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Spammers Sue Anti-Spam Groups
SuperBanana writes "The Register reports in a story today that spammers have banded together under the name EmarketersAmerica.org to sue various anti-spam groups- days before a large conference on spam hosted by the FTC(which will be attended by many spammers). Anti-spam groups think the timing is not by coincidence, but believe the move may backfire because they will be able to countersue and get access to spammer's internal documents. By the way, if you're wondering who these guys are, check out Spamhaus's directory of top spammers."
Here is what one of America's leading sports pundits has been writing:
Elliott Harris, Chicago Sun-Times: "A fan in Massachusetts, upset at Fox's decision to replace auto racing with Red Sox baseball, faces the possibility of a year in jail for sending more than 530,000 e-mails that shut down Fox's Web site in 2001. Hey, who knew a NASCAR fan would know spam was anything other than something to eat?"
Why do I h8 apple?
GREAT!!! nOw i know what organization to send the bill to for all this crap about giant penises wanting my credit card. PLus, now we all know where to forward our spam to!!! FANTASTIC!!!!
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Not a big problem but somebody forgot to throw the http:// in front of the url
emarketersamerica.org
Damn, and I thought these guys were dirty bastards before!
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Why must they soil the good name of America by appending it to their dubious business?
eMarketersAmerica, more like eMarketersNigeria
Quick, anyone have any contact info for these people? I have penis enlargements to sell them!
KaZaA users suing the RIAA?
Drug users suing dealers?
Smokers suing tobacco compani.... Oh.
In Soviet Russia, beowulf clusters imagine YOU!
A list of mirrors of the text of the filing in flordia's court:
/.'ed would only make things worse:)
/ fe lstein/slapp.pdfn /slapp.pdfd fp ://jscript.dk/2003/4/slapp.pdfx .net/lxix/slapp.pdf/ slapp.pdfs lapp.pdf/ www.acornhosting.net/spam/slapp.pdfi ocenter.helsinki.fi/~atossava/spam/sl app.pdf/ www.dragonfur.org/peewee/slapp.pdfo cities.com/spammersarestupididioticm orons/slapp.pdf/ slapp.pdfp .pdf
h ttp://www.spamblocked.com/slapp.pdfe chhouse.org/~lou/slapp.pdf/ slapp.pdf
(Spread out which ones you use, these are alot of folks with home machines on DSL lines. Being
http://ares.penguinhosting.net/~leftreveggplant
http://chickenboner.com/felstei
http://cjllewellyn.homeip.net/slapp.p
http://home.earthlink.net/~bbay/slapp.pdf
htt
http://members.co
http://members.shaw.ca/wooly
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/egplant/
http://SteveSobol.com/slapp.pdf
http:/
http://www.b
http://www.conmicro.cx/slapp.pdf
http:/
http://www.ge
http://www.linxnet.com/misc/spam
http://www.north-lincolnshire.com/slap
http://www.pearlgates.net/nanae/slapp.pdf
http://www.t
http://www.tirani.net
There's also been some lively discussion on NANAE about this issue....
Assuming there are such, as it's currently being hit with a DoS. I think it's the first time a website has deserved a /.'ing.
You obviously hate spam not quite as much as the next guy.
...
Anyone want to take bets as to when the DoS attacks begin? Secondary action: how long after the DoS ends does the site end up being 0wnz0r3d?
:-)
Of course, for once, we'll see the Slashdot Effect put to good use.
blog |
I found out about this from a friend(Hi Scott!) after I submitted the article. He put it best:
"It is classic... misspellings, copy + paste problems...He named rediculous people as defendents, including the brother of one anti spammer, who apparently lives in Italy and doesn't care about spam at all."
http://chickenboner.com/felstein/slapp.pdf
Please help metamoderate.
a large conference on spam hosted by the FTC(which will be attended by many spammers)
Can we bomb them, Oh please can we bomb them ?
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Do NOT register for the mailing list at www.emarketersamerica.org.
So, as a followup to this, from the SPAPHAUS website "90% of all spam received by Internet users in North America and Europe is sent by a hard-core group of only 180+ individuals"
It just goes to show how a few incredibly selfish individuals can bring chaos and ruin to society. It obviously does not take many to bring huge costs to business and government, so why is it so hard to prosecute these few individuals for abuse of the internet and indirect theft from business and government (taxpayer) coffers, especially if they are known?
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
He means that in theory, if the Internet traffic resulting directly from the activities of these 180 people were to stop, the number of spam emails arriving in your Inbox would drop almost to zero. Only 419s from Nigeria and occasional sporadic one-time spam would remain.
This isn't advocating some sort of lynching or suspension of civil rights- it's just a simple statement of fact. The point is that spam isn't something that a large number of people are doing; it's the activities of a very small number of people making us all miserable, and that small number is approximately 180.
It wouldn't really matter anyway, some other people would simply step up to fill in the void. .45 caliber handgun and about 180 loud bangs. Most of the anti-spam groups seem to view spam as equivilent to rape.
As for what, "spirited off internet" means, I think it involves a
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
These days everybody and their dog has a lil website somewhere.
Let's say we ditched the email concept, and messaging just involved people going to eachothers websites and dropping a note via webform. To reply, you simply click the link back to the senders message webform etc...
Then to ensure we don't have web crawling bots auto submitting spam through the forms, you add a dynamically created GIF/jpeg file with a 5 letter code embedded that the subitter needs to type for the form to submit.
Then, problem solved no? Christ the email protocol we've been using for the last 20years is ready for the shitter in my opinion.
--Zuchini
Funny how they keep their address hidden in a Whois lookup. Perhaps they don't want to receive spam either...
Keeping courts busy with unnecessary and pointless lawsuits, thus blocking "real" and important cases and wasting resources is its own form of spam: judicial spam!
The Spamhaus link already doesn't work (at least not for me, YMMV).
.... send more emails.
What's really amazing isn't that spammers continue to spam but that they continue to find people who are willing to pay them to do so. Have you ever read what an email marketer considers fair results? 2% of the emails you buy will be viewed (viewed meaning that someone actually generated an http request based on the HTML inside). How do they guarantee this? If they fall short, they will
This is an amazing comment on the ineffectiveness of spam. More than 98% of all spam messages are deleted unseen (or bounced). Of the remaining 2%, some of those were only "viewed" in the sense that they had active focus when the receiver hit delete. Of those that generate actual click-through, how many generate sales?
How stupid does someone have to be to buy an "email marketing campaign?" One could get better results by sending your $1000 to a local charity and putting out a press release.
Spam --- built on ignorance and stupidity.
So what happens if you send an email to abuse@emarketersamerica.org ?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
blacklisting IP addresses of the plaintiffs, libel, invasion of privacy, the publication of allegedly false information and "intentionally interference with a contract".
Allright the blacklisting is allright because the user is requesting those sites to be blacklisted. Don't know about invasion of privacy (probably publishing the names and addresses), publication of false information (isn't that libel?). Finally "intentionally interference with a contract".(well at least it's spammer english:) there was never any contract in the first place and is just the user trying to avoid harassment. I'll be very surprised if this goes anywhere then again we may not have the whole story, remember the register isn't exactly an impartial newssource.
I stole this Sig
They ARE raping our inboxes! We never consented to allow them to fill our E-mail inboxes with their penis enlargement spam, let alone without the protection afforded by the "ADV:" tag!
:= OFF
/.. We should be able to harrass them endlessly and make their signal:noise ratio equivilant to ours.
Anti_spam_fanatic_mode
I hope that someone finds the personal info of those 180 people and posts it here on
However, if we did that, then we would be no better than they are. Perhaps a more effective thing to do would be to sign our governmental representatives up for every E-mail mass marketing campaign there is and do so with the name of one of the 180 spammers. That wouldn't be too hard.
Plus, we could always claim that a nasty virus did it.
Oops, I was wrong. A whois at their registrar brought up the results:
Registrant:
mark felstein
P.O.Box 667933
Pompano Beach, Florida 33066
United States
Registered through: Go Daddy Software (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: EMARKETERSAMERICA.ORG
Created on: 16-Jan-03
Expires on: 16-Jan-05
Last Updated on: 16-Jan-03
Administrative Contact:
felstein, mark mefels@aol.com
P.O.Box 667933
Pompano Beach, Florida 33066
United States
9542887575
Technical Contact:
felstein, mark mefels@aol.com
P.O.Box 667933
Pompano Beach, Florida 33066
United States
9542887575
Domain servers in listed order:
PARK3.SECURESERVER.NET
PARK4.SECURESERVER.NET
"If these 180 were somehow spirited off internet - we'd be left with the Nigerians, and companies spamming by mistake. The spam problem would simply disappear," he said.
So... who's got 1,800 feet of rope and an orchard to spare?
which will be attended by many spammers
Now where's some of that Iraqi nerve agent when we need it?
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
Try the asshole attorney's supporting this case. Look at the bottom of the slapp.pdf file:
FELSTEIN & ASSOCIATES, P.A.
Attorneys for EMarketersAmerica.org, Inc.
555 South Federal Highway, Suite 450
Boca Raton, Florida 33432
(561) 367-7990 Phone
(561) 367-7980 Facsimile
mark@EMarketersAmerica.org
Mark E. Felstein, Esq.
FBN: 192139
I think we have a new address for every free cd offer, junk ad, and telemarketer list in the world.
My name is: Alan Ralsky
Address:
5016 Patrick Rd
West Bloomfield, MI 48322-1543
I REALLY NEED A PENIS ENLARGEMENT!!! PLEASE!!! I'll EVEN GIVE YOU MY CREDIT CARD NUMBER!!!!!
Get paid to code OSS
make decks of playing cards with pictures of these guys and then do various things that I will not specify here for legal reasons to them after we find them. :)
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
If you click on the link provided, you get the following message:
Dear Customer,
Please key in the password you see displayed to the right in order to obtain the information you requested from our WHOIS database.
In order to protect the privacy of our customers, Go Daddy Software has implemented a process that prevents unscrupulous spammers from running scripts that acquire email addresses from our WHOIS service (which in accordance with ICANN policy must be made available to the public). The password you see is provided in graphic format and cannot be read by a script. Only humans can read it. By taking a moment to key in the password you are doing your part to eliminate SPAM.
If I started sending out millions of spam emails using my ISP, then I'm certain I would be shutdown very quickly. So why don't they just unplug the worst offenders?
Eventually they will run out of aliases and addresses to use. But I suspect that the access providers make a lot of money from spam, probably providing a premium service to spammers much like the adult hosting business. Or maybe the access providers are just so big now that they just don't notice where the spam comes from? I doubt it though, if they were really losing money they would shut them down in a second.
Even if spam is not coming from your network, then networks could just not peer with networks that allow spammers to operate without discretion, ie those that send out unsolicited emails with false origination information or use brute force spamming techniques such as dictionary matching.
The worst spammers are akin to a DoS attack, which can be tracked down and stopped. This is basically the same thing. So why not just unplug the spammers one by one?
Or are they somehow smarter than us? Maybe these are genetically engineered super smart spammers that can anticipate our every move? No, its just the people that can deny them access aren't motivated enough.
Oh wait, that's the case here too... Nevermind.
Think about this the next time you advocate centralizing the Net (in terms of SMTP) on large ISPs in order to "solve" the problem of residental users spewing spam (directly or by relay).
The residential users are annoying because there are so many of them, but if, 10 years from now, the only way you can send mail is to relay through a large ISP's mail servers... who do you think said ISP's best business partners will be?
For an answer to that question look to the US Postal Service's largest customers: The US Federal Government and bulk mailers.
THAT is exactly the business niche that spammers are evolving into. All they need is for users to have slightly less choice and ISPs to have slightly more power to tell their users how the Internet works rather than the other way around.
Push to keep the Internet a network of peers while establishing a system of identity, trust and responsibility (which should in turn also by non-centralized, but rooted on an arbitrary number of certificate authorities and trust databases), and you will do yourself and the rest of the world a large favor!
But...
It's not that simple. The same laws that govern one thing cannot always be easily applied to other things. Things aren't so black and white. Think of it like "hackers". A "hacker" goes to prison longer than, someone who does, what we consider, a worse crime.
The internet and computers are a new realm. There is very little that is tangible, other than the hardware and the electricity.
This might pan out nicely.. but that's why we fight the DMCA and support anti-spammer laws, right? Because our laws have to change.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Okay, I read the first few pages of the lawsuit, and then I couldnt stomach the legalese anymore... I'm not a lawyer, after all...
anyway, the way it sounds is that they are being sued because they sell products/list information that people use to stop the flow of "crap" from these companies. From what I read, they didnt attack these companies, they didnt DoS them, they merely provided tools that people could use to stop spammers from contacting them.
The people that are using these tools probably never would have purchased anything from them anyway, and if they are like most of us, the emails are blocked/auto deleted/instantly trashed when they do get through, so its a moot point anyway.
I think these people are just ticked off because their scummy business is being threatened by people who are intelligent enough to "work the internet", not just "use" it.
thats just my thoughts, I could be wrong...
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
Here's the full dope on Eddy Marin, spammer, and why South Florida (especially Boca Raton) is now a haven for spammers.
r es s&searchString=209.203.192.0%2F19
Eddy uses a front company, "PG&C Leasing Inc." (aka lauderdale.net) to disguise his activity. This company buys the bandwidth for him to spam through. He then sets up dummy companies to act as "customers" of PG&C. If the heat gets too hot he'll "terminate" a "customer". Of course the spam just continues under another name.
He's operated like this since 1998. He's had a long time to develope a reputation among his spamming pals, and since he brings money into the local economy, Boca Raton loves him.
Here's just ONE of his netblocks:
http://www.senderbase.com/search?searchBy=ipadd
The bulk of the spam from that netblock is from "OmniPoint Marketing". If you've been paying good attention. Spam also goes out from "justdous.com, prefersavings.com, dealstwoyou.com, and tlck.net". These are registered to things like "M.M.COMMERCE,INC", and "OptIn LLC" (which is Terry Williams, another Eddy Marin flunkie)
stealthemail.com ??? Give me a break!
--Og
Spam exists because it is profitable. If we each dedicate just ten minutes a day to order free product literature, tie up spammer's toll-free numbers, or even order a spammer's product on behalf of another spammer, we can cause spam to become unprofitable.
I find it vaguely amusing that the complaint accuses Spews and Spamhaus of interrupting and blocking "the internet traffic of lawful businesses and individuals."
Name one.
By preference, one that complied with each and every one of the various anti-spam laws in the US. Anyone on the plaintiff's side of the case who did not abide by those laws should be jailed for perjury, I think...
And some of the complaint-items worthy of particular derision:
4: Failure to provide proper and correct addresses to the public for Spews and Spamhaus. Pot calling the kettle black here, maybe? Just a bit?
21: If the IP-addresses and servers in question were your property at the time, all you have to do is prove it. Though I doubt that the business practises were legal anyway...
23: So? So have I. But they didn't block you; they put you on a list that individuals and ISP's used (and trusted) to block you. Sue all of the ISPs that use that list. Dare ya!
32: How many Americans will become unemployed? The owner/operators of the individual spam-companies? Boo hoo!
39: Oh? Really?
Internet Explorer was unable to link to the Web page you requested. The page might use standard HTML or CSS.
sunbiz
We know which companies sell their email listings, right?
More than a few of us can write a script...
A clandestine server running in an undisclosed location--perhaps a public wireless hotspot--can go forever properly filling out the forms of these companies with complete and total gibberish.
It won't crash servers... nobody will even know until it's pretty much too late and the offended databases are loaded with utter garbage.
Recently, I wrote about passively doing this to spambots. I keep the page on the server for good measure.
My tech articles are geared to a nontech audience so don't give me crap if they sound lame. I don't preach to the choir except when hanging out at Slashdot.
That said, I don't see why this concept can't be expanded. They have no defense against form scripts.
Laws are for people with no friends.
Sounds like a good idea, but how do you CC someone? What about mailing lists?
Well, we should protect his privacy, and not post his email then. Please don't post this link anywhere.
mefels@aol.com
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
The information you seek has already been posted in news.admin.net-abuse.email
I am specifically asking that people *NOT* commit denial of service attacks on the spammers' servers. We do not need to sink to their level. A DDoS was committed against all of the people named as defendants in this frivolous lawsuit on or about 13-14 April 2003, and evidence in thatycase is being collected still.
about the number of people out there who actually believe some of the spam they get - if no one bothered with spam and the advertisers realized that they were wasting their money and that no one paid any attention to their messages, it would all stop! wouldn't it?
Then we submit their email addresses to the mailing list at the eMarketersAmerica site and any other spam wesite we can find :)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
It's worth quite a bit, actually. Guys like Eddie Marin, "probably the world's largest smammer," didn't get there as a result of an ego trip, but through his profit motive. There's money to be made in spam.
Getting rid of the top 180 spammers in the world wouldn't eliminate spam, any more than "getting rid of" the top 20 auto makers would rid the world of new cars. They are both competitive industries, with new suppliers waiting in the wings. Guess which industry has the lower cost of entry barrier? Making it more difficult for spam to break through the filter will only enourage more technologically advanced, more prolific spam; it's just a slightly higher cost of entry. However advanced the technology behind the anti-spam filters become, is exactly how advanced the anti-anti-spam filters will be.
There's gold in them thar spam.
Spam will not go away until it becomes unprofitable: either stop responding to spam with your checkbooks, or start collecting a (small) toll on each email received. Where there's profit to be had, the profit motive will always succeed.
The cure for cancer is coming: Reovirus
From the filing:
"Should the Defendants, be allowed to continue their assault upon the Plaintiff and the Plaintiff's industry, the Plaintiff's industry will cease to exist."
Yay. Now there's an incentive for a judge to issue an injunction if I ever heard one: the preservation of spam.
Yes, it's much easier to come up with a dumb idea without having to think the whole thing through first.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
So what would it take to file a class action suit on behalf of all users and ISPs? There have to be a large number of users who've missed important mail because it was buried in spam, or who've had to change the email address to get away from it, with the time lost to get everyone they care about switched. And as a small ISP, for the first time in 18 years, I'm in need of upgrading my system for performance reasons, because of the load spamassassin is putting on it dealing with all the f***ing spam it gets. Not to mention a domain that expired because the renewal notice got filtered and the time spent installing mechanisms to cope with it. I think I alone could argue for about $15K in actual damages, and I'm small potatoes. I just last night installed Active Spam Killer and I'm going to start migrating to it so that anyone who wants to send me mail that I don't know has to ask first. This is the world these assholes are making for us.
It says something about our crappy legal system that total crap like this can even be introduced into a court. There should be a pre-trial hearing to determine if something's even worthy of appearing in a court. No fancy legal bullshit, just some guy who looks at something and says, "that's fucking bullshit...trash can". Like the McD's coffee lawsuite, this is fucking bullshit and should have been trashed by the court clerks upon receiving it.
blacklisting IP addresses of the plaintiffs
No-one has to use these blacklists. They can and have the right to blacklist anyone for any damn reason they choose. If individual's don't like their blacklisting policies, they can use a different blacklist. The fact is, these guys deserve to be blacklisted.
libel
Hahahhahahahahahahah. For something to be libel, it has to false. Every claim made about these slimebags is completely true. Period. End of discussion. In fact, these spammers need to be prosecuted for frauid: none of that crap you see in e-mails is true. It's all fraudulent.
invasion of privacy
Hahahahahah. If you send out thousands of e-mails a day, your e-mail address and contact information are not private. In fact, your e-mail address, phone number, or house number do not get the protection of privacy. That is all public information. Even if this claim was true, there are no penalties for invasion of privacy of the kind they could possibly be referrign to.
the publication of allegedly false information
Bullshit.
"intentionally interference with a contract"
Bullshit. No-one who has received SPAM had a contract with the spammer to receive it. Period. End of discussion.
This crap should have been trashed by the clerks who received it, and these guys should have been fined a hundred thousand dollars for wasting the court's time.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
The spam blockers are selling/giving away a tool that lets system administrators and individual users ignore messages that they do not wish to receive. If I started a doorbell-removal business, would certain religious groups sue me for ruining their business?
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
DOS, schmoss. Why the hell aren't each and every one of the spammers' filter-evasion tricks prosecutable under the computer-cracking laws, as they are clearly deliberate actions aimed at bypassing the access security placed on a computer by its owner?
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
You should write a honeypot that looks like a relay but dosn't forward any but the first message sent to it. Running a few thousand of those will do more to fight spam than generating bad addresses.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Several things point to this being a joke. If it's not a joke, their lawyer is the most incompetent lawyer on the planet.
I have difficulty believing that a lawyer coud really have drafted this crud.
They make money from it. If they did 'magically' disapear, then 180 more would replace them and make they money they were making.
The spammers are bad, but they are only permitted to be so by those that pay them. If we stop those that pay them, there'd be a whole lot less spam. [a bit like the war on drugs, drug lords replace killed drug lords... but at the end of the day if there we could stop the addicts being the addicts there'd be no drug lords... a bit circular].
Of course, removing the source is not easy.
Because, although many in government have joked about Al Gore inventing the internet, the current crop in the US House and Senate have have very few among them who understand the problems, and fewer still who seem interested in doing anything about it. As I see it, most are dealing with problems brought to their attention by campaign donors or people highly motivated to remove them from office if they don't do something particular to their state or district. Though spam is a world-wide problem, they don't see it as important. There are laws which cover wire-fraud and such, but most people scammed are too embarassed or don't know their options well enough to do anything.
If you campaigned for office in my district and/or state, chances are you rattle on about social security, abortion, school funding, etc. If you did show up and I had the time to attend your rally, you'd get an earful from me about what a major pain this spam is and how its about time the Cybersecurity Czar or someone started knocking skulls. Unfortunately, most of the other people there would think I'm some nut and that spam isn't as important as the other issues. IMHO that pretty much explains the way it is.
BTW I was getting 30-40 spams a day back in November, 2002. A month ago it was up to about 120. Currently I'm getting about 180, during 1 hour break for lunch, today, I received 43 pieces. It seems to come in barrages, so I'm pretty convinced it's like Alan Ralsky just fired off his next pile of fetid crap and is getting ready for the next issue, probably about 8PM tonight.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It says something about our crappy legal system that total crap like this can even be introduced into a court. There should be a pre-trial hearing to determine if something's even worthy of appearing in a court. No fancy legal bullshit, just some guy who looks at something and says, "that's fucking bullshit...trash can". Like the McD's coffee lawsuite, this is fucking bullshit and should have been trashed by the court clerks upon receiving it.
You obviously don't know the facts in the McDonald's coffee lawsuit. McDonald's was serving their coffee -- systematically, as part of the franchise way of doing things -- 30 degrees F higher than "hot", i.e., 180 degrees F instead of 150 F.
Metaphorically, it's a little like the difference between sending someone home with a gun that's not loaded and the safety on, vs. loaded, cocked, and safety off. One is dangerous, but well understood to be so, the other is unnecessarily, negligently dangerous.
Beyond that, McDonald's had a long history of complaints and actions regarding the overly hot coffee. In other words, they were not doing something dangerous unknowingly, they were doing it deliberately.
Regular coffee from your average coffee place will burn you if you spill it on yourself, but it's only a 2nd degree burn. The woman who spilled the coffee on herself suffered 3rd degree burns. Look the difference up in a medical dictionary, preferrably one with pictures, and then imagine yourself having it done to your privates, like she did.
Wonder if you'd think it was a frivolous lawsuit then.
Why on earth would these guys demand a jury? They'd be better off with an old judge that never uses a computer.... not a jury of American people that hate spam almost as much as we do.
Proof that spammers are stupid, I guess. Either that or they honestly believe that the American public wants their penis enlargment pills.
I fully advocate spammer-lynching.
:)
Maybe it could be a PPV sport? I sure as hell would pay $19.95 to support it. Wouldn't that be ironic, their own demise being sold wholesale at the magic price
If the spammers are banding together to fight anti-spammer groups, it probably means that those anti-spamming measures are effectively interfering with their business model. Maybe those 550 rejects are actually causing them some pain.
I've been very happy with my sendmail configuration, where I'm using blacklists and whitelists (/etc/mail/access) and a collection of realtime blocking lists. I had almost given up on recreational computing because of the sorry state of my inbox, but now things are better.
I think it's time for us to better document & pomote the use of these measures so that more people are sending them 550's, instead of quietly deleting their garbage.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
Note: I'm not a lawyer, and if you want to get specific legal advice about which 20% of this message is totally bogus as opposed to merely imprecise or incorrect, you could go hire a real lawyer
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Could the guy buying all those penis pills, RC cars and septic tanks be indentified and net-quarantined? (Or shot, that works too.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Just like, if we prosecute all the drug dealers, the amount of drugs on the streets will drop?
Ummm... no, not really.
First of all, this is just a mathematical statement about the number of spammers that are responsible for 99% of the spam you receive. It isn't some sort of guide for public policy, which was my point.
Also, when we prosecute drug dealers we create a vacuum in the market that is quickly filled with more entrepreneurs. Soon every street corner is spoken for. If we were to stop prosecuting them, the market would quickly saturate and the price of drugs would fall, decreasing the profit motive.
There is no mechanism like that for spam. An existing spammer population doesn't deter more spammers from entering the "occupation"- until everyone just gives up on email. That hasn't quite happened yet.