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."

Comments

Text of Article, In Case of Slashdotting...

[Murdock037]

Steps to become a better spammer:

1. Insert head in ass
2. Click "send"
3. Profit!

Re:Text of Article, In Case of Slashdotting...

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the article, he used to be a web designer. After seeing his site, I now understand why he was forced into a life of spam.

Re:Text of Article, In Case of Slashdotting...

[Slack3r78]

hehe and the geek drive for efficiency shows itself even(especially) in the most devious devious moments. God, I love this place. =)

It doesn't seem terribly complicated

[Anonymous Coward]

Find a product you want to sell or a scam you want to run, find some exploitable mail servers and find a list of email addresses. Then just run a mass emailing program. What's the big deal?

Re:It doesn't seem terribly complicated

[jonadab]

> Obtaining a valid list of e-mail addresses is not very easy,
> you either need to invest money or you need to figure out how
> to harvest e-mails from the web/usenet.

That part's trivial. You'll get 50% invalid addresses, but so what?

Step 3 is easier than you think: at this time, you don't have to
fool the filters of the 0.05% who use even moderately complex
filters[1]; all you have to do is get past the things that are
deployed ISP-wide, like psmtp.com's filtering service. (This is
trivial to get past: write three spams at random, and two of them
will get past. No cleverness required.)

If you have to get past word blacklists, then you also need to use
a thesaurus (or 1337 sp33k), but word blacklists are relatively
uncommon, because they get too many false positives. Really, all
you have to do is get past the filters that ISPs deploy, not the
ones individuals install. Remember, if you have to send twice as
many messages to get the same response, it doesn't cost you that
much more. (This is what makes spam so problematic. *Almost*
makes me want the estamps thing to succeed.)

The hard part is convincing businesses that have money (and are
therefore presumably profitable) that they can gain more than
they lose by investing in your services. I assume you send all
the businesses in the universe adverts for your services and hope
0.001% of them bite. I would like to think that more than 99.9%
of them know better, but... I know better. Fortunately each
spammer has to compete with all the others for limited business,
so the number of spammers who can make money spamming is finite.
Praises be.

As for point 4, finding a spam-friendly ISP is a real pain; it's
much easier to run port scans and find open relays, then test
them to see which ones *don't* do a reverse lookup of your IP.

Then you send to the open relay from a custom MTA that you run
on a dynamic IP in such a way that it randomly generates From
and Received headers and such for each message, thus making it
a real pain for the recipient to track down where the spam
*originated*. Finding out where it came from to your ISP is
easy, but that's an open relay in the APNIC block whose IP is
not reverse-lookupable (virtually *nothing* in APNIC supplies
PTR records), and so tracking down the owner of the relay is
hard, and they don't speak your language, and they don't give
a rodent's posterior about your spam problem. For extra bonus
points, get a hosting deal in Asia and run your MTA there, so
that tracing you back to your ISP in the US is basically
impossible, and if we *do* figure out who runs the MTA in Asia,
we'll assume it's an open relay, provided you insert the usual
forged Received headers. Yes, I've spent way too much time
looking at mail headers.

So in conclusion, the main thing preventing a lot of people such
as myself from becomming spammers is that we hate spam. That, and
it's so obviously *wrong*.

[1] e.g., people like me, who trained a naive bayesian mail
classification system (ifile) on a collection of tens of
thousands of well-categorised messages in 3 dozen distinct
categories, including several distinct spam categories.

But actually, with a modicum of cleverness, a naive bayesian
system can be easily defeated. As soon as I read how the
algorithm works, I realised inside ten minutes how they can
defeat it. Consequently, they can figure it out too; if
enough people start using such systems they'll do that, and
we'll have to get more clever with our mail classification
systems, taking context into account for tokens, at which
point they'll drag out the Markov chain generators, which
will be *hell* to try to filter against. At that point it
might be easiest to hire somebody in the third world (where
the ecconomy is suc

Re:It doesn't seem terribly complicated

[autopr0n]

(This is what makes Spam so problematic. *Almost* makes me want the estamps thing to succeed.)

Estamps are the most idiotic things ever thought up. They introduce so many new parties and variables into the equation it's not even funny.

Email is a relationship between two people. Estamps would require a relationship between the sender, the sender's bank, the receiver's bank, a central authority, etc. It's stupid.

The solution is sender-verification. If you get an email from someone you don't know, send them a response indicating their need to prove their humanity to you. (obviously the other person needs to allow email replies from you as well.). If you need to get mail from some company, you can 'pre-verify' them, for things like receipts from e-commerce companies.

does this really require a readme.txt??

[Tuxinatorium]

all you need is a database of email addresses, a DSL connection, and a mass mailing program. You can send out a million spams an hour.

Re:does this really require a readme.txt??

[dknj]

I was one of the first people to bring spam to AOL. I wrote a program that would jump from chat room to chat room all day and just collect screen names. I would let the program run while I was at school and usually over night (only had one phone line, V.FAST baby). I sold the addresses to businesses and collected a pretty penny while in high school. My mom never believed where I was getting the money and thought I was selling drugs :\ My days of spam came to an end when I found something else to occupy my time. In fact, I never saw spam as something cool.. just an easy way to make money at the time

-dk

Re:does this really require a readme.txt??

[sidster]

I think there is more to it than having bandwidth and software.
You must have quite a few clients willing to pay you
for your "services".

Otherwise, every friend and coworker I have can be a spammer.
Each one of these persons have either a DSL or Cable modem
connection, and most are proficient with computers.

What they (my friends) lack are people willing to pay them for
sending out spam (oh, yeah, another thing working aginst their
success as spammers is morality).

To fight spam and spammers successfully, i think, we must
fight the source and not the messanger (= spammer). That
is finding out who is actually paying for the spam being sent
out and "pound" on them.

I've been fighting spam for several years now. I use RBLs
and ORDBs and even have blacklisted close to 14000 IP
addresses in addition to using spam-filters. But the spam
keeps coming in.

Re:does this really require a readme.txt??

[spacefight]

One word: Asshole.

Re:does this really require a readme.txt??

[Anonymous Coward]

My mom never believed where I was getting the money and thought I was selling drugs :

At least drug users voluntarily buy the drugs from the dealers.

Re:does this really require a readme.txt??

[Steve B]

You must have quite a few clients willing to pay you for your "services".

This shows that an anti-spamming law would, in fact, be a lot easier to enforce than one might imagine. Troll the "spammer support" boards, answer an ad, and then:

"OK, so we're agreed -- $299 to send out the 'Hot Dirty Teen Lezzie Sluts' message to your ten million addresses?"
"Yep; just sign here...."
[pulls out badge] "POLICE! Stand up slowly and put your hands behind your head...."

(And, no, it would not be "entrapment" if the police had evidence that the perp was offering spam services before the sting was set up -- that's one of reasons for the initial ad-trolling step.)

Re:does this really require a readme.txt??

[letxa2000]

What they (my friends) lack are people willing to pay them for sending out spam (oh, yeah, another thing working aginst their success as spammers is morality).

Exactly. Morality. Any woman can be a hooker, they all have the tools... but that doesn't mean that every woman would be a hooker if they had a paying customer. Likewise, just because someone comes to me and offers $2k to spam 10 million addresses from my connection I'm not going to do it. It's not the lack of a paying customer, it's morality.

Unfortunately, morality is hard to control. There are hookers even where it is supposedly illegal and there will be spam even if its illegal. The solution is not political or legal (other than suing them based on theft of service to drive up costs), but rather technical. While I will not deny spammers have been very innovative in getting around simple filters, there is a limited number of things they can do and still deliver a useful commercial to the intended reader. They already mangle words such as V!^gra, etc. and even so my Bayesian filter gives them a rating of 100%. They're going to have to mangle their message so much to get past ever-improving filters that at some point their messages are going to be so mangled that they will scarcely be readable. At that point, their already astonishingly low response rate will drop even further.

Spam and anti-spam is a war, as they said in the article. But the anti-spam camp will ultimately win because we have the advantage that, in the end, the spammers have to deliver a readable and understandable message. That puts limits on what tricks they can play to get around filters.

Re:does this really require a readme.txt??

[facelessnumber]

When I was in high school, I had an AOL account. I knew there were other ways to get online, but I actually liked AOL. There actually was "value added" AOL content at the time, and among those were the chatrooms. I used them, and the forums, a good bit. I later on learned that creating a user profile had become a bad idea, because that put you in the Member Directory, which spambots used to get addresses. Pity, because the directory was a good thing at first. The chat rooms were too. You had to dig around to find good ones, but they were there. Now, because of people like you wanting to make a buck by annoying people by the millions, an AOL user can't go into a publicly listed room or even a private one with a non-random title, without instantly becoming a spam target.

It's been a long time since I used the account regularly, but I still have that account. I use it when I'm out of town, because no matter where you are, you'll usually find an access number. Not for email though. Never for email. Sometimes I'll go into my inbox though to show people what eight years' worth of abuse from people like you has done to it...

I log in, and the box is full. Every time. I start my demonstration by deleting about twenty or thirty emails, and then we watch. After a minute, I refresh it. One or two more emails. Another minute, same thing. Wait five minutes and there are at least ten new messages. Wait half an hour, and the box is full again.

Thanks, asshole.

But I do admire your courage in posting non-AC that you used to do this. And I thank you for giving me an opportinuty to actually speak to one of you. I wish your email address wasn't hidden, but I do see a URL. In glancing at your page I don't see an email address, but I do see a form on your page for sending messages to your cell phone.

Fortunately, I don't care enough about it to do anything with that, but I did want to point that little detail out for every one of the good folks on Slashdot to see...

Re:does this really require a readme.txt??

[letxa2000]

First, the human brain is fantastically good at interpretation. It will take such an enormous amount of mangling to make the message unreadable that you'd have to filter out virtually everything.

I'm not forgetting that... But you have to remember it's a sales pitch. The more distorted and mangled the message looks, more people will just completely ignore it. Regardless of whether a message was spam or not, I would not take seriously any message that was sent to me in, essentially, SMS-speak. I certainly wouldn't refinance my home or accept medical advice from an organization that wrote me in that fashion.

Second, and more importantly, the majority of people do not wage a 24 hour war against spam and run a Bayesian spam filter. They just put up with it.

For now, that is true. But as time progresses more and more companies and ISPs will offer filters (perhaps Bayesian, others, or both) to their customers--perhaps defaulting it to "on." I wouldn't count on typical users making an effort to avoid spam, but I would expect more and more comapnies and ISP to do so.

If it was purely Bayesian filter vs spammer, spammer would win hands down.

I disagree, and I wonder if you have done much investigating with Bayesian? I've been working on it for the last 7 months and, believe me, Bayesian is surprisingly effective despite its simplicity. Messages I thought it wouldn't catch ARE caught with no special logic whatsoever.

Three things I would mention and which I advocate, especially as spammers try to outwit Bayesian.

1. Bayesian WILL catch their messages unless they munge their messages, which we must assume they will. They already do and, presumably, they'll do it more in the future. This is simple to address. Once your Bayesian corpus gets sufficiently large the expectation is that a typical valid email will not add a significant number of previously-unseen tokens to the corpus. If you have a corpus of thousands of messages and receive a new message of which 40% (for example) are new tokens, you may want to assume that's a spammer munging because a real mail is not going to have that many "new" tokens.

2. Even if you don't assign a cut-off point as in #1, you just make "characteristics" out of the number of new tokens. For example, if you have a message that contains 50-60% new tokens, that itself becomes a new Bayesian token. Perhaps, over time, Bayesian will find that "messages with 50-60% new tokens have an 80% chance of being spam." So the fact that they munge becomes a damning factor even if the computer can't identify the actual munging.

3. You add new characteristics as in #2. Perhaps another characteristic is "Messages that contain no body except for a URL." Perhaps 85% of those messages are spam, and Bayesian can count that as a damning characteristic. Or, perhaps, messages where over 50% of the body are devoted to URLs have a 90% chance of being spam. All these add new "characteristics" that can be used to calculate a spam probability for Bayesian.

So, the point is, Bayesian itself is very, very capable of solving the spam problem. I'm not saying that we write a Bayesian filter today and it never has to evolve. But now when spammers implement new countermeasures, we just have Bayesian do analysis that looks for those countermeasures and, when found, counts them as another characteristic. The algorithm remains untouched, but we have a growing number of characteristics that Bayesian is scoring--not just tokens (words) in the message, but characteristics OF the message.

Believe me, 7 months of research and development on this has convinced me that Bayesian is going to be the headache to end all headaches for spammers. Will it catch 100% of spam? No (more like 99.5%, actually |grin|). But will it catch enough so that the typical user isn't bothered by spam and to further reduce the response rate of spam to reduce the incentive to send it? Yes, it will.

And regardless of whether or not the w

Re:does this really require a readme.txt??

[jonadab]

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. Further note that these words do
not have to get in the way of the message: they can be stuck
anyplace the filter will see them, even if the user will probably
not see them there. (Think: X-Die-Filter-Die headers, sig blocks,
MIME separators, HTML comments, to the right of a hundred spaces,
and so on and so forth.)

Of course, we can make bayesian filters less naive by having them
consider context of tokens, but that consumes more system resources,
and then the spammers can drag out the Markov chains. And we know
there are miscreants who know how to write Markov chain generators,
because hipcrime has been using them for years to get past the
net.admin.net-abuse.* robocancel-moderation and pull assorted
maladjusted and juvenile stunts. And detecting Markov chains is
probably AI complete, or at least significantly difficult.

Regardless of what the spammers do, bayesian filters (if made less
naive than the current ones) can *probably* continue to work when
trained on a large bulk of well-sorted mail from a single user's
account and used to sort that same user's mail, but I don't think
they will ever be a hassle-free drop-in solution for the masses.
Without good data on the nature of a specific user's mail (i.e.,
data the spammers (hopefully) don't have), they're too easy to
defeat. Markov chains are not even especially new technology, and
while the idea is clever, much more advanced autogeneration is
possible... *generating* human language text is *way* easier
than parsing it, which makes the filtering game ultimately a
losing battle for mail clients -- unless intelligent user input
(selection) goes into training the filter for *each* person's mail,
which gives you a leg up on the spammer who doesn't have your data.

Re:does this really require a readme.txt??

[letxa2000]

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.

Re:does this really require a readme.txt??

[letxa2000]

I wrote it myself based on a Bayesian approach almost entirely on Paul Graham's original "A Plan For Spam." Paul's article claimed 99.5% success rate and, having implemented it almost exactly how he suggested, I'm finding that to be true. Sometimes it dips down to 99.4% and other times it bounces up to 99.7%, but it hovers right around 99.5% or 99.6%.

As of last month, 75% of my mail was spam. This month it appears that has inched up to 81%.

Jeez

[Dachannien]

"The idea is it's just like a commercial," Shiels said. "You don't just send it to one address once. You send it to one address five or six times. Do commercials only come on once? You get the same crap in your e-mail more than once. You have to bombard the person."

And they wonder why they get death threats.

Re:Jeez

[Anonymous Coward]

How many of you have gotten spam from this "University Degree" program? Want to know who they are? I found them. But I also found a way to really cost them (spammers) a lot of money, and it got to the point where they FINALLY gave up and took me off their list.

These people have a HUGE call center in London. But they have a USA registered toll free number.

Interestingly though, the ring sounds like a European type ring (germany, russia, france), but not the Brr brr type OK ring.

After further invstigation and social engineering some people at the UK call center, I found out the cost of every phone call.

30 cents - when calling them from a payphone (no charge to the caller of course).

$1.75/min connection fee from the 800 number through the overseas link to the UK call center.

SO I encourage all of you slashdotters to work their dialing finger and start calling their number...

877-722-2413 TOLL FREE to the caller, but over $2/min for the spammer.

It's best you call them from a payphone (they incurr more charges that way).

They apparently have about 10 USA lines, so it won't take up that many people to completely cut off their call center from USA calls.

Tips for keeping them on the line for a long time include giving them a speal about how you want to mail them a check, and to please give out their snailmail address. Of course they won't give it, but ask to speak to a supervisor (Even MORE hold time they have to pay for), then argue with them. I assure you, they are really sneaky people and KNOW they are selling this crap, but I also learned their policy is not to spam just once, but these people just HAVE to send at least 1000 spam messages PER EMAIL address.

REMEMBER - YOU can fight SPAM - FIGHT BACK. Take advantage of those 800 numbers they give out. Make them pay.

Waiting for bus or train? Are there payphones handy? Well, take down this number, and put it in your address book, then you can amuse yourself while waiting for train or bus, and put those payphones to good use.

1-877-722-2413

After your little dialing binge, you'll feel a great satisfaction, knowing you costed them this money.

Re:Jeez

[Anonymous Coward]

When your 10 year old daughter opens a message that talks about "Barnyard Fucking" (complete with pictures of women sucking off horses) you'll understand.

In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

Next week its how to be a pimp, followed the week after by "mugging for fun and profit".

How do you...

[bazik]

"How do you torture a spammer" would be more interesting.

Maybe tie him up on a light post and throw AOL CD's at him?

Re:How do you...

[TopShelf]

Personally, I think it would be more dramatic to tie him down and place one AOL CD at a time on his chest, eventually crushing him under the weight of 100 million disks. Talk about bulk email!

In the article, it says...

[DragonPup]

He'd heard enough complaints about spam from his friends, but he never understood them. The junk mail his mail carrier delivers bothers him much more, Shiels said.

"It costs money to be processed. And it's a waste of trees. It's intrusive as hell because you have to go through all of it. People don't get mad about that, and I don't understand why," he mused.

Is anyone else thinking what I am thinking?

Re:In the article, it says...

[mutende]

whois defibworld.com says:

Duncan Shiels
#301 6663 SW Beaverton Hillsdale Hwy
Portland, OR 97225
US
Tel.: 503.702.7466

Thanks Slashdot!

[rolfwind]

Just what we need! To teach more people this valuable trade.... But really, it won't be worth it. In a few years, so many people will be into it that the companies will have the upper hand on who to hire to get the message out........ and unless you have lists of email addresses in the hundreds of millions it won't be worth it. Besides, your customers will be limited to porn or those sleazy as-seen-on-TV type products. I suggest reading some advertising books, since that is the trade, and finding a more novel way to apply it to the net if you want to make real money.

online clubs?

[scubacuda]

...Shiels found the entry point -- online clubs for spammers. The Internet bulletin boards, which charge membership fees, allow "bulk e-mail" entrepreneurs to exchange information on clients...

Where are these things? I'm sure tons of /.ers would love to go in and wreck havoc on them.

Re:online clubs?

[NotAnotherReboot]

If they make you pay, you'd actually have to give them money in an attempt to bother them. Then, when you try to bother them, they just remove you account and keep your money.

If you're implying some denial of service attack, I don't really think you're any better than they are.

Re:online clubs?

[Steve B]

If you're implying some denial of service attack, I don't really think you're any better than they are.

I do not find your moral equivalence between an unprovoked attack on innocent bystanders (what the spammers are doing) and a retaliation/deterrent attack on perps (what a DoS on a spammer-support site would be) to be at all convincing.

hmm

[revmoo]

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

Re:hmm

[treat]

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.

What I find more interesting is that trivial software was being sold for many many thousands of dollars. He must have spent $20K on software. Are spammers themselves that stupid?

Re:hmm

[alphaseven]

What I find most interesting about this is that the article says that Sheils made over $1000 a week.

Maybe, but really i believe these guys about as much as those guys on late night tv with the yacht selling real estate advice.

If Sheils is really smart he is probably setting himself up so he can sell software/books to wannabe spammers. He can include articles like this and tell people "Work from home, make money like me."

Re:hmm

[Phroggy]

Note that he didn't necessarily make $1000 a week from people buying the products he advertised. He made $1000 a week from companies who paid him to advertise their stuff. Big difference! He mentioned that mortgage companies would pay him for anyone who requested more informtation, even if that person never actually got the mortgage.

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

True Story :

Somebody's eMail address gets abused as a spam reply-to (yielding a LOT of bounces, replies, etc.), sends it to a friend of mine who then goes on to investigate. Product being advertized is some kind of herbal that is supposed to give you more power, if you know what I mean.
Either way, site looks flashy (no flash though), with a snappy order-form, asks for cc number, etc. all through normal http. Now of course since you want to find out WHO is the perpetrator, you try variations on the URL, say, / instead of /order.php ... Whoops, directory listing. Interesting folder named orders there. Interesting file named ****orders.txt there. That file contains all the records that have been submitted on the order form, complete with name, address, Credit Card number, the whole package.

(we did forward said information to mastercard and visa)

A few days after, we check back. That file has now grown to a couple hundred (!) lines, most of which look legitimate (all @aol addresses though), all ordering them herbal bottles for $50 a pop. Sucks to be them. I don't know whether or not others have found the same facts, but I'm rather sure there are more than one or two persons that have found this gaping hole.

Either way, spam works, unfortunately. Just think about it ... a couple hundred times $50 for some junk that'll probably cost them less than $5, if they deliver at all, all for the price of sending some shameless eMails (undoubtably quite a few of them, but still).
Even if most people feel the same way as us, that leaves the 0.5% completely and utterly clueless and desperate for a longer version of a certain organ. Send enough eMails, find enough idiots.

Woohoo.

Re:hmm

[fname]

Here's the sad part. Let's say he sends ten millions spams a day. Then, for the sake of easy math, assume he makes $100/day. This works out to "earnings" of 1 cent for every 1000 emails he sends. This is very interesting.

First of all, how much does it cost to deal with spam? I bet someone has numbers, I bet the cost/ spam is much higher. But, consider this. Assume filters catch 90% of all spam, Then lets say it takes 1 second to delete the spam. At that rate, one person deletes 3600 spams an hour, or 36,000 total, including the filtered spam. So it would take 1 person 300 hours to handle this much spam. At a rate of $10/hour, this guy wastes $3000 of people's money for every $100 he makes. And he's providing a service? Parasite or leech is mor like it.

But it gets better. If he only makes 1 penny for every 1000 emails, that means we don't need a tax of anything approaching 1 cent per email. It could be 1 cent for every 100 emails, and spammers would no longer find it economically feasible. Of course, the infrastructure of the net has to change to allow this, but charging even $1 for a thousand emails would not bother legitmate email marketing messages (opt-in stuff), or regular folk. The solution to the SPAM problem is simple, as soon as the inherent trust in the system goes away.

Re:spam & mail

[Sebby]

"Email spam cost us money and bandwidth on our end, bulk mail dont"

Not entirely true. Most cities (including mine) have a recycling program (and most likely a cost-per-bag for garbage); every pound of recycling will end up costing you something in your taxes somewhere, so the more you have, the more cost to recycling, the more of your money in taxes.

So while bulk mailers pay for sending it, it's still costing you to dispose of it.

Re:spam & mail

[Golias]

He also doesn't seem to realize that he made his thousands by sending messages about penis enlargement to young children's e-mail boxes.

Furthermore, he doesn't seem to realize that Spam makes the entire infrastructure of the Internet more expensive.

I don't care if he got out of it because he couldn't stand the heat. Assholes like him, each getting into it for a year or two and then getting out, are what keeps the problem going. I would very much like to punch this guy in the throat.

I don't under stand why...

[Exanerd]

> Well first I PAY to have an Internet connection, I do not however, pay for the mail that gets sent to me - thats the mailers responsibility. Also it seems a bit more personal being intruded upon in your own home, than having something sitting in your physical mailbox outside on the step, or the entryway to your building. Personally I think snail mail is far more wasteful in terms of actual resources, I just don't directly pay for it and I don't get as much of it and I can recycle it, but the time I spend sifting through hundreds of ridiculous spam emails a day impacts me more directly.

As much as I hate to make it personal...

[JimDabell]

Shiels decided a spamming career wasn't worth the personal cost.

There you have it. I wonder if there is a way of applying this cost to every spammer.

Server Crashes

[micaiah]

"Because the hyperactivity caused a crash about every other day, Shiels monitored the computers all day."
Hmmm I guess the spam software is running on Windows.

information wants to be free

[ArchieBunker]

Sure its ok to post the source to DeCSS but now all of a sudden you don't like the SPAMMER-HOWTO? Thats odd I thought you didn't have a problem with it just being information and all.

Re:information wants to be free

[datavortex]

I don't disagree with their posting of the information, but I am disappointed at the persepctive of the article. It seems to glamorize spammers, I would have liked more commentary from the antispammers, and it would have been nice if they hadn't screwed up their info, such as the link to SPAMHAUS.ORG, not freakin' spamhouse.org.

How to stop it

[Nexus76]

Does anybody have a easy and effective way to stop spam mail reach the inbox?

Early adopter or bad reporter?

[isomeme]

Entering a murky world In 1998, Shiels quit his patrol sergeant job at the Adelanto Police Department in Southern California and moved back home to Portland to start a full-time career in Web design, a hobby he had been dabbling in for five years.

So he started in 1993, the year the first creaky Mosaic browser began filtering out of the lab? I mean, I consider myself a pretty cutting-edge tech dude, and I didn't build my first site until 1994.

Re:Early adopter or bad reporter?

[ipsuid]

Sorry, but you are wrong...

• The web was available to the general public prior to 1995. If it wasn't then I'm not sure what I was using while in high school!
• Netscape was not the first publically available web browser. You mention Mosaic, but assume that it was only available to academic institutions. It might have crashed every third image, but it was available.
• There were public ISPs well before 1993. In fact, one of my accounts from that time is still active (after 9 years of not being billed). The web was just as open as the rest of the net was at that time.

• Early adopter, sure... but definately not impossible.

What is truly amazing

[SCHecklerX]

Is that this scumbag doesn't believe he is doing anything wrong.

If he feels that this stuff is so legitimate, why is he using software that abuses open relays and proxies, and forges mail headers, instead of publishing the real address he is sending his spew from? Hmmm?

It's forgery, plain and simple, and there are laws that deal with it. Prosecute the fsckers on it already!!!

Re:What is truly amazing

[datavortex]

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.

DeCSS has legal uses...

[gilesjuk]

Such as watching DVD movies on operating systems with no DVD playing software. Where as spamming is always a pain in the butt.

Before DeCSS you would not be able to watch a DVD on Linux. Before spamming it was possible to let kids use email with no fears of them seeing obscene things, you can't now. Which is the biggest menace, I'll let you decide.

Interesting Read

[unborracho]

I have to say that this is a very interesting read. It portrays the spammer's point of view. Some of the points in the article actually make a lot of sense. We do get lots of junk mail from the u.s. post office (they could easily filter that, but they don't), yet we complain about spam the most... why?

I thought that was an interesting point. Although this article doesn't go into too much technical detail, it provided some insight into the business aspects of this which I don't particularly agree with ethically. Sure, it's a very easy way to make money if you know what you're doing, but it's still violating people's privacy by sending them unwanted messages.

Another thought... If your regulary Joe (the guy in this article) can find ways to become a spammer in 5-6 months of research, why can't the government do its own investigations and just put a stop to these facilitating network groups? I thought there were laws against spam in the U.S.

Re:Interesting Read

[ShaiHulud-23]

We do get lots of junk mail from the u.s. post office (they could easily filter that, but they don't), yet we complain about spam the most... why?

A few reasons. For one thing, spam is new, but we've been getting junk snail mail for years so we've had more time to adjust to it as a fact of life. Spam has seen a massive surge in the past year or so and people who weren't especially bothered by it in 2001 are now getting 300+ messages per day in their hotmail accounts.

Secondly, we trust snail mail more because it's distributed by the government and the senders have to pay for it and follow certain regulated procedures. While it's still unsolicited and still an invasion of privacy, it's generally legitimate and we take it on faith that there is an accountable, legitimate business behind it. The vast majority of spam is shady and sleazy, selling pyramid schemes and unapproved drugs and beastie porn, sent blindly to people who didn't ask for it and have no interest in it, by spammers who hide their identities and steal resources to do it.

We tolerate pushy salesmen at car dealerships because they work for a real company and are just doing their jobs. If snail junk mail is the pushy salesman, spam is the shifty guy in a trenchcoat standing in an alley going "psst, hey buddy, wanna Rolex?"

Re:Interesting Read

[MsWillow]

We do get lots of junk mail from the u.s. post office (they could easily filter that, but they don't), yet we complain about spam the most... why?

Hmm, could it be that, in amongst the real snailmail that I get, there might be, hmm, three? Four? pieces of junk mail per week. Those are easy to deal with - in fact, in Seattle, we have curbside recycling pickup.

Whereas, inamongst the spam I get daily (averages close to 90 pieces per day, and one day, when I was busy actually having a life, I didn't check my mail for almost 12 hours, at which point my ISP actually shut down my account's email, and warned me about getting too much mail!), there might be as many as ... hmm ... two real emails? On a good day?

See, I once posted on Usenet, and some genius in the newsgroup decided, as a favor to the community, to collect all the posters' email addresses, and ***list them on a Web site!*** (after which, the genius closed her own email account, so nobody can email her to remove their address). Between that, and my dear mother (bless her on this of all days!) who seems to think that emailed "greeting cards" are indeed free (and thusly signing me up for still more spam lists, as now they know that the address is valid).

Anybody wonder why I want an email program that uses a whitelist, and removes anything not on the list at the server level, before I even have to see it?

Best quote:

[Saint Aardvark]

"I know this all sounds like you're hiding yourself and doing this illegitimately, but the reason you have to do it is everybody tries to shut you down," Shiels said.

On another note, anyone got any idea where these "spammer clubs" he mentions might be? I got this new toy I wanna try out...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Controlling their money flow

[unsinged int]

How about making it illegal for a company to finance a spammer? They are starting to pass laws that make spam illegal, but why not go to the root of the problem? If you're going to make spam illegal, then making it illegal for a company to finance an illegal activity doesn't seem that much of a stretch. In fact, that's probably already covered under some more generic existing law.

If someone receives spam for a product and it could be shown that the company that makes the product financed the spamming, then fine the company some big bucks. It might be hard to prove, but in a lot of cases the fear that it might happen would be enough to stop companies from doing it.

There were some figures in the article indicating how much the spammer got paid per sale or per inquiry about the product. That has to be showing up (probably under some other name) in some company's advertising budget. With the crackdown on corporate accounting I think some of this could be uncovered.

As usual, someone misread the article

[compwizrd]

How is a 41 year old man called a boy?

Seems rather honest, and upfront.

[nurb432]

He claims he abides by the laws, and removes people when requested. And refused porn customers...

Also rather intelligent and well spoken.

While his previous 'career' is absolute scum, at least he took it seriously, as a legitimate business..

I'm impressed, too bad not most of the rest don't have his level of 'morality', and 'responsibility'.

As much as we all hate it, ( I know I do, both at home and due to my position at work ) as long as its legal, it will continue to be a large part of net-life.

This quote says it all

[philll]

Here's a quote from the guy: "There's people who sit in their basements and have nothing better to do than get all upset about spam."

What total assholes these people are.

Re:This quote says it all

[letxa2000]

Yeah... Kind of like there are people in the basement that have nothing better to do than get all upset about people:

1. Mugging them on the street (theft of service).

2. "Brrowing" their cars without permission to rob a bank even though they return them later, so what, difference does it make? (using someone elses mail server to relay spam).

3. Sending threats to politicians using your address as the return address (using some innocent person's email address as the return address for bounced spam).

4. Handing out pornographic magazines to everyone that walks by--10 meters away from an elementary school (sending porn spam when you have no clue whether or not the recepient is even an adult).

The NERVE of some of us getting upset about such silly things.

A clue about effective spam deterrence

[SysKoll]

The most satisfying solution would be to hunt down and kill spammers myself, but some courts still erroneously think that spammers are human beings. We need to have more children of judges receive explicit XXX spam. If you know a judge and their kids' email address, you know what you have to do. :-)

Until then, we are forced to put down the ClueBat and resort to financial penalty for spammers and people hiring them.. The article says: Viagra distributors pay spammers per sale -- about $60 for every $150 order -- while financial companies typically pay for every consumer who requests more information -- as much as $12 for mortgage leads and as much as $5 for insurance referrals.

There is something to act upon here. It's already illegal to make a sell through a prohibited third-party. You cannot, say, give a commission to a guy who sells your stuff in Libya.

So how about giving the Federal Trade Commission the power to slap a fine on people who make sales on spam-acquired leads? Enforcement would be easy. Just answer mortage or insurance spam. The would-be insurance or mortagage broker contacts you, proving he has used the services of a spammer. Small claim court, or send the stuff to the FTC. Whammo, big fine, they won't do it again.And since they have a legal front-end in the financial world, they have assets to seize if they try to evade courts.

-- SysKoll

How to retaliate

[jgarland79]

Here is an idea.. Whenever you get spam mail (the real kind that comes in your mailbox). Take those business reply mail envelopes and fill them with all the spam you can, and send it back. The heavier, the better. I have a few friends that do this. It helps out the postal service by giving them more money and it helps you to get your point across about the junk mailings.

Time for someone to go Cartman on him?

[draziw]

Wonder what his parents taste like?

Re:spam & mail

[i.r.id10t]

Which is why I send it back to them. Postage paid business reply? Right back in the box. Ads and such that come with my gas card bill, etc.? back in the envelope with my payment.

Yeah, its not much, but at least I'm sending a little more $ to the USPS for the PP mail, and I'm having the sending company use their resources to dispose of the trash they shouldn't have sent me.

Weapons against Spammers:

[LaceHater]

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

We'll Shock Your Heart ... For Pennies a Jolt!

[WCityMike]

Has anyone actually looked at what the business is that he's now in?

> "Defibworld is an authorized provider
> specializing in state of the art new and
> pre-owned AED's and Defibrillators at
> the lowest prices!"

Just what I want some hospital to be shocking my heart with: a "pre-owned" defibrillator purchased "at the lowest price"!

Re:maybe ?

[Phroggy]

Note that he says he DOESN'T SPAM ANYMORE. He's not likely to do it again. Let it go. Find somebody who is currently spamming, and go after them.

here are some

[ramzak2k]

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=

It's easy to become a spammer

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

First you get bitten by an existing spammer, then you transform. You'll need to stay out of sunlight and avoid garlic, though.

Killing the demand

[Inode Jones]

If mortgage companies pay spammers $5 for every referral then why can't we spam them back?

Simply create ten million or so "honeypot" email addresses, and have an automated system have them all request information on the mortgage deal.

Once the mortgage company is on the hook for $50 million, they will think again before going to a spam outfit.

This will knock out the mortgage and credit card spams, but won't make a dent in the porn or Viagra spams, as those actually require an order.

Re:Killing the demand

[1s44c]

There will always be people willing to do anything for money, and people wanting spam sent. There will always be international borders to hide behind.

The best way I can see to fix the current spam problem is to use tarpits like spamd. My OpenBSD mail system will tarpit any incoming SMTP connection on the spews list, and any connection from a netblock that I don't like the look of.

Tarpits make sending spam a very slow process, a few more of these would make spamming too expensive to be worth the effort.

Spammers - My email is spamme@our-police.co.uk

Pr0n sub-rule of Rule #1?

[AndroidCat]

Rule #1: Spammers always lie.

Many online pornography companies seek spammers, but Shiels said he didn't even consider hawking porn.

Sub-rule: Spammers always lie about pushing pr0n.

Article author

[AEton]

"Jeffrey Kosseff", jeffkosseff@news.oregonian.com, has written us a wonderful article short on facts and sadly devoid of technical information. This reminds me of one other Jeff K. I know--coincidence? Methinks not.

Bulk Snail Mail

[Anonymous Coward]

Many of the posters seem to be unaware that bulk mail sent by the Post Office actually subsidizes the cost of regular First Class mail. Hence, for all its drawbacks, it does provide legitimate benefits - unlike spam, whose costs are passed on to users and service providers.

A Warm, Fuzzy, Happy Feeling

[altairmaine]

What's so great about the article? The reason this particular spammer quit!

He quit because of hostile, harassing emails from the angry public! They work! Every email you've sent telling a spammer that they're a worthless turd of a human being had some miniscule effect!

Even now, the guy admits no moral qualms about his former job. He's still a thoughtless punk who sees nothing wrong with the practice, and I'd still like to punch him in the nose. But he QUIT, because we made his life miserable in return.

The lesson: keep giving 'em hell. It's not just gratifying, it sometimes works.

Re:Do the math...

[26199]

It just occured to me, this could present the ultimate punishment for spammers... jail time for the amount of our time they've wasted. It's a numbers game...

It amazes me...

[KC7GR]

...that an ex-cop, who should certainly know the difference between 'Right' and 'Wrong,' would not see spamming for the ongoing theft of bandwidth and resources that it truly is. He got out of it because of all the hate mail and such that he was getting, not because it was just plain unethical.

I still think the best possible defense against spam is to be self-hosted, server-wise. I would also be interested to know how often this guy had to change ISPs thanks to being (rightfully) shut down for abuse of resources.

Then again, if he were hosted on AT&T/Comcast, that might never have happened. AT&T likes spammer money too much.

Open proxies

[httptech]

This is the primary method of spam distribution today. If the spammers are smart, they are staying away from the Sobig.a proxies on port 1180/1182 due to the fact they will allow anti-spammers to quickly track down the spammer's real IP address. If it truly is a handful of big time spammers sending the bulk of the email, one could make a pretty big impact on them this way.

They do filter postal junk mail--if you ask

[mdfst13]

If you ask the Post Office to filter out the junk mail, they will. This is not 100% effective, but about 90% of postal junk mail is added on a per address basis by the post office. They can and will stop delivering that if requested.

Also, back when I only got a few spams a week, I used to read them. I never bought anything from them, but I would look at ones I found interesting. The problem is that we have gone from five to ten spams a week to hundreds. My yahoo account (which I mainly use for site registrations) collects hundreds of emails each week in its bulk (spam) folder.

There are several costs to me of that volume. One, I have to spend a certain amount of time checking for legitimate email. Two, what if I incorrectly classify a real email as spam. Three, I don't feel comfortable publishing my email address now, since I don't want to get more spam. In the normal course of business, I would want to publish my email (how much time is spent on taking anti-spam kludges out of email; how much server time is spent trying to send email to these invalid addresses). Four, since spam is sent indiscriminately, it drowns out legitimate uses; if it is a product in which I would be interested, I would like to learn about it. Unfortunately, very little spam is targeted towards my interests (science fiction, fantasy, etc.). Five, when I send email, I am subject to it being indiscriminately deleted because I am not a recognized sender.

Two thirds of the email traffic overall is spam. Without it (and the computationally intense filtering created by it), we could easily cut the infrastructure in half. Think about it. Half the email servers in use could become web servers, etc. instead.

By contrast, postal junk mail does not increase your delivery costs. In fact, postal junk mail fees pay a good portion of the cost of maintaining mail delivery to people. If postal junk mail stopped tomorrow, the post office would have to raise postage to cover the fact that they would then be running the same delivery routes with less mail. Even if there are disposal costs, these are offset by the savings in postage.

There are very few anti-spam laws in the US. The few that do exist are state laws rather than federal laws. Most anti-spam prosecutions are based on fraud and damage claims. Further, in the US, it is not really possible to shut down a group talking about doing something. It's not illegal to discuss how the law could be broken.

Meh

[Skim123]

This guy basically shared his story for a publicity plug for his defibralator Web site (see the last paragraph in the story). This would be synonymous to an ex-Enron exec who joined up with PepsiCola after the Enron fallout sharing his story of deceipt only to start off with saying, "Before I begin, let's all enjoy a Pepsi. Mmmmmm, Pepsi tastes so good and its stock price is very reasonable - buy now!"

Has Anybody Actually Checked This Out?

[StormyMonday]

First rule -- spammers lie. And there are a bunch of inconsistancies in the article that make me wonder.

I'd want to take a look at his books, and his bank account. Get a list of his clients, and see how much stuff they're actually selling. "Spam on commission" sounds seriously odd.

Also keep in mind that $1000/week is $50,000/year -- not all that impressive.

Get idea for an email address

[Simon Lyngshede]

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

Sadly, I have to agree with him

[JayBlalock]

Postal spam is worse. I've gotten to the point that, whenever I move, I *don't* fill out a change of address card because I'm sick of the fliers following me everywhere I go. I usually get 2 or 3 legitimate items of postal mail a week, versus dozens of bulk-mail ads. I'd simply not check my mailbox (which involves a 6-minute hike to the front of the apartment complex and back) but not checking it for more than a couple days causes my box to be crammed full. So, should I be more annoyed with: A)E-Spam, which takes me a whole 5 seconds to filter every time I check my e-mail, and is almost certainly mixed in with legitimate e-mails or B)A daily 6-minute hike which generally has the sole purpose of emptying my mailbox to physically make room for more bulk mail, with little chance of any practical yeild. See my\his point? (and no comments about needing the exercise, I quite enjoy walking - when it's by my choice out of no other obligation)

Sentencing for Convicted Spammers

[Seek_1]

When a spammer is actually caught, rather than fining them, I submit this incredibly complex formula for determining PRISON time.

1 second in prison, for every email that they've sent.

So if a spammer is caught, and after they raid his computers they figure he did 10 million emails that week, that would be...

10 000 000 / (24 * 3600) = 115 days in prison (roughly 4 months, for that week)

I think that would work out to a managable amount of time (ie something that won't overflow the prisons). It also would make things easier since the authorities would only need to analyze a relatively small set of data to get proof and sentencing (ie this month's ISP logs)

Or even if it wasn't prison-time, they could easily be forced to manual labour for the city the live in or something... (preferably something like cleaning sewers, but basically anywhere that manual labour is needed...)

sound like a good idea?

Re:Sentencing for Convicted Spammers

[Alsee]

I can't decide whether to appluad your suggestion or criticize it. In another post I assumed that it takes an average of 1 second per spam to identify and delete it. I then worked out that at the rate this guy was sending spam each year he was burning up an entire lifetime of other people's time just deleting the crap.

So, is a life sentence a fair punnishment for one year of spamming?

-

I disagree.

[Anonymous Coward]

He claims to have been a cop. And then he claims to have followed the laws regarding spam. Despite his going around those laws and using relays in other countries.

Not to mention I am sure he was in violation of his ISP's Terms of Service.

And he keeps portraying those who oppose his spamming as "living in basements".

What's with that? Doesn't he feel secure enough in his previous profession? Why does he have to keep making such claims about people who oppose his previous profession?

Also, why does he phrase it as "a war" and having to "bombard" people?

No, this isn't like a commercial on television. If I'm not watching that show, I don't get the commercials.

small social networks are vulnerable.

[Nihilanth]

Ive seen a rehash in this thread of several sensible (and not so sensible) ideas regarding reducing spam, and making life tougher for spammers. One idea this article gave me, however, that i havent seen discussed much, involves these message boards that were alluded to in the article.

A digital social network (in the form of bullitain boards, etc) through which people can trade information about addresses, software, and spamming methods should be a trivial thing for a large digitally sophisticated crowd (ie slashdot) to find and then attack, either by trolling/flooding, or more outright destructive means.

This dosent address the actual hardware involved in sending and receiving spam, but rather constitutes a multi-front assault against a subculture. Maybe it wont stop all spam, but it would make it harder for people to get into the spam business, by either exposing this social infrastructure and diluting it, or disabling it violently by disrupting the virtual real-estate it resides in.

Re:He's not making much money

[Eskarel]

Not only is 52k not lame for a full-time job, not even for CS anymore, but you also have to take into account the limited amount of effort it takes to maintain such a buisness.

He may have been making only 52k a year, but he could quite easily have worked a regular 40hr/week job in addition to that if he really needed more money, and this took virtually no skill on his part, which is the problem.

Even in a much better economy than currently exists, only highly skilled workers are going to be making much more than 40k a year, if you don't have at least a bachelor's degree you can probably kiss even 40k a year good bye. For someone who doesn't have a college degree and is making closer to 30k or less for working their tail off, this sort of money would look damned appealing, especially if they could keep their current job.

Do the math

[broothal]

He's been involved in the spamming business for 6 months

He spent the first 5 months researching and one month of spamming

He spent $10.000 on spam-software

He claims he made $1000 a week.

4 weeks times $1000=$4000 income.
$4000 income minus $10.000 is -$6000. So, the guy loses $6000 on spamming.

Film at eleven...

But you do get one benefit...

[geekotourist]

Albeit from an involuntary agreement: in return for that bulk mail all first class mail you send out is much cheaper- bulk mail subsidizes regular mail. However, because postal mail is a public good (in the economists' sense) you yourself don't negotiate the contract about this. If as in your case you don't receive or send much postal mail it is costly to you, but on average it works out.

Bulk unsolicited email is the exact opposite. It is an unnegotiated public bad- neither you nor your ISP negotiates that 'contract' with the spammers that makes all email / ISP services much more expensive.

Cable & DSL are geting BIIIIG here.

[jpellino]

"Ready, set, spam Armed with swaths of information, Shiels purchased four computers and two cable-modem connections, which soon were running above full capacity with only about six hours of rest each day. But that was just the beginning of the investments. "

This makes sense. In the past month or so, the amount traceable to DSL or cable clients has now pushed over 50% of my spam. I'm slowly automating turfing them to the abuse depts - but some don't even let you send directly - you have to go fill out a form. And they demand the full message- difficult when the email grabs an image as you open it - those don't stay. Seems the cable/dsl companies have this very low on their priority list.

I thought the idea was to rid ourselves of spam!

[digital photo]

Okay, the above poster is just being stupid.

I thought the goal was to give spammers incentive, whether negative or positive, to stop spamming.

How is abusing someone who gave up spamming going to help?

The message you are saying is:

"Once you've spammed, you're screwed. Doesn't matter if you stop or change."

That is plain stupid and the wrong attitude to take. If someone stops spamming, give them the pat on the shoulder and leave them alone. Move onto the next spammer. Why continue to harass someone who has gone legit?

If you abuse people because they spam and you abuse them if they stop, then you are basically telling them and anyone else that hey, once you have started to spam, there is no reason to stop.

I for one would like to see the spamming stop.

Speaking as an EMS director

[The Tyro]

I think I should cross that company off my list of potential providers for Defibrillators and AEDs.

He might be reformed, or he might not... but he clearly has not paid ANY of his debt to society, and his ethics are in question.

People tend to surround themselves with people of a similar stripe and philosophy (the old birds-of-a-feather argument). Just the presence of that questionable past makes me not want to do business with the company.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:I thought the idea was to rid ourselves of spam

[nyseal]

Regardless of anyone's single belief, SPAM is still not a felony. To make the analogy: Someone spams me today and tomorrow it becomes a federal offense punishable by law. He is subject to the law as it was writtn YESTERDAY. Now, if I killed someone 10 years ago...I'm still going to punished; under the law written 10 years ago. Either way, the laws today should NOT reflect those of 10 years ago, unless an aspiring lawyer wants to set precedent.

Fear a 30 day warranty on a Defibrillator...

[Dareth]

Doctor: "I'm sorry, we did everything we could, but the damn defibrillator we bought from a former spammer wouldn't work."

Patients Loved One: "Oh no... .. but .."

Doctor: "Don't worry, it came with a 30 day warranty, we will get our money back."

You're cheaping out - CRAFT TIME!

[72beetle]

You will need:

1 postage-paid return envelope
1 paper grocery bag
1 brick
some tape

1. Wrap brick in grocery bag (plain side out)
2. Tape postage-paid return envelope to outside of package
3. Drop into public mailbox

There ya go, an 8-dollar plea to stop bulk mail.

-72

Talk about fucked up facts!

[autopr0n]

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.

Re:His Previous Careers..

[sleeper0]

honestly i kind of feel bad for him, lets analyze his career moves so far

1. cop
2. web designer
3. spammer
4. online defibulator salesman

kind of a serious slide there, and i was feeling sorry for myself for my own career prospects. If he stays on track he'll probably be a clerk at a dirty magazine shop next.

Re:I thought the idea was to rid ourselves of spam

[WalterSobchak]

As much as I hate spam, I disagree.
The article shows various interesting things, one of them being that spammers are hated like beelzebub himself. If that does not prevent one from starting it, what does?
I must admit I was tempted about the idea of "taking revenge" on a spammer, but no. Stop spamming and repent, that is good enough for me.

Alex

P.S.: Then again... he raked in $4.000/mo. Maybe he should donate some of that money to spamhaus.org

Vengence and getting back at someone who wrongs u

[digital photo]

Some people who posted responses made many good points. They mainly center around one of the following:

1) The person wronged the online community and profited from it. "Just" letting them go would be wrong!

We all want satisfaction. That is the difference between enforcement of Law and dealing out of Justice. Persons who abuse online resources would be in violation of the law. The anguish they cause people isn't as clearly defined by the Laws. That leaves us without satisfaction. Without closure.

Taking it unto yourself to right what you percieve to be a wrong by taking the law into your own hands is called vigilantism(sp?). Those actions typically land outside of what is condoned by the Law as it currently stands.

I do believe that people should be penalized for doing something which is wrong and costs everyone in the community. Spam and Spamming falls under this kind of community abuse.

If you want satisfaction, change the Laws so that Spamming and Spammers will be penalized and not just slapped on the wrists.

2) "Spammers will think it is okay to spam and quit when they have made their money if we take the 'give them an out' attitude!"

The real problem here is that there is the question of satisfaction of our sense of justice being served. When a person goes to prison and serves their term and are released, we believe them to have repaid their debt to society. If they are repeat offenders, we consider them to be lost causes. (Sorry, I'm generalizing here.) And then, there are those who commit crimes and get away with it. They decide to quit while they are ahead and try to be productive elsewhere. If they slip back into the lifestyle, they will eventually screw up.

I guess my point is: Here is an example of someone who tried it out. Saw it was profitable, but due to the stream of hate mail and just having to dodge the proverbial bullet, has decided to quit the lifestyle and earn a living in a more accepted way.

He's already quit the spamming life. Harassing him more doesn't make him quit spamming any more than he has. Nor will it set an example for others to quit. Quite the opposite.

Then, you have those who are career spammers. They are the ones raking in 5+ digit earnings per month and they escape the reach of the law. Given death threats and harassment, they continue on.

I see them as the repeat offender criminal. The lost causes. They will continue to commit crimes both legally and socially. They should be the ones hatred and "requests to stop" be directed at. Not at people who have already stopped.

When you try to bring someone out of a life of crime or who has taken the wrong path, you don't continually harass them after they have stopped. That just pushes them back into the life. You don't pat them on the back either. You watch them carefully to make sure they don't repeat their offense. They ask for forgiveness from the community and work to re-earn the communities' trust. They are in essence, the little fish who have a future.

The repeat spammers who have been at it for years are the ones which deserve a lifetime of punishment for the ill they have caused and willingly continue to cause.

What we all want is spam to go away. So give them a reason to stop if they are spamming. Give them a reason to stay stopped if they have decided to stop. And get the law/government in on it if they refuse to stop.

Three types of spammers

[Hoser McMoose]

I'm currently working for a spam-filtering company, so I see a LOT of spam, and I've seen pretty much every trick in the book. Spammers generally can be broken down into three catagories. What you described would be the first catagory:

1. The amature. This is some guy who runs a mail server out of their basement. Mostly just hawking for their own business of running a fraudulant store (ie selling HGH or viagra), or some sort of scam to get users bank accounts or credit cards. These are DEAD EASY to block. Usually it takes all of about 10 seconds to block this sort of spammer. They might get a few thousand messages out in the first 10-20 minutes or so before their spam is spotted, but everything after that will be blocked.

2. The "legitimate business" spammer. These are the people who claim to be some sort of legitimate business. These are the people like 00Fun.com or Joke-of-the-day.com, as well as the people selling you wonderful new kitchen utensils, etc. They all claim that they are in full compliance with the law and that they only send to opt-in mailing lists. The trouble with these spammers is that it's sometimes hard to tell these people appart from some real legitimate businesses mass e-mails. What's worse, I've encountered many services where the spammer clearly used web harvesting software to get their addresses, but they also have had real users sign up to request the e-mails (mailing lists selling religion related products are the worst for this). When you figure out that these people are spammers though, it's usually dead-easy to block them.

3. The professional spammer who doesn't even bother hidding he fact that they're spamming. This is mostly porn, penis enlargement, loan sharks and HGH sellers. This is the only type of spam that is tough to block. These people will use every trick in the book to avoid spam filters. Given enough time, all of these messages can be blocked, the big question is just how much gets through before the filters are in place and how much time it will take to create those filters (often it's just not worthwhile to spend too much time on a single spam, even if it's not being filtered, simply because there's so much more than can easily be blocked).

The one upside to all of this is that, generally speaking the harder it is to block spam, the less likely it is that some moron is actually going to buy the stuff. While you would have to be REALLY incredibly dumb to buy HGH (Human Growth Hormone, aka snake oil) from a message with the subject: "Reverse the Effects of Aging!", you would have to be even stupider to buy HGH from a message with the Subject: "alksjdflksjdffhhfggf sjhdhfhfdsgfd Get Young!!!alosjdfalsdjfklsdjflsdfhhffg jdsjsdfd"

As a bit of a side note, I find that spam paints a REALLY sad picture of our society. Not so much so because there are people so lacking in morals that they think spamming is a legitimate business, but rather because some people actually BUY this crap! Honestly you have to be really REALLY dumb to buy anything from spam. It's blatently obvious that these products are not legitimate to anyone with an IQ above the freezing temperature of water (and I'm talking in degrees C here). But not only are people buying this stuff, but it would seem that there are hundreds of thousands of people buying this stuff. There are approximately 20 billion spam messages sent every day (rough estimate for, but a fairly conservative rough estimate given that Hotmail and AOL alone receive nearly 5 billion spams a day). A good 10% of those are penis enlargement spams. Thats 2 billion penis enlargement spams sent every day. Now, if we figure that it only costs $10 per million spams (it's actually probably at least $100 to send a million spams, when all costs are counted). That's at least $10,000 a day that is spent sending penis enlargement spams. If it costs $50 per dose, that means that at least 500 people need to buy penis enlargement pills every day just to break even (assuming zero costs to process the sale and no cost to supply the pills, which is a reasonable assumption since I doubt that spammers would worry about actually sending any products they sell).

Just some food for thought.

Stuntman!

[bkocik]

He left his hometown to become a Hollywood stuntman and then a police officer before returning five years ago as a budding Internet entrepreneur.

Screw spamming...I wanna know how to become a Hollywood stuntman!