Online Marketers to Stamp out Spam?

CodeHog writes "A group of online marketers want to get rid of spam and are proposing a registry base system for transmitting email. They are calling the project Lumos. Computer World has an aritcle on it Online marketers offer new antispam initiative . Doesn't it seem like these are the same businesses that profit from spam? Even better, this is being proposed by ESPC. The member list doesn't look too anti-spam to me." The obvious issue of course is that most spammers won't follow the rules anyway. My spam is up 20% over the 1st quarter of 2003! Yay!

Comments

Re:Incredibly intuitive notion

[cpeterso]

In related news about foxes watching hen houses, the Federal Trade Commission has selected AT&T to operate the new national do-not-call telemarketing list. Unfortunately, AT&T is #1 on the FCC's list of telemarketing complaints for 2001, 2002, and 2003 Q1.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/904102.asp?0cv=CB20

1/3 of all email is spam according to PCWorld

[zbowling]

According to this artical on PCWorld 1/3 of the email on the internet is spam and the rest is mostly person-to-person communications. http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,105525,0 0.asp I support anti-spam legisitlation.

Marketers

[jawtheshark]

SPAM makes Marketers look bad. I know people around here have no love for marketers at all, but I'm going to show you they are not all bad. My best friend *is* a marketer and I'm an IT guy. (He works for Panda Software , just to advertise a bit for them)

Anyways, when I told him about practices that spammers use like reselling email lists, scavenging webpages for emails, etc... He was outraged. Yes, you read that right. It just went completely against ethics for him, because that is not what they teached him at the business school.
He even got more outraged when I explained him what spyware is, but that is another can of worms.

Essentially, SPAM and Spyware is what the "real" marketers look bad. They're just the scum of the industry.

My Spam is down -(1/0)% in the past month...

[tigersaw]

...thanks to mailblocks (click here for original article about it). It was a pain at first getting all my contacts and listservs entered into my safelist, but since then I've been 100% spam-free. I just check my pending folder once a week or so for stranded messages. And heck, $10 for a 12MB inbox for three years is a deal compared to the big boys.

Re:web log spam

[Chmarr]

There are a number of popular Weblogs (blogs, whatever) that are being hit with this kind of thing. The reasoning is that these logs often display their referrers to the public. So, as a spammer, you can get some free advertising on these sites by accessing the blog with a referrer containing your message.

Stupid, yes, but who is attributing spammers with intelligence?? :)

Re:Meaning

[tinfoilgrrl]

Maybe from the Ancient Greek lume meaning outrage, maltreatment, corruption, damage, etc.

Or they've been reading too much Harry Potter.

This is not the way to stop spam

[bigberk]

New email registries will decrease spam? Set up by online marketers? No, sorry, I don't buy that at all. Remember what their interests are. The problem at hand is... most spammers don't care about creating inconveniences. They are like greedy undisciplined children, and won't stop spamming unless they are forced to (by law, vigilante retaliation, etc.)

To say something constructive now. There are two neat server side spam filtering projects I really like because neither uses IP-based blacklists (blacklists can bring a lot of collateral damage and require frequent judgement calls).

Spamprobe can be run from .procmailrc and uses a Bayesian scoring type of approach. It's a user-level solution which requires some training, but once it's accurate it's quite amazing. Currently it's missing only 3% of my incoming spam.

The Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse also runs server side and uses fuzzy checksums to identify mail that is being received by a suspiciously large number of mail hosts around the world. A brilliant idea which works better than you may think. I have never seen a false positive with this system, and it misses about 1/4 of incoming spam. Effectiveness will improve as more hosts join the distributed checksum system!

ESPC

[mark_space2001]

The ESPC website is darn interesting, check it out. In particular, they have a mailing list on yahoo groups, ostensibly for people to complain about false positives by spam filtering software. Really, it's a way for spammers to communicate about filtering, but it's really interesting to go there and browse through the list archives, which are freely available. Any admins out there might be well served by checking up on this list periodically.

The ESPC website also has a box where you can add your email address and receive "information" from them about the ESPC itself, which I would *ahem* not recomend. ;-)

Parent came from a spammer or spam supporter

[Dimensio]

The fact remains that even if you make it as easy as possible and have DOUBLE-opt-IN mailing lists

I stopped reading right here. There is no such thing as "double-opt-in". The term is used by spammers who have apparently taken the phrase to mean something that does not, in any way shape or form, involve the recipient consenting to receive the e-mail.