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

Yes, let's hand email over to marketers

[Anonymous Coward]

And lets also hand over civil rights to the Klan.

Like this is going to save the world

[Blaine Hilton]

This seems like a ploy to legitimize spam. I see this as actually increasing the amount, not decreasing it. The only people that will likely benefits are the advertisers that use this Lumos thing to get their email on a "approve" list. Much like the NAT sensors in a recent slashdot article, this will just make the spammers change their methods, if it even takes off in the first place. Although this plan seems at least to me that it is ill fated, something needs to be done about spam. Like censorship though it's probably best left to the end consumer and not some blind upstream connectivity provider.

Go calculate something

Re:Like this is going to save the world

[Musashi Miyamoto]

I totally agree. This would probably cause you to recieve more spam as a result. However, it might be a bit more cleaned up and "professionalized".

The only way to stop spam is either re-work SMTP or intellegent spam filters... Its hard to knock spam filters nowadays... They are almost artificial intelligence in their ability to spot a spam e-mail. Its amazing... Try a good one like iHateSpam and see... They remove close to 99% of spam.

I predict the first self-aware system will not be a 2001 HAL-like supercomputer, but a spam filter running on someones desktop.

"What are you doing Dave? How about a lower mortgage rate, Dave?"

Re:Like this is going to save the world

[johnnyb]

Having been involved in Internet marketing myself, let me say that most business don't want to send you email that you don't want to receive. That includes the mail houses that send them. The ones I have worked with get between a 10% and 30% _click_ rate. Why? Because send very targetted emails.

Few people are advocating any longer sending mass emails to everyone they can find an address for. Most people have found that using legitimate sources of addresses (such as your customer list, trade-show lists, and small targetted lists) get great results that customers are willing to pay for.

These people are usually sending out up to 10,000 emails at a time.

The professionals involved _want_ email marketing to be legitimate - because it gets higher-dollar business for them.

Spam up 20%

[RollingThunder]

My spam is up 20% over the 1st quarter of 2003!

So how can I get spam futures into my portfolio? Something going up 20% a quarter is just what the stockbroker ordered!

Incredibly intuitive notion

[mao che minh]

Terrific idea. I assert that we should also award the power to draft anti-monopoly legistlation to Microsoft Corporation.

Of course

[7x7]

I will gladly post my email to a public "do not mail" list. I assume the list will be harvested to "remove" me.

me too.

[nege]

I agree- every time I call Verizon I get a nice message in a soothing voice telling me that they respect my privacy. Yet I know they sell my number to telemarketers because I don't give that number to anyone else but personal friends! Then they will sell me some telemarketing blocking technology, and sell the telemarketers anti-telemarketing technology technology and so forth. I don't see how this email stuff will be different...but then again Im completely jaded.

cannot stop spam.

[Musashi Miyamoto]

Unless SMTP is re-worked to disallow false source addresses, spam is not going to be stopped by a system like this. As long as there is no accountability from the sources of spam, it will continue to be pumped out from overseas. Though projects like PennyBlack and SpamNet are good in concept, the only one that has proven to work is intellegent filtering. Spam filters like Spam Inspector remove around 99% of junk email... You need to have one to make using your e-mail account worth using again...

I couldn't imagine my Yahoo mail without their spam controls... (Unlike Hotmail, which spams you themselves)

Re:cannot stop spam.

[AnotherBlackHat]

... the only [spam stopping] that has proven to work is intellegent filtering.

There are two schools of thought on this,
which I like to call "spam assassin" and "spammer assassin".

People in the spam assassin school are interested in not reading spam.
To them, anything that stops them from reading spam "works".
They would rate things like Baysian filtering as incredibly successful.

People in the spammer assassin school are interested in stopping spam from being sent.
They would rate things like Baysian filtering as a dismal failure that "misses the point".

Intelligent filtering is effective against spam,
but not against spammers.
It may or may not "work", just depends on your school of thought.

-- this is not a .sig

Re:web log spam

[Mr. Sketch]

I am using a script that displays the recent referrers and it is currently half full of spam.

Hmm, now it seems to be half full of slashdot.org referrers.

ESPC are spammers

[gorbachev]

"The member list doesn't look too anti-spam to me."

That's damn right. It's the Who's Who of spam-for-hire operations. Every single one of them spams. It's just that they claim their spam is not spam.

Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. Remember to shoot the knees first, so that they can't run away while you slowly torture them to death.

This might actually help...

[Ironica]

Consider the movie ratings system. It's not in any way government regulated; it's run entirely by the Motion Picture Association of America. Whatever disputes I have with their policies and practices, you have to admit, the industry has been fairly successful at eliminating the need for government regulation through self-regulation.

It sounds more like these spammers are getting together to find a way to continue sending requested marketing email. Spam has gotten so bad that the baby is being thrown out with the bathwater at the ISP level, before the consumer even implements their own filters. They're afraid of losing the ability to market via e-mail *period*, so they've come up with a way to screen it.

If it actually works as they claim (in terms of unsubscribe rules, identifiability, and so forth) it might be a way ISPs could filter out commercial email that *doesn't* conform to this protocol, while still allowing commercial email to happen.

I'm not saying I think it will (or won't) work, but I think this is probably a sincere attempt to regulate commercial email in a manner that will be acceptable to consumers.

Give them spam back

[Pettifogger]

If everyone really wants to get rid of spam, do what I do. With every delievery, I forward it to my free "spam" account on Yahoo. Then I either send in a bogus order or ask them a lot of pointless questions about their product.

A number of people here have mentioned the extremely low response rate to spam. This is what allows it to survive. Imagine if their response rate went up something like 5000%, but 99% of those were fake, but realistic responses. This would *instantly* kill the profit motive. More staff will be required to process the fake orders/replies, and they'll have a devil of a time weeking out the true from the false responses. Eventually, the profitability scale will tip, and that is when spam will end. No program, list or change in technology is going to stop spam until everyone stands up and gives it right back to them.

Image Makeover

[Steve B]

Basically, these guys want to shake off the image of the sleazoids who sell you herbal Viagra to get your larger penis up while you watch images of hot teen lesbians.

However, they don't show any sign of being willing to bite the bullet and accept a pure Opt-In model -- which is the only way they can avoid the name "spammer".

It is now escalating out of control

[Boss, Pointy Haired]

As the owner of several domain names I am now facing the problem from 2 angles -

That of me receiving SPAM to my personal email account(s), _AND_ that of my domain names being used in the from/reply-to addresses of SPAM email.

The latter I actually find more frustrating. What makes it worse is my domain name is being used in HTML emails - your average [l]user has no idea that it is HTML, and in the message body sees only "EXTEND YOUR PENIS NATURALLY CLICK HERE" in big bright purple letters. The fact that the link goes to http://www.iamascumbagspammer.com/ is not apparent - what they do see however is my domain name in the from line of their email client.

I actually think that the we would be better off if the anti-spammers stopped pursuing their cause and just let spam take out the Internet's email system.

Then we can start again from scratch.

Surely SMTP's time is up.

Turn $25 into $500,000 in 6 months

[DrSkwid]

Hello,
You may have seen this business before and
ignored it. I know I did - many times! However,
please take a few moments to read this letter.
I was amazed when the profit potential of this
business finally sunk in... and it works!

With easy-to-use e-mail tools and opt-in e-mail,
success in this business is now fast, easy and
well within the capabilities of ordinary people
who know little about internet marketing. And the
earnings potential is truly staggering!

Send me $25 and I'll send you the tools.

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. ;-)

Re:Not all the mail YOU don't want is spam...

[Sylver Dragon]

God forbid that you, as an individual, forget to uncheck a box when you bought your last DVD or CD or book or whatever online. God forbid that you own up to your own impatience and your click click click lifestyle that results in you glazing over or not even caring about the terms and conditions of your latest purchase.

There is, in this, a large part of the problem why UCE is viewed in such a dim light. I have highlighted the applicable section. These things should always be opt-in, always and without exception. It really is just a sneaky method of getting people to agree. If it is known that most people will fall into the next-next-next mode when going through a series of forms, and you don't want to send emails people don't want, then your design should plan for this. Have the box unchecked by default, and allow those users who want the email, to check it. You are simply lying to yourself and us if you belive that an opt-out methadology can ever co-exist with the desire to only send email to those that really want it.

Well you know what? These people that do email for a living ARE trying to do something about it and what do we hear on /. ??? The classic "(insert name here) is trying to take our rights away and make money off of us and they suck. Open source forever and Linus rules my world and does email suck so much when blogging is the communication method of the future".

I agree with you here, it would appear that the companies involved in this are making a valid attempt to get the real spam under control. Though, I think this could be better solved by creating a huge opt-in list (which is not sold or publicly printed) such that, if a company wished to send a bulk email campaign, they send it through this list, and it then gets forwarded on to the intended and willing recipients. Probably also have some preference settings, which a recipent selects during sign-up, that allow for filtering based on interests, thus making the ads more targeted. And lastly, allow for immediate remove, by a user, of their email address from a list. Oh, and the hard part, give some sort of value for allowing one's self to be marketed to.
Of course, there would still be those abusers, you will never be rid of them. We will still get our "Enlarge Your Penis and Keep It Up Forever with Viagra" ads, but then we could start working on this problem, and not bother people who run legitamte mail-lists.

Not Surprising: just like drug dealers

[jadavis]

Drug dealers only make their high profits *because* of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The DEA restricts supply to the U.S., thereby increasing prices and taking out the "little guys". Generally, when the DEA gets a tip, it's from a rival drug lord.

It's the same with this SPAM thing. They want fewer "little guys" around so they try to force the supply of SPAM down which increases the effectiveness of their own SPAM. Not altruistic by any means, but if it lands fewer junk emails in my box each day, it's fine by me.