Australia's Largest ISP Redefines Spam

cpudney writes "According to this article in NEWS.com.au, Telstra BigPond, Australia's largest ISP will monitor its customers' e-mails and suspend the accounts of users suspected of sending spam, viruses or denial-of-service attacks. Under changes to its Acceptable Use Policy, BigPond will investigate cable and ADSL Internet customers sending more than 20 e-mails in a 10-minute period, and BigPond management "may suspend the (user's) account while the customer is contacted" if they are suspected of sending spam. Previously, BigPond's definition of spam was held to be 400 messages sent over a 15-minute period and now it's changed to 20 e-mails over 10 minutes. Internet Society of Australia president Tony Hill said BigPond's new definition of spam was very restrictive and he was concerned the limit had been set too low for legitimate e-mail users."

Comments

Oh telstra you dorks

[Anonymous Coward]

That's going to make life fun for my parents who use Bigpond, and type all their emails offline.

Log on, send 30 or so emails in 2 minutes, and log off.

Then wonder why they can't email again next week.

Re:Oh telstra you dorks

[mallumax]

Looks like they will be "monitoring" those accounts which sent more than 20 emails in 10 minutes. No need to get paranoid about that. But will they be invading the privacy. Suppose they suspect some mail to be spam will they be using a spam filter or they just pick up a mail in random and read it(assuming the no of accounts which send 20 emails in 10 minutes is less ..or else reading is not an option)

Re:Oh telstra you dorks

[halowolf]

Dear me! Since when has email actually been private...? I mean when I encrypt mine there is some security but the majority of mine still goes out plain text for the world to see...

There are so many steps along the way to sending and delivering email that if you were concerned about privacy, then don't use email, or start encrypting it...

Re:Oh telstra you dorks

[rebeka thomas]

1. Teach them to email online. Offline mailing is a false efficiency, all you're doing is delaying the sending.

2. Why are they using bigpond anyway? hundreds of other ISPs are cheaper.

3. 30 emails? perhaps they should cut down. If they only mail 19 at a time then they'll be under the radar.

I don't see what the fuss is about.

Re:Oh telstra you dorks

[bernywork]

If you read a little better, this is only for ADSL and Cable customers, why they would read offline (Unless they have a notebook or something) when on ADSL or Cable it doesn't matter if they are online or not?

On top of the previous posters comment regarding it only being investigated and not an automatic immediate suspension.

Re:Oh telstra you dorks

[FluxCapacitator]

The fact that they have to change their current habits?

Re:Oh telstra you dorks

[Blackknight]

Want some cheese to go with that whine? Things change, deal with it.

Re:Oh telstra you dorks

[rebeka thomas]

That's the way the world works. Do you still use a carburetor on your car? no... so you had to change there.

Re:Oh telstra you dorks

[tunah]

Sometimes I write emails on my laptop while it's not on the network, and send them when i plug in.

Re:Oh telstra you dorks

[-Maurice66-]

As long as they don't mention they just went out to get their viagra they should not have a real problem there ;-]

Cheers,

M

Re:Oh telstra you dorks

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck does that have to do with changing one's habits?

Re:Oh telstra you dorks

[sonamchauhan]

1. Teach them to email online. Offline mailing is a false efficiency, all you're doing is delaying the sending.


You're wrong - offline mailing is efficient, especially for old folks who take *eons* writing long mails to loved ones, hunting and pecking at the keys. If they used online mailing, the phone line would be tied up for long periods doing nothing. It's far more efficient typing, then sending and receiving in one call. The OP has a perfectly valid point and response.

Re:Oh telstra you dorks

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah - they're only putting this is in because they can't deliver more than 20 emails per 10 minutes. So, next time their servers fall over and your emails sit in the queue, their call center monkeys can say "nah, mate, youse was spammin'"

Re:Oh telstra you dorks

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope a large, disgusting man with HIV rapes you, kicks you in the head, and then burns down your house.

Re:Oh telstra you dorks

[jsfetzik]

Note according to the posting and article this limit only applies to cable and ADSL users, NOT dial-up users. Most people with such connections do not batch send email.

While I do agree that the new limits are a little low, the old limits were also too high. Somewhere in between, say around 50 emails in 10 minutes, should get the same results with fewer false positives.

Re:Oh telstra you dorks

[letxa2000]

If they used online mailing, the phone line would be tied up for long periods doing nothing.

Well considering the story itself says that "BigPond will investigate cable and ADSL Internet customers sending more than 20 e-mails in a 10-minute period", I fail to see where staying online for long periods will tie up the phone line.

Unless ADSL and cable service in Australia ties up the phone? :)

Re:Oh telstra you dorks

[spoco2]

You poor man, you're not wirelessly connected... :(

How sad... :D

Re:Oh telstra you dorks

[sonamchauhan]

I was wrong. Good point - thanks!

No, Australian ADSL/cable services don't tie up the phone. :)
I was thinking of Bigpond dialup.

This does seem a bit restrictive.

[Cyno01]

I hope they at least contact the user before shutting off service. I can think of many legitimate reasons to send 20 e-mails in 10 minutes. My adress book has many times that, and sending a CC to a fraction of my adress book would trip this.

Re:This does seem a bit restrictive.

[Liselle]

Might be over-reacting. I RTFA, and it's peppered with "mights" and "maybes". I'd wager that hitting the limit of emails in a certain time period is only going to make them put a magnifying glass on you for a while. They have access to enough information to ascertain whether you are sending legitimate emails or spam, that's for sure.

As a side benefit, this will help them help their customers that get hit with email worms... some people may not even know they are spamming, no?

Re:This does seem a bit restrictive.

[Kris_J]

I think that an email with a bunch of addresses in the CC: line is just one email. The more valid example is of people that compose off-line then send messages in a big burst. Except that local phone calls are a fixed price in Australia, so who still does this?

I hope there are some other triggers for this system, for example: Sending more than 20 email in 10 minutes The first time you log on to a new account would probably be more suspicious.

(Also, I think the comparison to /.'s two minute wait before posting is a very valid one.)

Re:This does seem a bit restrictive.

[bernywork]

Possibly not. A lot of virii and worms send email directly; therefore not using Telstra's mail servers. Therefore Telstra wouldn't even see the messages leaving the machine.

Re:This does seem a bit restrictive.

[ShadowDrake]

>Sending more than 20 email in 10 minutes The >first time you log on to a new account

From: Joe.Blow@bigpond.com.au
To: Entire Address Book
Subject: New address

Re:This does seem a bit restrictive.

[terremoto]

A lot of virii and worms send email directly; therefore not using Telstra's mail servers. Therefore Telstra wouldn't even see the messages leaving the machine.

Telstra are the ISP. They can see anything they want.

# tcpdump -i eth0 dst port 25

Re:This does seem a bit restrictive.

[CComMack]

The more valid example is of people that compose off-line then send messages in a big burst. Except that local phone calls are a fixed price in Australia, so who still does this?

People with dialup who want to keep their only phone line free for incoming calls.

Yes, it's easy for those of us who have broadband (or, I suppose, those of us who don't get [m]any incoming calls,) to forget about the common hazards of dialup internet access. This isn't stone knives and bearskins; it's a legitimate choice being made by many people around the world who just want to get online and sample what the internet has to offer. A policy that has the potential to discriminate against legitimate customers like this needs to be used carefully, or maybe reworked.

Re:This does seem a bit restrictive.

[pointbeing]

I imagine they're monitoring port 25 - it won't matter whether the mail comes from their server or not ;)

Re:This does seem a bit restrictive.

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point, but this would only happen once. So if the account was monitored, the ISP could quickly dismiss it and move along...

Re:This does seem a bit restrictive.

[Fishstick]

but I think this is an intersting point...

>A lot of virii and worms send email directly; therefore not using Telstra's mail servers

so do a lot of spammers

how are they implementing this? is the check at the SMTP hosts, or ar the routers?

When I read this, I had assumed (as benny also appears to have) that this would be implemented on the mail servers. I thought right away that this would be probelmatic since any "real spammer"(TM) would probably have a local MTA sending their crap out directly, not connecting to Telstra's mail servers.

># tcpdump -i eth0 dst port 25

ok, then what? I'm not suggesting that you couldn't sniff packets at the default gateways and then analyze them somehow, I'm just wondering how do-able this is given the amount of traffic Telesp must have. I would think this could become a bottleneck if not implemented correctly.

Re:This does seem a bit restrictive.

[A coward on a mouse]

Good point, but this would only happen once. So if the account was monitored, the ISP could quickly dismiss it and move along...

If you know of a way to sign into a new account for the first time more than once, I'd like to hear it...

Re:This does seem a bit restrictive.

[ilsa]

Indeed. Sounds to me (from the writeup) that when they see "excessive" email they actually do the responsible thing of contacting the accountholder and finding out why.

I was just reading today about trojans and viruses that turn ordinary PCs into Zombie Spammers and Zombie DDoS Bots. I wish more ISPs would care enough to give a call and say "Excuse me, are you aware that you've sent 82 emails in the last hour?"

Re:This does seem a bit restrictive.

[bernywork]

I think Telstra re-directing / copying all traffic for port 25 outbound and then filtering on that would be more trouble than it's worth.

I think given that they ARE the ISP and that they basically can do whatever they want, why wouldn't they just stop all access outbound to port 25 (Outside of their own network) and say to everyone "To send email you must use our mail servers". It wouldn't affect anyone but people who run their own mail servers (A very small percentage of Telstra's Cable and ADSL users).

People talk about the new announced change being restictive. What if Telstra came out saying their customers can ONLY use Telstra's mail servers. I don't see this as a major loss of functionality though. As long as you are on a Telstra network, you can actually use their mail servers, and send from any address. You don't have to be sending from an @telstra.com or @bigpond.com etc. email address.

From other things I have seen in the press recently about their recent major outtage; it was apparently blamed on a bad software upgrade from HP / Sun or something. Maybe this additional functionality is the reason for the upgrade, and their additional spending on their hardware is to account for messages they might hold until checked?

Re:This does seem a bit restrictive.

[Kris_J]

People with dialup who want to keep their only phone line free for incoming calls.

That's what mobile phones are for!

Seriously though, I'm not "us who have broadband", I'm "them who have dialup", but with two mobile phones in the house and 160 hours of connection time each month I don't compose stuff off-line, mostly because I want to reply in a timely fashion.

Honest question?

[bersl2]

Who here sends 2 messages a minute for 10 minutes? Do you treat e-mail like IM, or something? I am honestly curious.

Re:Honest question?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, my GF and I treat email like IM... all the time. We probably exceed that limit every day. It's way too low to be reasonable.

Re:Honest question?

[captaink]

I used to with my girlfriend until I got MSN Instant Messenger allowed through our proxy at work. This is going to be a big issue for those not so fortunate. I suppose this will force people to move to other providers for such email, eg. hotmail or yahoo mail. This does raise an interesting question however, will they be imposing these limits on people who use their mail system via the web interface? Or just users who go above their limits via SMTP.

Re:Honest question?

[Malc]

Why was this moderated -1, Flamebait? That's a bit OTT. Too bad their isn't an option +0, Naive. ;)

Re:Honest question?

[gl4ss]

anyone who writes them offline..
or has a bunch of friends they're emailing at once.
or a keeps a mailinglist..

you know, normal(consumer) users of internet would do that. exactly the one's who will not understand why their email is being blocked...

.

Re:Honest question?

[ducomputergeek]

I can send 20 messages in 10 minutes. I usually check my email at 7 AM when I get into the office. Many times its emails like "Can you update this item on my webpage". At the end of the day, say about 4PM. I will reply to these messages with a simple: Done, you have X hours of tech support left this month and I can send out 15 - 20 in 5 minutes easy.

400 in 15 minutes, yeah, that looks odd and should be checked into. 20 in 10...that's not too hard.

Re:Honest question?

[llamaluvr]

I am a teaching assistant for a programming class at a university. Most of the questions I recieve in email from students can be answered in about a minute. If I get 11 questions, and I answer them right away, then...

Re:Honest question?

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

Who? People who type e-mails offline. People who have a bunch of messages in their Outlook or Mozilla "outbox" and then go online. Messages get sent and they get fucked under this new system.

Re:Honest question?

[drinkypoo]

How many people do you know who like to forward anything and everything to everyone in their address book? It's not spam, but one message often has more than 20 recipients. The question is, are they counting messages going out, or destination addresses?

Re:Honest question?

[Anonymous Coward]

looks like you haven't learned the rules around here, mr uid 1751.

Re:Honest question?

[MrLint]

I know a State University of NY school that turned off all person to person communication on the VAX. They were using email as IM.

Re:Honest question?

[Anonymous Coward]

Programming, eh? You teach HTML? Whatever it is, it is obviously not a language that uses math.

Re:Honest question?

[gmhowell]

An earlier poster mentioned composing offline, and sending in a batch. That sounds a bit odd for someone on broadband (which the blurb says are the only accounts that will be monitored) but maybe it happens? An alternative would be to throttle the sending. IOW, you can queue up 50 messages, but they will only be sent from telstra at the rate of one every thirty seconds.

Re:Honest question?

[the_mad_poster]

Mmmm.... not that I'm necessarily disagreeing with you, but, natural logical flaw...

Why is it "odd" to send 400 in 15 minutes, but not odd to send 20-60 in that same time period? The numbers are all totally arbitrary, it's just that yours is 60 and "normal" and the original limit happened to be 400.

Granted, I understand implicitly what you're saying: they're not allowing for "odd looking but unsustained spikes" such as offliners or batch responders (like yourself). Best to explicitly point this things out in the original post though, lest you inflame the logitechnicality geeks like me :)

Re:Honest question?

[TwistedGreen]

I've done that before.

Re:Honest question?

[theparanoidcynic]

Email? What's that? :p

I don't even check my email on a daily basis anymore. Everyone's email has been spammed into oblivion to the point that it's unreliable. I'm better off calling. (Email may be free, but I can call Ireland for an hour for less than a cup of coffee costs me.)

Re:Honest question?

[Chanc_Gorkon]

This IS spam in my opinion. My favorite one is some friends that e-mail me the same thing over and over. Basically it goes like this...they see it, they send it, they forget about it then they send it again and repeat. Honestly...how many times do I have ot see sea life form the seal of the United States?

Re:Honest question?

[omega_cubed]

Quote the article:

"...cable and ADSL..."

Most people using cable and ADSL, unless they've been on an extended trip, or has the habit of bringing their laptops around, composing emails, and bring them home to send it, will NOT do the compose message offline, mail them online activities typical of dialup users.

Unless you are running a mailing list, or are CC'ing your entire social group, it really shouldn't matter.

W

Re:Honest question?

[drinkypoo]

Check this out, I straight up replied to my girlfriend's mom when she forwarded me a joke I saw on USENET seven years ago or so and asked her not to send me any of that shit. We are still friends, and she doesn't send me crappy emails. I told her about Bcc: too, though I have no idea if she uses it... because she doesn't send me that crap anymore.

Anyway I just don't have friends like that in general, because that kind of person pisses me off. If they start sending me email I get annoyed and then I start being rude back to them and then, well, we're not friends any more :)

Re:Honest question?

[Walterk]

Sometimes, yes. A few of my friends don't run IM, and a few of my other friends decide it's time to contact them, and we all get CCd, of course after a few minutes, a select subgroup of the gang who are always online starts replying. And then replying to each other. And thanks to mutt are able to completely saturate each other's pipes and spamassassins.

Re:Honest question?

[Robmonster]

Ah yes, my pals are often filling up a poor Hotmail using buddies inbox. We start the odd chat session going during work hours, but everyone involved is CC'ed in. When our friend finally gets to check his hotmail a few days later its invariable full of our chit-chat.

Poor fellow.....

Re:Honest question?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you perhaps poor at math?

At the rate of 400 in 15 minutes, you've typed and sent 26 a minute, or one every 2 seconds. For a broadband connection that is always on, you don't type and send in bursts, so one would obviously wonder what exactly you are doing.

At the rate of 20 in 10 minutes, you're sending 2 a MINUTE. That can be accomplished, but only by a very small percentage of individuals I'd wager. And CC'S don't count. That's 20 individual emails.

So while it's restrictive, it's not overly so, since all they're going to do is investigate. But therein lies the problem.

Who here actually feels comfortable having an ISP dig through the actual text of your emails?

Since I can now file my taxes on line, doesn't this begin to become illegal for them to intercept? They have no right to know my financial info, social security, driver's license info, etc.

Re:Honest question?

[Malc]

Oh I know the rules. The FAQ is quite clear on comments about moderation. If we were all so anal though, the world would be quite dull. Besides, I get perverse pleasure out of mocking moderators - they're so easy to provoke. What do I care if I get modded down? It's pretty easy to get the karma back elsewhere.

Re:Honest question?

[mistered]

Yeah, some of my friends and family used to CC: me email hoaxes like the HIV needle hidden in a theatre seat etc.

I'd respond like so

http://www.snopes.com/horrors/madmen/pinprick.htm

with no other text in the message. In almost all cases they got the message on the first try I don't have hoaxes forwarded to me anymore.

Re:Honest question?

[cayenne8]

"Who here sends 2 messages a minute for 10 minutes? Do you treat e-mail like IM, or something? I am honestly curious."

Actually, on many days, I imagine I send WAY over 20 messages in 10 min.

I don't use IM...its banned at work for one thing...and for years..I have often pretty much used email in almost real time converstations with multiple people at the same time..both for fun and work related.

I'm a fairly quick typist....so, not a problem at all to send 2-4 messages per minute.

Re:Honest question?

[the_mad_poster]

No, I'm not really that bad at math, but thanks for asking.

Apparently, however, you're pretty bad at comprehension since I pointed out right in the beginning that I wasn't disagreeing with the point, only pointing out that all the numbers being thrown about are aribtrary, so what makes his better than anyone else's?

And, if you're sending sensitive, private information through plain text e-mail, you have a bigger problem than potentially being accused of spamming.

Re:Honest question?

[Chanc_Gorkon]

Yeah I don't get hoaxes either...I just get a link to the same damn jpeg. e-card or whatever time and time again. I would use the tactic that someone earlier in this thread did, but then I like these people when they e-mail me other things. Most times they can't think of anything I would like to know (like simply hey we did this or that for Thanksgiving and we bought a new card and blah blah blah) and they decided well I'll just forward this chain letter or this "humorous" image. Usually it's something I had seen about 5 times or more (and usualy on a web page). The Hoax crap I hardly ever see (cuz I also forwarded the snopes link and talked to them and asked them if they really thought microsoft can trace how many times a e-mail has been forwarded or if a famous restaurant would send e-mail from yahoo.com. After a while, they, like me, finally get that e-mail, and computers, are not sophisticated enough to do 90 percent of the hoax things and that snopes is a good web site for the ones like the HIV needle thing.

They are nuts - what about regular POP clients?

[thona]

Never had to answer 20 emails? Great. Just hope you are online all the time and not coming back from a trip or something, where some emails may have acumulated in your outbox. 20 emails is VERY low - I am now going on a three day trip, and I can bet I will have 40-50 outgoing mails in my mailbox when I return, just waiting to hit our email server. So, with their definition I would be in trouble. WHOW.

Re:They are nuts - what about regular POP clients?

[KD5YPT]

I think they mean outbound mail. Not inbound. Inbound means you got spammed.

Re:They are nuts - what about regular POP clients?

[NanoGator]

" So, with their definition I would be in trouble."

Only if you replied to 20+ of them within the alotted time. Frankly, I don't think I could do that on purpose, let alone through casual email use.

Frankly, I don't see what's so bad about this. Not only would it make spamming harder through that ISP, but it'd also cut down on the damage caused by somebody who's machine is infected with a maliscious worm.

I think there are better ways they could approach this, but I'm not ready to knee-jerk into thisisevilville.

Re:They are nuts - what about regular POP clients?

[JuggleGeek]

While you're away for 3 days, you have 40-50 outgoing messages which apparently wrote themselves and are waiting to be sent as soon as you log on?

You should run a virus checker. It sounds like you're infected.

Time Scale Too Small

[Josuah]

Why is BigPond trying to identify a spammer from just 10 minutes of traffic. Or even just 15 minutes? I would think it would be much better to have a metric like 1000 emails in a single day. Or 10,000 emails over a week?

I can very easily go through 20 emails in 10 minutes just because I might be having one of those back-and-forth email conversations. I don't know if I could do 400 in a 15-minute period, unless I was running a mailing list (well, which I do, but that's why I use "personal" business ISPs).

This sort of metric just seems extremely silly. Is someone putting pressure on BigPond, or is one of their executives being an idiot?

Re:Time Scale Too Small

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, if they kept the same ratio, and pushed it out to say 12 hours: ie: 1440 per half day.

That would avoid people with occasional burst, while making it uneconomical to run a spam business.

Re:Time Scale Too Small

[Anonymous Coward]

Is someone putting pressure on BigPond, or is one of their executives being an idiot?

The second thing.

Re:Time Scale Too Small

[bryerton]

It makes perfect sense to me, no one sends that many emails in 10 minutes (unless they run a mailing list, in which case they should contact the provider before hand and explain the situation ) If they (the ISP) waited a week while someone was spamming away, think how much SPAM is being sent while they wait. What if the spammer only sent 8,000?

Re:Time Scale Too Small

[Kevan_moran]

No, I think that there is some point to this small time scale.

Internet eMail providers have taken at least some steps to prevent their service being used as a spam source. One is that, somewhat strange, request that you see to "type in the letters and numbers you see above"

The idea is that only people, not bots, can read the letters etc. So at least you know it's a person applying for the account.

This doesn't help too much if you then wait for a long period before you check if the user is acting strangely. Hey, I can sign up, read and type the letters and then let my bot use the address to send 10,000 spam mails in the next hour before they check - wickid.

So, yes, there is some logic behind their move.

Slashdot style

[GQuon]

Great..a slashdot style limit on time between posts.
Now Telstra's customers are just missing the lameness filter and the moderation. The occasional dupe happens in email allready.
Hm. There's a chance a lot of my work on Healthcare Informatics would be modded -1 Redundant and never reach my professor.

Ha!

[Scaz7]

Ha!

Don't worry, knowing the 'reliability' of Telstra this system will most likely crash and in one month be completely dismissed and forgotten about because the people in charge of this taking care of this will probably be the next people to be layed off...

This is just another effect of spam limiting real users (again), unfortunately we're probably going to be the one to get screwed over out of all of this.

Well at least there trying.

Execpt when it takes a user 4hrs to get in contact with a telstra bigpond techo to get his account reenabled. As if sitting on hold for 1hr on average isn't long enough....

Re:Ha!

[riprjak]

Whilst Im keen to leap into a Telstra bashing session at the best of times; in this case I say to many; RTFA!!
Also, I still choose to use their products, so I therefore consider their product superior to that of the competition (not entirely true, but a good generalisation, perhaps more convenient is true in my case).

An RTFA will reveal the following about the new spam levels in the agreement; It applies only to Broadband customers, sets the lowest level at which they MAY investigate at their discression and is clear that disconnection will follow investigation (a good clause to give us recourse if they do foolishly begin to unilaterally disconnect people). Furthermore, I severely doubt they will even bother with investigating rates that low, they are just ensuring themselves plenty of headroom; smart.

If you are really concerned, perhaps you should contact them (as suggested in the user agreement and as I did) for clarification?? They are quite clear regarding the differentiation between small, differing message counts with high cc counts (such as conversations in large, manual discussion groups; which they discourage in favour of using mailing lists set up on appropriate systems but dont disallow), infrequent pop connects (rare with broadband users as the suggested configuration leads to direct send of email rather than batch send) with large batches, frequent but clearly differentiated mail communication and mass-mailing. Under a certain threshold, all investigations are automatic.
Since spam is bloody easy to spot with mathematical methods (markov chain methods being the most common); the language of a sales pitch differs dramatically from the language of conversation; it is easy to make numerical distinction that will minimise false positives, the rest are investigated by a human. In reality, all they are really doing is publicly admitting to what happens anyway; sys-admins reading other peoples mail ;)

Also, I dont see an exclusion of disconnection for spamming in their service level gaurantee; so if they unfairly disconnect you they will end up losing income based on how long you are disconnected; even if we exclude the extra income they loose for all the pr0n you wont be downloading... :)

Now to the rant relating to service, be fair mate; I have never waited longer than 20 minutes to have a tech support call answered for my Bigpond ADSL (or preceeding cable) account; and that was during a major outage... The longest time my service has been down (I have used Bigpond broadband, cable first, then ADSL since at least early `96) is 2 days; and that was because the land line technicians accidentally forgot to reconnect my home line during maintenance on the exchange; otherwise my longest outage was a few hours when a login server or router borks.

Anyway, my pointless blathering is done now...
err!
jak

Re:Ha!

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Big Puddle, and generally they're pretty good. EXCEPT for not having a native OS X client. I use Launch, instead. Oh, and their tech support don't have a clue about Macs. Generally helpful, just pretty clueless.

Might be a good start...

[wrinkledshirt]

I couldn't tell from the article exactly how they were counting 20 emails (cc's or bcc's count? groups count?). But the fact that they monitor by email sending rate seems interesting. I think adding just one more step to that process could make it really useful.

1) Monitor all sources of emails in which large numbers are being sent over a short time period.

2) Allow a central repository for people to report which emails are considered spam. Once that amount reaches a certain threshold...

3) Connect the dots, you get a spammer.

Telstra BigPond was Largest. Will Others Gain Now?

[H8X55]

Ok. Great. Let's say I have an indie band with an (e)mail list of people who have said they wanted me to let them know about the upcoming release, tour dates, and mechandise info. Let's say my band is actually good and there are a few hundred people on this list. Let's say I use Telstra BigPond.

Looks like I'm looking for a new ISP.

I would have commented on this story sooner...

[Black Parrot]

...if not for Slashdot's 2-minute delay policy.

I'm relieved

[Anonymous Coward]

Our software team is only comprised of 19 people.
If it were 20 we would be in trouble we contacting by mail !

Re:I'm relieved

[Anonymous Coward]

Learn HOW to write, faggot

Re:I'm relieved

[Anonymous Coward]

Learn to punctuate, faggot!

Sigh...

[TroyFoley]

Ok, just send out a little note to my students that I'm gonna be gone on monday and...

cc: student1@asdf.edu; student2@asdf.edu; studERROR ACCOUNT SUSPENDED

Well then... guess they'll just have to figure that one out on their own.

What if?

[H8X55]

What if I just send one e-mail every ten minutes and carbon copy 1000 people?

This policy may be very hard on the company...

[Spl0it]

lets assume everyone of its users sends out around 25 emails sometime on monday within 10minutes to their friends/family/co-workers. If they suspend all the accounts, what kind of hell are they setting up for themselves?? yikes.

Re:This policy may be very hard on the company...

[zerogeewhiz]

It's the only way to avoid a repeat of their recent email outages. Typical Telstra. Rather than hit the people who do the damage, they just hit everyone who sends more emails than my Mum.

Stupid

[Uma Thurman]

There's no reason for this. All an ISP needs to do is institute a policy whereby if someone is caught spamming, the cleanup charge is $20,000. They already have their credit card, all they need to do is charge it.

Re:Stupid

[cyril3]

A credit card with a $20,000 limit.

Even if I was stupid enough to apply for one I don't think theres a issurer who's stupid enough to give me one.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

All it takes is good credit. I had a credit card with a $27,000 limit when I was 25. I only made about $30K at the time, never carried a balance and never had a bill higher than $2K.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the fuck would you do that? A ridiculous limit you could never pay if you got to.

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

They did not ask me what limit I wanted. I applied for a card and that is what it came with. I have had quite a few cards (though never more than 2 at a time), and I can not recall one asking me what I wanted as a limit. You can call and ask for them to raise it, but I have never done that.

Re:Stupid

[Reziac]

All well and good until your machine gets hijacked by a spammer, and you can't prove it wasn't you sending all that crap.

Re:Stupid

[mOdQuArK!]

The ISP just charges $20 at a time until they reach $20,000 or until they reach the card's limit :)

Re:Stupid

[LordKronos]

I have had quite a few cards and I can not recall one asking me what I wanted as a limit.

My credit union asked me what I wanted as my credit limit. I said $500, so they gave me $1000. Go figure.

Re:Stupid

[gnu-generation-one]

"All an ISP needs to do is institute a policy whereby if someone is caught spamming, the cleanup charge is $20,000. They already have their credit card, all they need to do is charge it."

Whose credit card do they have?

(Hint: spammers are also credit card thieves)

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Just pay your bills on time and wait a few years. When I got my last credit card, they gave me a $20K limit. The thought of charging that much terrifies me.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd kind of like to see a (smaller) penalty for allowing your machine to send spam. It's very preventable. If I don't keep my car serviced and it hurts someone's property, I'm liable. I don't see why computers should be different. $20K is a little steep. I'd say $5/day is enough to make most people pay attention, but not so much as to really hurt most people.

These zombie machines are getting to be a serious danger to the internet. The script kiddies weren't so bad, but now that spammers are using them for profit, it's need to stop.

More slashdot sensationalism

[Steve 'Rim' Jobs]

Quote:

Under changes to its Acceptable Use Policy, BigPond will investigate cable and ADSL Internet customers sending more than 20 e-mails in a 10-minute period, and BigPond management "may suspend the (user's) account while the customer is contacted" if they are suspected of sending spam.

It doesn't say anywhere they they will suspend your account if you simply send 20 emails in 10 minutes. All it says is they may investigate users who do, and may suspend their account upon further investigation. I really don't see a huge deal with this, and there isn't any plausible reason to get angry with this policy if it is followed properly.

Re:More slashdot sensationalism

[grolschie]

Also, how has spam been redefined by this ISP? Perhaps they have tightened up their system, but spam still is defined as 'unsolicited commercial email' - isn't it?

Re:More slashdot sensationalism

[WoTG]

True. To me, this appears to be a way for BigPond to have some recourse in case a spammer decides to program his software to send 399 messages per 15minutes. There's no reason to expect it to be enforced very strictly, but like the rest of the AUP (at least the one from my ISP) it gives them some options in case there is "abuse".

Wait and see

[SEE]

It's not like there's an automatic suspension for exceeding the limit. They're just advising that 20 in ten minutes is the level that now prompts them to look more closely at. If they aren't stupid about it, it shouldn't be a problem.

Admittedly, that's a big if, given that it's Telestra that we're talking about, but . . .

Re:Wait and see

[JoeBuck]

But that's stupid: invite 20 friends to a party and a spam investigation is launched?

Re:Wait and see

[realdpk]

Sure. And when enough of the investigations show a pattern of non-spam, maybe they'll scale it back, or discover some decent way to ignore the obviously non-spam. But it'll take humans to investigate these cases to decide what's necessary/worthwhile.

Mailing list servers

[charvolant]

This is going to be a bit of a problem for people running things like majordomo and so on from
their home linux boxes.

If things have been set up to use the ISP's mail servers as relays, which you might do to save on bandwidth, it's going to get sticky. (Or does one message with a trillion addresses count as one message?)

Re:Telstra BigPond was Largest. Will Others Gain N

[dgatwood]

Umm... no, that's when you realize that if you regularly send email to a large list of people, you should set up a real mailing list with majordomo or similar (which doesn't go through your ISP's SMTP server unless your ISP blocks port 25). If you aren't able or willing to set up a server for this purpose, you could do something like a Yahoo groups list or similar.

Now if they block port 25 and then do stuff like this... well, there's always the Yahoo groups sort of thing. Alternately, just get them to reactivate it. If you show that you're sending legitimate mail, one would assume that they'd make sure your account doesn't get deactivated again in the future (assuming they're even halfway competent).

20 in 10 minutes.... legit users are screwed

[Anonymous Coward]

I act as a class rep. for the technical program I'm in at school. I often have to send out information via the class email list... of 24 people... Hmmm... I'll be investigated for each email I send out to the list ?

PDA users?

[lpret]

I have a PDA and when I come home and it syncs up, it sends all the emails I've written during the day. Am I a prime target now?

This is WAY too restrictive!

[Newer Guy]

People writing mails offline, people sending out christmas letters, people that send out small newsletters (there are 1000's of them!) all will be considered spammers under this policy. This policy is not unreasonable, it's downright tyrannical!

Shouldn't be a problem in that case

[KU_Fletch]

They're only going to investigate those people, not disable their accounts. If they look at it and see that they sent legitimate messages because they just pop on to send e-mail, they'll be find and their ISP will move on. At least this should make the net big enough to actively catch spammers eariler.

Re:Shouldn't be a problem in that case

[cyril3]

You mean some poor sod at Telstra is going to check the email habits of the 1.5 million old age pensioners who log on for two minutes a day to send 30 emails, download their 30 email messages from their friends and then log off.

He wi;; be very busy.

Re:Shouldn't be a problem in that case

[Trixcomp]

Goodness, isn't that a waste of employee resources... digging into someones personal things. or do they have programs that search for it?

Re:Shouldn't be a problem in that case

[RollingThunder]

I would think it would be more likely that accounts that "burst" mail would get shunted to a second, still automated inspection process.

One that likely works on the "total per longer period" metric, sees it's 30 emails a day, and ignores it.

Re:Shouldn't be a problem in that case

[terrox]

1.5 million pensioners on bigpond dialup ? you are insane
the article says "will investigate cable and ADSL Internet customers"

(1.5 million pensioners on bigpond LOL)
mod parent down -10 off topic, misinformed, knee-jerk

Re:Shouldn't be a problem in that case

[Anonymous Coward]

mod parent down -10 shutup, they said "LOL"

Re:Shouldn't be a problem in that case

[3Suns]

Did you miss the "may suspend the (user's) account while the customer is contacted" part? Besides, actually looking at the emails would be a huge privacy offense and I would hope that would be a bigger issue than some false positives on spam detection.

Anyway, this is a pretty stupid way to catch spammers... most of them just use their own SMTP servers anyhow.

Re:Shouldn't be a problem in that case

[penguinoid]

They could just queue the messages and send them at 2 emails every minute. Most people wouldn't have a problem with that; those that do could make arrangements.

This will increase zombification of windoze machines, though.

Re:Shouldn't be a problem in that case

[thedillybar]

1) Emails are NOT private.

If you mistype an address, the entire message gets bounced to postmaster@something, which could easily be read by a human.

Okay so you typed the address correctly. If an SMTP server goes down, it gets bounced to postmaster.

Most SMTP connections are not encrypted. Even if you have an encrypted connection to your ISPs SMTP server, the chances of your ISP establishing an encrypted connection with hotmail.com's (or anyone else's) MX server is very close to 0.

If you want your email to be private, use end-to-end encryption (like PGP).

2) Just because spammers "use their own SMTP servers" doesn't mean the ISP can't prevent them from sending email.
The ISP can monitor outgoing TCP (port 25). Virtually all SMTP is on port 25, and snooping (or altogether preventing) these connections would not be difficult. The article gives no indication of whether or not they are doing this.

Re:seems fair

[Anonymous Coward]

didn't think this one through, did you....
imagine you want to send a party invite to 20 friends... well, according to you, you're now in need of a commercial account..
Back to clown-school you go!!

Stability of their email

[a.koepke]

Oh this will be brilliant.

Picture this: Telstra Bigpond email systems die again (just give it another week) and you cannot send out your email. You have 20 messages in your outbox waiting to be sent. Finally their systems come back on-line (for now) and you send all the emails only to get flagged as a spammer and denied to email again.

You end up back where you started.

This won't be good for Bigpond customers...

[Kulic]

One of my uni lecturers uses Bigpond as his ISP. He also has his uni email accounts redirected to his Bigpond address. He had problems a while ago when Bigpond went down. He normally accepts assignments via email, but everything sent to him got delayed a few days. Thankfully he accepted assignments which had been sent to him on time, otherwise a lot of people would have inconvenienced.

This lecturer also has other responsibilities (I won't go into detail here) which require him to him to send out newsletters to all of the students in our department, plus international committees and a large number of university staff. We are a small department, but still have ~100 students. Sending out a student newsletter would trip the new email limit. I don't know how he's going to get around this from home (obviously he can send it using our uni mail server when he's at work).

Just another example of Bigpond not being up to scratch these days. I personally use a competing ISP, and have never had a problem. I don't know how Bigpond is going to keep its customers with shit like this.

Re:This won't be good for Bigpond customers...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your dept has no list address that the uni mail server expands?

Re:This won't be good for Bigpond customers...

[wrmrxxx]

I don't know how Bigpond is going to keep its customers with shit like this.

Telstra has all sorts of ways to try keep their customers. For example, misleading advertisements - they were forced to take some of their TV ads off the air by the ACCC. Or abusing their monopoly on the phone lines by lying about the availability of ADSL - they told a customer he was too far from the exchange when he wanted to get ADSL through another ISP, but was close enough for Bigpond. Then they threatened him when he talked!

I think there is only so far they can slide, however, before even the most uninformed consumers see the light. Their recent run of email brown outs must have been hard for even the most tolerant of users to ignore. This article at whirpool suggests that people are finally starting to wake up.

Re:This won't be good for Bigpond customers...

[Eskarel]

Don't know much about Bigpond as a company(moved from Aussie well before anyone had ADSL or cable or even 14.4 modems), but if they go down I doubt it will be because of this. It's probably too strict and they will probably end up changing it, but spam is out of control and something has to be done to stop it.

Everyone here is usually all in favor of any sort unimplementable scheme to prevent spam and this one(with a bit of tweaking) might not be a bad idea. Admitedly some legitimate customers will be inconvenienced and might, here's a schocker, have to change the way they send e-mails, but if it works to solve the problem it might not be such a bad thing for that to have to happen. I've said it before and I'll say it again, you can either have a totally anonymous free internet where everyone including those you don't like(spammers, virus writers, hackers, etc) can do exactly what they like or you can give up that anonymity and a degree of freedom(as is already the case) and do something about those people. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

Re:This won't be good for Bigpond customers...

[Tim C]

I don't know how he's going to get around this from home (obviously he can send it using our uni mail server when he's at work).

Plenty of possibilities:

1) stagger sending - send 15 every 10 minutes. A real pain, but it'll work, unless they lower the limit again
2) have an alias set up on the uni mail server, that expands to all the relevant users, and send a single mail to it
3) have a mailing list set up on the uni mail server, and send a single mail to it
4) set up a modem on a machine in his office, and dial in to that rather than use the ISP

And that's just off the top of my head having just got up. Don't get me wrong, for people in his situation, the email limit is going to be a pain, but it's hardly insurmountable.

Re:This won't be good for Bigpond customers...

[Anonymous Coward]

This lecturer also has other responsibilities (I won't go into detail here) which require him to him to send out newsletters to all of the students in our department, plus international committees and a large number of university staff. We are a small department, but still have ~100 students. Sending out a student newsletter would trip the new email limit.

No, it would not. That would be a single message, with a lot of recipients. From the way it looks, this is about "a lot" of messages in "a short" timespan, not about a single message to few recipients.

Re:This won't be good for Bigpond customers...

[screenrc]

It should be obvious that sending classroom
assignments, or newsletters, is not the
same thing as sending email for "Give her multiple
orgasms". The ISP is targeting common spam,
not personal email or public announcements.

Re:This won't be good for Bigpond customers...

[Anonymous Coward]

The first one I thought of was calling Bigpond and telling them you run an true opt-in mailing list. I'm sure they have proceedures for this already.

Re:This won't be good for Bigpond customers...

[inf0rmer]

The issue here is that cable internet in Western Australia can ONLY be provided by Telstra. When you have an option of moving to broadband, it's either ADSL (1.5Mbps max) or Cable (5Mbps max). At the same cost for each at those speeds, it's easy to see why cable is considered the ultimate internet accessory.

Having used both, and currently using cable, ADSL has definate advantages in terms of market potential but appears to lack in areas of speed and reliability. Telstra even had issues with their usage meter - yes, we Aussies have a certain amount of traffic that we can use before being charged per Mb! Try getting that last Mb out of your account at the end of each month when the usage meter is saying 2890Mb used, 110Mb available; is there really that much quota still left? If not, that'll be AUD$0.20 per Mb please!

Still, this sort of regulation will ensure that our internet network connectivity should remain viable, with minimal speed degredation for sow time to come. I'd like to know how fast the cable and ADSL services work at is other countries, particularly the US.

The only thing we have to deal with then are the contracts that many people fall victim to when installing broadband. 12, 18 or even 24 months is a long time for people trying out these services, only to make the choice that they really don't need that sort of speed.

SpamCop paying $30K / year to fight DDoS attacks

[JeffMagnus]

It's been reported that SpamCop is paying upwards to $30K / year for bandwidth as a direct cause of the continous DDOS attacks on it.

The spammers are doing everything they can to squeeze the anti-spammers out. They use frivolous lawsuits (aka Mark Felstein and his porn spamming backers) or DDOS attacks that either knock the anti-spam resources off completely or increase the costs so that no hobbyist can run them.

And while all this is going on, the law enforcement agencies are doing nothing to counter the clearly illegal acts of the spammers.

And ISPs are doing NOTHING to reduce the number of zombies on their networks. So the DDOS attacks continue.

Nice going.

It's only a matter of time when someone (Al Queda?) will use the zombie network for something that will truly be noticed.

Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers

Damn them.

[BBSOD]

Damn these corporate giants! I propose we set up a petition so spammers that use Telstras services can complain about this obvious injustice and unacceptable change in services. Just post your name and home/work address and a representative will contact you shortly.

Also as Australia's most expensive ISP this should only effect the wealthy, the ignorant and unlucky (as in some regional areas you get little choice). This should exclude most us anyway.

Australia SPAM redefined

[superpulpsicle]

SPAM = beer = Foster Australian Beer

Re:Australia SPAM redefined

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt my kidneys are up for filtering that volume.

Article reliability

[tgt]

How reliable is that article ? Can it be the case that we are supposed to discuss the outcome of Ms. Dudley's 10 minute meeting with some Telstra's authority ? Like "uh-huh... spamming... blocking... sending a lot of messages... ok, thank you...". I doubt if the article actually reveals any technical details, because a decision like the one described is simply stupid.

Re:Article reliability

[tumutbound]

I can't comment on the article's reliability but the Bigpond AUP states that more than 20 electronic messages in a 10 minute period is SPAM.
Electonic messages include email, fax,SNS or ICQ

Re:Article reliability

[tgt]

Then this IS a stupid decision indeed.

Re:Article reliability

[geoffspear]

That's interesting, except that you're a big fat liar.

Re:Telstra BigPond was Largest. Will Others Gain N

[Anonymous Coward]

I recommend SwiftDSL. I've been a happy customer for 6 months now. So happy I bought $1500 worth of their shares last week. Given the way Telstra is screwing up, and the brilliant service I get from Swiftdsl, I figured they couldn't be going anywhere but up.

Sure, as of last week this a completely biased email, but I really am one guy who was so happy he bought the company (well 0.0001% of it at least).

That's good

[hdparm]

People will find various reasons to complain, I'm sure but this should definitely cut the amount of spam.

In addition, they would do the right thing if they implement filters like my ISP did recently. Filter works and comes with no extra (NPI) charge.

Spam

[the_real_rs]

I think its a great policy. All isp's should do this. then maybe just maybe we can have 1 spam in our inbox a day.

Re:Spam

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds nice but unfortunately, a large number of spammers run their own mail servers, use relaying mail servers (not their own), and a host of other methods of sending out spam. ISP's alone would not be the answer.

Re:Spam

[the_real_rs]

true but i can dream. But the new spam filters are working quite good.

Grumpy old man'

[LittleBigScript]

In my day we didn't have fancy smancy email. We sent messages by shooting old people out of cannons with messages written on dry, combustable paper. And we liked it!

I think....

[Anonymous Coward]

that's wrong. Or else I will be a spammer by their definition. Yet I am just a regular joe doing my email duties. Where is the justice?

Voting with my wallet

[Heartz]

Well, people have the option of voting with their wallet and taking their money elsewhere. Australia has tonnes of ISP. Bigpond imposes ridiculous limits, I move to Optus and if they screwup to Blue Planet.

Vote with your wallet people.

To say nothing of

[FearTheFrail]

When I'm sending e-mails to my disproportionately large extended family while drinking cans and cans of Red Bull.

Isn't this rather pointless?

[GabrielStrange]

Am I missing something?

I have an SMTP server running on my computer. I set it up a few years ago mainly to try to see how good a handle I had on how SMTP works, and I've continued to make use of it mainly so I can create my own Email aliases and help curb the amount of spam I get and keep track of its "real" origins... But setting it up was very little trouble for me. I grabbed a copy of sendmail, compiled it, spent a few hours figuring out how to configure it, registered an MX record with DHS International and that's it... It's running. DHS was a free service the first few years I was with them -- now they charge me $5 per year.

For a brief period my ISP was filtering access to the SMTP port on my residential address, which meant I couldn't receive messages using my SMTP server... But I was still using it to send them out with no trouble! But at some point I contacted them and told them that I only want to have it running for my own usage, just to help curb the amount of spam I get, that I won't be giving anyone else accounts on it and that I understand how relaying works and have correctly restricted it... And a week or two later my SMTP port became accessible again. (Hopefully they actually reviewed my usage logs and tried to relay something through me before they did this... I'd hate to think they weren't careful.)

Sooooo... If I had no trouble setting up my own SMTP server, isn't it reasonable to assume that any halfway intelligent spamming organization would do the same -- set up their own server, then use that server to send out their spam, and avoid giving their ISP the chance to easily monitor their messages' content?

So isn't this really a more or less completely pointless violation of almost always legitimate Email users' privacy?

Re:Isn't this rather pointless?

[Anonymous Coward]

They can mailhub outgoing traffic - think of it like a transparent proxy.

Shucks

[Black Parrot]

How can my Warhol virus harvest its entitled 15 minutes of fame, if they pinch it off after 10 minutes?

Not about Spam, about using Spam to gouge

[child_of_mercy]

This isn't about stopping spam, serious spammers don't use their own accounts, they relay off others.

What it will sneak through under the cover of Spam hysteria is the following.

1) It will force budget business users onto more expensive corporate accounts.

2) It will stop people batching their email correspondence to miminise online time which in turn will reduce peak load on telstra and also bring in more money.

3) Less nasty but equally beneficient to Telstra it will allow them to stop worm riddled machines bogging down their email servers (Telstra are facing massive damages over the near collapse of their email infrastructure and associated business losses).

Re:Not about Spam, about using Spam to gouge

[Anonymous Coward]

Telstra are facing massive damages over the near collapse of their email infrastructure and associated business losses

Really? Setting up a farm of POP/IMAP servers with qmail really isn't that hard. And if they're not smart enough, I'm sure they can contract it out to an Indian company on the cheap.

The only computational intensive thing for email would be virus scanning or spamassassin-type analysis (which they don't seem to be doing)

Re:Not about Spam, about using Spam to gouge

[child_of_mercy]

Telstra are masters of doing things on the cheap. It's one of the reasons they generate billions (real billions) in profits.

But part of that is they don't leave a lot of spare capacity in their networks and the mimail and swen worms of recent times kicked the network over the cliff.

In terms of technical choices, after a brief, disastrous, dalliance with NT in their infrastructure they tend to make good choices, but their idea of "good" outcomes is a little different from a users.

Re:seems fair

[ncc74656]

Seems like a reasonable compromise to help eliminate spam. If you are sending out more than that, you probably should pay for a commercial account of some kind, or a mailing service.

I smell a troll here, but I'll bite anyway.

"Reasonable?" I guess you don't run any mailing lists. I'm the webmaster for the local homebrew club. Some of our members opt to not have dead-tree newsletters mailed to them; instead, they receive notification in the mail that this month's newsletter is up on the website. I use a throwaway shell script and Mutt to send notices to the 30 members on the list. If Cox were to impose such a limit, I would end up hitting it once a month.

(FWIW, my "home" cable-modem service is actually business-grade (grandfathered from before they started using DOCSIS for residential service) and I run my own mail server on it. Nevertheless, there are plenty of other legitimate reasons why somebody might fire off a smallish quantity of messages...for instance, somebody might send a change of address to everyone in his address book.)

won't last

[kiwi_damo]

This is just another cr*p idea from Telstra. Acting before they've thought it through again. There's no way they'll be able to police the thousands of users who exceed this amount. Good luck to them - more jobs for those Aussies.

I know it when i see it.

[MrLint]

Come on guys, everyone knows what spam is. Its plain and simple. What this seems to be is a description of common behavior patterns of ppl who send spam. Thing is that this is going to have false hits. Filtering on content is really the only way to be sure (other thing nuking from orbit)

TLS interactions

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who uses TLS connections to their email server (IE. Secured - or SSL tunneled) and doesn't use Telstra as their email server will be invisible to this - there is no way to detect the contents of a secured link. So any secure SPAM will still get through.
My mail server always does this where for email client connections, and also tries to use it when delivering email to the target server!!! for security/integrity reasons - doesn't yours.

As a network professional...

[the man with the pla]

I can tell you that contacting users before shutting them off is a very bad idea. It's very frequent that a user will have wrong contact info on file when you go to contact them...any time you try to wait to contact them you're almost always just delaying for the sake of somebody who knows nothing about their computer except that how to use word...for the sake of what! Notification == waste of time, 16 years experience agrees with me.

Re:As a network professional...

[Anonymous Coward]

So, if you can't contact them, shut 'em off and wait for them to call. Then ring the fucker's clock for not having the correct contact information, and for sending spam.

Re:As a network professional...

[Blackknight]

You got that right. We have started calling customers when their site is about to be suspended because of billing, and half of them have no idea what we're even talking about.

Web site? What's that?

Re:Honest question

[bersl2]

I opened a super-sized can of worms with a (NULL, Dumbass) of a question... damn brain cramp...

The New Equation

[ewombatnet]

1. Detect 20 e-mails in 10 minutes 2. ???? 3. Profit! And as we all know, Telstra will damn their customers to the deepest pit of Hell if it means at least 1c more profit for them... OK, I promise not to get on a 'why utilities shouldn't be privately owned' rant...

Solution: have the ISP host the lists

[Anonymous Coward]

If running a mailing list as a mere user gets you in trouble, then have the ISP host the list. Make sure it can only be joined by someone who actually confirms the subscription. Give the list owner a way to kick people off, and allow them to limit posting privileges to the list owner, list members, or not at all (aka wide open mode).

In other words, welcome to 1993. Colorado Supernet used to host a bunch of majordomo-run lists on their machines - either teal or csn itself. You could have their machines do the work for you instead of trying to slam dozens or hundreds of mails out from your lightweight machine. I'm sure that many other ISPs offered the same services back in the days that shell accounts were the norm.

Re:Solution: have the ISP host the lists

[Anonymous Coward]

If running a mailing list as a mere user gets you in trouble, then have the ISP host the list.

What sort of dreamland ISP are you using? I'd be happy if my ISP (insert just about any USA broadband provider's name here) could keep their POP/SMTP servers up half the time. You think they're gonna run my mailing lists?

I welcome our new SPAM-throttling overlords

[Crypto Gnome]

But seriously folks!

This is what you get for being a sheep and supporting your local (ex)Monopoly. No surprises here, none whatsoever.

Pain for many normal users? Sure!
Likely to increase ISPs income? Sure!
Actually going to make a *real* difference to professional spammers? Not likely!

Not much more than the usual big company thinking It's not important to solve the problem. It is only important that we convince the public we're working hard to solve the problem. (eg Microsoft and Security)

Then again, perhaps it'll encourage a few % more people to seriously consider their Internet Access choices in Australia, and they'll be better off in the long run.

If it's not entirely obvious (read-my-sig), HELLstra is not my ISP.

Spam Assassin in reverse?

[naelurec]

If someone is intent on sending out mass mailing spam, they have LOTS of ways to accomplish this and I'm guessing by having an ISP limit outgoing messages in an effort to reduce spam is not going to stop them.

This type of a system could be effective in detecting and disabling accounts that are infected, zombies or unintentially sending out spam. While it would be nice if everyone was a "good netizen" and maintained their systems and was security minded.. its not going to happen. A system like this, if it is well designed, could be very effective and not inconvience legitmate heavy email users (mailing lists, CC/BCC, queued mailed, etc..).

Re:SpamCop paying $30K / year to fight DDoS attack

[Anonymous Coward]

Good riddance. Spamcop is a pos service. We do small mailings to "registered" subscribers who were interested in our products. 100% legit emails.

Dumbshits submit us to spamcop and immediately I reply to them and their like "Oh, well I didn't think to try the unsubscribe". I proceed to say "You're the dumbshit that signed up, unsubscribe and say you were wrong on spamcop". Of course they don't so we sit there for 30 days for doing nothing wrong. Spamcop won't remove us either...they just let it expire. Bullshit! Spamcop got put in our bit bucket list along with sexfun.net and all the other loser domains.

It's one thing to follow up on claims and it's another to ban first, ask questions later, and unban even later.

Re:SpamCop paying $30K / year to fight DDoS attack

[Jeremi]

It's only a matter of time when someone (Al Queda?) will use the zombie network for something that will truly be noticed.

Agreed. But fighting the spammers won't prevent that. The only way to prevent that is to secure the majority of on-line PCs so they can't be zombified.

"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT. defcon4

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the Plural of `Virus'? What's the Plural of `Virus'? The plural of virus is neither viri nor virii, nor even vira nor virora. It is quite simply viruses, irrespective of context. Here's why.

Sections in this document:

• English Inflections
• Classical Inflections and References
• Journey Into the Fourth Declension (new)
• Other Latin Resources
• ASM News
• ASM News Update (new)
• Footnotes

English Inflections First off, the OED gives nothing but viruses for the plural. Here's its abbreviated entry:

Etymology: a. L.

virus slimy liquid, poison, offensive odour or taste. Hence also Fr., Sp., Pg. virus.

1 Venom, such as is emitted by a poisonous animal. Also fig.

2 Path. a A morbid principle or poisonous substance produced in the body as the result of some disease, esp. one capable of being introduced into other persons or animals by inoculations or otherwise and of developing the same disease in them. Now superseded by the next sense.

b Pl. viruses. An infectious organism that is usu. submicroscopic, can multiply only inside certain living host cells (in many cases causing disease) and is now understood to be a non-cellular structure lacking any intrinsic metabolism and usually comprising a DNA or RNA core inside a protein coat (see also quot. 1977). [ Formerly referred to as filterable viruses, their first distinguishing characteristic being the ability to pass through filters that retained bacteria. ]

Other sources that support viruses include Birchfield (n Fowler :-) in Modern English Usage (3rd Edition), and also the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language . Classical Inflections While one would hope that the authoritative sources cited above would suffice, some writers prefer to maintain the classical inflections on some English words, particularly in technical writing. For example, conflicting indexes/indices and minimums/minima are both easily found, depending on the intended audience and use. In that case, what's the classical plural of virus?

The simple answer is that there wasn't one. The longer answer follows.

Writers who, searching for a fancy plural to virus, incorrectly write *viri are doubtless blindly applying an overreaching -us => -i rule. This mis-inflects many words. For example, status and hiatus only change the length of the final vowel; genus goes to genera; corpus goes to corpora. Others are even worse if this rule is mis-applied, like syllabus, caucus, octopus, mandamus, and rebus.

Anyway, Latin already had a word viri, but it was the nominative plural not of virus (slime, poison, or venom), but of vir (man), which as it turns out is also a 2nd declension noun. I do not believe that writers of English who write viri are intentionally speaking of men. And although there actually is a viri form for virus, it's the genitive singular[1], not the nominative plural. And we certainly don't grab for genitive singulars for the plurals when we've started out with a nominative. Such hanky panky would certainly get you talked about, and probably your hand slapped as well.

This apparently invariant use of virus as a genitive singular may als

Re:"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT. defcon4

[Eskarel]

This may be both off topic, posted by an anonymous coward, and insanely long, but it should be modded up just so that the general slashdot population isn't denied the pleasure of witnessing the worlds most anal retentive pedant in action.

I've seen grammar nazis before but this is the most incredible thing I've personally ever witnessed.

Re:"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT. defcon4

[Anonymous Coward]

*Notes that it's just a c/p from perl.org*

http://www.perl.com/language/misc/virus.html

So it's not like whoever posted that actually *wrote* a 3000+ footnoted slashdot comment, just to point out the correct plural of virus.

Re:"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT. defcon4

[Anonymous Coward]

pleasure of witnessing the worlds most anal retentive pedant in action.

No, the pedants are the idiots who tried to puff up their egos and appear "educated" through using the moronic pseudo-Latin pseudo-word "virii" and who just got those overinflated egos punctured.

Hint: if you're going to spread on airs by using the "correct" word, at least take the trouble to get it right.

"Virii" indeed.

Re:"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT. defcon4

[CGP314]

But I like the 'i' ending.

Re:"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT. defcon4

[TwistedSquare]

And on the (very long) note of mispluralising, the word agenda (and similar gerunds) only have English plurals because they are in fact already Latin plurals.

Re:"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT. defcon4

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on now, if we believed dictionaries we would be led to think that the plural of 'box' isn't 'boxen' !!

Re:"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT. defcon4

[Andy_R]

So, the modern usage should be
j00 h@\/e \/1ru5e5 f001!!!!!!111111233
not
j00 h@\/e \/1r111111 f001!!!!!!!!!11112
?

Re:"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT. defcon4

[Tooky]

Languages are funny things.

The first thing that should be pointed out is that they have regional dialects. These dialects can effect everything from spelling to pronunciation, usage, and even grammer. For example take the simple English word colour. I'm English, therefore my spelling is based on British English, in the USA of course the spelling is color. The reason for the difference is regional, based on the way the language evolved on different sides of the atlantic.

The point I'm making is that virii is may not officially be part of the English language now, but that doesn't make its usage unacceptable or even wrong. It is a word that has evolved from its usage by a particular group of people and it is understood outside of that group of people. It may not be the plural of virus, but, 'computer virii' could well become a plural of 'computer virus'.

Re:"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT. defcon4

[Joe Tie.]

Out of curiosity, would you say that something like "i kan spel beter than u!" is also "not wrong"?

Re:"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT. defcon4

[u-238]

did the man not even go out of his way to explain that there are not examples, in ANY regions, of a plural form of virus being used?

Re:"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT. defcon4

[cfuse]

What's the Plural of `Virus'?

Oh God! Not again!

Re:"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT. defcon4

[Anonymous Coward]

It's worth pointing out that the above post comes from http://www.perl.com/language/misc/virus.html

Re:"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT. defcon4

[JuggleGeek]

Your post, as well as the off-topic long stupid quote that you replied to, should have been modified as "Troll". It's sad to see crap like yours modded up.

Re:"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT. defcon4

[Tooky]

Out of curiosity, would you say that something like "i kan spel beter than u!" is also "not wrong"?

I don't believe that spelling is consistently used as the normal spelling within any English dialect.

But virii is being used consistenly by a group, as part of dialect if you will. This isn't a regional dialect in the traditional sense though, it is almost an internet dialect.

The issue is really about communicate, does it affect the effectiveness of the communication? No, we all understand virii, viri, viruses as being synonyms, so why be pedantic about something that evolves any way.

Re:"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT. defcon4

[Eskarel]

Just as a point, I never expected it to get modded up, I just wanted the parent modded up so people could see something like it. You may note that I even turned off my karma bonus so I wasn't whoring.

Re:"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT. defcon4

[JuggleGeek]

Go back to cussing me out while posting as AC. It looks better on you than telling me about how you "turned off your karma bonus" and other nonsense. You and I both know what happened.

Re:"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT. defcon4

[Eskarel]

Never posted as AC in my life, I honestly didn't expect karma from this. I actually expected to modded down.

Re:"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT. defcon4

[JuggleGeek]

Sure, it wasn't you that cussed me out (twice) for pointing out that you posted off-topic crap, it was someone else. I (sarcastically) believe you.

Re:"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT. defcon4

[Anonymous Coward]

Your life should be modded "Troll" and "Irellavent." You should also be "put to sleep" and your organs harvested so that useful people may live.

Are They Really Dumb?

[Bob9113]

Is Telstra really excessively dumb? I would guess not, so let's suppose for a moment that they aren't.

If they're not really really stupid, they might have thought: Gee, I wonder if there's any way to tell what's 3 standard deviations above the mean as far as peak mail sending rate is? Do we have, anywhere, a listing of all the emails that have been sent by our users? Preferably arranged in chronoligical order, with timestamps? If we had that, why all we'd have to do is a little grep and wc action, toss in some particularly ugly perl to aggregate the results, and we'd be able to figure out what normal is. From there, we'd be able to figure out what weird is. Once we know what weird is, we'll know which accounts we should take a closer look at.

I've gotta think they figured that out. After all, they have to have figured out how to count the mails per minute per user to be able to implement this (and their former rule), right?

Of course, it's possible they really are too dumb to look at their own server logs. Maybe they pulled this number out of some business weenie's ass during one of those catered lunch meetings in the big glass windowed room with the collossal oak table. If this is the case, then they'll get false positives by the cartload and they'll quickly be swamped in the acrid stench of their own foolishness.

I find the latter a little implausible. Telstra may be a big evil monopoly, but I don't think they're a big evil imbecilic monopoly.

Re:Are They Really Dumb?

[Ingolfke]

You're assuming they actually count the emails, which they may, and could. But it's very possible that the policy was simply put in place to smack spammers when they cause trouble. For example outbound spam increases the load on one of their SMTP servers enough to generate a threshold ticket to their NOC, which they investigate, identify the cause as spam, identify the user and send them an email saying... oh look you've violated our policy we're shutting down your account. By setting the email per minute ratio so low they don't have to worry about nitpicking over the details of how many emails where actually sent, because any spammer who would cause them a problem is going to seriously exceed the threshold.

I like the technical approach to calculating normal email patterns though, it's MUCH more interesting.

Re:Are They Really Dumb?

[hankwang]

> Do we have, anywhere, a listing of all the emails that have been sent by our users? Preferably arranged in chronoligical order, with timestamps? If we had that, why all we'd have to do is a little grep and wc action

I'd guess that they would be violating the privacy of the users by doing that retroactively. Maybe what they are really saying is: if more than 20 emails in 10 minutes are sent from your computer, then it will be registered and used for spam-analysis statistics.

Re:Are They Really Dumb?

[martin-boundary]

I'd say that they're pretty dumb in that case. 3 standard deviations assumes a normal distribution, which most likely is not the case. So anyone doing such a statistical analysis as you suggest is not competent. The correct distribution is likely to have long tails, and 3 standard deviations is the wrong quantity to monitor.

Re:Are They Really Dumb?

[dilby]

Well....

1. They are 51% owned by the government, and

2.They run their server with Microsoft

......so I'd say yes.

Whoa!

[Bifurcati]

As many people have (rightly!) pointed out, I could easily send two emails a minute - if I get back from a few days away, I might have twenty emails to reply to, and I have Pegasus Mail set to send everything in one hit. Especially if they're counting the number of recipients, and not just the number of emails (which would make sense re spam!)

What I want to know is, how do they decide if you're sending spam or not? Do they read your email? If so, that's pretty serious - I'd be interested to know what the user policy is with regards to that sort of thing. And if they just disconnect you while they check, that's bloody dramatic! I guess they can monitor you for continued heavy use, and then make a decision, but I can't see any middle ground between those two alternatives.

Either way, yet again glad I'm not with Telstra!

J.

Let us all be thankful.

[utahraptor]

I am so glad that I live in the USA where all of our needs are apparently met so we have nothing better to do than debate stuff like this. I am also happy that companines like the RIAA are so confident that all other problems have been solved so that they can feel free to invent new problems. How many years must go buy before we realize that we are all stuck on the same chunk of rock and that there exists no I in the word Team.

Well, this should be entertaining.

[Niscenus]

If that happened here, I could only imagine the number of pseudo-mass-mailers that would have issues. You know, the people that send almost EVERYBODY WHOSE EMAIL ADDRESS THEY EVER HAD the greatest joke they read this morning, or funniest picture or....

Even I could get screwed over! After releasing a newsletter, which goes out upto 10 addresses (half in BCC), I get to hours old email, dashing through as much as I can, which tends to probably push the limit about once a month.

Besides, this problem could only be gotten around...oh, what, a dozen ways? Zombies, protocol switching, virii (have to write your own) and lets not forget remote accounts and any combinations you could come up with. Signal to noise is most certainly going to be difficult for Big Pond. As much as I dislike what they've done, I sincerily feel for their tech support.

Re:Well, this should be entertaining.

[TiggsPanther]

I am so glad that my ISP doesn't (currently) inplement anything like this.

20+ mails over 10 minutes?
Well I can't remember the exact number I have to send my Anime Club's (fortnightly) bulletins out to, but if it's not over 20, it's pretty close. (And that' not counting when I have to re-mail something, if I've forgotten to list the date, or something equally daft)

The idea is good in theory, but it does fall down as they've not catered for teh fact that there are some people with legitimate reasons for having to do the occasional mass-mail.

Tiggs

A good idea for new customers.

[TPFH]

I hope there are some other triggers for this system, for example: Sending more than 20 email in 10 minutes The first time you log on to a new account would probably be more suspicious.

Or for the first month or two. I'm guessing a spammer would be willing to wait a week or two before sending out spam, but not to be a paying customer for multiple months before spamming.

For customers who have been using an account for over a year I would hope that they would be much more conservative before even investigating.

But for customers that are in their first month I think it would be a good thing for even more ISPs to investigate as is being proposed in this case. If spammers had to pay for an account for months before using it to spam that might make spam cost-prohibitive.

Re:A good idea for new customers.

[eugene ts wong]

Maybe they should also add a standard that you have to send out X emails before you get more privileges. This way a spammer can't just leave an account idle & then start to use it. I suppose that he could just make a cron job to make him look active, but every little bit helps.

Re:A good idea for new customers.

[rokzy]

no this doesn't help at all. the spammer can use the work around like you say, so it can only hurt innocent people.

it shouldn't be about stupid arbitrary restrictions or conditions for all users, just about identification and elimination of offenders with no collateral damage.

Re:A good idea for new customers.

[eugene ts wong]

But I think that it does help, because the spammer would be required to behave for an extended period of time, as opposed to just signing up & sending out gazillions of emails within the 1st hour. After he gets kicked off, he just has to start over again. If he is required to behave for a year, then the rate of spam goes from gazillions per hour to gazillions per year [or whatever the time period is, & give or take a few jazillion emails].

As long as the ISP is willing to look over it by hand to give a final check before disconnecting [or whatever negative things can happen], then it should be okay.

sucks to be their users

[Indy1]

but then i could care less anyways. I got sick of Bigpond's massive outgoing spam, and their complete lack of a clue in responding to it, so i ended the problem permanently. For someone people, there's spam. For everyone else, there's iptables :) ( For the clue impaired, i firewalled all of bigpond's network off from my mail server)

Transparent SMTP

[rf0]

Does bingpond intercept all SMTP connections? If not wouldn't it just be possible to buy a small hosting accounts with AUTH-SMTP and send out via that. The other choice would be to just setup an SSH tunnel on a non-standard port and tunnel to another SMTP server

Rus

Australia Population: 20,000,000

[Futurepower(R)]

It helps get a sense of perspective to realize that Australia has a population of 20,000,000.

Re:G'day Mate!

[Anonymous Coward]

Stone the flamin' crows, mate. This bloke thinks himself a true-blue comedian. Don't come the raw prawn with us aussies! Streuth mate!

Reputation

[phorm]

Reputation sets a lot of precedence in this though. BigPond is known for screwups, and not being overly helpful to customers.

When a company is known for screwing customers over, then customers should be a little wary of what their ISP does might not in customers' best interests

Bigpond partly to blame, too

[Gavin Rogers]

This is probably common with all huge Telco ISPs the world over but I think that Bigpond themselves could do more to prevent tides of Spam originating from their customers... I think these mega ISPs have a "CPE" attitude that's left over from their Telco division - i.e. If it's beyond the equipment we provide - it's "Customer Premises Equipment" and we therefore, don't care.

Bigpond could install heavy default firewalling (especially ports 80 and 25) to protect against people who install default operating systems with Christmas tree options or are infected with spamware so they readily become spam relays and force customers to use ISP provided gateway servers. Better yet, ask customers to knowingly switch off their ISP firewalling if they're providing a legitimate Internet service. (and therefore prove that they know what they're doing)

The end days of open-slather unfirewalled broadband accounts for "Mum and Dad" Internet users is long overdue.

The conspiracy theorists claim that because Bigpond charges customers per Mb for both incoming and outgoing traffic, they really don't care if their customers are open-proxy spam relays because they'll be hit with a bill for the traffic "they've" used at the end of it. That's probably extreme, it's more than likely that they just don't care or have the technical/human resources to do anything about it...

A far better idea.

[grolschie]

If ISP's run spam filters (eg spam assassin) in their incoming servers, why doesn't BigPond run one on it's out going servers. Any emails with subjects like "G%@fasas!!131ah@#@ you wife will love this!" and etc should warrant a closer look. Or how about when their email servers receive about 3000 bounced emails for the same account in an hour.

Re:A far better idea.

[geoffspear]

So when I forward all of the spam I receive to SpamCop, my ISP should consider me a spammer and take away my account?

Re:A far better idea.

[grolschie]

Ah nope, because you can forward emails as attachments to spamcop.

Every year or so

[dtfinch]

I have some legitimate reason to send 50 or more emails in under a minute.

Taking the BROAD out of broadband

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people using cable and ADSL, unless they've been ..., or has the habit of ...

Exactly. Most. But not all. You list several legitimate activities yourself that could trigger the spam-detectors. There may be more. Thus, it's a poorly thought-out policy.

The more I have to justify what's in the packets I send and receive, the more 'broadband' just doesn't seem very 'broad'.

Perhaps they're using this system......

[Anonymous Coward]

The Kangaroo Approach to Data Latency on the Grid
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/kangaroo/kanga roo-se minar.ppt

The First Hop

"We have implemented a kangaroo testbed which has most of the critical features:

Each node runs a kangaroo_server process which accepts messages on TCP and UNIX-domain sockets.

Outgoing data is placed into a spool dir in the file system for a kangaroo_mover process to pick it up and send it out.

Bypass is used to attach unmodified UNIX applications to a libkangaroo.a which contacts the local server to execute puts and gets."

OT: Re:"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT. defcon4

[bernywork]

Simple mistake. I had viruses there, and thought, "Nope, viruses virii... Bugger virii will do, people still know what I mean".

"I've seen grammar nazis before but this is the most incredible thing I've personally ever witnessed."

I read that and the last part of your previous sentence and nearly fell off my chair laughing.

Great work.

Pressure or idiocy?

[wombatmobile]

This sort of metric just seems extremely silly. Is someone putting pressure on BigPond, or is one of their executives being an idiot?

Don't wonder too hard mate, this is Telstra .

Right?

Road Runner seems to have this

[DrMorpheus]

If I send email to more than five people then the mail that was cc'd to someone with a RR account gets bounced. Apparently RR thinks if your mailing more than five people your running a mailing list and they want the person receiving it to verify they agreed to the mailing list to them, (that is, Road Runner).

I object to this for several reasons:

• I come from a family of eleven children most of whom have five or more children so if we try to arrange things via email for the holidays we end up having much of our email bounced.
• Why should I, or anyone else, have to let RR know what email lists we subscribe to? Sorry, this is too big brotherish for me.
• Finally, there has to be better ways to stop spam. This seems too "designed by a committee" stupid.

Re:Road Runner seems to have this

[JuggleGeek]

Road Runner must not like you. I send BCC messages to friends who use rr.com accounts, and rr.com isn't bouncing my messages.

Re:Road Runner seems to have this

[DrMorpheus]

Actually I think that's the problem. I'm CC'ing them and your BCC'ing them. I think that might solve my problem, thanks!

Re:SpamCop paying $30K / year to fight DDoS attack

[MMaestro]

'The only way to prevent that is to secure the majority of on-line PCs so they can't be zombified.'

You mean they aren't already?

Re:SpamCop paying $30K / year to fight DDoS attack

[pairo]

Can we say utopia? The only real way to fight DoS attacks is to apply ingress/egress filtering on routers. That way, not only can packets be traced back to the source, but your upstream may also have a chance at filtering out the DoS.

Bayseian Filter the go.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why?
This ruins their reputation, and hurts shareholders again. Another decision, with no reasons or technical justification. Probably breaches European Privacy laws too - because dumb monitoring like this fails the needs tests.

They can be smarter than this, and most people have Christmas lists of > 20 friends.

I'm sure other /.ers have a smarter way, and can come up with a ruleset better than this.

The second rule should be: does it contain 'ADV' if so let it through ; if the senders address is not faked. Clearly labeled, 'honest' spam is not an issue.

Re:Bayseian Filter the go.

[letxa2000]

Probably breaches European Privacy laws too - because dumb monitoring like this fails the needs tests.

Yeah, but since Australia isn't in Europe it really doesn't matter since it fails the "relevant law" test. :)

Graffiti knows

[wombatmobile]

Graffiti from Newtown, Sydney in the 1980's:

Q: What's the difference between Telstra and a bucket of shit?

A: A bucket of shit doesn't continually rip you off.

Re:Graffiti knows

[Anonymous Coward]

wasn't it telecom back then? when it was run by the government. (hi jerry, first time poster - long time reader :)

Shorten the Period is an Error

[Tuqui]

They must not make a shorten period of time to check if is a spammer or not. They must do it longer.
Spammers send more than thousands mails per day. no normal user do that. But normal users can send more than 30 mails in a minute if send a greeting to all the address book.

Spamassassin on outgoing email

[some1somewhere]

It is simple... enable Spamassassin not just for incoming mail, but for outgoing mail too.

Then calculate the scores of each user. If a particular user is sending lots of email that Spamassassin is "scoring" highly, then it is likely that the user is spamming or at least sending out spammy emails, and would warrent a closer look.

This would increase the load on outgoing mail servers, but if they want to do this right, and do it much more automated than manually reviewing everyone that sends "X emails in X minutes", then this would be one good way.

Or even... hold user's emails that have a very high score in a "pending" queue, and have an admin go through the queue to make sure it isn't spam before actually sending it.

Of course, this depends on Spamassassin being able to correctly target spam versus ham (and recently spammers are getting better at getting around it) but each new version of Spamassassin gets better at this again, so as long as they keep upgrading, the above system would work pretty accurately, and would minimize intrusion into people's private emails.

Re:Spamassassin on outgoing email

[zyridium]

"and have an admin go through the queue to make sure it isn't spam"

FUCK THAT

Re:Spamassassin on outgoing email

[KenFury]

Thats a great idea, if by admin you mean to say abuse cop who is not an admin, not really a tech either, but some poor slob making 8-10/hr. Then they could forward the mail on to someone who has a clue.

Otherwise, fsck that, it's just not cost effective and a waste of an already over loaded admin's time.

Re:Time Scale NOT Too Small

[Anonymous Coward]

The time scale is definately not too small. If the ISP wants to stop a spammer, he should do that as soon as possible (after 10 minutes or even earlier), not a day later, when 10.000.000 e-mails have already left the pc. Once upon a time one of my servers was an open relay and got abused for a spam-run - I assure you: in 10 minutes the server will spout out several thousands of e-mails! Kudos to Big-Pond!

Sounds familiar -- and not even bad

[llauren]

There was an article, featured on Slashdot, quite some time ago, which could be applied here. The thought was that if an identified spammer tries to send to your SMTP server, the service would be slowed down.

To protect both the ISP and the innocent, they could implement a feature where after 20 mails in 10 minutes, mails would only be processed at the speed of, say, one mail per 30 seconds, and maybe slowing progressively after each 100 mails. When the mail pipe has been silent for a given amout of time, say ten minutes, the "mail slower" would be reset.

This wouldn't make much difference for the legit home user but for the spammer (and for a business connection) it would be a tar pit to avoid.

This could probably be implemented just by installing a crappier mail server ;)

~llauren

Re:Sounds familiar -- and not even bad

[Anonymous Coward]

To protect both the ISP and the innocent, they could implement a feature where after 20 mails in 10 minutes, mails would only be processed at the speed of, say, one mail per 30 seconds, and maybe slowing progressively after each 100 mails. When the mail pipe has been silent for a given amout of time, say ten minutes, the "mail slower" would be reset.

That won't work.

What happens when one ISP sends legit email to another ISP? It's very likely to have a sustained rate of 1 email per second. If you throttle the connection, email will take several days/weeks to arrrive.

Oh wait, maybe some idiot at Telstra actually implemented this idea!

Re:Time Scale NOT Too Small

[jhunsake]

You don't wait 24 hours and then check if they exceed the limit, you check it everytime they send an email.

Only an idiot like yourself would implement it as you described.

Cannot run e-mail listserver then...

[Domini]

If I had to set up a community listserver on my private account. As well as any e-mail auto-forwarding. When I go online, I get 20 incoming e-mails and thus 20*n outgoing e-mail messages in a short period of time.

Hm...

Re:More slashdot sensationalism (MOD PARENT UP)

[Ingolfke]

I agree. This is just a policy change to make it easier to deal with real spammers. By lowering the threshold so low, any real spammer will be in clear violation of the policy and BigPond can avoid bickering over the details of how many hundreds of messages were sent in such a short period of time. I doubt they'll even really investigate the lower threshold abusers simply because it would be way too much work.

YAY! this is great!

[the_unknown_soldier]

I am a bigpond user. and i know that for many users this is a godsend! you see bigpond has very restrivtive and long contracts which cost a lot to buy out of. this gives us the chance to get out of our contract without paying the fee. also... bigpond has the worst spam of any network in the world...simply because they have incompetent staff. this won't stop it.

PBEM

[Robmonster]

I tend to agree. Email conversations will easily trip this limit as you usually just do a reply (or reply-to-all) and jot a brief line. You can easily get through those 20 emails.

Also, what about Play By Email games? I regularly play Laser Squad Nemesis (http://www.lasersquadnemesis.com) . This game requires you to send an email to begin the game, another to issue your orders , and for certain users you can send them external emails to chat. After a few games of that you'll soon fill this quota. I'm sure there are other PBEM games out there that use a greater number of mails too.

Are they crazy

[sneakybilly]

What about users that create emails offline and then dial in and send them all.

Re:SpamCop paying $30K / year to fight DDoS attack

[Andy_R]

wouldn't catching ddosers and putting them in jail help too?

Re:SpamCop paying $30K / year to fight DDoS attack

[pairo]

And catching them is sooo easy if you don't even know which machine they launched the attack from!

Akin to Yahoogroups

[Robmonster]

This reminds me of measures taken by YahooGroups whereby if you sent over 10 messages to them (across any number of groups) within a small timelimit they automatically set your account to a suspended status, which could only be reset by a Yahoogroups employee. (This differed from the Bouncing status they set you to if you get an odd bounced mail)

I might have some of the numbers wrong (it was a while back that this was introduced) but it caught out a LOT of users who wrote their mail offline and then sent them all when they connected. I realise this story is dealing with DSL customers, but the comparison remains.

As an offline user, I'd appreciate this.

[Fiery]

I'd really not mind at all, to be honest, if my ISP protected me from spammers by putting a hold on my mail if I sent too much within ten minutes. It will indeed affect them most with recurring offline batch users such as myself -- and I'm alright with that.

Hotmail and Baysian filtering

[Kevan_moran]

I had some problems using my hotmail accounts today.

Once they went away, there was a very different interface, including a "report this as spam" button.

I can only conclude that they've included a baysian (sp?) filter into hotmail.

I've seen a few press releases about upgrades in NZ but no major discussion in places like /.

Was I sleeping the day hotmail did this in the US or is this a pilot trial.

FYI: US corporates often use NZ as a trial location as we

a. Speak English after a fashion

b. Don't matter as there are only 3 people here and 10 million sheep.

I guess that would kill my majordomo server

[AchmedHabib]

that I have on my ADSL, so I am happy that I am not living there.
Some ISP's have blocked port 25 on ADSL connections. But I would rather prefer if it was open and then they should be more than welcome to block it if people started to send spam. and charge 100$ to open it again.

Free Internet No More?

[Anonymous Coward]

The question arises as to whether or not this is intruding in on not only invasion of privacy, but also a restriction of a medium that (for all intents and purposes) is to be "unlimited and unbridled." Granted I hate spam as much as the next guy, but the thing that bothers me is, will this cause a cascading effect in which will cause further restrictions elsewhere? For instance, many ISPs block certain ports that have been deemed "in use by P2P applications." This I find insane. I don't care if this is a noble cause, it violates 2 things (at least what is acceptable here in America)... "Unlimited" Internet, and invasion of privacay via e-mail monitoring.

- Mr. S.R.

JESUS! RTFA!

[PatrickThomson]

THEY'LL SIMPLY INVESTIGATE IT!!! NOT ARBITRARILY SHUT IT DOWN! AUUGH!

sorry. wading through 100 pages of "well I have am ate who sometimes sends more than 20 emails" articles tends to wear on the nerves.

Might i point out that long-term analysis of mail volume is pointless because in that case by the time the accont is closed alreay more than enough damage will have been done.

We're talking looking at emails for things like "Cheap V1agra! Click here" so I doubt "Newsletter attatched" will pose much of a threat. Admittedly thry could have stressed the "investigate" and "possibility of" sections of text a bit more, but only to protect the stupid from thier own paranoia.

Re:JESUS! RTFA!

[dilby]

Hi. Look Jesus called and apologised he didn't have time to RTFA, he's been busy - 'preparing for Christmas and all'.

But what do you lose?

[mindstrm]

I realize you are looking to the ISP to solve the problem.. but is it truly theirs to solve? Heck, why not lobby the huge backbone carriers of the world to start filtering and regulating email traffice? Why not hardware manufacturers? OS vendors?

I WANT them to act like a common carrier, and stay the fuck out of what I do. Charge me for the data I send, not what particular port it is, or what sub-protocol I'm using.. all they should be doing is routing IP.

Letting large ISPs filter and work like this is a slippery slope.... example:

One of the first things to be blocked large-scale by ISPs was port 139. They felt it helped customers, who were using windows in an insecure manner.. and of course, it did help. Others had to follow suit, because their competitors did it and would even advertise the fact.

Then we get ISPs who force you to use their mail server. Sure, someone could just tunnel to their own.. so all the ISP is really doing is making people jump through hoops.
Then we get ISPs that are going to block VOIP traffic, block VPN traffic, block incoming port 80 traffic because it's "not for servers".
Seee the problem?

Yes, the ISP *could* solve the spam problem. I'd rather see them do it by enforcing a policy in this way (investigating if they think there is abuse) rather than filtering traffic.

Stupid spam, or not?

[FireMotion]

I thought most people here dislike or even hate spam, DOSS attacks and people with outlook who send out virusses?

Isn't it a bit of a good idea that at least someone is trying to limit all those attacks? I think it is. I'm pretty sure that the legitimate users won't be affected by that monitoring limit (or am I wrong?).

*picturing UserFriendly strip*

[Niscenus]

Stef convinces Pointy Head that its easy to track spammers. I see the whole staff of Columbia Internet explaining to dozens of people why their personal lists got flagged. "Have you considered Jabber?"

Oh, wait, better, a web page that says, "Just click this button to automagically send a complaint to our PHB and Marketting department that you're not a spammer and offer them a chance to be on your personal joke/pr0n/anime list. Additionally, just to clarify, their email addresses are phb@columbia-internet.com and putz@columbia-internet.com. Since they're in charge of this decision, feel free to add them to any list that you think will make them happy or, at least, keep them from flagging down perfectly innocent people like you."

Huge button.

Another AJ to the rescue strip, which will bring the total upto *check* four.

Those who run their own mail servers watch out.

[Bruha]

One reply to a chainletter will get you shut down.

Damn evil chainletters!

Virii is a perfectly cromulent word.

[Cyno01]

nt

It's a start.

[BCW2]

A more realistic cap would be 50 in 10 min. Now if someone would get MSN, Yahoo, and moomia to do the same, at least 70% of all SPAM would dissapear.

Telstra Mail Server reliability

[goonerw]

As if Telstra's Mail servers will stay up long enough for people to send 20 emails in 10 minutes. And, given the recent problems, what spammer in their right mind would use Telstra's mail servers if their spam will take up to 2 weeks or a month to get out to everyone?

Re:Telstra Mail Server reliability

[Anonymous Coward]

BigPond's iPlanet mail system is stuffed and falls over once it gets loaded over about 40%. This is all about trying to limit the load on the system at any given time so they have a chance to keep the system up and not suffer the failures of a few weeks ago. Until they replace the system - rumoured to be next year, they just keep throwing hardware at it and trying to stop any volume spikes.

Re:SpamCop paying $30K / year to fight DDoS attack

[AndroidCat]

DDoSers have to have a control system. (What good are all those zombies if you can't point them at a target?) Tracking them back from a zombie isn't as easy as just following the wire, but it isn't impossible.

It does take more resources than most anti-spammers have. A little help from law enforcement would be nice -- hopefully before someone uses the same technique to take down something else other than "just that anti-spam stuff".

This has nothing to do with dial up

[FictionPimp]

All these people talking about having tons of messages in their outbox and logging on to send them must of not read the article. This has nothing to do with dial up. ONLY cable and dsl customers. They are always online (unless you know people who unplug their modem when they arn't using it.)

Re:This has nothing to do with dial up

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, I DO know people who unplug their cablemodem when they arn't using it. Why? they are afraid of hackers. Apparently hackers got ahold of their box once and downloaded all kinds of porn onto the system. Yes, they do have an adolecent son who suggusted it was hackers, why do you ask?

Prison Colony?

[wytcld]

Australians: Do you really miss your days as a prison colony? I ask because here in the States we're headed that way, and we'd like help in seeing the upside so as to put a happier face on our future. There is a certain beauty in regimentation, is there not? Why else would most of the nations whose heritage is the English conception of Liberty be retreating from it on so many fronts? Is it time to take pride in our surrender, as Geo. Bush did when he surrendered his youthful freedom to "God"?

At least the news from Canada is a little better ... except that's attributed to their French cultural influence!

It's the number of recipients,not number of emails

[joshv]

Ignore the frequency of email. If you are going to go digging into the details of your subscriber's emails, perform a one way hash on all of the recipient addresses and simply count the number of unique recipients in the last month (storing only the hash ensures privacy). More than 1000 - spammer. No spammer could make much money spamming less than 1000 people.

Granted, this is going to add some processing and storage overhead, but it could be done offline, and the statistics gathered used to suspend accounts once a day.

-josh

cris.com charged you for this type of activity!

[Anonymous Coward]

I had an account with Connectix, I believe it was called, cris.com, where they charged $500 if you went over their arbitrary email limit, which was something like 25 addresses (I think that was a cc:)! (I don't recall the exact particulars of this, but that was rather impressive to have that hanging over one's head.

Umm there goes a mailing list

[nurb432]

A simple mailing list, or hell even a forward of something to all your friends and family at once would fall under that limit and get your connection cut off..

Nice they are trying to address spam, but this is a bit overkill....

ISPs can act more proactively

[coral256]

ISPs do need to more closely monitor mail that is sent from their subscribers computers--not the content but the destination and headers. Similarly, ISPs need to filter incoming mail as described below. I am glad to see an ISP like BigPond taking some step though I think they could more narrowly tailor their efforts.

Right now three domains owned by members of my family have been chosen by spammers as the forged source domain for their spams, which are primarily sent to AOL, MSN, Yahoo. Working with AOL's postmaster team (which took a long time to find), we have determined these messages originate all over the world from a number of machines on many dozen ISPs and universities--directly from clients on those networks, not mail servers. AOL says there isnt a thing they can do about it (apparently even thousands of spam messages aren't a lot for them and no filtration process exists to, say, block any email which purports to originate from a domain but doesn't originate from the ip address of that domains email server) and I should contact each network directly (a daunting task since no one reads postmaster emails anymore).

Meanwhile, AOL's, MSN, Yahoo, etc. postmaster account sends hundreds of rejected messages to our domains daily.

The spammers' chosen method seem to be to create a relay on these public access networks. Chose a random source domain (which remains relatively constant) and then apply a number of random email account names to create a forged source. Then send to every possible subscriber at a major ISP in small but continuous batches.

Short of requiring authenticated emails, it would still seem relatively easy to detect this spam both leaving and coming in to an ISP:

-- mail is being sent directly from a client and not relayed either through the ISPs mail server or another relay which matches the reply to domain.
-- mail from the same machine continually iterates reply-to names
-- if 100s of messages are being rejected, then logically 1000s must be successfully sent--which means these machines should be more than a blip on ISPs server logs.
-- while messages come in waves, they continue throughout the day (and mail sent by humans is sent in small batches usually during waking hours)

What I would really like is a registry, perhaps tied to my domain registrar, wherein I can register the mail server(s) of my domain(s) and other ISPs can do a lookup for incoming mail and block email which isn't relayed through that mail server/IP address. This simple method would stop all my spam--at least until spammers find a new method.

I got so much spam I changed my address to...

[Anonymous Coward]

uce@ftc.gov

Will they have to read it ..???

[burgessms]

I wonder if they *read* your mail to see if
it is spam, or if they log the quanity, or addresses....

Re:SpamCop paying $30K / year to fight DDoS attack

[scrytch]

> Agreed. But fighting the spammers won't prevent that. The only way to prevent that is to secure the majority of on-line PCs so they can't be zombified.

Perhaps 3/4 of the zombies exist because someone ignored every single warning about opening an executable attachment, and ran it anyway. I'm not saying "users are lusers", merely unsophisticated users are going to compromise any system that isn't so locked down it's unusable. Securing the desktop is important, but no matter what, the immediate upstream also has to be secured as well, so when a box is compromised, the damages can be limited.

they used the wrong language.

[twitter]

Why is BigPond trying to identify a spammer from just 10 minutes of traffic. Or even just 15 minutes?

Because the VB script that does the counting uses an interger that can only count to 32,767 before becoming 0.

Roman Style.

[twitter]

Any two slaves caught meeting together without permission will be put to death. Limiting the number of emails slaves send out at once will reduce the likelyhood of them getting together and Telestra will lose less of their property that way. For heaven's sake, don't let the slaves publish anything! If they knew the truth they would revolt in no time.

Easy fix for the good doctor.

[twitter]

I don't know how he's going to get around this from home (obviously he can send it using our uni mail server when he's at work).

SSH and Mutt. He can load whatever he's working right up via sftp then send it out to as many people as he wants much faster than he can email 20 people per 10 minutes.

Spam throttling with Qmail: qmail-spamthrottle.

[Nonesuch]

To protect both the ISP and the innocent, they could implement a feature where after 20 mails in 10 minutes, mails would only be processed at the speed of, say, one mail per 30 seconds, and maybe slowing progressively after each 100 mails. When the mail pipe has been silent for a given amout of time, say ten minutes, the "mail slower" would be reset.

See Spam throttling for qmail. The software is written specifically for qmail, but could be ported to Milter. Supports configurable rates based on source IP address and network ranges, and aggregation of multiple sources within a subnet (VLSM).

By default, hosts exceeding permitted rates temporarily see answers to SMTP commands delayed. Mail gets through, but very slowly.

What happens when one ISP sends legit email to another ISP? It's very likely to have a sustained rate of 1 email per second. If you throttle the connection, email will take several days/weeks to arrrive.

Clearly the default rate needs to be somewhat higher than 1 recipient/second, and some sort of whitelist for legitimate ISP mail gateways would be appropriate.

What I do is reformat the list of network blocks found on the PDL into the spamthrottle configuration file format.

For example, my mailserver is willing to accept no more than one message per second from the DSL dynamic /17 address block used by Ameritech to serve all dynamic DSL customers in downtown Chicago.

That works fine for the one or two DSL users who run their own mail servers and who need to send me mail, but stops bulk scan runs and dictionary attacks.

The same code can be used on an ISP "smarthost" to slow down relayed mail acceptance from their average end user.

This kills my SPAM filter...

[wodelltech]

I use MailWasher each night - and I usually find 30 or 40 unwanted e-mails. When I use MailWashers's 'process mail' function, it attempts to bounce all of the blacklisted e-mails. This usually results in 30 to 40 e-mails being sent within 10-20 seconds.

Read this now

[Anonymous Coward]

Does any of you has a clue about mail servers?

Has anyone heard of tarpitting?
You can send 5000 messages if you want, it's only that after the 20th (for example), SMTP server will "sleep 1", then after the 21st, "sleep 2" so you will be able to send all 5000, it's just that it will take .. well, much longer than otherwise.

Gaming the system

[pavon]

Yeah, thats what I got out of the article - that it was just the threshold that they use internally to determine who's worth looking at and who isn't. Actually I am surprised that they even published the number, as that will just tell spammers how far they can go before they get caught. All the places I've worked at that had limits on what you could do on the internet never told internal triggers that would set off an investigation. That way you knew you were being watched, but didn't know how to keep from being caught, so the only safe action was to not do the things the company didn't want you to do.

This could actually HELP their users...

[csoto]

At least they will learn to write better. I mean, the only people this would innocently hurt are those that pop off one stupid email after another. Come on! Take more than 30 seconds to write something. This could help reverse the trend of absolutely crappy grammar and speeling you see in emails today...

One of the 1st things ISP's need to do...

[cdn-programmer]

One of the 1st things ISP's need to do is clamp down on forged headers.

What about privacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you send out what is a reasonable amount of email and they now put the magnifying glass on you, possibly to the point of reading your mail?

Oh yeah, that would give me confidence in my ISP.

Is This What The Creators of The Internet Intended

[Anonymous Coward]

It should be clear to any casual observer that when this miserable failure created the Internet, he intended for it to become the hot bed of pr0n and other vices that is today. I mean, the man's own wife wouldn't let him listen to music with the word fuck in it.

A better quota

[phobonetik]

If you sent 19 emails in ten minutes... then x6 x24 = 2736 emails a day. That number is pretty hard for a single email. I mean, on a good day I might send a hundred, but never a thousand. However, what would be better is to, for example, get a 'demerit' point every hour you sent more than 20 in ten minutes. If this occurs, say, 10 times a week, THEN they look into it. Would minimise the number of false checks, and thus unhappy customers and checking-staff... Another way would just to check the top 500 accuonts at the end of each week, etc.

iPowerWeb

[Anonymous Coward]

This ISP is so bull headed about stopping spam that just one mistaken spam report to them, will permenently disable the users account - NO EXCEPTIONS....

I think this is a bit harsh, and ISP's need to adopt a more reasonable policy of dealing with spam and spammers, and some are just clueless to the fact that most spam from them are as a result of an innocent FUCKUP when a PC users mistakenly opens an attachment.

I suspect that more and more ISP's are going to follow this policy.

John

Re:SpamCop paying $30K / year to fight DDoS attack

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget it - anyone stupid enough to use Winblows is certainly not going to be smart enough to understand the concept of the dangers of opening up attachments. Bill Gates knows this, that's why his wallet is so Phat.

They redefined spam?

[Trejkaz]

They redefined "Spam"? That's nothing. Those guys already redefined "Unlimited Broadband".

Re:"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT.

[Anonymous Coward]

how about this: Fuck you and suck my anus you fucking asshole.

Its sad to see fuckhead pigs like you with no fucking humor fucking talk.

Id beat you down too you pasty fat sexless nerdy puke. Fuck off.

Re:"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT.

[JuggleGeek]

how about this: Fuck you and suck my anus you fucking asshole.

Its sad to see fuckhead pigs like you with no fucking humor fucking talk.

Id beat you down too you pasty fat sexless nerdy puke. Fuck off.

Oh, no, whatever can I do? An annonymous coward has cussed me out! I feel so horrible that I have hurt his feelings.

Funny that I replied to Eskarel (565631) and I suddenly got cussed out by an AC, isn't it? I wonder who (Eskarel 65631) it could be?

Re:"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT. defcon4 tsarkon

[Anonymous Coward]

if one fucking moron shoots another fucking moron in the head in cold blood, then all the fucking morons shoot others in the head and it becomes ubiquitous for any fucking moron to randomly kill you, then it should be legal and accepted right?

when you act like a fucking moron, eg, saying virii, you should be punished for your fucking moronacy by society so you can become a better member of it. not continue to be a fucking moron.

Re:"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT.

[Anonymous Coward]

FUCK YOU IT WAS ME LORD TSARKON.

Thou shalt suffer greatly for not knowing when a god strike syou in anger and fury!

Re:"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT.

[Anonymous Coward]

Look JuggleGeekFuckingPrick.

You stupid fucking asshole. You are polluting my troll thread.

I cant believe your stupid dumb prick ass doesnt realize WHO THE FUCK you are arguing with. You stupid fucking shitbitch. Lets assume you think this isnt Lord Tsarkon and someone you are having an argument with. So fucking what. So fucking what. You look like the fucking prick asshole here. Now you have polluted my trolls for the last time you hear you little cum guzzling fucking bastard. Fuck off. You need to get a fucking life, maybe a job, pay a hooker for your first time sex, lose a little weight, take a bath and maybe you should also consider going back to school, you strike my as only partially educated.

You stupid fucking shitbitch. I wish you would just shut the fuck up.

Lord Tsarko has spoken.

dissecting jugglegeeks resume of trash and lies

[Anonymous Coward]

This is JuggleGeek's resume. I will rip it to shreds because he is viscous and very much an unskilled arrogant jerk that constantly makes paranoid statements, espouses half truths and makes arrogant comments on Slashdot. JuggleGeek: An NT 4.0 Lover. A bit behind the times, don't you think? His work is so cheap and unprofessional they use Win98. He claims to be a programmer. His "workstation" OS of choice: Win98. Nice.

HAND CODED HTML! WHO WOULD HAVE THUNK IT COULD STILL HAPPEN?
You mean "Thought it would happen," not thunk. Thunking is something a "programmer" should know about. Most people hand core or use code to generate HTML. Big fucking deal

WELL, IT'S MOSTLY HAND CODED. BUT TO BE FAIR, I HAVE USED
HOMESITE 2.5, AND IT IS PRETTY NICE.
So it is not hand coded. Make up your mind. Moron
MOSTLY, I LIKE HAVING A QUICK ONE-KEY METHOD OF SEEING HOW
THE PAGE LOOKS AT ANY GIVEN POINT.
HACKER : STEPHEN WHITIS
You cannot hack HTML. That is an amateurish, juvenile thing to say. You can author HTML, no more. Its as easy as using a typewriter

Stephen "JuggleGeek" Whitis's Resume Page (p1 of 3)
- Moron error. Possessive form of Whitis is Whitis'.

I am currently seeking employment.
Forgone conclusion. That is why resumes are written. Moron.

I am interested in Delphi programming, with an emphasis on internet related applications, user interfaces, and databases. Web design is not a specialty area, but I have basic skills and an interest in developing them further.
Interest in a subject is not a reason to hire you. No one cares what you like. It is about what you can do for other people. Moron. So, you want your next employer to teach you not to suck in web design?

I currently live in Dallas, and have no interest in moving.
I currently have a company "INSERT COMPANY NAME HERE" and have no interest in hiring you.

I am not looking for "traditional" work. Part time work would be considered, as well as telecomuting [SIC] work. The usual 9 to 5 job doesn't interest me, as I have an ongoing project which already takes up a certain amount of my time.
Translation: I'm a loser that cant keep a real job. I don't have the attention span or the responsibility to finish anything. I like to telecommute to further hide my ability to do nothing. I fail to mention the project because its probably killing small animals or fucking sheep.

If you have a project you need done, and the project interests me, I can be hired cheap.

You can be hired cheap because you suck
If you are looking for a full-time, long term, 9-5 kind of guy, then I'm not the one you're looking for. I'm a self taught programmer with 20 years of professional experience. I'm confident that I can be successful with any programming project I take on, but I will only accept offers where the project interests me and the working conditions meet with my non-standard lifestyle.
This isnt a resume. This is a stupid conversation you are having with no one. Self taught means you point out the fact most real programmers will rip you apart. 20 years? Doubtful. Most of your expoerience is more IT than programming. You have never contributed to an opensource project to prove you can submit code, you have no code portfolio. Non-standard lifestyle. FUCK YOU.

I get a lot of emails from headhunters wanting me to consider jobs out of state. I am not leaving Texas. (And I'm very unlikely to leave Dallas.) If your out of state company wants to hire me, then I'll need to telecommute.
You are threatening your employer with the fantasy you might be having about being head-hunted all the time. You will begin by saying, "You want me, but I'm constan