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Good Guys 2, Spammers 0
JoeJob writes "A couple of victories in the legal war against spammers. First, a Washington resident has been awarded a $250,000 decision against a spammer that sent him 58,000 copies of a spam. Second, looks like the spammers who are trying to sue Spamhaus, SPEWS, and other spam blacklists have decided to tuck their tails and run. Let's hope this trend continues." If you care to celebrate this, one food springs to mind.
Spam and rice is what my Hawaiian college buddies called it. You could smell it all the way down the drom hall. And it tastes really good. Really. ;) Kind of reminds me of sushi, only saltier.
you can sign up at their How Can I Help page, and apparently it costs nothing to join.
If you're not in the U.S., you can sign up to their international chapters:
EuroCAUCE - Serving the entire continent
CAUBE.AU - Serving Australia, New Zealand, and all of the Pacific Rim
CAUCE Canada
CAUCE India - Serving Asia and the Indian subcontinent
I'll be signing up today.
The best anti-spam tool I've found so far is SpamBayes, a great open source app that lets you decide what is spam and what isn't. Just train it for a few days (perhaps longer depending how much Spam you get in a day) and it'll filter all the junk mail to a separate folder. If there are any false positives (or negatives), just move it to a "good" folder and train it again. After a week of training, it hasn't failed once!
You can filter at the server end based on subject:Of course if you don't run your own server, you're SOL.
Trolling is a art,
Bah to that.
I used the Osirusoft lists for a good while. They helped me reject more spam than you can shake a stick at. I don't care about the guy's personality that runs the show (Joe), I just like his product. Just as I like OpenBSD.
Trolling is a art,
Thats the funny thing: they *DIDN'T* find the lawyer.
Mark Felstein is not only the representing council for EMarketersAmerica, he's also their sole corporate officer, and as far as anyone can tell, their only member. The EMA was formed mere weeks before the lawsuit was filed.
One of the defendants assertions has always been that EMarketersAmerica was formed for the sole purpose of filing the lawsuit. In fact, somewhere on the NANAE threads was a remark that Felstein admitted that he would dissolve EMarketersAmerica at his earliest opportunity once the lawsuit was resolved.
Of course, the defendants might have a thing or two to say about that...
AFAIK, caning is "corporal punishment", not capital. Capital = death, corporal = physical.
And I agree - bring back the cane!
You've probably got a good point here -- but it'd be an even better one if you mentioned what mail server this little recipe worked with. Would you be so kind as to post that info, so I and other mail server admins might be able to use it?
How To Get Humans To Mars
Yes, a "fixed" SMTP or a new protocol will drastically reduce spam.
SMTP is a trusting protocol. It relies on the sending computer to correctly identify the sender.
This is how spammers send out millions of messages with bogus From: addresses. If a new protocol was implemented that required the sender to prove their identity (or at the very least, made sure the From: domain is actually in the network being served), that would make it harder for spammers to BS their addresses, thus making it much easier to block them.
Unfortunately the spammers don't seem to understand that if we have a spam filter enabled, WE DON'T WANT THEIR CRAP! All it does by slipping past our filters is piss us off.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
You mean a replacement like this:
http://amtp.bw.org/
I saw something the other day that it now has its own RFC.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
"Capital = death, corporal = physical"
Capital = of the head, Coporal = of the body
Under your "logic" (note the quotes), you would encourage a city to put up military roadblocks, and prevent anyone from going in, when they find one crack dealer in your neighborhood.
Please. SPEWS is intended for blocking email, not EVERYTHING.
I have the freedom to associate with whomever I want. So do you. Do not our servers have the right to associate with whichever servers we choose? Apparently not, in your opinion.
And when you go to complain, noone exists. Not "you know their name, but don't have access to them", but "nobody knows their names, and we won't tell you".
There's a reason for that, too. Simply running a blocklist, no matter how gentle, will get you harassment from spammers, death threats, frivolous lawsuits, etc. Those who formed SPEWS simply wanted to avoid all that. (I am not SPEWS, nor do I know who is.)
"Unfortunately the spammers don't seem to understand that if we have a spam filter enabled, WE DON'T WANT THEIR CRAP!"
Yes they do.
> All it does by slipping past our filters is piss us off.
And make them lots and lots of money for doing little work.
There's a huge problem with this approach. Satisfying though it might be to punish such people, it's typically not their fault that they are ignorant. How can someone's grandma, who's still trying to figure out this "email" thing, be expected to know that she needs to purchase a firewall and install it, keep up to date with all the Windows patches /and/ all the patches for other applications that she has, and purchase a copy of an anti-virus program and a subscription to their update service? Even sometimes people who /are/ knowledgable legitimately can't get patches out on time; often rolling updates out to a production environment takes a long time, and with new patches coming out almost weekly for Microsoft OS components alone, you're simply never going to catch up.
You're looking to put the blame in wrong place, I think. Why should we have to put up with products that require patch after patch after patch? The people whose feet we should be holding to the fire are the developers who fail to adequately test their products before sending them out. It's a travesty that we permit them to disclaim all liability in a EULA; try that in any other industry and see how far you get.
See U.S. Supreme Court
ROWAN v. U. S. POST OFFICE DEPT., 397 U.S. 728
Chief Justice BURGER delivered the opinion of the Court:
"Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit.... The ancient concept that 'a man's home is his castle' into which 'not even the king may enter' has lost none of its vitality.... We therefore categorically reject the argument that a vendor has a right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another. If this prohibition operates to impede the flow of even valid ideas, the answer is that no one has a right to press even 'good' ideas on an unwilling recipient. That we are often 'captives' outside the sanctuary of the home and subject to objectionable speech and other sound does not mean we must be captives everywhere.... The asserted right of a mailer, we repeat, stops at the outer boundary of every person's domain."
You can read the entire Supreme Court decision on the FindLaw web page (http://www.findlaw.com/). The specific URL is http://www.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=U
Then of course, there's the CyberPromo/AOL lawsuit, in which the judge held that CP had no First Amendment right to send UCE to AOL's customers. The transcript for that case can be found at:
http://www.leepfrog.com/E-Law/Cases/Cyber_Promo_v
Note: Most of this was lifted verbatim from Message-ID: 343A9BBF.4340@stanford.edu
Um, no.
Which is sort of the problem with all these folks bitchin about the protocol being broken, they don't understand the existing protocol but think they can fix it.
Almost all mail servers correctly identify the source IP of the sender. Its in the mail headers. Technically it could be faked, but spammers aren't really working at that level. They use open relays to hide their source IP's, but thats hardly SMTP's fault.
And how do you verify that the "FROM:" address is actually in the network being served? There is currently no resource that can affirmatively state that 192.168.1.2 belongs to mydomain.com. And if there was, it could easily be added to current SMTP server implementation. There is no need for a new spec.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
And how do you verify that the "FROM:" address is actually in the network being served?
SMTP+SPF
A host is a host from coast to coast...
Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
Ya know, everyone admits that SpamAssassin kicks ass.. I personally have it catching about 95% of my spam, which is a level I'm very happy with. 1-2 spams a day isn't a lot to have to delete.
The problem (at least with me and a lot of my friends), was that I have 5 addresses (I'm a webmaster for 2 different sites). The one site I really had control over had SpamAssassin, but the other ones were admin'd by someone else (who was too lazy to install SpamAssassin).
I recently found a free service out there that not only uses spam assassin, but allows you to use it when viewing *ANY* of your email addresses. So now I've even got my @hotmail address being scanned with SpamAssassin.
I don't mean for this to sound like a retarded plug, but I'm VERY happy with this service (well, as long as it stays free!). It even allows you to store files online and generate temporary accounts.. you should seriously check it out: www.shadango.com
Nate Dogg
There are limitation as to what somebody can send you in the mail. Also mail fraud is a federal offence and there are strict laws dictating what can be mailed and how. What do you think would happen so somebody who mailed unsolicited pornography?
Also 99% of all spam is fraudulant in nature. Those pills will not make your dick bigger and there is no money secreted away in nigeria.
If the govt put the same restrictions on spam that they do n mail and telemarketing I would be very happy.
War is necrophilia.