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

Earthlink Abuse Department Rejoices

[datavortex]

here is a photo of some of the people in the Earthlink Abuse Department responsible for the yearlong investigation that landed the Buffalo spammer in jail. Today is a great day for all of us!

The people pictured are from the Atlanta team, there's also a Pasadena team that is putting a picture together. From left to right they are: Tom Tatom, Kate Trower, Bobby Arnold, Beth, Milliken, Larry Fine, and Louis Rush. People in Atlanta not pictured include our team lead Erich Hablutzel, Brian Greer, and the departmental manager, Mary Youngblood. The Pasadena crew includes Laura Truchon, Kenn Wilson, Brad Patton, Brian Majeska, Jesse Kolbert, Kevin Phillips.

Today is a good day for all anti-spam activists!

reverse checking on senders address

[joeldg]

I am writing a SMTP server which has a plugin called "reverse" which goes and checks the "mail from:" address to see if it is valid.
http://lucifer.intercosmos.net/index.php?display=h oneymail it is not finished yet, but hopefully it will keep only people with real email addresses able to send email.
And yes, it does store known "good" emails in shared memory so that all child processes can have access and know which emails are already allowed to send email.
The project is called honeymail as you can set it to "honeymode" so that when a spammer finds it and thinks it is an open-relay they start sending and everything just gets forwarded to spamcop, Occams razor etc..
Would love any ideas anyone has on honeymail.

$1 million in bandwidth

[Monkelectric]

Anyone notice the buffalo spammer article said the spammer used a cool million in bandwidth sending 825 million emails? Theres no way thats possible.

If you generously figured 1$ per gig (in reality prices are a fraction of that), they're saying each e-mail was 1.21megs. If you go by more realistic prices, (25c/gig), you come up with 4.8 megs per message.

If you want to work the numbers the other way, earthlink is saying it costs them 1.21 cents in *bandwidth alone* to send an e-mail.

I'm calling bullshit on earthlinks "cost" of spamming. In reality I'll bet he didnt "steal" enough bandwidth for grand theft. (At my web host, 500$ would buy me 1.3TB of transfer).

Wether or not spamming is legal -- THEIR network allowed him to do it. They didnt notice a million dollars worth of bandwidth being pissed away ? Earthlink Buffalo didn't notice they were a million dollars less profitable this month/year and go WTF? Of course they didn't, they're lying through their teeth.