AOL, MS & Yahoo Unite On Anti-Spam Initiative

dilaudid writes "FT.com has an article about AOL, Yahoo and MS putting aside their differences to combat spam. An AOL VP is quoted as saying "Our customers are telling us it is the number one problem with the internet." Their intended response is "narrowly-defined federal legislation aimed at so-called "king-pin" spammers" who send the bulk of the mails. "

Comments

Huh?

[IAmRenegadeX]

Did you read the article (or even the /. blurb?)

The groups said they were particularly looking for narrowly-defined federal legislation aimed at so-called "king-pin" spammers whom they believe are responsible for the largest volume and most pernicious of unwanted e-mails.

They're looking to legislate the "spam kings" to death, not block mail from them for their collective subscribers. Funny, however, that they continute to ignore "black hole" lists that are actually quite good at deleting/preventing spam.

Re:Huh?

[stratjakt]

That's good. I dont want "black hole" lists at the ISP level.

I dont want providers arbitrarily deciding that some IP block can no longer send me e-mail.

Because then you wind up with some person/comittee with an agenda deciding that I can no longer get e-mail from, say, a group with an opposing point of view. If Bill Gates controlled the black hole list, maybe kernel.org shows up on it. If RMS controlled it, hotmail would show up on it.

It's a bad system, wide open to abuse. Punish the criminals, don't hinder the internet.

Re:Huh?

[rizzo]

Just another personal note on black hole lists. I thought they were the greatest thing since sliced bread until somehow my IP ended up on one. My web/email service is on a shared host. The host itself doesn't host any adult content, but the IP that it had recently acquired was listed in the same IP block as pretty much every adult/teen/kiddie porno site you can think of, and most that you can't think of. Ameritech subscribed to the blacklist and so I couldn't forward my domain mail to my ameritech.net account. It was a weekend from hell.

are you sure you didn't mean pro-spam initiative?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://spews.org/html/S1928.html
http://spews.org /html/S681.html

aol & msn not exactly innocent either.

these idjits need to get their own houses in order before yammering about the rest of the world.

Re:Exceptions

[SuperBanana]

How do you know her email address was even sold? Ever have a Hotmail address? It doesn't come because it's sold, the spam comes because of the brute force spam attacks on it.

I know it's hard, but try and read through my entire post, and note this particular point I specifically mentioned:

"it had a very unusual account name(with numbers in it, too)- no dictionary atttack hit this one"

Next time, read the entire comment, okay? Shame on those of you who moderated him up; he didn't even bother to read the whole comment.

Re:AOL, MS & Yahoo, again?

[Chris_Stankowitz]

(some percentage, like 100%) of spam is unsolicited,

Its ALL unsolicited, thats why its called SPAM!.

Re:Exceptions

[stratjakt]

Don't be so sure.

It doesnt have to be a common address to be brute forced.

Spammers leave their bots running all day and all night, and they dont care if they get 7 billion bounced emails for 500,000 delivered. Especially when it comes to the big dog domains like msn.com, aol.com hotmail.com or comcast.net.

Kingpins not enough. Guarded email, etc.

[dwheeler]

Attacking the kingpins will probably have a very nice short-term effect. But will it really help long term? I doubt it. Instead, there will be new kingpins in countries outside their control, perhaps in places where it's still legal to crack into other computers. Also, there will be a gradual increase in spam from the large number of other spammers.We need techniques that work long-term.

If you're interested in countering spam, please check these out:

1. http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/stopspam.html - essay about techniques to stop spam
2. http://www.dwheeler.com/guarded-email - a paper about Guarded Email, a challenge-response system that might really help.

Re:Dumb and Dumber

[krray]

And this is the dumbest idea (IMHO) -- sorry.

The spammers will continue to either highjack foreign servers (foreign to them at least :), steal end users bandwidth, so on and so forth -- and label it all "Personal".

I'm right back to trying to figure out what is and is not really personal flagged as personal. Nothing will change.

LAWS won't fix the problem -- how do I reach out and touch somebody in China that spammed me from the US? It's just easier to block them all.

I've gone from trying to play nice to playing with various RBL schemes to my heavy handed approach. 1 IP with spam blocks the entire /24 subnet. Forever. Only are single IP's unblocked as needed with the associated PHONE CALL to me.

I'm seeing about 300 rejects today with 100 newly added subnets going in daily now. 3 IP's singled out for "OK" status that were blocked. This to a new honeypot domain doing nothing but harvesting spam since April 1st, 2003. ...it's just my own RBL for the rest of the domains...

No, It Won't

[Steve B]

I used to be firmly in the "kill the spammers" camp, but I've come to the realization (like many others) that the real culprits are people who actually BUY stuff in the spam they get sent. If nobody buys the stuff, spam WILL disappear.

Big-time spammers get their money up front from the spamvertiser, not piecemeal from individual suckers. If nobody falls for whichever scam is being promoted, that's just too bad for the spamvertiser -- the spammer has the money, and rigorously follows the First Law of Acquisition.

Yes, individual spamvertisers will give up if they get burned often enough, but there are always new sleaze artists to take their place.

Re:huh? nobody gets that much spam

[letxa2000]

I get upwards of 100 legit emails a day, with 4 ! very public addresses that are years old, and I never get more than 5 spams a day. WTF are you doing to get that much spam?

That seems hard to believe. If you have domain names registered with your email address, you'll get spam. If your email has been around more than a few years, you'll get spam.

My email has been active since 1994 and while I don't plaster it everywhere I don't make huge efforts to hide it since I feel that being able to send me email is what my email address is for. I get about 100 per day, although with my Bayesian filter now operating I only see one every couple of days.

I find it hilarious that MS and AOL is bitching about spam, their open relays enable most of it. My spam originates from MSN, sHotMail, AOL, Yahoo,

Me thinks you don't know much about spam. Most spam doesn't originate or go through MSN or Hotmail, they just claim to originate there so people like you are fooled into believing that MSN and Hotmail are the cause of the problem.

Re:AOL CENSORS THEIR EMAIL

[User 956]

Hell, if the filter worked 90% of the time I'd use it at my ISP...

One word: Spamnix.

Out of the 25 or so spams I get every time I check my email, maybe one actually lands in my inbox.

Re:AOL CENSORS THEIR EMAIL

[blakestah]

Last week they blocked all email originating from SMTP servers hosted at DSL lines. /. covered it. AOL has a wide array of auto-filtering that occurs before stuff even gets to you.

HERE

The pro-spam coalition

[Animats]

Much of this is opposed by the pro-spam organization National Business Coalition on E-commerce and Privacy. NBCEP boasts of killing "opt-in" legislation in several states. In the words of their executive director, John Schall (a lobbyist who was a Bush I appointee),

• SPAM is an issue we're watching. We certainly support efforts to restrict abusive and deceptive unsolic-ited commercial e-mail, but unfortunately some of the anti-SPAM legislative proposals set some dangerous precedents in terms of enforcement, for example. Ultimately, we want to make sure that no bill undercuts e-commerce generally, and we want to make sure that any SPAM leg-islation does not have the unintended consequences of having a chilling effect on this growing sector.

What really scares them is an anti-spam law with teeth.

Re:Technical Pressure

[Anonymous Coward]

Like this?

Paul Vixie proposes the use of a special "mail-from" name in each domain that has 0-priority MX records listing all servers authorized to send mail for that domain. These servers do not have to be the same ones that receive mail for the domain (the regular MX hosts).