Spam, Milord

Your daily dose of spam... rjwoodhead writes "Hansard, the official journal of the UK parliament, reports on a recent discussion of spam in the House of Lords which not only mentions Monty Python, but reads like one of their skits." A New York spammer has been arrested. One account isn't scientifically representative, but it's a grim picture when you're showing a spam-doubling every 42 days. And an article in New Scientist suggests solving a puzzle, which is essentially the same idea as hash cash.

Comments

Not to be a wet blanket, but...

[kiwimate]

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer heralded the case as the first criminal prosecution of a spammer under New York's six-month-old identity-theft statute. "Spammers who forge documents and steal the identity of others to create their e-mail traffic will be prosecuted," Spitzer said at a press conference.

Seriously...the Buffalo spammer was almost trying to get caught, at this rate. The reason they got him is not because he's a scumbag spammer; it's because he brazenly engaged in identity theft. That just happened to be a tool that he then used to aid his spamming operation.

The article contains one or two references to the amount of bandwidth consumed by his activities, but so what? If it hadn't been for the identity theft, he'd be vilified on /. -- and free to continue spamming. Sorry, but I don't see this as all that encouraging.

Um, what?

[bopo]

Blockquoth the Lord Sainsbury of Turville:

We aim to implement by the end of October this year the privacy and electronic communications directive. This includes requirements that unsolicited e-mails may be sent to individuals only for the purpose of direct marketing with their prior consent...

"Please send me stuff I don't want you to send me."? (Yes, I know what he means, it just struck me as funny.)

Also, I know we're not supposed to bitch about this, but it's a slow day at work and I'm bored: "2003-05-14 16:11:21 Buffalo Spammer Arrested for Identity Theft (articles,spam) (rejected)"

Good..

[the-dude-man]

!!!

I think we really need to start seeing more arrest with regard to spam...spam is getting to crazy and in some cases damaging levels. Just yesterday I had to hack up a few mailserv's tcp stacks in the kernels because they are reciving such a heavy load of mail (for approx 20000 users) that they were all starting to need rebooting every 2 weeks.

This isnt the sick part, the sick part is when i looked at the postfix logs, there was almost 5, 000, 000 pices of mail being delivered daily, and out of this, over 4,000, 000 were being bounced because they satisfied the requirements to qualify as spam.

Now I admit, this is more mail than most mailservers recive (this is a major mail system for a WAN, so it recives more mail than most --- and relays alot of mail for other networks ) but this is absloutly insane. 200 000 users are generating 5,000,000 pices of mail, and 4,000,000 of those are being bounced!

This means, the average user on this network is reciving 25 emails a day, and only 5 of these are being delivered. and 20 are being bounced because of spam.

Now if anyone says we dont need to throw a few spammers in jail for no other reason than just to make an example of them...well after seing this, you cant possibly belive that.

My favorite solution to date is to find the top spammer....kill him...video tape it and publish it on the web and say the #2 spammer is next!

Re:reverse checking on senders address

[the-dude-man]

Postfix has tried this, it almost works, but it takes a while for mail to be delivered, and if someone is using an open relay, it can very easily fail

What you will need to do is to do a check agianst the first mailserver in the mail headers...however, this dosnt always work, because some companies place their mailserver inside the network, and then use a ssh tunnel to send to a mailserver outside the network...to prevent their mailserver from taking a hit.

all in all...it COULD work, but some niftly little tricks are needed first.

Re:Gotta love british humor

[eggz128]

Lady Saltoun of Abernethy: My Lords, do the Government have any plans to restrict unsolicited faxes? My fax paper is always being wasted by people who send me faxes I do not want.

I doubt she reads /. , but by calling 0845 070 0702 you can opt out from the fax direct marketing list. It nicely cut down the ammount of fax spam we had in work from around 15-20 pages to, well, 0.

(Number taken from here.)

Re:Gotta love british humor (inside joke?)

[Chris Mattern]

> I think that they may be referring to "unwanted" faxes and lettermail from constituants.

Um, "constituants"? This is the *House of Lords*. They don't *have* constituants, they aren't elected.

Chris Mattern