Slashdot Mirror
EU Rolls out Anti Spam Strategy
An anonymous reader was one of several who noted an article about the latest developments in the
EUs War on Spam. The article is pretty realistic in pointing out that EU Legislation won't be very effective unless Asia and the US do something as well.
Section 3, Chapter II:
....
Article 1: All unsolicted electronic communications (UCE) intended for commercial purposes, including but not exclusively for the sale of electronic products, personal services, errection-producing drugs, digital images of a pronographic nature, and percentage offers of the fortunes of deceased African dictators, shall follow the code of conduct established in Article 2.
Article 2: all business email sent to and from correspondents in the member states of the EU shall be provided in all four (4) of the following languages: English, French, German, and Italian, plus any two (2) of the following languages: Finnish, Swedish, Irish, Spanish, Portuguese. The Dutch language may only be used as an encryption device for confidential communications.
Article 3 - Sanctions. The minimum sanction for any natural entity sending emails in an illegal combination of languages shall be no less than twenty years of service in the customer service department of the European Union.
I don't see the problem, so long as all EU countries implement this convention fully. That, and castrating spammers should take care of things.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
And the vast majority of the Spam I receive is in Chinese. About 100/day. Don't know how I made the Chinese spammer's lists so deeply, but I did. By the way, the only language I speak is bad English. Just cause you don't have the problem, doesn't mean that others don't.
I used to wonder what was so holy about a silent night, now I have a child.
even if North America, the EU and Asia all work together to pass anti-spam legislation, there is little chance of [...] Cyprus [...] following suit.
On May 1 2004, Cyprus (at least the internationally recognized greek part) wil join the EU. So if the EU goes ahead with this anti-spam legislation, Cyprus will have no choice but to follow.
Actually, Symantec has tracked down the person as selling the illegal copies of their stuff, Dr. Fatburn aka George Alan Moore and filed a lawsuit against him. AOL has also filed a lawsuit against him for using their servers.
I was about to file a lawsuit against him for spamming me, but figured that after AOL and Symantec finished with him, there would be nothing left.
Fight Spammers!
The EU definition pretty much matches with the one at SpamHaus: if an email is unsolicited and bulk, then it's spam. Make sure your mass mailings are confirmed opt-in and you're all set.
you just block all mail coming from Asia.
90% of spam I received came from Asia (korea, china etc) until I added the following to my postfix access config file:
202 554 All sites from Asia-Pacific NIC blocked due to excessive SPAM
203 554 All sites from Asia-Pacific NIC blocked due to excessive SPAM
210 554 All sites from Asia-Pacific NIC blocked due to excessive SPAM
211 554 All sites from Asia-Pacific NIC blocked due to excessive SPAM
218 554 All sites from Asia-Pacific NIC blocked due to excessive SPAM
219 554 All sites from Asia-Pacific NIC blocked due to excessive SPAM
220 554 All sites from Asia-Pacific NIC blocked due to excessive SPAM
221 554 All sites from Asia-Pacific NIC blocked due to excessive SPAM
61 554 All sites from Asia-Pacific NIC blocked due to excessive SPAM
I have been running a spam honeypot for about 2 weeks now as an open relay. And as far as I can tell all the source ip addresses are from APIC countries.
/var/log/maillog* > count.tmp; \cat -n count.tmp
/var/log/maillog.1:Jul 11 23:37:30 pot sendmail[16117]: h6C3bRV16117: to=, delay=00:00:02, mailer=esmtp, pri=30535, stat=queued
Just for kicks I did the following:
grep queued
414686
The above email is from a spammer checking the relay.....I have to manipulate the queue daily to make sure they get the response they are looking for:-)
In two weeks time It has nabbed about 400,000 spams and all of them originate from APIC addresses where the Sysadmins and upstream providers ignore complaints.
So all is useless unless apic countries do something.
You have to realize that this scheme won't work at all. I send out mail that some people would consider spam to some of our former clients, and each time we send 60,000 emails we make at least $1500.00. A $60 fee leaves us with $1440.00. Hell, even if it was a cent per email we would still be making money... and so would the people sending the mail for us. The one thing nobody accounts for in the micropayment system is who ends up getting all this damn cash that people pay to send emails. If the provider gets paid to send email, exactly what motivation do they have to keep spammers from using their servers? none. They're already getting a cut, regardless of how good or bad the spammer's email campaign actually does!