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How to Become A Spammer

permeablepdx points to this story in The Oregonian about how to become a spammer. Summary: "Local Oregon boy makes big bucks after learning from the Spam masters."

9 of 458 comments (clear)

  1. hmm by revmoo · · Score: 5, Informative

    What I find most interesting about this is that the article says that Sheils made over $1000 a week. That just amazes me that there are that many stupid people out there, that actually purchase products from UCE.

    I mean, just on principle alone, I will never purchase something that I get spammed about, and I would think that most people feel the same way, so that just makes me wonder, who DOES buy this stuff? It's those people that are to blame for the continued onslaught of spam. If no one bought their stuff, they wouldn't waste their time(and ours) anymore

    Just a thought

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    I would expect such blatant racism on Fark, but on Slashdot? Mods please ban this asshole.
  2. Re:What is truly amazing by datavortex · · Score: 5, Informative

    The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 covers exploitation of open relays. My company tested this in court against spammer Khan Smith, and we trounced his ass. Using an open relay to send mail is illegal in the states, provided the relay is also in this country. This ex-cop most certainly broke the law.

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    He either comes off as a real interesting guy with encyclopedic knowledge,or a pathological liar with an ax to grind
  3. As usual, someone misread the article by compwizrd · · Score: 3, Informative

    How is a 41 year old man called a boy?

  4. Weapons against Spammers: by LaceHater · · Score: 5, Informative
    Some useful links for reducing spam income:

    For People with an *nix Account:

    • Spamassassin ruleset-based mail analizer. Detects spam quite well, especially if you enable access to Razor and Realtime-Blacklists. Newest release includes a bayesian filter.
    • bogofilter My favourite bayesian spam filter. Pro: Very good detection rates after training properly. Con: Needs to be trained.
    For everybody
    • Use Mozilla Mail The up-to-date Mozilla release includes a bayesian spam filter which can be easily trained by marking spam messages. Very good detection rate after resonable low training effort.
    • Find your favourite bayesian filter here

  5. here are some by ramzak2k · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://www.email2success.com/?hop=gilly031.e2succe ss

    http://www.spamfreedesign.com/

    http://itsmyfranchise.com/sfop99/os.cgi

    http://www.anconia.com/?r=1&s=email+advertising+ so ftware

    http://www.allaccessmarketing.com/clients.htm

    Some more by seaching on google where these scumbags advertise
    http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&ie=UT F-8&oe=UTF- 8&q=email+marketing&meta=

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    Siggy Say, Siggy Do
  6. Re:In the article, it says... by mutende · · Score: 3, Informative

    whois defibworld.com says:

    Duncan Shiels
    #301 6663 SW Beaverton Hillsdale Hwy
    Portland, OR 97225
    US
    Tel.: 503.702.7466
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    Unselfish actions pay back better
  7. Get idea for an email address by Simon+Lyngshede · · Score: 4, Informative
    And it automatically deletes addresses that have such phrases as "info" and "service," those that likely don't immediately bounce to an actual person.
    I'm consider getting a service@ address, maybe that would cut down the amount of spam I'm getting
  8. Talk about fucked up facts! by autopr0n · · Score: 3, Informative

    And it was not until March 1995, that CERN handed over the control of the web to the WWW Consortium run by MIT and INRIA (France). It was only at this point that the Internet was first available for outside use by non-academics.

    WTF!? The 'internet' was available for outside use long before that. Intel.com was registered in 1989. There are other uses of the internet besides 'the web'. Like, I donno, email... Also, before the web, people used things like IRC, email, gopher, telnet, ftp, and Usenet (around since the mid-80s).

    and not only that, mosaic wasn't the first web browser, it was just the first 'good' one. HTML and hypertext had been around (but in limited use) since 1989.

    I'm not saying that this guy isn't full of shit. I'm just saying that you are as well.

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    autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
  9. Re:does this really require a readme.txt?? by letxa2000 · · Score: 3, Informative
    Defeating naive bayesian filtering is easy: weight the message with N random words from a dictionary file, where N is calculated to be sufficiently large that it will surely contain at least half as many squeaky clean words as the number of "most interesting" tokens the filter considers.

    I don't think it's that easy. Bayesian filtering assumes each user has his or her own corpus of good and bad tokens. Taking dictionary words is not likely to find words that have extremely low Bayesian scores--they are likely to find words that are either previously not in the corpus (Paul Graham and I assign those 0.40) or will find words that are not particularly innocent.

    For example, if you look at my corpus right now, the word "CAT" has a 20% chance of being spam, "DOG" has a 56% chance of being spam, "KITCHEN" has a 50% chance of being spam, "THE" a 56% chance of being spam, "RED" a 21% chance of being spam. The point is, you find that you need some truly exceptional CLEAN words (i.e. spam score of 1% or 2%) for a message to NOT be considered spam. If you have a few that rank 99% and your best "dictionary" word comes in at 10%, it's probably still going to be 90%+ overall. In fact, with just 100 good emails and 100 bad emails in the corpus Bayesian will do really good at catching pretty much all spam: the problem is with 100 and 100 you'll get many false positives. A large Bayesian corpus isn't necessary to CATCH spam: a large Bayesian corpus IS necessary to reduce false positives.

    So the point is: Dictionary words will seldom be the words that are going to reduce a message's spam score. It's person-specific words, such as "TED" if you know someone named Ted, or "PARIS" if you like to discuss Europe, etc. that's going to get a message through--not a dictionary attack.

    Plus even if a dictionary attack happens to get through, it will work only a few times at best: The words used in the dictionary attack will eventually have a spam probability assigned to them that makes the very use of the dictionary attack RAISE the spam score rather than lower it. :) It's really quite slick. :)

    I believe Paul Graham is right: This is going to stop current spam big-time. Eventually you'll see really short spams, 1-liners with reference to a website. I'm seeing that already, actually. Messages with a 1-liner that is nothing more than a URL to some incest site. That's where spam is going--and that's going to be even less effective than current spam which will reduce even further the incentive to send spam in the first place. But even those 1-liners will soon be filterable by Bayesian as developers add new characteristics to the Bayesian filter that rank the probability of a message being spam if it consists of nothing but a single URL link, etc.

    Don't underestimate Bayesian. I think you'll find it's much harder to get around than you think.