When Good Spammers Go Bad

pfleming writes "According to this blog article on BadTux by Eric Green, the constant harrassment of spammers has a price. You get a Cease and Desist letter- or more correctly, your ISP gets a C/D letter. But, if you're a hard core geek you just might get your site more notice as it gets mirrored out onto sympathetic hosts. Also mirrored in other locations."

Comments

Kind of on topic

[0x7F]

I got this little gem in the mail this morning.

Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 04:59:32 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: Pussy-Hunter.net was hacked

I know they probably logged my IP, but I dont care, because I think it is wrong of them to steal my email address and send me porn adds, I recommend that you cancel any subscriptions with them immediately. The reason you are receiving this message is because im using Pussy-Hunter.net's own tool that they use to send emails to thousands and thousands of people. They have lists of stolen and random generated email addresses. If you dont beleive me just goto www.pussy-hunter.net/cgi-bin/ and look through the files.

Re:It was going ok.

[ameoba]

my god. I can't believe that any real business would be so fucking childish as to post the picture, name & address of their detractors. that right there, regardless of any of the other stuff surrounding it, is enough to put them on my shitlist.

Sales and Marketting

[Sabalon]

I got a call from some sales guy from some company once. I was busy, so I told him to send me some literature. Got it, looked at it, wasn't interested, so pitched it.

Apparently the sales guy thought that by sending me junk, he now has the right to call me whenever. First time I told him I wasn't interested, second and third times I added not to call me back. Fourth time I laid into him - he called by bosses number. Fifth time I did some research and sent his boss and a few other high-up's in the company an e-mail explaining how I had nicely asked to stop being bothered by the company and that they have now left a very bad impression, and that I talk with lot of other people that they may want to deal with, and am not afraid of sharing my opinion of a company if asked.

The VP of the company sent me an e-mail back saying (THE SALES GUY) IS DOING A GOOD JOB GETTING THE NAME OUT THERE SO BUY SOME PRODUCTS FROM US. (no lie - all caps).

Upshot is I've not been called anymore.

I look at it like X-10 - they've made some good products, but as soon as marketting/sales starts to lead, even the best company can get dragged downhill.

Better iptables use...

[ErikTheRed]

Great idea, however, if you really want to fuck with them (at least in a legal way), use -j DROP rather than -j REJECT. This should make their system wait for a timeout and thus tie up their spamming engine a bit (well, at least one thread of it)... See this article for more information.

Re: when good stories go down

[Eric Green]

Well, when I staggered to my laptop at 5:45am this morning, immediately after putting on the coffee, and I couldn't read my EMAIL (which resides on the same server)... it took me about 5 minutes to reboot the server, watch it start all up again, killall httpd, read the server logs, and note where all the referers were coming from :-) Then I just set up the vhost to point to another directory (with the 'slashdotted!' in it), and set to retrieving the actual article of interest.