Spammers Not Complying With CAN-SPAM

Zelphyr writes "The Register is reporting on a study done by MX Logic found that of 1000 messages tested, only three complied with the recently enacted CAN-SPAM act. Little wonder why the spammers weren't shaking in their boots when this spam friendly anti-spam bill was passed."

Comments

Crime pays

[DigiShaman]

It doesn't matter if the crime is though hacking, smuggeling, murder....whatever. The fact of the matter is this. If the crime you commit far exceeds the net total loss from being busted, then why would the suspect want to stop? It's not that hard to figure out.

Sometimes, you have to fight fire with fire. So ladies and gents, let the SPAM hacking begin. Anyone feel like being evangelist for Joe Sixpack with an AOL account?

"compliant" spam...

[Doppleganger]

I actually received a spam the other day that claimed it was CAN SPAM compliant.

It seems someone got the bright idea to take the portion of the law that specifies the primary purpose of an email literally. So the top part of the mail (proudly pointed out as the "primary purpose") was a short joke. Then the email went on to its "secondary purpose"...

And at the bottom, of course, was a disclaimer that stated again which part was the "primary" purpose and which was the "secondary", just in case you hadn't noticed the big notices above.

I'd love to see someone try to argue this point of view to a judge with a straight face...

Internet Death Penalty

[Graabein]

Anyone remember the USENET Death Penalty?

Methinks we have to get a little more drastic in order to have any effect on spam. I mean, everything else seems to fail.

Let's get extreme and start dropping packets from entire /24s from which spam is originating. In extreme cases, let's drop entire spam friendly ISPs. This is the only way to get rid of pink contracts, if all the customers of an ISP suddenly find that large parts of the Internet become unreachable to them.

If an ISP finds itself dropped from routing tables and unable to reach most/all of the rest of the 'net, I have a feeling they will get tough on spam and on clueless customers with open relays/proxies real fast. They'll have to, or they'll be out of business.

Yeah, I know this is extreme and drastic, but what else is there? SPF records won't be effective, laws don't do squat (a: because this is a global problem and b: because law enforcement haven't got the resources/motivation/whatever to enforce the laws anyway).

I'm just getting so sick and tired of these antisocial scumbags ruining email for the rest of us.

Re:Internet Death Penalty

[xlsior]

Let's get extreme and start dropping packets from entire /24s from which spam is originating

Nice... Except you need to be *very* cautious about which /24's you're willing to drop, because part of the problem of spam these days is that is originates everywhere.Zombies, free trial accounts, hit-and-run dialup spammers, open relays, etc. Spam is something that affects every ISP these days, to greater or lesser extend.

As soon as you start blocking AOL and Earthlink's IP blocks because of the high volume of spam you get from them, you will also lose customers by the droves because all of a sudden they can't receive mail from their grandma anymore.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for spam filtering, as well as hitting the spammers themselves where it hurts, but 'extreme blocking' will hurt you and your own customers more than it will hurt the spammer.

Most spammers won't even see the rejections caused by your networks, since some other poor guy will be on the receiving end of all their bounces, and they truly won't care.

I personally use SpamBayes (Free, open source) for my spam filtering, which does an unbelievably good job of detecting spam, with no false positives so far. Written in Python, runs on Windows as well as Linux. http://spambayes.sourceforge.net