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Building A Better Inbox (Updated)
vudujava writes "c|net is reporting that a new free (Update: not free, actually, read more for details.), web based email service is opening it's doors today. They promise to deliver "100% spam free" email to their users by using a challenge-response system to all incoming, first-time mail. Catch the entire story here. Although the idea isn't new, it shows that we are notching up the "war on spam"."
Alert reader George Hotelling points out this post on Politech which may give you pause when it comes to the new mail service's Terms of Service.
And kraksmoka writes "As reported on this article on MSNBC : 'Hotmail subscribers are now limited to sending only 100 messages a day "in an effort to prevent spammers from using Hotmail to spread spam," said Lisa Gurry, MSN lead product manager.'"
dlanod writes "In your snippet on the main page you report mailblocks.com as "a new free, web based email service". Looking at Mailblocks' site, it actually costs $9.95/year for the standard service, or $24.95/year for the expanded service with no free option listed (https://app1.mailblocks.com/register.htm)."
Best damn email on Earth is at http://fastmail.fm
If you're still using Hotmail or Yahoo, upgrade. Now. This minute.
BTW, mailblocks.com isn't free; it's $10/yr. However, that's still only half what fastmail.fm charges annually for their spam filtering service (with SpamAssasin).
This undeclared "war on spam" is unauthorized imperialist aggression!
Mailblocks is not free! They charge either $9.95 or $24.95 a year depending on the file size limitation you choose.
The future isn't what it used to be.
Seriously, who spams from Hotmail anyway? Don't all the real spammers use custom software with a built-in smtp server? I've gotten enough spams advertising it, after all.
sulli
RTFJ.
I've been using yahoo mail for a while now and it is virtually spam free. The built in filter is great. Occasionally one makes it into my inbox, we're talking one every two or three days, otherwise they pile up in my bulk mail folder.
.Mac and I'm a os x geek.
It's so good I paid for a year of mail plus. I didn't even do that for
Um, so let me get this straight. They challenge all incoming mail except for the spam they've been paid to let through? And this is an "inseparable" part of the service?
Next, please...
irb(main):001:0>
It really pains me to see the amount of competition *and* press coverage our competitors are getting.
We invented this system for authenticating email, and we've had a product on the market for 2 years now making use of it.
We have the most affordable service available still. It's one thing for competitors to realize our idea is the solution - it's another thing for the media to ignore the origins of the system completely.
Ace
When I go to sign up using Mozilla on Linux, I get a JavaScript pop-up that reads:
"Mailblocks may work with other browsers, but it is only tested using Internet Explorer"
Anyone tested using other browsers? This sort of thing was never anticipated when people were excited about the Internet...
Can we start calling what it really is? I realized today- "spam" sounds like "the internet is down."
It is Unsolicited Bulk Email, or if you prefer, Unsolicited Commercial Email.
I own a small business and much of my client correspondance is via email. That means, I have to run my own IMAP server and I have 200 mb of mail on the server.
Someone would do well to offer this service with your own domain (if you change your MX record), IMAP and reasonable charge for each 50mb increment of disk space. This is yet another web mail service, only this one is hosted off of a MSFT server and it implements intrusive spam blocking. SPAM Assasin works very nicely, I've found.
*yawn*
--------- Matt
...rather than government legislation. It doesn't matter how much one country's government may ban spam, if it still comes from outside it's still going to come in time and time again.
This setup may not be perfect, but to me it's a step in the right direction. Working towards a system that doesn't allow spammers to exist is wholly more admirable.
--
Curiously, why were open relays ever in existence? And once spam started, why were open relays kept around? Is there a use for them? Why not have all mail servers require authentication for outgoing mail, much like POP retrieval. That would have to stop a great deal of spam
Like a very annoying email service. Doesnt this kill speed advantages of email? I would hate to send an email out, and have to go through more red tape so the recipeint can receive their email. The sender would be doing all the work to help solve the recipients spam problem.
What about the mass emails I like to receive, such as newsletters?
100% Insightful
So, they simply create more Hotmail accounts and send out more spam.
Besides, I've never actually had spam *from* Hotmail - it's usually going *to* my Hotmail account or spam coming with forget Hotmail headers.
I seriously doubt this is going to do very much to curb spam.
What are these other browsers you speak of? ;)
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
1. Services. Mailblocks provides a fast, low-cost email service to its users. The Services also include online calendar and address book features, and other features may be added in the future; unless expressly stated otherwise, any new or enhanced features will be subject to the then-current version of this Agreement. In exchange for your use of the Services, you expressly permit and authorize Company, and such third parties as may be authorized by Company, to furnish to you from time to time, through the Services or any other means, with information prepared by Company or by (or on behalf of) other entities, including advertisements and solicitations (such information, "Third Party Content"). You acknowledge that such Third Party Content is an inseparable part of the Services, and that furnishing such Third Party Content to you cannot be terminated unless the Services are terminated. All such Third Party Content will be understood to be requested by you through your use of the Services. Some third parties furnishing you with Third Party Content may permit you to "opt out" of receiving such communications from them. However, Company is not responsible for any such party's failure to comply with its own "opt out" policies.
Company neither endorses nor is responsible for Third Party Content, and you may be exposed to Third Party Content that is offensive, inaccurate, misleading, deceptive, out-of-date, or incomplete. You must evaluate, and bear all risks associated with, the Third Party Content, and your use of and reliance on any such content. We are not responsible for any errors or omissions in Third Party Content, for hyperlinks embedded in Third Party Content or for any results obtained from the use of such content. Under no circumstances will we be liable for any loss or damage caused by your reliance on any such Third Party Content. Your correspondence or business dealings with, or participation in promotions sponsored by, any such third party advertisers, or any other third party providers of goods or services accessed through the Services, and any terms, conditions, warranties or representations associated with such dealings, are solely between you and such third party advertiser or provider.
We may establish limits and restrictions on the Services, including without limitation, the maximum disk space that will be allotted on your behalf, the maximum number of days that messages will be retained, the maximum number of messages that may be sent or received, the maximum size of a message that may be sent or received, and the maximum duration for which you may access the Services in a given period of time. You acknowledge that Company reserves the right to terminate accounts that are inactive for an extended period of time. You further acknowledge that Company reserves the right to change these limits and restrictions at any time, in its sole discretion, with or without notice.
COMPANY MAKES NO WARRANTIES CONCERNING, AND ASSUMES NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR, THE TIMELINESS OF DELIVERY, MISDELIVERY, DELETION, CORRUPTION, OR FAILURE TO DELIVER OR STORE ANY EMAIL MESSAGE(S) THAT YOU MAY SEND OR RECEIVE USING THE SERVICES, OR FOR ANY LOSSES THAT YOU MAY INCUR THEREBY.
By /. If they can stand up to this, how slow could they be?
Webmaster Wanted - Entropic Reactions
TMDA looks interesting, I'll have to check it out. But what happens when a person using a TMDA-protected email account attempts to contact someone else using a TMDA-protected email account?
What's to stop there being a cascading ping-pong of confirmation messages? (Or are you supposed to automatically whitelist everyone you send email to?)
Wow, definitely read the TOS info...
It reads more like they wish to charge you $10 to become your primary spam provider, oh and they will also be sharing your personal info with 'their' spammers (3rd parties), which you can't opt-out of.
Pay to go from bad to worse ? I think not !
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
The article here indicates that this company plans to charge $10/year for the service. Cheap, if the system proves to work, but definitely a different business model.
Further, it says that the 7 digit passwd will be sent in a "digital image"; kind of a hassle for those of us with text-only email. (long live pine)
Anecdotal evidence! I'm sold!
i hope "the war on spam" is more successfull than "the war on terrorism"... and more painless than the current "war on iraq"...
- tired of anything labelled the "war on <insert cause here>"
Challenge based spam reduction sounds like a great idea. The only problem is that the spam is still going to be sent. Only when the internet comunity goes out and actively shuts down spammers will the problem ever be solved. Hotmail may now limit their users to 100 messages a day but that wont stop anything. Sounds like a PR gig and another reason for high volume legitimate emailing fools like myself to pay for a "professional" hotmail account. Let alone the fact that most spam comes from open relays that are exploited on a daily basis. Stop the spammers before they stop you!
PRINT "Signature line broken."
GOTO 1
Challenge/response systems have the problem that if two parties both use a challenge/response system, they may not be able to communicate with each other at all. The challenge message may not get through. Worst case, they create a mail loop.
Challenge response was first done by using Incredimail last year. I know of at least a July email that I needed to respond to from them.
Challenge-response will be the new way to combat spam, but I still believe that if the response will still allow you to have incoming spam from advertisers then e-stamps are the key to limit folks from emailing you, and for those that do, have some $$ from the e-stamps be paid to the email user.
Here's a FAQ on the PaidStamp solution we are testing:
http://www.brainclone.com/PaidStamp%20FAQ.htm
Anthony Loera
Service Pricing
I want the following Mailblocks service:
Standard Service -- $9.95/year
* Standard Service includes 12 megabytes of storage.
* Promotional launch offer: Buy one year of service for $9.95, receive an extra two years of service for free. That's just
Expanded Service -- $24.95/year
* Expanded Service includes 50 megabytes of storage.
* Promotion not offered for the expanded service.
* Can I upgrade later? Sure.*
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
That $24.95 must be for shipping and handling.
Myrealbox filters the spam, and it is free. Why would you want to pay for something that is already free. www.myrealbox.com
There have been procmail-based autoresponders that essentially do this for ages. You maintain a whitelist, people who are not on it need to reply to an email and then get added to your whitelist.
WAR on drugs
WAR on Iraq
WAR on
WAR on SPAM
How American.
Gosh, I loved the first WebTV even after MS bought them. It was a great, lightweight client with a beautiful user interface, at least for the time. Now the jerk wants to save us from SPAM just so he can spam us himself. Plus, you pay him $10/year and can't avoid it. That's right, the TOS says you CAN'T opt out.
Memo to VCs: don't fund ex-M$ people. They seem to believe that they can jam any TOS down people's throats.
Looks like you can also use IMAP to tap into your mailbox as well:
Eddy.WriteLinux.Com
Remember, spam targetted for a specific audience is not all that bad.
I used to work for a bulk email service. We pride(d) ourselves on the fact that we supplied game offers to gamers. If you were a hardcore gamer, you didn't mind the mail. If you didn't care about games, you didn't get our emails.
Is that such a bad thing?
Sure, a large sum of spam isn't targetted for a specific audience, just as many people as possible. That should be blocked. Targetted mail, however, should not.
Yeah, I'm a Republican AND a geek. It is possible.
mailblocks says "All login information is sent securely to the Mailblocks server."... but I don't see any "https:". I tried signing in with a bogus userid/password just to see if I got a SSL response but no. Am I missing something?
Standard Service -- $9.95/year
.23 cents per month to rid your life of spam.
* Standard Service includes 12 megabytes of storage.
* Promotional launch offer: Buy one year of service for $9.95, receive an extra two years of service for free. That's just
Expanded Service -- $24.95/year
* Expanded Service includes 50 megabytes of storage.
* Promotion not offered for the expanded service.
* Can I upgrade later? Sure.*
What, me Tweet?
If the challenge/response is only on the first email then it would be posible for the spammer to use an address that has already been green listed. Sometimes i get spam messages that bounce back that have my own email address as the to and from fields. This system certainly would not get 100% of all the spam it claims!
Hmmm. No thanks.
You are not the customer.
Web based email service is opening it's doors
That made no sense.
Some people make no sense.
try out oddpost
http://www.oddpost.com
it truly is the best web based email
i've every used. if you like outlook,
evolution, eduora, >... you'll feel
right at home in oddpost.
pretty cheap too... only $30 a year
and the 1st month is free. and the
spam filtering is coming along nicely
to boot.
Before allowing e-mails through to your in-box, Mailblocks automatically transmits a numerical password to first-time correspondents. The senders must then retype the code into an onscreen dialog box before the system acknowledges them as legitimate.
This will block a lot of legitimate mail. You won't be able to subscribe to mailing lists. You can't recieve those "account authorization/activation emails" that lots of sites use. E-cards won't work. You won't be able to to get daily comics. Bascailly, any system where the mail is sent by an automated system won't work. There are probably others I can't think of.
Aw crap, ninjas!
you invented this idea the way al gore invented the internet. :(
as I posted earlier, mapson predates any commercial implementation I have seen. I downloaded version 1.0 to doublecheck -- unless yours was written before 1997, or you employ Peter Simons, I'm afraid your claim to being the first doesn't hold water.
mailblock at least doesn't claim originality, just that they do it better. which may be true; they have a pretty slick "mail siphon" feature going.
Try Spam Gourmet. Not only are the email addresses disposable - but they automatically self-destruct after a little while. It seems to work quite well and is effective at cutting back on spam.
No shit. We should declare a "War on War"! Stop all wars. But then the US gov't would try to start up a "War on Peace" or something.
Our white paper on the system was published in November of 2001. A challenge-response based system has existed for longer on web sites to prevent automated submissions.
To offer the system for email requires a more advanced server-client architecture, overcoming challenges such as "what if both systems require authentication" to ensure that Spam still can not get through a 'hole' for this scenario, and finally: The actual challenge-response is being done wrong by almost all of our competitors. A simple dictionary attack could authenticate a spammer for their entire user list.
We're the longest running email-authentication project (obviously, since we did invent it) and we have a very large list of improvements planned for the system. I suspect these other companies, which publicly lie about trade mark, patent and copyrights to the system (that have never been registered) will take our new ideas and claim to own them as well.
Only time will tell.
Ace
Got myself an account over at pair.com
Basic FTP account is all you need + vanity domain.
Setup what is called recipes,
e.g.
foo@my.vanity.domain
any mail sent to that address will either get forwarded to my actual email address, or get deleted. I create a new recipe for every person/site I come into contact with.
Quick, Cheap solution for my spam problems. Unfortunately my real email address got out before I setup my recipes.. so I'm still get some spam.
yes, fastmail has 4 price points, including a free entrylevel one, but given the context of the article, the relevant price point for fastmail is the cheapest that offers spam filtering.
war ( P ) Pronunciation Key (wôr)
n.
1.
1. A state of open, armed, often prolonged conflict carried on between nations, states, or parties.
2. The period of such conflict.
3. The techniques and procedures of war; military science.
2.
1. A condition of active antagonism or contention: a war of words; a price war.
2. A concerted effort or campaign to combat or put an end to something considered injurious: the war against acid rain.
Of course you've had! I get them about once a month. It's from "Hotmail Staff" or some such, and it includes a paragraph about the standard "fighting spam" and "send your photos to granny."
Then, it goes on to shout out the virtues of MSN 8, MSN Messenger, MSN Wallet, MSN XBill, MSN We Hate Torvolds, et al.
For grits and shiggles, I reported it as spam. Forwarded it to abuse@hotmail.com and whatnot. I got a message back informing me that the email -- containing advertisments I didn't want -- was not spam. Go figure.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Love and kisses,
Phil Goatse
I cite a specific example of a challenge-response system for authenticating email dating from 1997, and you reply that since you started in 2001 you are the longest-running.
way to refute me, champ.
For 10 a year you can buy a domain, build a box, load server side spam protection, and sell it to your friends and coworkers for profit. Capitalism++
What does one cow say to the other? Moo.
I use yahoo mail whenever I do anything online, but I give my "private" email address (my own domain) only to friends and relatives. In the two years I've had the address, I've literally gotten THREE pieces of spam...the last time was about two months ago. I have no idea how they "found" me, but it's not like I appeared on someone's list or else I'd still be getting junk emails!
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
I noticed that some free email services with spam protection will let through spoofed messages. If challenge-response is the "new" form of spam fighting, than I would imagine that dictionary attacks on the from address would become the new form of spam.
Since spambots harvest email addresses from websites and online directories, they will already have good guesses about who you receive messages from.
1. It imposes hurles on first-time contacts. Posted your resume and got a response? HR person doesn't have time to answer questions like "what color is the sky" or whatever they use to verify you're human.
2. Spammers can use it! If they get a challenge they know the e-mail is valid. Then, they can forge senders. If they forge the right sender the spam gets through. If they forge the wrong sender a challenge goes out to the 3rd party. The challenge has to carry a subject doesn't it? Voila! The spammer has hijacked your box and used it to send quickie text messages to 3rd parties. OK, well, maybe you change the subject so that it simply gives the time of the message or something... but then the sender is less likely to recall if he actually sent the message.
Even if it works, C-R floods the network with with little micro-spams. I for one do not look forward to having my inbox flooded with messages with subjects like "SpamMaster response requested for message you sent 3/24/03" because I never sent the message and some lousy spammer just forged my address in the Sender.
Maybe they've come up with some ingenious way to fix these problems, but I doubt it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Trust me - they probably didn't want your spam. About all any bulk email services can pride themselves on is a self-delusion that they're spam is any better than ones pusing the herbal penis enlarging vitamin pills.
I don't know how many of you use Outlook, but if you do check out Giant Company This prog works wonders for me. It filters all your email via its predefined filters, so you don't have to come up with your own filters. Prior to using this I would receieve 300+ articles of spam a day to my inbox, now maybe one slips through if its lucky.
T
There are a lot of sites gearing up to do exactly this. Sites like Mailrazor are doing spam-blocking with tools like spamassassin and such, as well as adding things like whitelisting/opt-in. (IE, you might be able to allow in things which pass draconian spamasassin/RBL filters, then force suspected spam to opt in). Meanwhile, if the user sends out an email to an address, it whitelists automatically and even if it sends a 'suspicious' email it will be autowhitelisted. With confiruable behavior, of course.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
you only have to authenticate _once_ to each recipient. less if you're important enough that they pre-auth you. :) Unless you're working in tech support or something where you mail dozens of new people a day, it's hardly a bother.
Sure, something has to be done about the problem, but paying for a bad system that will just sell your name to other spammers and will block legitimate e-mail isn't much of a solution and should not be accepted in a desperate I'll try anything approach. I would propose that a simple open season on spammers, with perhaps a six spammer limit so every hunter gets a chance, and even a small license fee to help pay down the national debt, would be a much better approach.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
One thing I hate about this sort of thing is that its quite dumb when it comes to mailing lists. More than once I have written an email to a mailing list I'm on and got back a messages along the lines of
"foo@bar.com is subscribed to our service. Please click on very long URL to let them recieve your messages"
Now this means that everyone who posts to that list has to do this for one particular user. Why should they? I'm sure that user has something to say at some point but I don't want/need to do it everytime I post to a list and someone new has joined who uses a similar service.
Why don't they whitelist the address of the mailing list? That would seem obvious to me. Even mailing lists that allow anyone to post normally have very high signal to noise ratios with the occasional spam.
Just my pet peev
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
http://www.markfiore.com/animation/bluster.html
If you want to try it out, you will (most likely) need your own machine handling mail (if you're a broadband or DSL user, this is easy enough, I'll assume you've made that step...)
Now, make sure Perl is installed.
Now, as root, type "perl -MCPAN -e shell" and follow the instructions to set up Perl's configuration system.
In that shell, type "install Mail::SpamAssassin".
Exit that shell and type "/etc/init.d/spamassassin start"
You will want to do what your OS prefers for making sure this starts at boot time, under Red Hat Linux, that's "/sbin/chkconfig --levels 35 spamassassin on"
Exit your root shell, and do the rest as your user account.
Assuming you use sendmail with procmail (see the SpamAssassin site for other MTA configuration steps), put:into your
SpamAssassin is now doing its job. It just marks messages that it thinks are spam. See the example procmailrc on spamassassin.org for more information on how you can move the mail to another folder, delete it, or even more complex things. Also, there's a procmail bug that the example config can help you work around.
If you're doing this on a busy site, I recommend adding "-m 20" or so to your spamd command-line to throttle periods of intense mail delivery.
You can also configure SpamAssassin to do lots of useful stuff just the way you like it. There's a FAQ on your site that will walk you through it, but after the first time spamd handles mail for you, it will create a ".spamassassin/user_prefs" file that has good comments in it that guide you through common configuration needs (like whitelisting users).
As much as I would like to applaud hotmail on doing something about spam I can't help but feel that its not going to work. I say this as in all my time fighting spam I've only actually seen a couple of spams actually come from hotmail.
More often than not I actually see Hotmail accounts as drop boxes. i.e. places bounces go or you reply to. Prehaps it might be better for Hotmail to restrict the incoming number of emails to an account to 100 a day.
Now that would hurt spammers more.
rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Hotmail subscribers are now limited to sending only 100 messages a day "in an effort to prevent spammers from using Hotmail to spread spam,"
They don't need to use hotmail itself (in fact, I've never seen a spammer that has). They just need to spoof Hotmail addresses, which is quite easy. Chalk that up as yet another episode of M$ letting itself sound stupid...
All I want is a kind word, a warm bed and unlimited power.
Basically, it's challenge/response, with the response being via telephone
I replied to him with the following:
As some else pointed out, the filter should check addresses that have had messages sent to, to avoid challenge/response infinite loops.Why would I pay for a service like this? I read the Terms of Service, and it states that "Third Party" solitations will be allowed by this services. I read that as SPAM. It also states that they are not responsible for third party "Opt Out" failures.
They reserve the right to release any and all infomation... from the TOS:
"Mailblocks furnishes our members, and permits third parties to furnish our
members, through the Services and otherwise, with information, promotional
materials and solicitations, from time to time. You may not "opt out" of
the receipt of such promotional materials from Mailblocks and/or its
affiliates, advertisers or other business partners if you wish to use the
Services. The receipt of such promotional materials is an inseparable part
of the Services that Mailblocks provides. If you decide that you would like
to discontinue receiving such promotional materials, you must stop your use
of the Services and terminate your account with Mailblocks."
"Mailblocks reserves the right to release any personally identifiable
registration information regarding you to third parties who provide goods
or services that we believe may be of interest to you. Some third parties
furnishing you with promotional materials may permit you to "opt out" of
receiving such communications from them. However, Mailblocks is not
responsible for any such party's failure to comply with its own "opt out"
policies."
"Mailblocks uses individual data to "target" advertising - to decide which
advertisements and sponsor messages to send to which members. As an
example, if Sponsor Co. wishes to send their advertising only to Mailblocks
members residing in California, Mailblocks uses member registration data to
ensure that Sponsor Co.'s ads are sent only to members residing in California."
"Mailblocks may use individual members' data to "pre-populate" forms which
are displayed for the purpose of collecting individual data by Mailblocks
and/or its sponsors. In no case does pre-populating a form automatically
transfer any data to any advertiser or third party. Only if the member
voluntarily requests that such data be transferred will any transfer take
place - for example, if/when a member clicks a "submit form" button or
other button."
Doesn't look free to me. Says $9.95 when I viewed it just now.
There are already plenty of white-list spam applications out there, most are GPL'd and easy as hell to setup.. Just go to sourceforge.net and search for spam + whitelist.
This is exactly what spamgourmet is useful for. Spamgourmet is free, and forwards messages to your "real" address, but only as many as are specified by the address. To use Spamgourmet, you first become a member with a single user address, however you can add "sub-addresses" in a similar way to subdomains, starting with just a lame label, then a number of MAX emails to be accepted at this alias, then the username.
,br> for example, if you wanted to get a confirmation from newegg.com, but didn't trust their mailing list... you could simple fill in newegg.3.joecool@spamgourmet.com. this would give them a max of 3 emails, 1 for billing, 1 for shipping, and 1 for whatever is bound to go wrong.
Try it out today at spamourmet.com
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
MyPrivacy.ca
Mostly use to help people from having their WHOIS information harvested, but should work for general email use too.
Oh, and the 100 email limit on Hotmail is kinda lame. I doubt that many of the 100+ spams I get from Hotmail accounts each day are actually from Hotmail users. Fake headers, more likely.
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
> I have no idea how they "found" me,...
By bombarding your mail server with thousands of messages with randomly-generated user names in the hopes that some will just happen to coincide with the user names of real users on that system. Most of the spam I receive these days is of this sort. All of it claims that "bipiu34@my.domain.tld" or some such opted in.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I use a custom system that is also free of charge http://SpamDominator.com it does the one time auth method.
Let me try to explain it to you. Sometimes you need or want to get an e-mail from someone who you haven't got an e-mail from before. You might need to get a tech support response. You might need to get an order confirmation for something you bought on-line. You might subscribe to a news letter or other information that you want but don't know the exact e-mail address it will be sent from (and that might even change some day). You might receive e-mail from an old friend or classmate who is trying to track you down, and perhaps they even got your address from a common friend. You might want to use your address publicly for a legitimate reason, like in a newsgroup to request information. You simply might think that you should have the right to make yourself findable for legitimate contact without opening yourself to hundreds of vulgar and dishonest spam messages every day.
Or, you might really dislike spam, and not want to hand over your address book with your friend's valid e-mail addresses in it to a known spammer - Microsoft.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
In order to block spam, you have to agree to accept spam? What?
No thanks, I'll stick with Apple Mail's Junk Mail feature.
mbbac
I've been using SneakEmail for years and I get absolutely zero spam. It works, it's free at the basic level, and if you're willing to cough up a little cash (~$25/year) there's some damn decent additional services available. It makes email filtering far, far more convenient, too. Finally, as an added bonus, they (unlike MailBlocks) don't sell your address, personal information, or the likes.
For 10$ a year you can sign up to be spammed
by ONLY those spammers that pay them also.
No thanks. *sigh*
I haven't tested it extensively, but the algorithm seems solid.
Not to mention all the reasons why challenge-response filtration systems are alienating to the rest of the world. Sure, you will get almost no spam, but you'll also lose a lot of legitimate email from disgruntled people who don't like being challenged. (My standard reply to TMDA challenges is to ... not. I find it very obnoxious when I reply to someone, answer a question, or heck, just email them for any legitimate reason, that I have to prove that I'm a human. It basically sends the message that "my time is more important than your time".)
Thankfully, there are some strong anti-spam methods that are being developed which don't require challenge-response, opt-out lists, patented crypto, or any of the other dumb ideas I keep reading about.
A free mail application that seems to do this better is incamail.com. You can create multiple suffixes (e.g. for account me@incamail.com you can create a suffix-account 'me.slashdot@incamail.com' or whatever suffix you want) and also restrict access to each account.
It'd be nice if, instead of this webbased system, there was a company that I just used as my mail exchange (MX) provider and they filtered out the junk and viruses and relayed all the real mail to my *real* MX machine.
Ok, I'd have to be a bit tech savvy and know how to reassign the MX records for the domains I want protected, but it would suit companies or tech savvy users much more than any kind of installed software would.
Does anyone know of any companies that offer this service?
Nick...
How about instead of limiting outgoing email ( which I really doubt is a huge source of spam as they might lead you to believe ) , they instead fix their own incoming spam filters. I'm sorry, but if you cant tell that twertert@wtertert.sadaa is not a valid email address, then your spam filter is fucked. I posed this question before and somebody said it's a preventative measure in case somebody mistypes their email address ( ie xtermz@hotmail.omc ) .. That just doesnt fly with me.
This is all just a ploy to get people to "upgrade" their hotmail account. I've all but given up on hotmail. I use it to get a few mailing lists, but never use it for outgoing mail or anything of critical importance..
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
I will wager you another $9.95 that you will receive spam. Quite often infact. Not because the technology doesn't work. I'm sure it does. Infact their business will depend on it. You will receive spam because THEY will send you spam. And their business partners will send you spam. The businesses that paid them the exclusive insider's spamming fee.
You receive spam, I get ten bucks. You don't get spam, I pay for ANOTHER year for you to receive their "fantastic service". That's FOUR years of service for the price of one!
Read The Fine Print in the Terms of Service. It's not legal babel. It's spelled out clearly. You're paying them to spam you.
"Last one in is a rotten goblin!" - Kepp
You might have made a good point, but I refused to read further after you presented yourself as one of those idiots that propagate the "Al Gore invented the internet" myth.
Why would the opinion be respectable if it's coming from a person that is gullible enough to believe folklore rumors, not verify them, and propagate them in an effort to be funny?
Hushmail has a challenge/response mechanism for quite a while now. And it works remarkably well ...
It doesn't like mozilla. Won't even let you see the demo with mozilla.
POP3 is NOT supported. See their support page for details.
If I was someone who had a spam problem, I get one once in a blue moon, I would recommend your solution
based on those numbers. Pretty dang good.
I used to use Yahoo with pop3 client and was quite happy (except the spam part). Then they started charging and I was ready to pay, except I did not want to sign up for their wallet service (keep your fingers out of MY wallet!!!). So, I just found a hosting company and got myself unlimited mailboxes, website, ftp site etc, etc. for $60/year.
They have a nice web panel for controlling all aspects of the site. I can make a mailbox just for spam. Shut that box down when it get's overwhelmed. Have webmail access from anywhere.
Found out, that works the best for me.
My guess is that he's well aware of the fact it's an urban legend. I'm guessing he's one of those people that propogates the rumor to bash Al Gore. Just like I do.
I don't do TMDA yet, but I can virus scan/spamassassin scan your domain email before forwarding it to your host. I charge based on bandwidth used.
Rick
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Just below this article, I'm looking at an ad for CipherTrust IronMail.
The next article is about RedHat 9. I wonder if there's an add for SuSe or even Microsoft there...
Lately democracy seems to be based on the skybox, the Happy Meal box, the X-box, and the idiot box.
"Mailblocks reserves the right to release any personally identifiable registration information regarding you to third parties who provide goods
or services that we believe may be of interest to you. Some third parties furnishing you with promotional materials may permit you to "opt out" of receiving such communications from them. However, Mailblocks is not responsible for any such party's failure to comply with its own "opt out" policies."
They guarantee you'll get no spam, while selling your address to spammers.
Still, could be worse. Last time I sent something to using a challenge-response "anti-spam" service, the challenge was sent in pure HTML, and rejected by my mail server as spam.
Spammers are winning, because anti-spammers are stupid.
It looks like the FAQ link is not an a link.
I tried pasting faq.html into the url as well,
but that didn't give me back anything but
the front page.
Anyone care to post the spamgourmet FAQ page ?
People who send me mail have to reply with a number???? WTF????
Im sure MSN "get away with it" because they probably get paid for it, and send it themselves, rather than from a 3rd party
If they want to do something to cut down on spam, why not just limit the number of messages that a server can send to hotmail addresses? Meaning, if I want to send out spam and my list includes 100,000 hotmail adresses, hotmail's servers will reject every message I send to a them after the 100th. That just wiped out 99.9% of spam that hotmail users would receive.
Yes, it would take some work and the processing cost per message would be higher, but if it works, and cuts down on traffic by a higher percentage than the increased cost associated with the system, it would still be an amazing improvement.
I've always wondered why MS couldn't look at all incoming messages and spot spam based on vast numbers of similar messages.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
Protest this agression against innocent inboxes. No blood for email! ;)
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
RUNbox.com
c om
mobile.runbox.com
fast.runbox.com
www.runbox.
100meg space IMAP POP SMTP everything and basically no limits, it has NEVER been down and does an AMAZING job with spam, I havent gotten more then 1 a day with them vs 10-20 before!
This 'service' seems to me like shit. The principle of the challenge looks nice. OTOH you trade in Spam from all over the world to Spam from Mailblocks and their bizpartners.
If I should pay even 1 ct, I don't accept any spam from the service provider. The only messages I would accept must relate to the service itself and must be opt-in.
There is a simple way to reduce your daily load of spam. It requires a little interaction from time to time but it should work. All you need is mailclient which is able to filter by headers.
Kmail since 3.0 from KDE is an example. You can set filters which work on the POP3 server.
My 0,02
If you are sensible with what you do with your email addresses, you won't get spam.
Just like if you are sensible with where you put your wallet, it won't get stolen.
MyRealBox provides a good free service, and I've never got spam from there.
I really wish people would stop thinking that spam is inevitable.
you just made three assumptions about me, none of which are true. maybe if you'd pull your head out of your butt you'd realize there are other explanations than the one you salivate at like one of pavlov's dogs.
here boy! fetch!
The solution would be to adhere to the following protocol:
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
I can see certain problems stemming from this whole challenge-response style address verification. For example, if someone writes a new message to a new person and forgets to add the address to his whitelist, then a situation may arise where the recipient sends a challenge to the sender, and then the sender running a similar scheme recieves the challenge message and decides to challenge its sender..
Infinite loopsville...
All I want is an email proxy (in java, perl, or python, or *extremely* portable C/C++) that I can run on my local node, using whatever email client I want. This proxy would allow me to whitelist, blacklist, and administrate challenge/response as I see fit. Anybody know of such a beast? If not, anybody want to collaborate on one?
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Where's the free service?
from the bottom of their registration: "Mailblocks accounts are restricted to people over 18 years of age" ...and their policy page: "WE DO NOT REGISTER USERS YOUNGER THAN 18, NOR DO WE KNOWINGLY COLLECT PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE INFORMATION FROM CHILDREN (DEFINED HEREIN AS MINORS YOUNGER THAN THIRTEEN YEARS OF AGE)."
mix_master_mike
vafrous
vudujava writes "c|net is reporting that a new free, web based email service is opening it's doors today.
it's -> its
Hell, are the editors good for *anything* these days? If you can't write properly, don't bloody write at all.
Apparently claiming that a $10 service is free will induce EVERYONE to point out the inaccuracy, regardless of how many times it has been don previously in the thread. Good work, comrades.
P3P as specified by the W3C, underlying concepts that aren't 'web' based, as patented by OneName, a former employer of mine. The patent is _easily_ broad enough to cover your system, I promise.
If you 'private' email address is listed on your domain's whois record then that is probably where it was harvested by spammers.
You could patent something, anything and go take a long hiatus in the South Pacific to catch some rays for a few ,if not more years. Then, upon returning to civilization, find your patent has been infringeds upon. At THAT TIME, you could bring proceedings against the infringers. Patents are supposed to HELP you from being infringed upon, but if you are NOT AWARE of the infringement, then you can start from the point upon which you notice the infringement. IANAL, but I read law daily.
I was until recently using Mercury with Spamassassin for handling spam. It worked great, no false positives (mostly due to the fact that most of my legimitate mail isn't in english I guess) and just a couple percent false negatives.
However, setting it up was painful and processing was slow (forking a separate Perl process for every mail).
The most annoying fact was that Perl stole focus whenever it was launched to process incoming mail (eg. in the middle of furious Warcraft III battles)
Then Mozilla 1.3 came out with Bayes filtering. This really rocked my world. I downloaded a spam-archive and hacked together a quick script to concat them into a Mozilla mailbox. Fired up Mozilla mail, imported my OE mailfolder (which was ca. 1300 already Spamassassin'ed/hand-sorted messages), marked them as ham and the spamarchive folder as spam.
It works great! I can count the false negatives I've received since then on one hand, and learning Mozilla about them couldn't be easier. No false positives. Despite the pretty huge memory footprint (and that moving around lots of messages between folders is sloooow), Mozilla Mail is just great, and as a bonus I won't have to worry about 0-day OE exploits anymore (although, with up-to-date patching OE has become pretty solid).
If you're sick and tired of fighting off spam all the time, I really would recommend you try Mozilla Mail. Just be sure you have LOTS of handsorted spam/ham that it can "learn" from.
Out of the last 1460 or so spam messages I've gotten (in the last 4 months), only 131 have hotmail.com in the subject or sender headers. I'd guess that almost none of those have any hotmail servers in the "Received" headers. A pseudo-random sample of 10 of them showed nothing but forged headers.
Doesn't matter how many restrictions MS puts on their users, since most spammers use their own mail servers, or break into open relays/proxies. Sounds like MS just wanted an excuse to reduce server costs.
First off, I'm very low tech compared to most of Slashdot, so please bear with me. Why should the person on the receiving end have to deal with the majority of E-mail, why not use the U.S. Postal service in comparison. If I wanted to send out a million notices to the local community that I'm opening a new widgets shop, then I have to front the bill for each individual letter I send. Therefore, why not FORCE a system where after you reach your cap of so many bytes of transfer on port 13 you must pay by the byte for delivery. Does this system already exist and I don't know about it? From watching the majority of American service industry where every opportunity you can find to reasonably exploit the customer for additional charges you do so to increase revenue; I'm shocked that such a system might not be in place.
I hate all sigs, even this one.
(AP) Arab countries have condemned the "aggression" against spam and called for the immediate withdrawal of filtering software from the internet.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
If the patent is broad, it might have been approved but it can still be contested. I'm sure there's patents out there for the wheel (oh wait, there is). but they're not going to hold up against a very specific, isolated idea. Or if they do, it doesn't matter much anyways ; since we invented the system and aren't seeking a patent.
I might patent the numbers 1 and 0 though, that'll be broad enough for me to claim I own everything.
Regards,
--Doug Styles.
Ace
I'll believe there's a "war on spam" when I see spammers or their I.T. sites targeted by mortars or cruise missiles, or a few spammers strung up from lampposts or up against a wall with the firing squad going "ready! aim! ..."
Right now there isn't even a minor skirmish.
And as government action - your email box seems to have less protection than your fax machine - (though a FEW small claims courts may be coming around on that).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The Internet community attempted to challenge the patent(s) after they were granted, to no effect. It's about as solid as a patent as you're likely to find.
Just use Yahoo's web based email... I rarely get spam, and if i do it usualyl goes to the "bulk" folder, which is like a trash bin... and if I do get spam, i can mark it as spam, and then yahoo banns the address...
;)
yahoooo!
peace
at least it will stop those annoying friends everyone has, who have just discovered email and like to send a bazillion forwarded emails along the lines of 'poor botiswane mitiguinai who only has a burlap bag for a body becuase her mummy is so poor, but if you forwards this to 5000 people, bill gates will donate 5c for every email... blah blah'. they usually just contain a wholelotta '> > > >' characters anyway :-/. you all know the type.
Spammers of the world,
You have 48 hours to cease sending spam and give up. If you fail to stop sending spam after this timeframe, we will remove you from the Internet forcibly and swiftly. We will track you down and destroy your lists. Insecure servers will no longer be regarded as innocent relays, they will be dealt with swiftly and justly as well.
You have 48 hours to comply with this ultimatum. Act responsibly with email and you will reap the benefits. Use spambot and harvesters and our forces will react with force.
-Coalition of Canned Meat
Hammer of Truth
That affects more tha just spammers, what about the stalkers. I mean some of US stalk more than 100 women at any one time.
Won't some please think of the stalkers !!!
The patent is solid, how it holds up against similar ideas is not. It may have a broad definition and be intended to protect something fairly specific accurately. Where that definition crosses over to include other inventions the uniqueness of each idea must be contested. My patent on our system (for example) might mention that we use a web site and graphical display of text for our challenge.
That relates directly to other systems in use before us, which worked for authenticating on web based systems. If we were granted a patent it doesn't mean they wouldn't be as well for their own system even though we have some broad definitions listed.
The fact of the matter is our [example] patent is meant to protect a very specific system, and contains a group of different factors that must all be in play to be called "our specific system".
There's some very egotistical posters in this forum going on and on about prior patents and claims (aside from yourself). Hey, I'm open to discussion and arguments but the fact of the matter is it isn't going to be patented. If it were to be patented, yes, I'm sure other people would want to contest it and claim we're infringing on parts of their patents - that is the process for *all* patents. I believe we have a good case, and I'm just outlining why that is.
Also, we had a patent lawyer and an unrelated copyright and patent agent that both specialized in this area and believed we had a good case, even after researching it extensively. I know that our competitors have based their system on the original white paper I wrote and published, or on our later release of the actual system.
I also know that while similar systems may have been in place prior to ours, ours is very specifically unique and for that uniqueness at least, we could easily argue a case for a patent. However, as I said - we don't have the money, and we don't believe in the patent process.
We don't like competition, especially not growing competition, or very competition with very large backing. But we are ok with competition. We just want fair and accurate media coverage.
Regards,
--Doug Styles
Ace
As much SPAM as my hotmail account generates, their filters are sort of effective, but having the same old address for many years has benefited me several times, allowing old friends or online buddies to find me.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
You have a "Fill-in web form" requiring an email address and an answer to an optical character recognition question. Blind users need not apply. Wireless email users who don't have a web browser readily available don't get to send email either. Email users who do not like entering their email address into web form links sent in email wouldn't use it either. Sight-impaired visitors may have problems (I did when I tried testing it on your web-page, though it did eventually authenticate). Misaligned multi-colored text on a gray background does not make for easy reading.
I'm sorry to say that I wouldn't be using your service, even it was free. If I got a challenge like that from someone I really needed to send email to, I would use a one-shot email address in your web form, since I have no reason to trust si20.com more than any other company asking for an email address. I'd probably not bother with it at all, call them on the phone, and ask why they were letting si20 read their email. Accessibility and flexibility is important.
I recently got a spam that offered a remove URL at http://www.1verio.com/rm/rm.html. I started poking around looking for a way to complain and found an unprotected directory that has collected 8.7 mbs of March email addresses from the poor bastards' who don't know not to respond. There is also an additional 38 mbs of addresses collected in January & February. The people collecting the info sent me a spam for cheap diplomas, but the root doc is selling miracle cures. You might be onto a big one here. http://www.1verio.com/rm/remove.txt The server is running Apache/1.3.27. I don't know how to do it, but I understand that it's not that difficult to break into a www dir and possibly rescue these people before they get dumped on again. I would never suggest that any of you take this on, but perhaps you know someone who will. Usually I am an atheist, but I'm sure this would be doing god's work. Best of luck
I've been using Sneakemail for awhile, it allows for totally disposable addresses with FULL accountability for each sender.
/. filtering (which every site should have). Every email forwarded from sneakemail shows which specific one-time address it was sent to on the subject line. And since sneakemail allows you to filter each individual address seperately by every sender that's ever mailed that address if nessesary, I can easily turn off the spam while not having to truely discard an address. Plus it's great to know exactly where your address was harvested from, in fact one I've gotted alot of spam from was a one-time address I used for a techdirt.com spam article reply I made!
For example, say a spammer grabs my address from here despite the
Did I mention it's a quick bookmark popup thats easy to use and free (banner supported) or cheap premium (6 months $12US).
This is of course only part of the solution, for the rest I use Mailwasher.
Jonah Hex
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
The website says $9.95 a year. So if it's free, who is going to pay the $9.95 for me?
You know, it's interesting to read through this thread, because I just realized that..yes, you guessed it, you're fucking spamming the comments on Slashdot with product advertisments. "Oh, our system doesn't just block 95%, it blocks 100%! Sure, people have said that before, but we really, really mean it!"
You probably signed up the account just for this story, get a few hits to the ol' company website. Tell me, if I buy your wondrous anti-spam software, based on a whole new idea no one's ever implemented, can I use it to shut you the fuck up?
Yes, and you have such a good case you're not even going to try to make it! That makes so much sense!
Speaking as an egotistical poster, I'd like to ask you again to get off your soapbox and stop trying to sell your magic spam elixir to the grand unwashed public here.
where is the "free" option?
1) Standard Service -- $9.95/year
2) Expanded Service -- $24.95/year
Indeed. I saved my read spam and ham in different "Trash" mailboxes for a couple months, then I ran them through bogofilter to make the appropriate good and bad lists (only about 2500 messages total). I put bogofilter at the bottom of my procmailrc after all my mailing lists and put anything that set it off into a "Spam" mailbox.
Not a single false positive or negative over literally thousands of messages. I'm getting ready to trust bogofilter enough to stop checking the Spam box altogether. Of course, I'll keep it around so that the filter can keep training itself on the messages that end up there. I don't dread opening mutt in the morning anymore (90% of my spam seems to come while I'm asleep). Whoopie!
Game... blouses.
I must say, I enjoy using Mozilla 1.3 for my email. It marks and moves most of the spam that I get to my "junk" folder. As time goes on, and I mark more and more messages as spam it will only become better. Of important note is that I have been training this program since the day it was released for beta testing.
SIGFAULT
Spammers can be shut down if spamming is no longer profitable -- which will be the case if spam filters get good enough and are installed widely enough.
If your authentication method requires viewing images, then it is inaccessible to the visually impaired and is thus NOT section 508 compliant, and you're not going to be able to sell your system to the U.S. government.
Will I retire or break 10K?
By placing it in an image along with some obfuscation designed to confuse OCR, automated response systems would be extremely difficult to write.
Correct; that's the entire point of The CAPTCHA Project, which has previously been discussed on Slashdot. But the current CAPTCHA systems, which rely on human recognition of features of an image, are inaccessible to blind people and to others who can't view images and are thus NOT Section 508 compliant.
Will I retire or break 10K?
After all is't any good OCR software enable to transfer those to text?
Test your OCR software against Gimpy and see if you still think OCR can defeat automated Turing tests based on a distorted image of text.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I hate TOS which assume you agree to terms that they reserve the right to change at any time. I think if they change it they should send it out and make you agree again.
And clicking on the submit button automatically makes you 18.
And it isn't free. Why is it being promoted as free?
And rego is non-refundable whether they accept you rego or not? I am not sure that is legal in Australia, to accept a fee for service and then not provide the service...
Terms of Service
Last revised: March 17, 2003
Mailblocks, Inc. Terms of Service Agreement
PLEASE READ THIS TERMS OF SERVICE AGREEMENT CAREFULLY BEFORE USING THE MAILBLOCKS SERVICES. Mailblocks, Inc. ("Company," "we," or "us") provides online services, including, without limitation, personal email, (collectively, the "Services") subject to your compliance with the terms and conditions set forth in this Terms of Service Agreement (the "Agreement"). This Agreement governs the relationship between Company and you, the user ("you") with respect to your use of the Services and your access to the web site located at www.mailblocks.com (the "Site"). It is important that you read carefully and understand the terms and conditions of this Agreement.
If you are under the age of 18, you may not CURRENTLY use the Services. BY CLICKING THE "SUBMIT" BUTTON LOCATED ON THE REGISTRATION PAGE OR BY PAYING FOR THE SERVICES, YOU AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THIS AGREEMENT WITHOUT MODIFICATION. IF YOU DO NOT ACCEPT THIS AGREEMENT, YOU WILL BE DENIED REGISTRATION TO USE THE SERVICES.
WE RESERVE THE RIGHT AT ANY TIME TO:
Change the terms and conditions of this Agreement;
Change the Services, including eliminating or discontinuing any Services; or
Change any fees or charges for use of the Services.
Any changes we make will be effective automatically immediately after posting such changes on the Site. Your continued use of the Services following such changes will be deemed acceptance of such changes. Be sure to review this Agreement periodically to ensure familiarity with the most current version. You can determine when this Agreement was last revised by checking the "Last revised" legend at the top of the Agreement.
1. Services. Mailblocks provides a fast, low-cost email service to its users. Other new features may be added in the future; unless expressly stated otherwise, any new or enhanced features will be subject to the then-current version of this Agreement. In exchange for your use of the Services, you expressly permit and authorize Company, and such third parties as may be authorized by Company, to furnish to you from time to time, through the Services or any other means, with information prepared by Company or by (or on behalf of) other entities, including onsite advertisements (such information, "Third Party Content" or "Advertising"). You acknowledge that such Third Party Content may be an inseparable part of the Services, and that furnishing such Third Party Content to you cannot be terminated unless the Services are terminated.
For more information, please review our Privacy Policy here.
Company neither endorses nor is responsible for Third Party Content, and you may be exposed to Third Party Content that is offensive, inaccurate, misleading, deceptive, out-of-date, or incomplete. You must evaluate, and bear all risks associated with, the Third Party Content, and your use of and reliance on any such content. We are not responsible for any errors or omissions in Third Party Content, for hyperlinks embedded in Third Party Content or for any results obtained from the use of such content. Under no circumstances will we be liable for any loss or damage caused by your reliance on any such Third Party Content. Your correspondence or business dealings with, or participation in promotions sponsored by, any such third party advertisers, or any other third party providers of goods or services accessed through the Services, and any terms, conditions, warranties or representations associat
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
An answer to spam's discontent?
By Charles Cooper March 24, 2003, 4:00 AM PT
Phillip Goldman is either another rich guy with a death wish or a man on the verge of etching his name into tech history.
All that has to be music to Goldman's ears, because his new company, Los Altos, Calif.-based Mailblocks, claims it can provide 100 percent protection against unsolicited junk e-mail. For long-suffering Web surfers, that would be the holy grail, the Super Bowl and the World Cup all wrapped into one.
Yeah by clicking on that submit button you agree that you solicit email, ie it's 100% solicited email by definition in the TOS...
But I'm sure that the same people who sign up with the Nigerians will fall for this one.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
The question is whether or not we invented it.
We did.
the case doesn't matter.
man do you have serious problems following a conversation or what. Magic Spam Elixer my ass, I wonder why everybodies stealing the idea. Including C-Net. The origin of this entire conversation.
Moron.
Ace
I started to sign up for Mailblocks myself, paused to read the TOS and Privacy Policy, and then aborted the process and sent them a complaint when I saw the provisions about "sponsored" advertising. However, to my surprise I received the following reply:
So, it appears there's hope for this service after all? I just checked their posted Privacy Policy, though, and it hasn't been updated yet; I wonder if the fact that their tech people are saying otherwise in private mail is good enough, or does one have to wait to "see it in writing" at their Web site first?Might makes right. I get it.
Can I use your post when someone asks me why I think MS is evil?
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
I use zoneedit.com for DNS, they let you create unlimited email aliases including a wildcard alias, so I can create disposable addresses as I fill in the forms. "Tainted" addresses can be aliased to trash, like so:
*@mydomain > public mailbox
private@mydomain > private mailbox
spam@mydomain > bitbucket
slashdot.registration@mydomain > public mailbox
disposable1 > bitbucket
etc
Bluebottle is a similar service, and it's free. Hope this helps.
So email wasn't originally just an SMTP-over-TCP/IP thing. There were many different protocols for email, some of them less incompatible with each other than others were, and getting just about anywhere required relays of some sort. A couple of the bigger parts of the world were the Arpanet (which was small then, and only defense contractors and some universities were allowed on), and UUCP (the Unix file copy program that Unix mail often used, and which used relays as its inherent way to do anything), and Netnews / Usenet, and BITnet (which ran on evil IBM EBCDIC systems), and CSNET and Phonenet and Fidonet and X.25.
"Unix-to-Unix Copy Program," said PDP-1. "You will never find a more wretched hive of bugs and flamers. We must be cautious."
Mostly relays were open, except for connecting to expensive services where you might want to limit who could run up your phone bill. Eventually the Honey DanBer version of UUCP changed the default behaviour to only accept incoming UUCP requests from systems that you knew how to connect back to (which made it possible for bouncegrams to be reliable) and made fanatically reliable bouncegram support available. But basically, sendmail emerged as the popular program to relay mail as well as delivering it, and relaying was of course open by default because that let you have more ways to deliver mail, and meant that you didn't have to write eleventeen different protocol-specific methods for _closing_ relay capability to unauthorized users. And they didn't need to be closed, because social pressure pretty much prevented spamming for a long time, even in parts of the network that weren't subject to the ARPANET Acceptable Use Policy of non-commerciality and/or official business only.
Why did they stay open when spammer relay abuse started becoming a problem? Partly because it took a while for MAPS to start bullying big ISPs into closing their relays, partly because there are millions of small systems with people who don't know detailed email system administration (Did you know that you can write a Turing Machine in sendmail.cf?), and partly because there's lots of broken software that nobody's really maintaining carefully. At least current versions of sendmail and other popular Unix mailers come with relays closed by default.
But some of us miss the old days, when the Net was more of a community, and running open relays was the neighborly thing to do, rather than an attractive nuisance that will be abused if discovered.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Hey everyone... I don't know if anyone is still paying attention to this thread, but I emailed Mailblocks yesterday about their terms of service and this is their response to me:
Agreed. These were old and should not have been on the site. See the note below and the new versions now on the site.
Dear Mailblocks Customer,
Our apologies, we picked up an old version of our TOS when we went live. We will NOT be allowing 3rd parties to send unsolicted email to our userbase. Please check the site for the updated and correct TOS. We apologize for any confusion or inconvenience.
Thank you for using Mailblocks. If we can be of further assistance, please don't hesitate to contact us.
Regards,
The Mailblocks Team
> I just wanted to let you know that I was seriously considering signing up
> for your service today, but decided not to because of the inability to opt
> out of your promotional materials. What is the point of blocking everyone
> else's spam so I can get yours?
> When you guys come up with a better revenue model than that, let me know.
> > Sincerely,
> > Chris Nienstedt
Pretty interesting.
for even more effective control of incoming messages, i've instituted a set of five questions:
"You want a toe? I can get you a toe by three o'clock... with nail polish."
I've been using yahoo mail for a while now and it is virtually spam free.
/.). If Taco thinks it's funny enough and atually posts it, your e-mail address will be on the front page for about 12 hours, and one link depth from the front page for about 3 days.
Submit an article to Ask Slashdot entitled "Spam me" and say you're performing an experiment and you'd like your e-mail address posted on a major traffic website (such as
We'll see what your spam free looks like then. Along with all of the flames you get, I'm sure you'll be placed on some not so plesant mailing lists.
so quit whining and get out there and sell.
Blag yourself some media coverage or buy some decent advertising (not 10 Billion click for $99).
Sitting there whinging about it won't help.
Extraordinary claims require extraodinary justification.
# Mailblocks is a new class of email service that completely rids your Inbox of spam and offers the powerful features you want in your web mail.
# Mailblocks was designed to perform like an application. It's as fast over dial-up as other web mail services perform over broadband.
So where is the proof ?
Ok, as a user of Mailblocks I have to point out a couple things (and I have to admit a buyer's bias up front):
The Challenge comes as a link. If your email blocks any message that comes with a link typed out inside it, you have bigger problems.
You only have to do the Challenge once to get added. If taking 60 seconds out of your life to save your friends/family/co-workers a hundred times that clearing out sludge from their inboxes is too much for you, well, again, I think you have bigger problems. And with an attitude like that you might not be the kind of person they want to deal with anyway...
Every time you send an e-mail, that address gets added to your Authorized list. And you can always add addresses manually. Or delete them (or block them) manually. So most of the people you correspond with regularly probably won't even have to do the Challenge once. And if they do, so what? I did it myself out of curiosity. It takes 2 seconds to read the e-mail, 10 seconds tops to load the Challenge page, and, if you hunt N peck, maybe 10 whole seconds to complete the Challenge. Yeah...a tragedy.
As for mailing lists/tech support/online shopping/and so on: that's all covered. Trackers. You can read all about them (and get answers/rebuttals to many of the questions and accusations made so far here in Mailblock's own FAQ. RTFM). In a nutshell they're disposable e-mail addresses. You can have mail sent to those addresses go, unchallenged, to either a folder you designate or directly to your inbox. So not only does it work as a bypass of the challenge system for uses you choose, but if you start getting spam at that address, it's disposable (though for my mailing lists, the normal Mailblocks e-mail address has been working fawlessly anyway).
So far the only legitimate gripe I've seen regards the blind. Yes, if you are blind, you won't be able to see the Challenge. And that's A Bad Thing (tm). But if you have no arms and legs, you can't ride a bike. That's not a flaw in the design of a bicycle, it's just a simple fact that no product or system can work for every single person out there. Don't get me wrong, I'm not making light of compatibility issues for persons with disablities, but since you only have to do it ONCE you'd think maybe you could find someone to help you out with the Challenge, then move on with your life (or come in here and complain endlessly, your choice, I guess).
On top of ALL of that, you have access to your Pending folder, so you can see who's gotten challenge messages. If you notice a message from your blind cousin Earl, just move it to your inbox (which automatically adds the address to your Authorized list) and drop Earl an apology e-mail. He's now set for life.
I don't know about you, but I always had to review my junk mail folder in hotmail and yahoo anyway. At least a couple times a month legit e-mail would get flagged as junk mail, and yet I'd still have 20-30 (or more) pieces of Spam in my inbox that I'd have to delete. So checking my Pending folder from time to time is not a big deal (and so far not a single piece of Spam has slipped in to my inbox). Besides, I have a feeling I'll be checking it less and less as time goes by; once I've tweaked it to my satisfaction, I doubt there will mistakes to warrant it.
As for the TOS...yeah, that bothered me a bit. But honestly, it's a paid service that markets itself as being Spam free. Do you really think they're going to bombard their users with crap? Even if I got a marketing message a day from them, that's still a 99% reduction in Spam from my other providers. And I really don't think they'll come close to that 1 a day anyway (not to mention the apparent changes in the TOS as mentioned here in other posts). Paranoia can be a good thing sometimes, but if this is your biggest complaint, I think you've made a case FOR the service.
And as for the clause about 'not being responsible for missing e-mail' yada yada yada. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that pretty much a standard part of EVERY
I just got this email from support@mailblocks.com
Our apologies, we picked up an old version of our TOS when we went live. We will NOT be allowing 3rd parties to send unsolicted email to our userbase. Please check the site this evening for the updated and correct TOS. We apologize for any confusion or inconvenience.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really
good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they actually change
their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really
do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are
human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot
recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
-- Carl Sagan, 1987 CSICOP keynote address
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