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A Timeline Of Spam And Antispam
Haak writes "American Scientist has a fine article by Brian Hayes summing up the history of spam and proposed measures to deal with it." A shorter article along the same lines is running at The Economist.
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Anti-spam activists go to a lot of trouble to help locate and identify people and groups responsible for flooding the net with spam (or who provide spamware to misinformed laypeople). These same good-doers are often sought out by spammers, sued by groups of them, have their privacy invaded (release of home phone, address) in effort to scare them into shutting up.
I am not kidding here. Take a look at some of the projects that scare the hell out of professional spammers:
spamhaus keeps an exhaustive list of major spam operations.
SPEWS lists areas of the Internet that have frequently be used for spamming, including detailed evidence files and histories of ISPs that turn a blind eye to spam.
Spamware vendor list has a listing of sites that sell spamming software -- without which we would have little or no spam.
First I ignored it. This worked for a while, but my paitence didn't grow nearly as fast as the spam volume (I've been on the net for years, so I remember when spam was a rare occurace). These are only the major things. I've tried others here and there.
Next I started using MS Outlook's built in spam catcher. This is basically a blacklist that you maintain that you can easily add things too. This actually worked somewhat well, but as the use of forged addresses (and just plain random ones) grew, this became less effective.
Next I started to use SpamNet. I used this up untill about last week. This used to be somewhat effective, and in the last month or so has been almost completely effective. This is the most wonderfull anti-spam device I've used. It was great near the end of the beta. But now it's out of beta and I'm not going to pay $5 a month to stop something I shouldn't get in the first place. Sorry Cloudmark.
When Spamnet started, it was pretty effective, but still left a decent amount to be desired. So I searched around and found SAProxy. This program let's you run Spamassassin on Windows, and the combination of this and Spamnet worked wonders. As Spamnet got better, this became more or less useless.
Unfortunatly, I had to get rid of Spamnet, due to the afformentioned monthly fee. So now all I have is SAProxy. It does work great, and it does get better with each new release. Now only about 3 messages a day get through, which is quite fantastic. Only 5% or so of the spam I get gets though. I could set the limit lower (to catch more spam) but right now I don't have to worry about it catching ham (it never has for me) and I don't want to have to start wading through my spam folder to check for ham. I thought I was using this stuff to not have to do that in the first place?
So in short, I'm now using SAProxy and quite happy. If there was a free version of Spamnet, I'd use it, but there isn't. If you're on Windows and have a supported e-mail client, get SAProxy, and save yourself a huge headache.
So what will I use next? I've been thinking of setting up a perl script to automatically find the home address of people who spam me and sending them a few ICBMs with notes attached like "HOW TO WIN AT EBAY WITH FREE CHEAP ICBMS THAT INCREASE YOUR SEXLIFE AND GROW HAIR."
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
According to This Site, The earliest spam was sent by DEC in 1978.
Einar Stefferud, a longtime net hand, reports that DEC announced a new DEC-20 machine in 1978 by sending an invite to all ARPANET addresses on the west coast, using the ARPANET directory, inviting people to receptions in California. They were chastised for breaking the ARPANET appropriate use policy, and a notice was sent out reminding others of the rule.
Interestingly, a young Richard Stallman argued that spammers had every right to send spam.
I'm not Seth.