Slashdot Mirror
Brightmail Denies "White List" Deal With Spammer
ThePretender writes "From the InfoWorld article: 'A spammer's claim to his clients that he had an agreement with anti-spam technology vendor Brightmail to not block his traffic was contradicted by Brightmail officials today.' From the sounds of it, Scott Richter (apparently a notorious spammer) might just be looking for some media attention, he even goes as far saying he has similar agreements with some major ISPs. Ouch! May the drama unfold..."
The problem is that anyone can create bogus emails, thereby masking their own identity. Well surely there is a technical solution to this, such as abandoning the current mail protocols to prevent people from submitting emails with fake identifying info, or from submitting emails from bogus IPs. But where is there any progress along these lines?
Well, glad you asked. The result of the Anti-Spam law will be more American jobs moving over seas or to disreputable neighbors.
Think about it. Once those jobs move over seas America will have even less power to constrain the pread of spam.
There ya go Slashbots.
Corporate officials are not all the much more trustworthy, unless I see hard evidence either way this becomes a mute point. All goes down too who you trust more, companies out to get your money or individuals out to get your money. Best way to stop them getting it is to not have any money, which is working out just fine for me.
Tell me, does this involve Microsoft's decision not to issue any patches for a month?
You can't shut us down! The Internet is about the free exchange and sale of other people's ideas!
I have written several times of a major spamming operation that is using major ISPs. This is the guy who has been paying MSN > 1Million / month (apparently, also, Yahoo and AOL, but I do not know what the amount or deal is there). MSN then was getting greedy and raised it to > 5Million. From what I understand several of the other spammers kept the deal, but this guy approached another major DSL company and offered 2Million / month. The interesting thing is that he wants IPs and bandwidth. The major companies do not try to shut down insecure servers becuase they locate them and then simply use those IPs. Later they can blame the client.
Most of the spam that everybody thinks is coming from overseas is not. It is here, but the large ISPs are willing to hide it for a large price.
Am I the only one that sees the irony of this whole submission to slashdot because it was a post about a spammer pretending to have white list access and submitted by a pretender?
*'A spammer's claim to his clients...*
I think that's the key phrase here. Apparently Scott is losing customers, and in order to retain them, or gain new ones, he has to tell clients he is "whitelisted". What reputable business would want to pay an email broadcast company, when that company is blocklisted. He couldn't possibly think to use this as a defence, saying that if Brightmail whitelists him, he must not be a spammer. But then again, from what I've seen regarding him, I wouldn't be surprised.
As far as I'm concerned, any business that uses Optin is just as sleazy as Scott.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
Even if spammers move their servers overseas, the people running the business here can be sued. Even if the spammer is completely overseas, they can still be sued. If a US company hires a spammer to spam, the US company can be sued.
Fight Spammers!
You generally can't believe a thing the guy says. I know for a fact he doesn't have agreements with at least one of the carrier/ISP's he says he does, and that carrier has had problems with him off and on for years through a couple of their larger hosting customers.
Of course, just for saying this, he'll threaten to get his dad (who's a lawyer!) to come after me, except of course that he's a tax lawyer.
Out of spammers, this guy is the lowest of the low.
You're just feeding his notoriety by talking about him, obviously it's a stunt on his part.
Brightmail has so few false positives and allows so little spam through that any noticable continuous stream of spam caused by such an alleged "arrangement" between Ritcher and Brightmail would be bound to get noticed by savvy end users/administrators, if not Brightmail post-installation tech support.
Same with alleged "whitelists" at ISPs - enough people have eyes on MTA configs that there would be questions.
This is bullshit and I'm sorry Brightmail had to stoop to a public answer.
I was told by a friend of mine (mortgage broker) that his company stopped using ileads.com because they were getting too many "bad quality" leads.
It seems that some people are starting to fill out these forms and having the brokers contact them and then after taking all the contact information from the broker, they inform them that if they don't a) divulge the information of where they got the lead and b) agree to stop using companies that use SPAM to generate leads that they will hand their contact details to the foaming at the mouth public.
Is this legal ? Souds like sweet justice to me.
Not only do some anti-spam software companies make deals with spammers (according to the article), but some also are among the worst spammers.
I talked to a few different anti-spam software companies over the last few months. With each of them, I told them that once we made the decision on which (if any) software to go with, I wanted absolutely no further phone calls or emails trying to sell me their product. We made our decision just over 3 weeks ago and informed the software venders.
Two weeks ago, I received a spam from one of the venders we didn't purchase from. (Yes, the software we decided on caught it, but still, it's the priniciple of the thing.) I followed their procedures to opt-out and also sent an email to the salesperson whose name and email address appeared in the email. I informed her that I told them that I wanted no emails from them trying to sell me their software. I explained how disappointed I was in them and asked to receive no further emails.
A few days later, I received another spam from them. This one was "signed" by a VP of the company. Again, I opted out and sent an email to the VP explaining the entire situation. I explained that I was beyond disappointed and was now getting angry. I demanded that I not receive another sales email from them and explained that if I did, I would be passing the word about their tactics to friends that might be in the market for such software.
Guess what? I got another one. This time, I called the salesperson I was dealing with and explained that I was going to tell everyone I know about how Intellireach is an anti-spam software company that spammed me, did not honor my request to not get spammed in the first place and also did not honor several opt-out requests when the requests followed the instructions in the spam.
But why is the rum gone?
I wouldn't do anything stupid, mind you. I'm not going to jail for that fucko.
;)
But a lot of "passive" justice can be done. You just have to be creative.
Then if any spam filtering companies are whitelisting spammers, then go after the companies for fraud.
Fight Spammers!
For quite some time their filtering has been effective. Brightmail won't say how they do it, but human screening, and subsequent filtering of emails containing links to spamvertised domains seemed to be a part of it.
Lately I have just been spammed silly. Looking at the spams (what choice do I have) the same spamvertised domains are represented over and over. This had not happened in the past.
This spam continues after desperately hitting the "Report Spam" button (available on their webmail interface only).
This supports the theory that either ATT or their contract spam filtering with Brightmail are passing or inserting certain mails.
With this development, I am not inclined to extend this service contract with ATT. I will be certain to pass on this information when the contract is terminated.
do spammers really care about what laws they break? After all, they only use willing worm-infected computes, right?
You would need to use a "CREDIT" card not a "DEBIT" card. I had one company in the past mess with me on a warranty issue. I simply called the bank I had the credit card with and the company finally resolved the issue, but not after having the money ripped out of their hands while they messed around trying to fix things.
When MC/VISA/AMEX start loosing money on spammers, you can bet that they will shut down their merchant accounts.
The thing I fear the most however is dangerous criminal activity from spammers to people who choose to do this. This can only be safe if lots and lots of people do this.
The other danger is bad guys deciding to do this to a legitimate buisness. Say I was an unscrupulous nasty SPAMINAL and I wanted to take out the competition, you could easily generate lots and lots of spam and then link to your competitions web site and watch them go down in a sea of bad transactions. This is what concerns me the most with this scheme.
Or we could make opt-in harder.
We could have an authority that you pick a username and password for, and a list of e-mail addresses, and then allow you to make records with three data items:
1) Key itself
2) Company
3) The e-mail address used
If there is only one such authority, and each e-mail address can only be registered once, then spammers would be forced to illegal action. Companies wouldn't be allowed to sell e-mail addresses, because only they would have the right to use them, NOT whoever they would sell them to.
Of course, spammers could register and then opt in other people's addresses, but that would obviously be equally illegal and actually easy to prove.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
My company is far too small to contract directly with Brightmail so we setup an account with a Brightmail service reseller recommended by Brightmail. The very day we switched our MX record over to them the amount of spam we received actually skyrocketed. I even tested this theory by sending a piece of mail to a brand new mailbox with a GUID as the address through a telnet session directly to the service mailserver. Within an hour that mailbox started to receive spam!
They deny the possibility and called me a liar. We no longer use that service.
There is always the possibility that one of their employees is not so honest and the company has no knowledge of this activity but something is amiss.
"The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion." - Arthur C. Clarke
Many of the "make penis fast" jokers are using web servers in China (and good luck getting info out if them, Brazil (ditto), with credit card merchant accounts from Tongo, Balize, or other countries, using a fufilment center that only has bogus contact info.
About the only one that's reachable is the fufillment center (the guys that actually pack up and ship the product), and them only if they are whitehats. If they just want to make a buck, forget them too.
So you can go the whole chain and never get any info at all that you can use, even with a court order.
Thankfully, all spammers are stupid and can't keep their mouths shut. They almost always manage to out themselves, and if they don't, some people that are doing the dirty work will tell you off the record. The only exception known at this time is Gavin Stubberfield, whose real name appears to be Jason Jaynes, I think.
For a while, open proxy honeypots were doing well, but the spammers are now using hacked machines to control their open proxy scanners and open proxy zombie masters. Spam fighters have moved on to a more effective technique, but we won't discuss that until the spammers catch on to that one.