear waste means that an effecient method of producing electricity was used. Spam just means that someone has a permenant 12-inch stiffy and has given all of their money to Nigeria.
Do you think that a technological solution, whilst imposing to everyone else the, well, the thechnological solution, is better than a law, against the spammers, like, putting them into jail, or like?
If I was the president of the company that makes Viagra I'd be nervous.
What steps have you taken to prevent spam from entering your ISP's email system? Do you recommend any kind of spam filtering software to your customers that implements Bayesian filtering? If not, why?
Is it time to apply the computer-cracking laws to circumvention of anti-spam filters? After all, the two are identical in effect (break into somebody else's system without permission, and indeed against an express prohibition).
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Do ISPs have the tools they need to prevent outgoing SPAM from their own customers? I look
at Sendmail and don't see anything that would allow you to throttle mail volume, check outbound messages for SPAM, restrict new customers etc. There isn't even anything built in that would warn you about a customer sending a million messages. It would seem that a few tools like that would be a big help to an ISP too small to develope its own.
I certainly am tired of deleting the penis elargement and Nigerian bank deposit e-mails, but where is the balance and how do we attain it, if ever?
Even if it's three strikes and you're out, I could find 3 addresses to complain about someone that i dont like for other reasons.
Then it becomes the isps responsibility to investigate otherwise they could face legal libability for cutting off someone account wrongly.
I am currently using a permission based solution to block spam, called Choicemail. It works great since I know that there are no filters trying to guess what is spam and what is not. People on my white list get in, people who aren't get sent a message asking them to identify themselves.
The only drawback is that some people may possibly feel slighted that they are forced to go through such a process. But so far no one has complained. In fact, most people seem to be intrigued by the concept. If this type of spam blocking catches on, people will begin to expect it. Sort of like having to knock on someone's door before entering their house. It is a custom so pervasive, we feel strange just walking into someone's home, even a friends, without first knocking.
Sorry for the length of this post, and now to the question: How do you feel about this type of spam blocking?
(Disclaimer:of course, this is said firmly tongue in cheek, I don't approve or condone physical violence against spammers, etc. etc. yadda yadda yadda)... =)
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Why hasn't any large ISP or enterprise seriously considered whitelisting mail? The traditional blacklist idea -- when I see spammers I'll no longer accept their mail -- is so easily overcome that many spammers don't even wait one generation to change addresses. Instead, bounce all mail you don't recognize, with a note to the sender on how to inform the system that you are a real user. Nearly all spammers loose their incoming account immedately, so this seems the natural choice. There's some more detail on this method at the TMDA project.
who will be up against the wall first?
A) Spammers
B) the IRS
C) Lawyers
D) Microsoft Lawyers
As far as I know, most spam originates from a relatively small number of smtp servers which are open for posting without identifikation. Where there ever efforts of blacklisting these servers and denying to accept mail from them, and if yes, with which results?
Or alternatively blocking whole ip-ranges of ISPs which deny to cooperate on this issue?
Do you think that there will ever be a long-lasting technological solution (e.g. Bayesian filtering systems) to spam or do you feel that any technological counter measure will be circumvented fairly rapidly?
I would just have a blanket, three strikes you are out policy. If someone complains about the content of your email three times, no matter the circumstances, you are outta there.
So if your best friend is infected with klez (or the latest variant) and sending messages that appear to be from you, if three people call to complain that you are sending them junk, you are outta there? Those are three complaints about the content of your email, and your policy says no matter the circumstances.
What if I don't like your political views that you've espoused on a political discussions mailing list and I call up your isp and tell them that your opinions about certain PICKWHATEVERPARTYYOUHATE Senators constitute a terrorist threat. After 3 of those complaints, you get dropped.
I wouldn't use an isp that didn't have some intelligence behind its decisions or didn't have an appeals process if I feel I was mistreated.
I was just thinking about this... what if there was a national "do no email" list? I'm just wondering if something like that would be effective.
All spammers would have to (by law) query the "national do-no-email" database before sending out their crap.
I'm just wondering if something like that would be an effective way to cut down on the noise out there?
sad robot making broken music
Do you think new laws that allow ISPs and end-users to collect damages from spammers on a per-message basis can be effective tools to reduce spam?
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Ah, here is the reference. Diplomat shot dead in Prague
Much has been made of the problems of blacklisting. Do you see whitelisting as a viable alternative, and (if so) what form do you think that it will take?
For one, I would like to see more people actively making the distinction between unsolicited "spam", and legal (albeit questionable) "direct email marketing". I say this because I work for a marketing company that does some email advertising, and I've also worked in the abuse department at a local ISP so I've seen both sides. The difference being that the spam mentioned in the article comes largely from unsecure, hijacked mail servers. Not so say that spam is the fault of some system administrator who didn't properly configure their SMTP server, but a lot could be done right there to slow down the constant barrage of penis enlargement offers. Oh, and the company I work for DOES in fact honor the opt-out links in all our ads. If you don't want to receive email from us, you won't. Unfortunately, if one of us has you on our list, 100 others do already.... Again, I just want to see people differentiate between illegal, unethical mail server hijacking, and more legal methods. A solution to stopping one type won't necessarily work to stop the other.
In hindsight, if you could start afresh and redesign the protocols and software on which email is based, and influence any relevant ISP policies & user education, how would you do things differently to deal with the problem of SPAM?? And, of these areas, which is the weakest link in the spam-war?! Not part of the question: Why don't all webmasters add SpamBot traps to their websites....?
Vacancy for signature. Apply within.
Many posts talk about proposed changes to society, government, and technology to lessen the spam problem. However, an ISP has more insight into the problem than many others, and I thought I'd ask a question to tap that insight:
Given today's society, technology and infrastructure, what can an individual do that would be effective in reducing not only the personal strain of spam, but also lessen an ISP's burden.
What kind of strategies have you seen work. For instance, in particularly bad instances I'm prone to send an e-mail to spam@isp.net, abuse@isp.net, or admin@isp.net, but usually never even get a response. Is there a better thing to do? Are there things that are absolutely the wrong thing to do (such as replying to a spam)?
In short, what would you like to see users do in response to spam today?
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
What legal pursuits do you feel would be appropriate to deal with spammers? What penalties? Prison time? Just fines? Given that some spammers make large sums of money from their spamming activities, what scale of fines would be appropriate?
Carpe Diem
Sure it'd be a short term hit on the number of hosts you could exchange mail from, but eventually I think anyone who wanted to talk to anyone would have to get on.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
ISPs have tried to rely on 'common carrier' defenses in the past. However, if they start blocking SOME email, can they be held liable for mail that they DON'T block?
And can you selectively give up common carrier status? If you block some email but host anyone's web page, for instance, can you be sued successfully for objectionable content on those web pages?
And a good whitelist will pay attention to outgoing mail, as well, and authorize replies.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
What is the most evil thing you have seen, so far?
Reply-to impersonation?
Embedded hypertext identifiers?
I'm sure it's much worse than that.
What would you do to stop that evilest of evil practises?
Yes, I agree. Except the software I am using automatically adds anyone I email first to my whitelist. No hoops. The only people who have to jump through the hoop are people who have never emailed me before.
How do you protect those companies who are using legal means of targeted email marketing? I see many people who believe that they are receiving spam when they have either knowingly or unknowingly opted into these lists, which makes it perfectly legal. However, these people report them to their ISP and these companies get blacklisted unfairly. For many companies this is their bread and butter, and although what they are doing is completely legal and legit they suffer because of spammers. My idea was to have an Internet Direct Marketing Agency. With this agency direct email marketer's must register and have an "Internet Advertiser's ID". This ID would be paid for on a yearly basis and based upon the advertiser's volume. The fees would be spilt among the ISPs who had mail sent through their network, to pay for this excess bandwidth usage (a per transaction tax, essentially). Additionally, an email proxy would check incoming "spam" for that ID and if it did not check and match to the email server's IP it would be tossed as spam.... make sense?
I used to be a MS fan but then I was brainwashed. Now I see the Light. Mac OS X pwns u.
There's plenty of talk about passing laws against SPAM, replacing SMTP, and all sorts of other things that other people can do to reduce the amount of SPAM we recieve. My question is what can we the users do to reduce SPAM? More specifically, what that most people don't do now would make the most difference if we all started doing it? Even better, what that most people are capable of doing (email users with little or no technical expertise), would make the most difference? Perhaps the best strategy is not to evangelize the most effective methods, but the reasonably effective methods most likely to be widely implemented.
Convert RSS to HTML - integrate webfeeds into your website
I'd argue this collateral damage has destroyed the usefulness of email even more than spam has. It's simply an unreliable medium these days -- you never know if your mail got there or not, because it could have been silently dropped with no bounce message sent. Thus whenever I send reasonably-important emails now, I use either the phone or AIM to confirm it was received.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The problem with Spam is that there is minimal retaliation. You can send the prepaid envelopes back to the junk mailers and they get charged for that. You can slam the phone on telemarketers or play a catchy tune with the buttons why they try their pitch. the problem with spam is you can't get them back. Even if you filter, you still have to do something that does no damage to them.
spam works... that's the root of the problem.
do you think there is anything that can combat this?
simply telling people that nothing will add three inches may not work as well as we hope for... stupid people are gullible.
Runnin' On Empty
If you had known back in the early 90s that spam was going to be the problem it is now, what steps would you have taken then to protect yourself and others from it?
For instance, what changes would you have advocated in the mail protocols and what standard procedures would you have told other ISPs to use to prevent spammers from getting a foothold in the first place?
Do you have any statistics on how much of your ISP's bandwidth is consumed by spam? (And for comparison's sake, other stuff like p-2-p and Quake servers.)
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Should end users set up their SPAM filters to bounce the offending messages, or should they just get quitely filed into the SPAM folder?
I used Mailwasher for a while, which gives users the options of generating bounce messages while filtering. There is some personal gratification in making it look like my email address doesn't exist. But does it actually help, or does it just add to the ISP's bandwidth requirements?
I don't give out my email address to anyone I don't know well, and I change it every year. I tell people who need to get in touch with me to call.
All this is because I started getting 50 spams a day. Right now, it's impossible to post to a newsgroup, put an email address on a web page, or have an email address that's listed in any sort of a directory without getting tons of spam each day.
I agree with that article that email is a failure. Important/busy people just don't have time for it.
A friend of mine finished looking for a new full-time job. He sent out some resumes by email to the listed addresses, and some by Fed-EX. Only the Fed-EX ones got answers. Companies get so much spam that they miss good resumes coming to them!
Best Buy can have you arrested
DJB claims that with this system bounce messages will be eliminated (if I read correctly).
In the interview from InternetWeek, you seemed to not care about false positives. At what point do you care about false positives?
Ie. are you attempting to stop all spam, with the possibility of false positives an acceptable risk, or is there some sort of calculation that your organization uses to balance the false positives (mail rejected as spam that wasn't) against the false negatives (mail that was accepted, but was spam)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I've used mod points for Mattcelt's posting, but just have to reply - I immensely dislike SPAM & spammers that much. Don't knock my karma off for this, CmdrTaco!
SPAMMERs disregard the rules of SMTP fair play (falsified headers, for one), so we should have the tools to deal with these miscreants.
1) Allow users to reply to SPAM with "User unknown" message as if the administrator issued the message.
2) ISPs should allow users to report SPAM and falsified headers, which are then compared to the spooled email messages. E-mail issued from offending domains are rejected with a "Please Resubmit" message. This could be an Opt-in service to allow community policing for SPAM. Imagine the flood of Resubmit Messages back to offending (or falsified) domains. Even if the headers where hacked, the SPAMMERs would not reach their audience, and the postmasters would shrug off the "Please Resubmit" requests. Shouldn't swamp any email server.
3) ISPs should allow users to delete, ignore, and read email messages without informing the entire mailing list of your current status. AOL does this, and I can just imagine SPAMMERs elisting people to parse through email status - Who reads them, who deletes them, and who ignores it.
What, in your experience, has been the most *cost-effective* spam-reduction software solution? Is it server-based, or is it some kind of client software?
cleetus
While in the short term I concur, in the long term I must cry au contraire.
If Baysean filtering makes its way to the general public -- or is introduced at an ISP level, then it will reduce the amount of spam that gets through to potential customers, and hence make each spamming less profitable.
The least profitable of the spam messages will dissapear, thereby reducing the loads on our mailboxes and on the ISP as a whole. Therefore, perhaps a better question is:
Support a few technologists in Washington.
I would like an email account where senders not on my whitelist need to pay something (e.g. thirty-seven cents), or at least risk paying something, to put a message in my inbox. Two businesses that have been mentioned on slashdot before are Vanquish.com (has a bonding system) and internetstamps.net (sells stamps).
Are you thinking of providing a pay-for-attention email service through your business?
It seems to me that the existing email protocol has some fundamental problems that contribute to spam. It is basically impossible to authenticate who an email came from. Do you think that adding a new email protocol could solve these problems?
Specifically, if we created a second protocol that required that all email be digitally signed by the person listed in the "from:" clause and that the originating ISP guarantees this identity, wouldn't that solve most of the problems? The true identity of people who use the bandwidth I pay for to communicate with me seems like a fair thing for me to be able to insist on. I might even be willing to pay a little more to have such a system, although I would think such a system would be cheaper for my ISP, since the cost of carrying 33% garbage isn't there.
I should be able to say I want to filter email from Alan M. Ralsky of West Bloomfield, Mich or from any that passed through any ISP that cannot guarantee me that I can determine this. The problem is that Mr. Ralsky can send me email and I have no hope of identifying that it came from him. All that is required, it seems to me is for the leading ISP's to get together and create and enforce a standard that says your new-style email will be digitally signed with your legal name and that only ISP's that comply with enforcement practices will be allowed to use the new email protocol.
If the average genuine mail to spam ratio on your system is 1/10 (ie: for each genuine message, you get 9 spam messages) this will have the inevitable effect that your infrastructure has to be capable of processing a load which is 10 times higher than would be required if there was no such thing as spam.
Given that 1/10 is probably a very conservative estimate (escpecially for big ISPs with a lot of J. Average Customers), you can imagine that this can have a huge impact on the systems required to handle this.
Also when a spammer is using a fake (or real) address at the ISP as a return address, a lot of bounces get directed there in very short period of time (which in fact is very much like a DDoS).
While silicon speed is still increasing at a mindnumbimgly speed, disk platters haven't. It's not costly to get a lot of storage (73GB disks are 'affordable'), but it can cost a lot to build a storage subsystem that can cope with the load and is relatively solid (raid / backup).
On top of that there are the hidden costs, eg: customer support for dealing with customer issues related to spam, system administrator time spent extra on dealing with spam-related problems.
I don't think it's so simple as to stating that "bandwidth is cheap" (which simply isn't true for a very big part of the world) and "storage is cheap" so spam can not cost much.
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
[Zappa]
That sounds great, but you have to also remember that some ppl have vendettas against others. We have a 2 strikes policy, but we will not take a complaint from any free-mail providers (hotmail, yahoo. etc...) seriously. It is too easy for one kid to get pissed at another on irc/irl/where ever and create different email account and complain 3 times. I also will require full headers when in doubt due to all the new virii that spoof the from address.
We had a customer who was a spammer, and he admitted it, but he outsourced his bulk-mailling to a company in Nevada. I told him repeatedly that I didn't like the business he was in (spamming to sell email addy lists) and that all I needed was 2 complaints and he was gone. He assured me that the company in Nevada would be the only ones to get complaints, not us. Well, one day it seems that the company in Nevada was having problem and we started to get complaints. I smiled as I told the customer that he would need find a new provider, his account with us was terminated. We then called the admins for the other local ISPs and warned them about a possible new customer.
technoid
Two wrongs don't make a right, but 3 lefts do - Lew of GO magazine
This is exactly what SPEWS does, and it's remarkably effective.
This is preached on email abuse newsgroups as gospel but I have yet to see anything other than anecdotal proof. What I do see are a lot of innocent ISP customers whose business is being interruped, not by spammers, but by SPEWS' vigilante blocking policies.
The analogy is much the same as having a crack house open in your neighbourhood. You either take action on the crack dealers or move out...
My $Deity, where to begin...
To correct your analogy the spammer is the crack house operator. What SPEWS does is start blowing up all the houses in the neighbourhood that surround the crack house in the hopes that the neighbours will complain to the authorities (The ISP)to take action.
What this farcical pretext misses is that spammers can move from ISP to ISP daily and as soon as you shut down one account they have opened a new one either on the same or a different ISP. The number of spammers and their mobility precludes an ISP permanantly blocking a spammer and thus the chances of getting off SPEWS once an ISP are on are minimal.
SPEWS has no posted policies as to what the timeframe is between an ISP complying with their blackmail blocking and the removal from the SPEWS list. 24 hours?, 2 weeks? who knows, SPEWS doesn't tell you. How often do they check? What criteria is applied during a check? Why don't they block the large ISPs like AT&T? Why don't they announce listings/delistings anymore? Why is there no direct method for applying for delisting? Why are postings from innocent ISP customers asking for reasons for listing met with scorn and accusations that sound make the customer is a nazi sympathizer?
There are far too many questions about SPEWs' practices.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
I am a Systems Administrator for a statewide ISP. We have found that blocking such domains as azoogle.com, topica.com, etracks.com, and other claimed Opt-In spammers has really cut down on spam complaints. We had to go as far as firewalling these 3 spammers since they were chewing our bandwidth to peices. EverBlur which was recently kicked off their provider, has stopped altogether.
My question is, do you see this as an effective method? Do spammers really quit after seeing their packets are being dropped? Why do they not?
Lets pretend that congress takes up the issue of spam and passes a very restrictive law essentially outright banning it. COULD that be an effective way to prevent it, or would the international nature of the internet make it useless?
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
I worked a couple of years ago for a company that makes 'emarketing' software, and I managed the company's ASP for that software.
Most of the emails we sent out we're from internal, registered customers of the company. I would call these 'opt-in' emarketing messages that ranged from pitches to buy new or upgrade products, customer satisfaction surveys and automated replies for visiting a website and signing up.
There were, on the other hand, spammers. That is the only way to describe the quality of the emails they sent out. When I could query their databases and find email addresses of 'abuse@someisp.com' and other, similar non-customer addresses, there is no other way to classify it.
In either case, we never tried to hide or run away. We always used real email addresses and kept the same domain names. So, my challenges were, "How to I keep the 'good' customers from impacting the 'bad' customers?" I dealt a lot with CAUSE, the MAPS RBL and other organizations to keep the emails flowing.
So, here is my question: How do you, at the ISP level, differentiate between legitimate email marketing and Spam?
For those of us who are trying to set up incoming SMTP servers (or who are just curious):
What are the current "best practices" and state-of-the-art for the little guy (enterprise, small office/home office, little ISP, etc.) who:
- has some need or desire to directly serve inbound and outbound SMTP and
- has SOME time to sysadmin, but
- does not have the resources to throw several full-time-plus-pager sysadmins into the spam wars?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
My friends and I are often responsible for small sites - our own colocated servers, small businesses, and the like.
What are your technical recommendations for us, to make your life easier?
For instance, I usually argue to require valid FQDNs in the HELO and MAIL FROM command, and reject anything claiming to come from myself or one of the RFC1918 reserved IP addresses. This is entirely content-neutral - I just see no point in accepting any message from somebody who can't be contacted in turn if there's a problem delivering the message.
But I generally don't bother with RBLs, and am philosophically opposed to IP redlining since it could easily lead to a world where a few corporations act as gatekeepers.
I know what impact this has on my sites, but does this cause problems for the large sites? Or does it help you as well?
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
What the government should do is expand departments and cooperation to track down the people who attempt to sell these things and shut them down. Most of these people are crooks and charletons, so that shouldn't be very hard. The govt. should, also, crack down one people like Alan Ralsky, requiring him to verify that each recipient of his product has personally requested to be on his lists.
All these goofballs have to make themselves available to their victims (those foolish enough to open or respond to spam.) There's a phone number or web address. Credit card usage can be tracked, with the assistance of credit card companies (and much of this is fraud anyway so you could expect them to warm to such investigations.)
Visualize:
0600: Spam sent out, promising teen webcam shots
0601: First spams arrive in honeypot email accounts
0605: Website has been identified.
0607: Run tracing credit card number to see extra material
0620: Template of potential violations has been reviewed and yields potential charges on: Adv sent to email account of unverified user (potentially a minor), in-state spamming, potential age violation if various claims on site are true (underage).
0630: Contact local law enforcement
0800: Local law enforcement pays a visit/takes people for questioning/obtains search warrant/impounds equipment, etc.
Not perfect, at first glance, becuase it could still be abused (i.e. I hate someone and set them up, but a good template test could reduce this), still, we're ready to spend billions on Iraq, yet I've heard nothing about going after these scoundrels.
PR is also a useful thing. Public service messages for radio and TV. ("Don't respond to spam, send for free guide how not to be fooled, or visit FTC website.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
- Boucing messages with Mailwasher
- Having munged addresses where the "NOSPAM" is in the user part rather than in the domain part (that is, "bozoNOSPAM@isp.net" instead of "bozo@NOSPAMisp.net"), so your servers get hammered with invalid harvested addresses.
- Using often broken tools such as SPAMCOP to LART other ISPs?
- Does a significant number of problems from your user always come from the same users, or is the problem widespread?
are having a negative effect towards your own efforts at fighting spam, either by diverting ressources or simply being a nuisance?How much of the SPAM complaints do you do receive are properly done (that is, with headers and sent to the proper ISPs)???
By fighting spam you are diverting your resources to an endless task, plus, you are creating a false sense of the situation.
Wouldn't it be easier to just allow your customers to receive the hundreds of emails you filter and by doing so creating an awareness on the severity of the situation?
I mean, once Joe User gets really tired of receiving spam, won't he be more aware of the need to regulate the whole thing?
As it is now, with the heavy filters in place, the end user only gets a tiny fraction of what is indeed sent to them, so why should the general population worry?
My technical proposal: people/companies purchase SMTP message-sends the way they purchase cell-phone-minutes:
- spammers who use open relays would saturate that relay's quota, and most of the spam thus
relayed would fail to go out, thus the owner of the
relay would have incentive to fix it, so they
can send their own mail.
- spammers who send directly from ISP accounts would have to purchase large numbers of them in order to send a given volume of mail.
To enforce such a system, you would need to build a smart firewall that knew just enough SMTP protocol to read the RCPT To: lines, and count recipients. When a given sending host exceeds its counter for the week, poof! the firewall blocks further SMTP activity (or even all activity) from that host until someone clears it.Backbones could limit individual ISP's with such a system, and ISP's could in turn limit individual customers; indeed they would basically have to, so that one customer can't ruin their SMTP quota. If the ISP doesn't enforce such a rule, their backbone tap enforces it for them.
If such infrastructure became widespread, the only way a spammer could send large numbers of messages would be to get large numbers of ISP accounts, which would hopefully cost them enough money to make it not worth their while anymore.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
I have foudn that once I get a physical mail address to a domain and indicate that I ma 30 minutes away and will visit with my pfist that the spam stops..
How effective is this type of Physical threat towards spammers?
Caution: This doesn't work on Nigerian spammers..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
He's right, though -- it's not his job as an ISP to fix it on an individual basis. We need a change in the whole infrastructure.
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It seems that law enforcement has no reason to get aggressive on this problem as long as companies such as yours bandaid it with technological measures. What do you think about a "no filter day", in which all of the ISPs remove their spam filters for 24 hours and let the world get first hand the full brunt of the traffic you're filtering? The outrage alone, if correctly managed, could get the appropriate authorities off their asses and go after these guys.
I am a security technician and sysadmin for a research institution. My clients, who are scientists, are not interested in being paid to watch advertisements, or in having our institution funded by advertisements shown to them in email. We don't want to be paid to receive spam; we just want not to receive it. We just want the spam attack, the theft of our resources and our people's time, to stop. Do you see any way this can be reconciled?
Q: If ISPs are really all that upset about spam, why haven't they done anything about it?
It's patently obvious that ISPs could eliminate spam simply by blacklisting individuals who engage in the practice (and other ISPs who don't follow it). This is how credit ratings work, an area in which there is both a greater monetary incentive for misbehaviour and much lower (technical) barrier to entry.
Properly implemented, such an individual blacklist would eliminate most worldwide spam - since only a couple dozen individuals are responsible for more than 90% of the phenonema.
It seems to me that the real reason ISPs don't stop spam is due to base economics: spam houses pay money. So spam elmination has become a classic games theory problem - money you spend to search for spammers on your own network is wasted; you just have to respond enough to keep off the RTBL.
And because detection is always someone else's problem, spammers will continue to thrive in the time it takes to process the request.
A few questions:
How would you grade the effectiveness of current filter techniques, and blacklists etc.
What filters/blacklists do you use, and how could they evolve so that you would feel comfortable using them? When choosing blacklists or filters, how do you measure the gains of blocking x% of spam against not-blocking y% of legitimate emails.
How do you regard the threat of spam in opposition to some of the major viruses. That is, viruses like "sapphire" that generate huge disabling traffic netwide, or like "code red" that - to this day - is still making attempts to access "cmd.exe" on my own linux box.
And lastly, as we all want to know, what do you think can be done to spammers to strongly discourage them from continueing their immoral practices.
Hello, Barry--
As a World customer, I found last year that I was getting removed from several mailing lists I was subscribed to beause so much of their traffic was being bounced by World spam filters.
When I contacted customer support, they said that the messages must have contained strings that triggered the filters, and that the solution was for the lists to avoid using those strings in the future.
What strings would these be? Customer Support couldn't say.
So, if I wanted to use my World account to recieve my list mail, I would have to persuade all other list members to not use the filter-triggering words. And I would have to do this without telling them what those words were.
It seems to me that strong filtering of customer inboxes is one thing, but doing so with no provision for opt-out or whitelists interferes with the individual's right to get the internet servide he's paying for. Do you disagree?
Through my own travails with SPAM to my personal account, I've come to the basic conclusion that filtering out SPAM is a sisyphean task. No matter how good we make our filters, determined SPAMers will find a way through those filters. Blacklisting of open relays helps, really only punishes careless sysadmins, not the SPAMers who victimize them.
I see much more promise in technologies like HashCash which force sending machines to burn CPU cycles in order to send their message. My question to you is, are you aware of this type of technology? Do you think it would be effective? And what do you think it would take to get such a technology deployed (standardization, ISP acceptance, MTA/MUA integration, etc)?
Lawsuits. Why don't we see more lawsuits?
* Are spammers too hard to track?
* Is it too expensive right now?
* Have the courts not been favorable?
I'd happily participate in a class action suit. My email account gets hit with 100-200 spams a day, nevermind the rest of my family, including my kids who get porn spam right along with the rest of us (see Britney with a guy, a gal, a bullsnake and a tractor!). It takes time to maintain the anti-spam filters, and even then I have to wade through the crap they miss. Then there's the time dealing with complaints from people who think I spammed them because the scumball spammers use *my* email as a return email address. And so on.
The people who think spam isn't a problem are simply clueless.
Could an escrow email system be a helpful service improvement over current SMTP email, assuming that participation is a voluntary addition to normal SMTP traffic?
By "escrow", I mean that licensed businesses would be responsible for storing and delivering email under specially defined rules (which are open for debate on ways that would improve security and reduce unsolicited items). Servers could refuse to accept or deliver email that did not meet the established rules. Subscribers could refuse to accept email from non-escrow servers (or hopefully more specific arrangements could be made depending on the "rules" of escrow service). Email service would be a legal contract, so the identity of subscribers when they submit emails would always be known.
The standard unregulated email system should still be available to all internet users to provide for free (beer) and free (speech) usage, but the escrow method would be a voluntary subscription service.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If the US passed a law outlawing spam, or provided a do-not-email list, with harsh penalties for breaking it, do you think it would help? I'm in WA state, we have an anti-spam law, it doesn't help.
Are spammers too hard and too numerous to track down to be worth it (and too poor to pay the fine even if caught)? Would spammers just move offshore and continue to spam?
Using the spammer's last SMTP protocol leg, before your mail server closes it, why not do the following:
By not letting go of the (would-be spammer's) SMTP connection, one can consult the mail recipient white list. From an unknown sender, instead, save the entire email in a holding queue and send back the following SMTP error message:
With a marriage of sendmail MILTER and Tagged Message Delivery Agent, one can shift the burden of automating the mail recipient white list back to the sender (like ICQ does).
With a tweak of the last leg of SMTP protocol, we, the email users, will have control over what is 200 and what is 5-f@cking-50.
What say you?
- Shamelessly ripped from the Seinfield TV episode "Soup Nazi."
About what percent of the messages that go through your ISP per day are spam? Can you guess what that spam costs you per day in the increased bandwidth and better computers you need to be able to handle it? Do many customers quit giving spam as the reason?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I've been an active anti-spammer for quite a while now and am quite proud of the knowledge I've acquired in the fight against spam. I even make good money off of filtering spam for others. As an anti-spammer I'm sure you've encountered folks that simply don't understand the purpose for a DNS blacklist. They claim it's prone to false-positives, dated information, legality issues, informally administrated, submission information isn't verified, hard to get removed from a DNSBL, or just plain silly (I actually had a person tell me this once). Most of these people make such claims due to a bad experience they personally had with a DNS blacklist at some point. It might be that they didn't get a newsletter they'd signed up for, when it reality the sender might actually use spam as a marketing tool. It could also be that they no longer get yahoogroups.com mail, when in reality they harbor spammers and take no action on abuse complaints. It could also be that they themselves had a MTA listed, when in reality they were incompetent mail admins and their MTA was an open relay. The last one is the worst of all. Unfortunately a large number of the people that have said these things somehow manage to call themselves mail administrators.
As a mail admin, I'm sure you have a better understanding than most about how much spam can hurt a business and can see the usefulness in DNS blacklists. How do you make the case for DNS blacklists when faced with the misguided biasness from those that simply don't understand?
There seems to be a lot of disagreement between spammers and their victims on what exactly is "spam". Lots of spammers claim that it's not spam as long as [it's not commercial | it's not porn | I bought an opt-in list | etc]. Some users don't mind diet pill ads but hate herbal viagra.
What do you consider spam? Is it unsolicited commercial email? Unsolicited bulk email? What about chain letters forwarded to you by your Aunt Ethel? Any successful legal solution will depend on a good definition.
What can I do now about a spammer spoofing with my email address?
I'm currently getting hundreds of bounced, undeliverable messages from various organizations because a spammer is using my email address to spam others. The web site he's advertising is located in China, and I seem to have no way of finding the individual much less taking action against him.
What are my options?
_ The bureaucracy is expanding to meet
the needs of an expanding bureaucracy.
One of the easiest solutions I can see would be introducing laws to expressly criminalize relay rape, and give law enforcement enough teeth and incentive to prosecute regularly.
Upwards of 90% of the spam hitting our servers is relay raped off innocent 3rd parties. When you report the criminal trespass to law enforcement, they shrug their shoulders and say "there's no law against it" or "there's not enough fines to make it worth our time to prosecute".
Well, there should be.
How do you feel about the increasing usage of utilities like SpamAssassin or DNS-based blockers using very liberal blanket blocklists such as SPEWS (which has had a tendency to block entire subnets even if some hosts are not spammers at all)? Do you think this is a good tactic in combatting spam or is it a bad method and is harmful to the Internet as a whole? SPEWS rarely unblocks innocent bystanders caught in the middle of a blocked subnet, with the excuse of "the ISP supports spam." Many mailservers use SPEWS to completely block incoming mail from blocked hosts outright, instead of using it as it was designed, as an early warning system.
In your opinion, is it morally correct to regulate commercial solicitious email, or would that be a violation of their rights to free speech in the U.S.?
I'd like to know if there's something tangible I can do about spam. I've seen lots of suggestions... don't reply to "to remove" links, just throw it away, etc. Basically "ignore it". A few antispam efforts have popped up from time to time, some of them legislation, some net efforts, etc, but they all seemed hopeless or completely without effect. I have spent some time in my own efforts, tracking headers and finding the spam portals, and writing nastygrams to the portals who are alway claiming "all our sponsors are opt-in and have removal links". Now I never did get a reply and I doubt it really did any good, but even with that, it felt like it had an impact, even if only a spec of sand on a beach. Is there anything we can do that will REALLY MATTER? Something we can see is having some sort of impact somewhere?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
The question:
Currently, a company that follows all of the "guidelines" and does everything right, still stands a good chance of getting listed on SPAMCOP and other RBL lists based on a handful of complaints from clueless customers.
BCDE.COM maintains an nation-wide network of high-volume web sites. Access to the most basic site features is free, but all value-added features require that the user register -- The registration page includes very clear notice that that the "cost" of registration, of access to advanced features, is that the user will receive marketing email from BCDE.COM.
If you choose to "unregister", BCDE.COM will stop sending you email, and you will no longer be able to access the advanced site features.
Filling out the form on the site is just step one -- based on the form, an email is sent to the email address supplied, re-iterating the terms on the form, and providing a URL to "confirm" opt-in. The URL includes a secure hash to prevent spoofed confirmations. Once an address has been sent a registration request, it cannot be sent another request for a week (to prevent using the form as a flood attack).
Daily, BCDE.COM and their ISP(s) receive complaints from users and from SPAMCOP about the confirmation email, about the marketing email, about the "spamvertised" sites hosted at A.BCDE.COM which are promoted in the marketing email.
99.999% of the user base has no problem with this business model, and would prefer this approach to actually paying a subsciption fee for access to the "value add" site features.
How can an ISP known that a sending site that their customers complain about, or a customer that other ISPs complain about, is a legitimate business that is following all the "rules"?
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.