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In (Sort Of) Defense of Spammers
CowboyRobot writes "Eric Allman of Sendmail has a rant in which he looks at the economic forces that have led to the spam problem: 'The sad point of all of this is that I'm going to (sort of) defend the spammers and point out that they are responding to basic economic forces that we all respond to at one level or another. As long as spammers can take in more money than it costs them, they will continue to spam. This is "rational" behavior in the economic sense.'" Otherwise known as the Willie Sutton principle.
Drug dealers and people who commit fraud aren't going to go away becuase they can make money ding what they do. We still despise them and send them to jail when we find them.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
Kill all the Marketing Majors.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Altman is right on about the economic factors that spam produce. First of all about knowing the behavior of the applications that *usually* behave in normal fashion but produce wierd results if one of the input interfaces of a *closed application* doesn't get the desired input. But the way i understand is that a few of the interfaces may not be in user control. How do we get to know the inputs defined at the hidden input interfaces? Will it be possible to inject some faults over there? As Eric mentioned, increase the memory load and see the behavior of notepad, this is simple case. I was wondering about ip tables and NAT rules defined in *nix or even some billing hook defined for some telco. How would be ever able to know the input interfaces of that black box? And another important point that will it be possible to take output of black box / closed app and intercept it so as to avoid it's default behavior and treat that output as input to some other black box? I mean chained black box debug behavior.
so as long as a burgler can make more money through crime than he spends, it is a rational career path?
I prefer the Willie Maykit principle for spamming, ie. Willie Maykit from his house to the grocery store once everyone knows what he does for a living and the government suspends any and all criminal offenses for 'dealing' with this type of scum.
When it comes right down to it, heuristics and Bayesian filters and challenge/response systems do improve things from the point of view of the recipient, but not from the point of view of the IT group that has to support all this overhead. Ultimately, e-postage is probably the right way to go, but the costs (implementing the micropayment overhead, plus protocol changes, plus the human frustration) are prohibitive in the short run. Don't look for this in the next couple of years. Besides, people just hate the idea of paying for their e-mail.
.01 cents an email, I don't think anyone would mind paying a cent for a hundred emails we sent out (if it meant no spam). To a spammer, such a cost suddenly makes bulk emailing not an option and they'd be screwed. I wouldn't mind an electronic analog of "junk" email in the way we get junk snail mail. It's not something I love, but legitimate companies do have legitimate goods and services. This is to say, I'd have no problems if "junk" email was 2-5 emails a day from medium/large legit companies containing various sales info.
A questionable set of assumptions. If you charged
G-Force music visualization
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
We've known this all the time. Spammers spam because it makes them money. Didn't we have a /. article a while back showing how big of a house a big-time spammer had, and giving all sorts of stats, e.g. foreign servers in China, Russia, etc spewing spam, three T1 lines, a network of computers in his basement, etc?
Yes, spammers spam to make money. But that doesn't make it legal. Robbers rob to make money, but stealing is illegal.
As long as spammers can take in more money than it costs them, they will continue to spam. This is "rational" behavior in the economic sense.'"
I don't follow. Responding to "market forces" (and God knows I'm an ESR-esque capitalist) doesn't give you the right to invade my privacy. Arguably, the mafia responds to market forces. Extortion is "rational behavior in the economic sense." Your point being?
I have discovered a truly marvelous
Yes, and I could kidnap bums and sell their organs on the black market for profit, but you don't see me doing that.
And corporations could cut corners and ship potentially dangerous products, saving them a lot of money and putting their customers at risk.
And lawyers could do half-ass jobs and let their clients get on death row.
And loggers could cut down every single tree they find and make money off it.
The point is, even if it's profitable, it's not responsible, and it's ultimately detrimental to society.
Plenty of crimes (Drug dealing, fraud, plain 'ol theft) make sense. That doesn't mean they're morally acceptable.
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
Robbery and murder may be economically rational too, but I'm not looking in to a career change.
"... the economic forces that have led to the spam problem ..."
That is an easy one:
Greed+Stupidity=Spammer
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
thieves with no money who mug old ladies are responding to "economic forces" too.
it makes good business sense to not bother protecting workers' health or the environment beyond the minimum you can get away with.
just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.
so what's the point? flamebait story?
Maybe a little TNT will change their minds! ;)
I never understood what was wrong with making spam okay (to a point) as long as they have an Adv: in the subject line. This still allows other people to get it, along with an easy way to filter.
Did anyone cath this guys HOME email, we could all SPAM THE SHIT OUT OF HIM, that might change his tune......
"The problem is that our approach to the solution has also been short-term thinking. We have to think long-term. We have to make the spammers pay more than we do."
:P
My dear sir, the problem has been more than adequately defined a MEEEELYUN times at least. I was hoping for a solution, not another whiny 'spammers do it 'cause it's so cheap' rant. Like that's news.
---
SCO is weenies
Gator is Spyware
Microsoft is thugs
It may be efficient for the spammers, but their business does not take into account the external costs that are borne by ISP providers and the resources expended by people trying to wade through the junkyard that is their inbox. Spamming is not efficient in a Kaldor-Hicks or a Parato model.
While spam benefits spammers, it steals man-hours and network resources from companies who would rather put their personnel and equipment to more productive (and profitable uses). Spam is the collect call that you're forced to accept.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Neolibralism (capitalism) is the basic ideology behind their actions. Just as any other company out there, their goal is to maximize their shareholder's profit. A board of directors that do not maximize profit are doing a bad job.
I guess it's rational for me to become a hit man.
If you charged .01 cents an email, I don't think anyone would mind paying a cent for a hundred emails we sent out (if it meant no spam). To a spammer, such a cost suddenly makes bulk emailing not an option and they'd be screwed.
Not really. If a spammer wants to send out 1,000,000 emails, the total cost would be:
$0.0001 * 1000000 = $100
That's not really deterring. It's a small investment that the spammers would make back within the first few sales of their product, I assume.
There are many things which are clearly "wrong" and which, therefore are not "right" regardless of the cause. I really don't think that "market forces" are a justification for filling your mailbox with as many penis-enlargment or "generic male enhancing formula" ads as possible.
Seriously, sometimes there are forces which drive me to run nearby vehicles off the road whilst on the freeway, but I find the human capacity to control myself for the greater good. Why can't we ask the same for spammers? Because they face absolutely no punishment or cost for their actions.
The point of the whole article can be summed up, IMHO, in the paragraph below:
Ultimately we have to reassign costs from the recipient back to the sender. Such costs can be artificial (e.g., e-postage) or fundamental (e.g., slowing down SMTP connections, perhaps by adding authentication overhead).
So, he is actually making an argument for one of Microsoft's projects: The Penny Black Project.
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
I am sorry, anyone who responds to penile-enlargement ads, or nigerian scams, or any sort of other spam is a complete and utter moron.
I dont know why anyone out there would do this, especially given the poor quality of the advertisements sent out via email by the spammers....
Ahh..but as Monsieur Barnum said, "A Sucker is Born Every Minute"....it was true then and it is true now, there are people out there too stupid to live!
And in response to a previous post, at least drug dealers and embezzlers require a modicum of intelligence, the haphazard style of the spammers indicates they have none.
Post apocalyptic gaming goodness
Willie "The Actor" Sutton was a bank robber. His claim to fame is that someone asked him "Why do you rob banks?" and his answer was "Because that's where the money is."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Well... I RTFA and that article didn't go anywhere.
/. postings and personal experiences.
He says there's a spam problem (no kidding?) and that the economics of it are viable (Well, no kidding? Is that why we continue to receive spam?) and there's no way to stop it without incuring an overhead in transmission (either through permission based, authentication or challenge and response) - well... we already knew that through 100's of
So what was the point of the article? To just rehash the same old situation?
We need a solution, not a restatement of the problem. The solution is going to involve more overhead, because the fundamental problem with SMTP is the touted low overhead itself. There's no real authentication and anyone can send anything to anyone else. THAT is the problem, so of COURSE we are going to have to have more overhead in a "new" SMTP protocol of some sort if we want to affect a change. This is just a given.
The focus needs to be on coming up with a system to track the responsible parties (for good or ill) - and that will cost overhead. We'll have to suck it up, but it's the way it's going to have to be, unless we want to continue on the road we are on now.
Yes, every criminal is merely responding to economic pressure. I'm sure many non-ACs have said the same. What a fucking mornonic thread this is.
Charging for email without securing the email infrastructure is a bad idea.
Spammers don't send mail from their computers, they send from your computer. Who gets the money from this micropayment? If its the recipient, guess what? All of the spam will be directed to the spammers from the hijacked computers. Instant Powerball jackpot winner. If the ISP gets it, guess what? All of the spammers will become ISPs.
Adding a new market force just changes the dynamics, it doesn't eliminate the crime.
Spammers don't make money by selling their products, they make money by selling addresses to each other.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
I like how he gives a couple possible solutions and then says how much they suck.
Basically, the story seemed like a bitch-fest.
I was always told to not spend too much time complaining about a problem unless I also could recommend a solution to the problem
This article is a bit obvious don't you think? Who didn't not know that whole mass mailing business is based on how easy and cheap is sending e-mails?
Well, the main health insurance company here has a helpful service that will send a text message to your mobile phone to remind you to take your contraceptive pill. My only regret was that 6am was the earliest time you could select for that reminder...
Otherwise known as the Willie Sutton principle.
Who's Willie Sutton?
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
Stealing is another activity that with a little investment i could get a lot of economics benefits. Killing for money is another, usually they get from that activity a lot more money than i.e. the cost of the bullets.
Of course, the hidden cost of those activities, more than the social and moral problems, is to been caught, thing that is not so trivial with spam (at least, not the people that actually do it) nor there is no legal risk doing it, at least not yet, not worldwide.
At least with scams (i.e. nigeria ones) could be some kind of legislation that put some risk on doing that, but for now spam is a free lunch, no risk and with highly probable economic return. Wonder how the balance will be change and would be real legal risks in doing spam anywhere.
If I hadn't made money from it I wouldn't have done it.
It made "economic sense" to kill DiLivio as if he had gone to the cops I'd have gone to prison.
It makes "economic sense" to cook the books like Enron as you get rich, all you are doing is using the market and obeying basic forces.
It makes "economic sense" to use slave and child labour, its cheaper, all you are doing is obeying basic market forces.
Oh and Guns don't kill people... number of deaths as a result of "drive by Sarcasm hits" still at zero however.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
So a spammer who follows the rules and actually lets people opt out of their lists is a legal and legitimate businessman. However someone who hijacks boxes, never allows opt-outs etc is in fact just a criminal. So I suggest that we make a distinction between the former Legitimate E-mail Marketer (maybe LEMer) and the criminal. But then I hate to assoctate SPAM (The Food Service Product) with criminal properties and Lemer is pretty lame, so anyone have any reasonable suggrstions for terms?
Yes I did think of CSPAM for the criminals, but it's so close to CSPAN...
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
Everyone is drawing comparisons between spammers and thieves/drug dealers/other money making illegal activities.
This is not an accurate analogy. Thieves do not come to you asking you over and over if you would like your wallet stolen, they just take it. And if you were stupid, then maybe you would just hand it over with a smile. The fact of the matter is most forms spamming are not yet illegal (as far as I know) and a closer comparison can be drawn to pushy, insistent door to door salesmen - annoying, bullshitting and trying to get your money in exchange for a piece of crap.
Eventually there will be laws passed against them (like no soliciting laws in real life) but the law has always lagged in progress behind technology. For now, this article only defends the REASONS for spamming - not the activity itself.
Spammers spam because it is profitable. Companies hire spammers because it brings them in money. 95% of the spam I receive is illegal (forged headers, no opt-out,etc). I wonder if we could petition Visa/MasterCard to have a process for cutting off the merchant accounts when there is evidence of illegal spam. Then it would no longer be profitable to hire spammers.
I wonder if the PR coup would be enough to offset the money lost from spammers transactions.
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
Pay who, exactly?
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
What if instead of trying to get money involved, we get the "backbone" companies involved, (MCI, ATT, Level3, etc.) and had a centralized mail system, that each mail server would have to be registered with, and only registered servers could send mail. If there is evidence someone is spamming, they get the AXE, and can't send mail out to the public world anymore. Instead of "blacklists", we need "whitelists", that way simply changing IP's or domainnames wouldn't bypass the filtering system.
As usual, the problem is the email user. There are enough clueless email users who will actually spend money for penis enlargement or to invest in incredibly profitable opportunities in Nigeria that the spammers and the scammers that use them make a profit. I really don't understand how this could be, but it is. When the spamming and scamming is no longer profitable, then spam won't be a problem.
Not to defend spam, but this issue of economic rationality applies to the recipients of spam too. For too many people, the cost of searching for a product exceeds the cost of clicking through a spam email. HTML email and the internet have made it too easy for the recipients of marketing material to satisfy their curiosity (and buy) from spam. In contrast, taking the initative, opening up a web page to Google, searching for a product, and reserach company reputations is too much bother for too many people.
I suspect that many people see spam-promoted products as no more disreputable than companies found by a search, so why not buy from the most convenitent channel? There may even be a perverse psychological drive that favors spam. If you get screwed by a company that you actively searched for and selected, then you feel like a complete idiot. If you get screwed by a spam compnay, then you can (at least psychologically) partially blame the company that sought you out.
As long as it is easier to click through a spam to reward a spammer (and people are lazy), spammers will be rewarded.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
The email system (and bandwidth on the internet in general) is sort of like communism. Things are fine if everyone behaves themselves and respects others' rights etc. It can work well for small communities. But obviously humans are greedy. So when the internet grows big you get into all these problems. Laws make the problem worse, because if you outlaw an economically sound model you start seeing the totalitarian side of communism.
Could we have designed a mail protocol which cannot be abused in this way? Sure: mails are kept on a server for which the sender pays until the receiver decides whether or not to view it (or a timeout elapses). Just the reverse of SMTP. I won't go into the details, it has been discussed at length on /. before. But is it practically feasible at this stage to switch to such a system? That's an entirely different question.
I can see SPAM killing itself in the not-to-distant future. SPAM is a numbers game, and it used to be that they could get very small response rate and still make money if they sent out a large volume of mail.
Now, everybody is assaulted with countless email messages, mostly peddling the same products. As people get more and more SPAM, the response rate will inevitably drop lower and lower, and I believe it will eventually bring in too little money to justify the costs that spammers incur to send it out.
My public email address will have 100% junk email on some days. I read 0% of those emails beyond the subject line. 3 years ago, when it was only 10-20%, I at least had a chance of actually viewing the message as I was sorting my mail.
Just look here (warning: explicit pictures).
This was well written and well thought out. Plus it has the extra advantage of being dead on the money when it comes to Spammers and why they flood our mailboxes with crud.
Sadly however, what can be done to make the spammers pay more than the recipients do? So far the best idea I've heard isn't all that great...Micropayment
Micropayment isn't the answer since many people have legit reasons to send out an email to a group of people. List servers, Customer lists (Yes I would like you Turbotax to let me know when the stste module is ready for download), Updates to fans when [insert musical group here] comes into town. All of these things are legit reasons to send out thousands of mails per day to people who really want this information. The costs would be too great and it would be the end of the list server altogether.
What can be done to make the spammers pay and not hurt us...besides a locked room, the spammer, fifteen minutes, and a 14-lb lump hammer?
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
Spam is a social problem, similar to STDs. It takes just a few dumb people for the problem to get out of hand. Part of the solution is security - killing off open relays, stuff like that.
The other part of the solution is education. Teach people the world over that they should never ever ever ever buy anything from spam. Teach them that spammers do some pretty scummy things, so you shouldn't trust them with your credit card. Teach them that by giving spammers money they're making the problem worse.
Basically make it unprofitable to spam. Take away that 0.00001% response rate and that will go a long way to solving the problem. And it's better than money spent on increasingly hostile spam solutions like whitelists and capchas.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
And wrong because it is not THAT dificult to stop spam. No, really. But you have to be practical.
1. Make good legislation. Thou shall not spam. IF you spam, you'll be seriously fined. Allow the $@#$%#@ lawyers to sue. Every time I get spammed, I forward the message to the anti-spam organization. Then, the lawyer sues, gets the money, keeps a fee and gives me the rest.
3. Don't tell me it's hard to track the spammer. It's EASY. Follow the money. Here comes step 1. If spam money are sent to Korea or China, block the transfer.
The last point I want to make: there was/is another advertising system where the recipient would pay more than the sender. But, guess what? They don't send ads through fax. Why? Huge fines.
My .02
Bite my shiny metal... oops... Nevermind!
All it takes is to bust a few of them under existing laws, and make sure the other inmates find out "he's in here for showing dirty pictures to little girls".
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Here is Rational Economic Sense to you:
(cut to the 'GodFather' set -- small smoky room in the middle of nowhere)
Godfather (in a very breathy voice): Guido, I know you like that little spam business of yours, but I am gonna make youse an offer you can't refuse...
Spammer (badly bruised up and tied to a chair between two very tall and muscular men): Yes, Don Corleone?
Godfather: You stop that little racket of yours -- the one that sends me insulting emails about my manhood size -- or you are going to find yourself in a trashcan in the toilets of Grand Central Station. All 600 little pieces of you. Is that economically rational to ya or what?
Spammer: Su... Sure, Don Corleone...
Godfather: Good boy. See? I just knew ya were going to like my deal! (pats spammer on the cheek)
(Godfather stands up and exits the small smoky room . A group of even bigger tough guys are waiting outside.)
Godfather (talking to no-one in particular): As soon as he has erased his hard disk, chop him up in a thousand pieces and drop the remains in the toilets of Grand Central Station. Then, kill all his family and business associates, chop *them* up and throw the pieces in the Hudson.
(Godfather enters his long black limo)
Godfather: Increase my penis size! Sheesh, you don't get no respect these days...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
There are two ways to do this. We can reduce the response rate through educating people. If no one ever clicked on the links in spam, it wouldn't be worth the effort for them. And as we increase security it will become harder and harder for them to send it out. Eventually it will cease to be worthwhile.
Alternatively, everyone who recieves spam could club together and chip in 1p (or 1c). If enough people did, we could get a million dollars or so together a pay an assassin to take out a few of the spammers. Eventually the fear for their lives wouldn't be worth the amount of money they made.
Feel free to start sending your money to me and I'll sort something out...
Dealing heroin, they take in more money than they lose. Does that mean we sigh and say 'Ah, such are the wonders of market forces'?
People who beat up little old ladies and take their purses also take in more money than they lose. Do we blame it all on market forces or do we send them to jail? We send them to jail.(*)
Just because something makes a profit doesn't mean it's not bad. The fact that this needs pointing out to anyone is pretty fucking sad.
(*) Except in the UK, but that's an anomaly.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
I predict that if it comes to the point where we pay for email that personal email will be charged at something like $0.50 (fifty cents) per email (or more) and that organizations like AOL and MSN and Yahoo will be selling bulk email to companies at $0.01(one cent) per pop and we will hear endlessly about how they have to have the bulk email in order to support our personal email.
If I were to set up a filter that said the first time you send me an email put Foobar in the subject line and then you will be added to my allowed list. This does get rid of soome of the overhead of the send-reply-send auth email schemes. I could then put my email address (not obsfuscated) on my website with the subject filled in Foobar and then if a long lost friend was looking for me it would be simple for them to get past the filter and be in address book of allowed people in the future.
Don't trust the media. Just because they said he was a front-runner _does not make it true_
If everyone who ever gets a 1-800 number in a spam were to actually call it and waste the person on the other end of the line's time that would cost them a fortune..
unfortunately it is rare to have a 1-800 in the spam.. but please use this strategy.. nothing wrong with pissing off spammers with innane questions..
r.
Ear tags aside (I'm sure many would volunteer to help install them), this ties in with the idea of making it cost something to send spam. This also can be seen in charging spammers money to send spam.
There is complete legal precedence for this. Just look at the Us Post office. They charge in the form of stamps, etc.
A License structure means that there is a legal registry of spammers, complete with accurate names addresses and phone numbers. This means making them legally accountable.
I also propose that companies and individuals be permitted their own "spam processing fees" chargable to these individuals and companies.
And as proposed more recently, spam hunters, who go out and track down illegal spammers, for a certain fees, not always small.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
that you don't understand the premise.
"In the economic sense" means you look at the problem purely from the economic standpoint. Not the legal, not the ethical, not the moral - the economic. Just the economic.
Think of it as functioning in a world of just economics without outside forces like law and morality. Things that make sense - i.e. that will make money - are good, period. However, these ideas tend to lose their appeal when acted on by outside forces - i.e. the aforementioned law and morality. You rolled law and morals into your assessment of a model that does not address them.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
I've gotten several pieces of spam from a AdWords based Search Engine Optimizer. Now, it seems to me that at the end of the day, its not only the spammer, but the SEO advertisting it, and even Google that is making money out of this.
This is an extreme case, but shouldn't it be possible to go after the advertiser and the benefactors, not only the spammer's themselves?
Morality is part of the "cost" of an action. For someone who places no value on morality (morality in the very general sense that most of us accept, like fraud, theft, etc), that person would commit immoral actions if he saw the overall benefit as greater than the costs. On the other hand, someone who thinks he might spend eternity in hell (as an example, another example would simply be having a guilty consceince), would have additional costs to consider. So, the cost/benefit analysis isn't limited to cash in/out, but also other factors. And that's where people decide to do different things, we don't all have the same sense of morality. Almost everyone agrees (or most people anyway) that fraud is immoral, so most people don't do it. Not as many people believe spamming is immoral, so more people will participate in that (if all other factors remained the same).
A modern day witchhunt.
Seriously, why is everyone so up in arms about spam, when our brains are saturated in advertising everywhere we look?
Spam is what happens when you take mass-communication away from the multi-national mega-corps and give it to the common man...
I've started an online business or two in my time, and carefully-target unsolicited email (aka spam) was an essential part of our business plan, and it brought real benefit to most recipients.
I see a lot of ideas floating out of various government agencies around the world based on making spam more expensive. Personally I don't think this is a good approach. We shouldn't be removing the ability to mass-communicate from the common man, we need to be reining in advertising and other forms of brainwashing in a much more general sense.
What that should mean would make for a much more interesting and productive discussion than just talking about the "spam problem".
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Forget the spammers, Contact the pen1s enlargement people.
Tell them that in spite of the fact that maybe in the future you will be looking to enlarge your pen1s, their use of spam as an advertising technique has prompted you to cross them off of your list of acceptable business providers. Spam operates in the statistical mud of return rates, and it can only do so because bulk email is "free". To stop spammers, we have to make sure their income becomes less than their expenditures. Adding postage to email is an example of the latter. "Educating" businessmen about the downside of advertising through spam would be an example of the former.
Since spam does "work" with such small return percentages, it wouldn't take much complaint mail to give them the message about what we don't like in our inboxes.
My spam filtration works pretty well, but a few leak through every day. But that's not so much that I can't take a few minutes and answer every single one, especially if I had a canned response ready. I should do that. We ALL should do that. Then they'd get the message, and find a different way of advertising.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I like to think of spam like this. Think of your computer as a leaf blower. Suppose your neighbor breaks into your garage and steals your leaf blower and then proceeds to gather all the leaves from his lawn, put them in bags, and throw the bags onto your front step. This is not legal. How is that any different from a spammer taking control of your computer and filling up your hard drive with useless crap that you didn't ask for???
everyone notice by now how your Baysian (sp?) filter becomes ineffective when the spammer puts random words at the bottom of the message?
I need someone to help me update spamprobe to it only looks at the first 25% of the message now..
seems like it should be easy enough..
did you a disservice. Bringing attention to something that is not right- even if you cannot solve it yourself can be very helpful.
Maybe someone else does not recognize the problem but will be able to solve it after you bring it to their attention.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I have a strong suspicion that most of the little-guy spam email factories are really just suckered into an industry with the same structure as Mary Kay Cosmetics, Herbalife, Tupperware, Avon, and many other multilevel marketing systems (aka MLMs).
It starts with shit-on-a-stick advertising. You know, the handbills and placards on street corners, or on your company breakroom bulletin board. Somebody reads this junk and thinks they can finally have a job which doesn't require much time and lets them raise their rugrats too. The advertising doesn't say what it IS, it says a lot about what it ISN'T. No selling. No parties (unless you want). No data entry. Use the computer you've got. Some will mention MLM pyramid buzzwords, like "grow your organization," and "get your friends involved with your new company."
Now, in many fraudulent MLMs, you have to pay a fee for a starter kit from your advertising contact. The only difference between a legal MLM and an illegal Ponzi investment scheme is the "product." If you actually schlep skin-cream or candles, you *theoretically* can make back your starter investment without growing a downline organization of other suckers.
You can buy other aids from your advertising contact if you find yourself floundering. Buy a CD-ROM with more email addresses. "Validated." Finally, if you don't think you can possibly sell that much product personally, the only way to escape without major losses is to put out some cheap advertising on your own, asking your friends to get into the act. That's right. Sucker other people to join the organization, so they can share in the same bad investment you originally made.
Spam email "product" would just be the opportunity advertising space itself, which marketing majors will tell you is seen as inventory. The fun thing about email "advertising space" is that it isn't really accountable. You can just run spiders to comb more databases to create more advertising space. Those who get some technical savvy will figure out how to work around a spam filter, and then you can start to build your own library of "validated" addressing space, ready for delivery.
The only way to break apart an illegal MLM is to find the organizing agents of each illegal MLM, and pound them into the dirt legally. Upper tiers are usually found to be defrauding their downline agents, through misleading buy-in advertising. Then prosecute every downline until the roots are too small to grow back on their own. Of course, if they legally have a "product" like "advertising space," and they're careful about how they phrase their recruiting pitches, it's going to be hard to prosecute effectively with today's laws.
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Set up a private fund that would give money to individuals who seek out and bring spammers to justice. These individuals could somehow *cough* convince spammers to not spam anymore. (Some money would also be used to bribe public officials to "look the other way.")
Once spamming becomes the most dangerous job less people will decide to make that career path.
Seriously, we must expose who is doing the spamming. Once people are out in the open, they may be less willing to send spam.
But really isn't feasable.
What I would like, supposing this could be done, is actually a higher charge, say $.10 per e-mail. Thing would be, if the recipient decided your e-mail was worth their time, they'd have the option to cancel the fee. So if you e-mail me for a good reason, I just cancel the charge, if not you pay. Add to that the ability to create white lists, so I can set senders that are always allowed to send me e-mail with no charge.
Something like that would work great at not only eliminating SPAM but cutting down on drive-by flamers and the like for large websites.
However, any pay-per-email scheme I can think of is just totally unworkable. E-mail is just never going to be a centrally controlled entity, it wasn't designed as such and I can't see any workable way to make it.
Now you could potentially create a new service that people would subscribe to that worked like this for sending messages BUT it would never fly. People wouldn't bother to sign up.
On an unrelated note, there is no Wikipedia article for Willie Sutton. Could some knowledgeable person rectify this?
I wonder if we could petition Visa/MasterCard to have a process for cutting off the merchant accounts when there is evidence of illegal spam.
What about people who BUY from spam? Shouldn't they have their credit cards cancelled and a mark put on their credit report? "Hey, I'm so stupid I buy from spam. Hit me with offers, pleeezeee!"
Spamming is an ethical issue at its heart. Using open relays, using individuals' computers to forward mail, and other uses of bandwith that the spammers aren't paying for is at the least dishonest, and moreso argueably theft.
There is also the consideration that freedom of speach by definition includes freedom from speach, so we shouldn't have to be subjected to the spam in the first place.
Is the name of the economic principle Allman is describing. Allman needs an editor, his article is too wordy, and spitting in the face of human behavior is futile. Ask the authors of the Volstead Act.
Same as a factory dumping waste, instead of processing it.
All drug dealers and call people who commit fraud should go to jail
Well, thank you, Mr. Ashcroft. I personally think that drugs laws are illegal, unconstitutional, and immoral. I do NOT believe that people should go to jail for selling drugs. But, thanks for your Nazi-esque input!
Check This Earlier Discussion out. All the benefits and fewer drawbacks.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
If AUTH added a 10 second pause to every incoming connection, how would that affect spammers? Would it in fact cut the spam volume down by a factor of 10?
If the majority of distributions and MTA's added this to their default configuration it could be very powerful, if it in fact works.
Anyone?
For spam to be profitable, *recipients* must be responding to the offers and paying money.
How about instead of coming up some contorted "standard", Microsoft and the other biggies put out an anti-spam PSA campaign... I'm sure the Gates Foundation can find a few mil for this...
Convince all those newbies not to respond to the spam offers and the senders will dry up.
Why do the above? It forces the spammer to house the mail instead of the recipient. If it is a spam, there's a good chance the sending site will be blacklisted before many of the recipients ever receive it.
Not perfect, but it changes the economic balance in the right direction without payment schemes.
Responding to economic forces does not in any way exempt anyone from being subject to moral and ethical evaluations.
If I mug people for money and manage to get away with it, that doesn't constitute a defense of any substantive kind. Yes my behavior can be *explained* motivationally by economics, but for someone to therefor be emotionally conflicted as to whether or not I should be condemned for it would be - to put it kindly - absurd.
Now if the alternative for spammers was to starve to death, that would cast this in a different light. But that's not the case. Spammers are people who could have chosen to go to work doing something useful, and instead decided to pollute the commons.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Okay, accepting that everyone has a right to try to make a living, but the thing that irritates me most about spam is that I'll get the same email 6 times in one day to the same address!
So unlike snail-mail based junk mail where the costs ensure the sender will only bother to "spam" me once a month, email spammers abuse the system.
If they'd just behave a little more sensably then I'd have more simpathy/empathy.
The other thing that annoys me is the content of some of the emails. It really isn't right sending out explicit email when you don't know anything about who's receiving the email.... seriously, some of the spammers should be hung, drawn and quarters for the sh*t they send out.
Getting back to the "volume" problem, this will eventually force the spammers out of business, as it will continue to increase and force changes to the email system. It would therefore make sense for spammers to draw up some kind of unofficial code of conduct, e.g. clean their email lists of dupes and "webmaster" and "abuse" addresses, etc, and only send any given "advert" to a single address once every... month preferably, but if they restricted themselves to once a week it would still be a vast improvement.
I can't see that this would be at all difficult for a spammer and I can't see that it would make any difference to the volume of business generated... I mean, there ain't no way I'm going to order viagra 6 times a day anyway!!
Kerry had less money and less populist support, but a better traditional organization. Dean's impressive on-line donor list did not translate into active party members who took the time to assemble big groups of supporters on the voting days of the various states.
I'm not a Kerry supporter, but I would not call him a non-entity. He's an experienced senator who was on Gore's "short list" of possible VP running-mates four years ago. I suspect he will put together a pretty good coalition of both the moderate and far left wings of the party, and give Bush a pretty good run. People who think he has no chance are forgetting that nobody thought much of Bill Clinton (a small-state governor who spoke too long at the 1988 convention) in early 1992.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
This is something that's bothered me for a long time. If spam largely is fraudulent (direct ripoff) or advertising fraudulent products (real product, doesn't work), or even criminal (selling drugs illegally), why don't we ever hear about prosecutions for this?
Presumably the money trail is the easist thing to follow in a spam message, particularly with the scary new laws associated with money movement these days. It also seems that RICO statutes could be used to ensnare pretty much everyone involved as part of a corrupt enterprise. And then you go away for hard time, 10-20 and forfeit most of your assets to $100k+ fines.
Given that these laws are powerful and their penalties severe, it would seem that a couple of major RICO busts would put a serious dent in the overall spam business. It would not eliminate it completely, but serious jail time for some of the larger members as well as continuing prosecutions might make it much more scarce.
My own theory is that the government is loathe to prosecute fraud, simply because "aggressive marketing" is so entrenched in otherwise "legitimate" business. My tinfoil hat extension to this theory is that otherwise legitimate businesses are profiting immensely from spam (albeit at an arm's length), and have told FTC/FBI to go easy on it (naturally through their paid-up contributions to their favorite officials).
Although to this day, I'm still wondering why nobody seems to go to jail for selling bogus penis pills and Valium without a perscription.
It is simple to make the spammers pay. Use challenge response - not for identity verification, just to make them burn some CPU time. CPU time is usually not considered a cost, but it could be significant to a spammer. Some time is also burned by the recipient, but we can change the balance in our favor as well. "Here, factor this number and I'll accept your mail." Simple. It does cost something from the recipient, but it's imbalanced in our favor. There is one more big big problem to solve before this can really work: Most people get their mail from an ISP mail server. This means the ISP is going to pay the cost on the receiving end no mater how small. Worse yet, those who insist on fondling your outbound mail will pay both prices. Naturally we need to reach the point where we handle our own personal mail before these costs truely don't affect people, and that requires everyone to have an IP address, and that requires IPV6... And there you have it, IPV6 is an enabler to stop the spam problem.
As long as spammers can take in more money than it costs them, they will continue to spam. This is "rational" behavior in the economic sense.'"
The problem is, the only way spammers can make money is to break the law. Honest spammers are bankrupt spammers. All spammers who make money do so by committing fraud, or helping others commit fraud.
Economics is about decision making. A cost benefit analysis should be a true analysis of costs versus benefit. What you have described is a good way to make a determination of Expected Gain, but does not calculate expected costs. After doing the analysis you have above, you should then do a cost analysis, something like:
(monetary cost of getting into the business) + (Time associated with getting started) + (Time associated with running said business) + (Moral costs) + (other stuff)
At that point, you can compare the costs vs benfits. In reality, you have lumped costs and benefits together, and they can be seperated out, so taking what I've totaled above, you can add your costs, which were:
[(Probability of being caught) * (Estimated monetary cost of penalty)] + (Opportunity Cost)
A cost benefit analysis is not restricted to only monetary costs/benefits. As I posted in another thread, a religous person would be concerned with what God thought about that action (assuming the "action" was something like stealing, etc.), which increases the total costs. Or, someone may just have a guilty consceince, again increasing the costs. There are other possibilities that would increase cost, but the important point to note is that the big variables are "moral costs" and "other costs" (as it pertains to this issue of spammers anyway). There are lots of reasons people may choose not to be a spammer. That doesn't mean those people are not making decisions, it's just that their decisions include things you haven't included in your formula.
A modern day witchhunt.
One possibility I haven't seen discussed much is to make mail transmission intentionally unreliable. What would happen if a mail server rejected 90% of the attempts to send a message through it (and the sender was configured to keep trying until it went through)? Normal, legitimate, one-off emails would take up 10 times as much bandwidth (and time) due to failed requests, but these numbers are right now measured in kilobytes and seconds so it's not that bad, and the increased load on any single ISP wouldn't be all that great compared to their other bandwidth consumption. A mailing list with several thousand users would be significantly slowed, but it might be tolerable. A spammer who depends on keeping his connection filled to capacity with outgoing emails would see his output cut by an order of magnitude and go out of business. Objections?
"No one finds a briefcase full of crack on the street and asks, 'Hmm...how am I going to get rid of all this crack?'."
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk, but Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now, think about that. That does not make sense! Why would a Wookiee - an eight foot tall Wookiee - want to live on Endor with a bunch of two foot tall Ewoks? That does not make sense!
What does that have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense!
Look at me, I'm a lawyer defending a major record company, and I'm talkin' about Chewbacca. Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense. None of this makes sense.
And so you have to remember, when you're in that jury room deliberating and conjugating the Emancipation Proclamation... does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed
jury, it does not make sense.
None of this makes sense.
If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests.
---
IMHO, of course.
May the SOURCE be with you.
Perhaps we need a crypto algorithm that is slow to encrypt and
fast to decrypt. Give every mail a unique key that is sent in plain text with the mail, encrypt the rest of the mail with this key. A MTA will not allow duplicate keys forcing the spammer to re-encrypt the mails that are being sent causing his CPU to be
exhausted and slowing down the spam process. Anyone good in math could maybe find a good algorithm for this.
All a spammer has to do is send spam on the behalf of companies that are not their customers and there would be no way to know which merchants should be prosecuted. Spammers muddy the water as much as possible - that is their entire means of survival.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
I'm sure I'm not the first person to mention this, but I was surprised that the article didn't make mention of it...
Imagine an email delivery protocol that allows the user determines whether or not a sender is charged for sending email. Sending an email requires a fraction of a cent deposit. I as a recipient only get to chose whether the sender is charged, and if I so chose the sender's fraction of a cent goes to pay for the overhead of maintaining the system (and not to me as a recipient... this is important). If I don't chose to charge the user within some arbitrary time period... say one week, the sender's deposit is returned.
Why isn't this being mentioned? Has it already been deemed unviable.. or just dumb?
Just because spamming is not illegal (and it is, under an increasing number of laws) under some conditions does not make it morally or ethically "right." It is still theft by conversion and trespass to chattel. The court system decided that a lonnnng time back in the original case of Cyber Promotions vs. AOL.
Muggers, shoplifters, and other thieves are not going to go away as long as they think they have even the ghost of a chance of making a quick $$.
Spamming is not going to go away as long as spammers think they can make an equally quick $$.
Spamming would stop practically overnight if the entire Internet-using population simply failed to respond to ANY of the offers contained in spam, no matter if they came from a supposedly "legitimate" company (and, in my eyes, no company that sends any form of spam can be considered "legitimate") or some huckster in a double-wide in a trailer park.
The answer, to my eyes, is two-fold, and is simple enough.
(1) Extend the existing anti-junk FAX laws to cover E-mail. In other words, ban spamming outright. Period.
(2) Teach people early and well, especially the earlier generation: NEVER RESPOND to spam, other than to block or filter it.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
Just tell your computer illiterate friends and family to STOP BUYING PRODUCTS FROM SPAMMERS!!!! Explain to them that if they want to buy something, they need to search the internet, research the company they're planning to buy from and not accept offers made through email.
I wouls like to propose a new solution for spam, first, all broadband connections will have port 25 outgoing blocked by default (or just straight out blocked) If you want to unblock a port you call a phone number and an automatic prompt will allow either a one-by-one unblocking or an unblock all option, doing so would carry a one-time fee of 5 dollars, once you paid it you could mess with your port block settings as much as you want for free (plus local telephone charges if applicable) I would pay a one-time fee of five dollars (or even $50 if needed to pay for the infrastructure for this) dollars for the "privlidge" of custom port opening while having the benifit of safety for my parents who just want to read email, instant message, and surf the web.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Working for a living, even with those annoying advanced degrees, costs a significant amount of time and effort. I've seen claims that acquiring a single job through direct application costs close to $100. And that's not considering the 40 hours a week one must spend at the job. Doing a job that pays poorly is inefficient, so workers limit the number of jobs they do to the highest paying they can find.
But suppose it costs you essentially nothing to make a buck through mugging. Then your best strategy to maximize profits is to mug as many people as you can find. After all, if you're mugging mortgage financiers, there might actually be some money in their pockets. You would miss those potential money sources if you trimmed your list. Perhaps some folks who have expressed interest in designer beer mugs are also walking in your area. If you did the "rational" thing you and didn't hit them over the head with a sand-filled sock, you would miss them, and it costs you nothing, right?
The sad point of all of this is that I'm going to (sort of) defend the muggers and point out that they are responding to basic economic forces that we all respond to at one level or another. As long as muggers can take in more money than it costs them, they will continue to beat people senseless and take their money. This is "rational" behavior in the economic sense.
For the billionth time, Spam != advertising. When a company advertises, THEY cover the costs of the advertising. They buy the billboard and pay the guys to put their ad up on it. Spammers, on the other hand, use MY money, MY network and MY time to deliver advertisements to me. The reason spammers are able to break even is because they're using other people's resources to get their advert out. Besides, if the "common man" wanted your "mass-communication" everyone would be checking out www.viagra-adipex-free-teens-larger-wang.com instead of slashdot.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
I got this in my mail, what should I do? Hello. Spam Hosting. Location: Korea OS: FreeBSD Port: 100mbit. IP: + PHP, CGI, MYSQL, 500MB, cPanel. 250$/mesyac. Fraud Hosting. Location: Korea OS: FreeBSD Port: 100mbit. IP: + PHP, CGI, MYSQL, 500MB, cPanel. 450$/mesyac. Dedicated form 500$ per mounth. Contacts: ICQ: 434432 I want him to suffer! :]
SMTP servers process all email as fast as possible, spam included.
If you slow down email from known spammer sites to say 1 byte per second that makes their T3 pipe rental a lot more expensive. Another thing that could happen is that the messages pile-up at the sender's end and crash their server.
I know there is a SMTP deamon that does this already.
But instead this could be done at the firewall on port 25.
This way you don't force Admins to swap-out their existing email infractructure (read M$-exch).
Spamming is not justifiable behavior period. It's nor morally or ethically correct to force someone to do something in order to live in the world. Time_life used to send me books for a free 30 day trial. If I didn't want them I had to send them back... well no, I don't have to send them back. Time_life is not the boss of me and cannot force me to return something they sent to me that I never requested. Sure they can try like hell but they have no right to. I got them to stop, by keeping the books and finally one day answering the phone when they called. They wanted to know if I still lived at (my address) so they could send me a book to try out. I said "why yes i do still live there and I'd be happy to receive their book, however I'm not going to return it nor am I going to pay for it."
Spammers shouldn't be the boss of me either but they are. They force me to delete their email, dick with procmail and pay for the bandwidth that their advertising costs me. Currently my only choice is to not play the email game. But given my occupation that would be virtually impossible.
I used to think the only way to combat spam was to raise the public's awareness of it's evils and get the public to protest by boycotting the companies who's products are being marketed by spam. Of course given the mindless do'h mentality that most American's (at least) enjoy that will never happen. If it ever were to happen, we'd see rival companies sending out spam, advertising their competitor's products. So I guess that's not going to work either.
People like Eric Allman who try to justify a spammer's behavior make me sick. Gullt is the only weapon we currently have and he's even minimising it with Timothy's help. Now 1000's of slashdot readers who were just considering becoming spammers are going to go on over to the dark side because it makes economic sense. Thanks guys.
G
Mafia Don Announces New Anti-Spam Venture
As the NSA and FBI fear, traditional crime organizations have been incorporating high-tech communication into their organizations. Although Janet Reno was quoted stating "This is law enforcement's worst nightmare.", techies around the world are sure to be pleased with one New York Syndicate's new venture.
It all started when Don Dominiqi signed onto his AOL account last Monday morning. His inbox was filled with "Make Money Fast", "Viagra On-Line", and "Teenybopper Web Sex" ads. Lost amidst the drivel was an important note detailing a non-taxed shipment of Marlboros, which were later confiscated by the BATF. Little did he know, as he shouted "Bring me the left hand of this f*cking gutterslime!" what would become of it all.
Later that same day, Billy "Run!" Brutekowski and Larry "My Eyes!" Plucker cornered the pasty-faced offender of the Family in a small cyber cafe in Grenich Village. "This was by far the creepiest place the Boss has ever sent us." stated Billy, who only spoke on condition of anonymity. "Everyone in this place looked pale and sickly, like they had already been 'spoken to'. We asked for this punk, and several people quickly pointed him out. Most of the scum we find in gin joints aren't so quick to finger one of their own," Billy continued.
"He must not watch much TV, because this sh*t didn't even flinch when we came to the corner he was hiding in," Larry proceeded to relate. "We dropped this sheet of paper the Boss had given us on his table and he says 'So you guys want to make money fast, eh?' He puts out his and says to give him $20. This scrawny little dirtball tells me to give him $20!" Larry was quite agitated at this part in his story, and his description of how Sammy Spammer's hand fell off was quite garbled.
Billy continued, "Up till now, this was a routine visit. We was just being playful. The weird sh*t began when we tried to leave." "This pimply faced kid blocks the door as we try to leave, and I'm thinking to myself 'Great, a f*cking Karate Kid hero. He just stand there, and then he hands me a $5 bill." Billy pulls out the $5, and holds it like it is his first quarter from his favorite grandmother. "They lined up after that, and we had $175 in 'tips' when we left the joint."
Later that day the Don himself visited the cafe, unwilling to believe the story. Although the details are unclear, sources at the cafe indicate that the Don has hired them to build and host a new Anti-Spam site. Through a SSL transaction system, the site will accept spam complaints and credit card donations towards 'solutions to problems'. Multiple complaints against the same spammer are added to the total until an acceptable solution has been found.
Larry tells us that a typical $250 solution is a broken hand, and for $2000 all anyone ever sees again of 'the problem' are his shoes.
The URL is to be announced next week, and the cyber cafe's phones have been jammed with requests for more information.
I've posted this before, but it is still funny.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Extortion is irrational because you tend to get caught and punished for it.
If spammers were caught and punished, spam would stop being rational.
You are saying that anything which makes economic sense fits the model?
... Enron fits the model ... bribery ... kidnaping for ransom ... if Bush had said we are going to war to get the oil, that would fit the model ...
Not just ordinary robbery
There is no point to all this. What the hell does fitting some model have to do with anything useful? You may as well argue how many angels fit on the head of a pin, it has no use to anybody.
Infuriate left and right
All this talk of paying for email is silly. It won't work. We're already nickled and dimed for bandwith, connection fees, cell phone services, etc. It's an interesting theory, but it just won't work. I have a better solution to deal with the spammer solution.
First, you hunt down the spammers. Torture them until you get a hold of the people they were hired by. Torture them. Continue until you get to the CEO of nike, or viagra, or whoever started the chain.
Take this long line of people and dismember them publicly (perhaps take some of George Carlin's ideas about letting people bet on the event to make some money) in a most graphic fashion. Make sure that everyone knows that this is because they were spammers, or directly contributing to spamming.
Repeat as needed. Eventually this none too subtle approach will encourage people to find other lines of business. Sure, you might get some collateral damage, housewives, people wrongly identified, that sort of thing, but if you do your best (ie: not just looking at mail headers), this can be minimized. You have to break eggs to make an omlette I say! I think it'd work.
Seriously though, saying "it takes in more money than it puts out" is a bogus argument. I can pimp out my 12 year old sister on the street corner and take in more money than I put out, but that doesn't make it right. Saying "but she's a blonde, and all I have to do is buy a pair of high heals every 6 months" doesn't make me not the scum of the earth. I can make money by dumping radioactive waste in a playground for big business and make money as well, but does that mean I should?
On second thought, maybe my first idea isn't so far fetched after all.
Everyone always says that as long as there are people willing to buy this product, spamming will continue. Well, looking at the products advertised by spam, I have trouble believing anyone buys these products.
I don't believe the problem is that spamming successfully brings in new customers. I believe the problem is that spammers sell their service to unsuspecting "businesses" that believe whatever phony lines they are handing them about how it will be good for their business. As long as there are small businesses who believe this, spammers will find a market for their services and spam will continue, even if the premise that spam has a nonzero response rate is untrue. Eventually as it becomes commonly accepted knowledge that businesses are not successful with this type of advertising, spam should drop off.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
I'm sorry, I just don't buy it. Screw economics.
The bottom line Allman is NOT addressing is SMTP IS A BROKEN PROTOCOL. Spamming happens because it is EASY TO DO and it takes more effort to stop it.
SMTP was designed in an era where internet hosts implicitly trusted each other (this same era gave us the horribly insecure TELNET and FTP as well). That era is LONG LONG GONE.
The reality is that SMTP headers are too easy to forge. We will NEVER be free of open relays--this is the fault of the protocol as much as the clueless admins. SMTP needs to be completely replaced.
Look--you can still get spam-free email. Just not over SMTP. Believe it or not, FIDONET still exists and guess what--I don't get any spam there. Why? Because the system would smash down anyone that tried rather quickly--the protocol works. I've been encouraging anyone who will listen to jump back on one of the many FIDONET or Citadel BBS systems available on the internet for decent, spam-free email.
The problem started when text based email was upped to be able to have HTML inside.
It is the HTML that makes email a marketing tool, without it there is hardly any money to make from sending emails around.
Knowing the corporates it will never happen, they rather close down free email altogether and put on a fee based equivalent.
So they will do all they can to ruiening the current system, and what's better than combining marketing and destroying email at the same go...
Since a lot of spammers rely on open relays, maybe it's about time a few honeypots are set up with open relays that send all port 25 activity to /dev/null, sends the spammers fake ACKs, and log who's trying to send the spam.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
It is quite easy to get rid of spam. This is what I do: 1. Receive Piece of spam regarding penis enlargement. Sent to junk mail, or doesn't go through my spam filter. 2. When I get a few minutes, and I'm rather pissed off at something, I pull up one of my default response templates. Ie, received E-Mail of Penis enlargement pill/patch/voodoo dance, and simply send an E-Mail back saying: "Hi, I'm interested in your . Please send me some information on your product." 3. Wait for response to mail 4. Send another appropriate but stupid question to them, never actually purchasing. 5. Repeat step 3 if a further E-Mail has been sent to me. Some interesting things I have noted: 1. My spam has decreased. The spammers are not all stupid and they blacklist my E-Mail address. (From 400 mails a day, down to about 50) 2. And this is the big one. It costs a small, tiny fraction of a cent to send out a generic spam advertisement. Therefore, easy or genuine responses are economically viable, as they only get a few a day. Now just imagine, if we have the force of a fraction of a few dedicated /. readers. Perhaps about 100,000 of them sending on average 5 generic responses per day. That's 500,000 E-Mails to the evil inboxes of doom.
Let's say that 1 company gets 70,000 bogus E-Mails in a day. It still takes approximately 1-2 mins to read and respond adequately to a person if they want to make a potential sale. Thats between 70,000 and 140,000 minutes a day.
That's about 1,167 to 2,333 work hours a day to respond to the junk they get back to perhaps glean 100 real potentials from their campaign.
If you need to pay an employee just $10 an hour, that's still between $11,670 and $23,330 a day. That's between $4,259,550 and $8,519,100 that the spammers have to pay in work hours.
Now, lets say that they make about $2,000 a day from the 100 e-mails they get that are legit. They are now running at a loss.
Reading only the subject lines and filtering out the 'non-genuine' responses will result in REAL reasponses being filtered out as well, making their profits drop.
As the article said, they are using basic market economic forces to make a profit.
We can use basic market economic forces to reduce the spam.
Summary:
1. Responding to spam has reduced my Junk mail, probably due to blacklisting. (This is only me, and I am only stating what has happened in my case.)
2. If enough people respond with fake letters of interest, the spammers go broke, and it becomes non-profitable.
So a call to arms /. ers. You hate spam? Me too. Let's do something about it.
CRyACin
If life gives you shit, then sell fertiliser - Bayani Portier
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Comment removed based on user account deletion
the links. Except for the rare text only spam most spams either have a picture or a link that goes to a domain.
Those domains are used by tons of spammers. So by filtering out a single domain blocks dozens (or more) of spammers. And there's zero risk of blocking a legitimate e-mail since no legitimate e-mails are going to link to those spam domains.
The other bonus is that IPs are free from the ISP but domains cost real money. I've harvested hundreds of domains from spams that have hit my mail server and at $7 a pop or more, I've just "cost" spammers thousands of dollars. They have to pay a chunk of change any time they want to spam me about something. Every few days enough spams get through to care to update my Mercury Mail server filter with the new URLs.
And thanks to the HTML protocol you can't obfuscate an URL. The best they can do is base-64 the entire message but those are easy to filter out as well. It does't matter if they plain text the URL either. It's not looking for an href. It's just looking for "topofferz.biz" or whatever. As long as you keep the ".com" or whatever you don't have to worry about random letter domains that have letter combinations that can show up in legitimate attachments. Attachments are encoded without the use of a "."
The filtering happens server side so I save 50% of the bandwidth cost for every message caught. Plus cost spammers real money they paid for their domains. It's a win-lose situation just like it should be.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
How can anything I do now help my ancestors? They're more-or-less all dead.
Because I don't try to communicate by billboard, TV commercial, or radio commercial. As such, these ads do not pollute my personal communication methods by resulting in a 50:1 ratio between crap and actual communication.
Your natural response to this is of course mail and phone, which are communication means, so I'll address these. First, it is now legal to opt out of phone-spam as of yesterday (thanks FCC and appellate court!), so that actually becomes a precedent now for getting rid of spam. That leaves actual mail, which is costly enough that I have at least a 1:1 ratio between ham and spam.
Bottom line is that people hate spam for two reasons: the spam:ham ratio and the fact that it should be a communication means.
I've started an online business or two in my time, and carefully-target unsolicited email (aka spam) was an essential part of our business plan, and it brought real benefit to most recipients.
That's a great troll. In case you're not a troll, on behalf of all the rest of us, go away. We don't care about your business plan, and you didn't hear from the 99+% of recipients who didn't get a benefit from your spam outside of a shit-filled inbox. Incidentally, what exactly did you do to give such benefit to millions of recipients? Also, did you use your own server to send that stuff, did you use a spam-friendly ISP, or did you illegally hijack a server?
see a lot of ideas floating out of various government agencies around the world based on making spam more expensive. Personally I don't think this is a good approach. We shouldn't be removing the ability to mass-communicate from the common man, we need to be reining in advertising and other forms of brainwashing in a much more general sense.
I would agree if every person had a means of keeping you out, as just referenced by the court decision on the FTC's DNC list. You have the right to mass communicate. However, that's trumped by my right NOT to be mass-communicated to BY YOU. If you can set up a method by which all people have the right not to be emailed by spammers, and this is enforced by something real, then I'll agree to let people spam, but not before.
In other words, I don't want your email. None of us do except for the world's truly stupidest people. Take your "business model" elsewhere.
The answer is simple. Change the economics of email. Do it in a gradual way and make sure it remains backwards compatible during the process. It would likely take several years to completely replace the existing infrastructure but it could be done.
Well there are companies that dump harmful waste into our water suppply instead of having it properlly disposed of, but I'm not going to defend them.
TruePunk | Games
As the article says, spammers send spam because they make money at it. The solution presented is one we've heard many times... charge for email and make it less profitable.
Why not go after the source? Go after the companies that are advertising via spam? Track them down, follow the links they send, follow the trail, and jail them. Fine them. Make them pay.
If the spammers are making money off of spam, that money has to lead somewhere. Follow it to the source, and deal with the source.
The infrastructure for micropayments on email would be insane considering that (most?) every country in the world would have to back it, there would be a huge amount of tracking and auditing to be done, and a fairly seamless cutover for millions of companies would have to happen... Yeah, right.
He didn't say that because there's a cause to the effect of spamming, it should be legal. He simply said that so long as spam paid off, there will be spam, legal or not, and that if you want to solve the problem you need to look at making it not pay off.
Too many of you sit around with arguments in your mouth waiting for someone to come along and trigger your spewage. Shut the fuck up and THINK about what's being said before you open your pie-holes.
No wonder Sendmail is full of bugs, if this guy writes code like he writes English. The author was stylistically awkward and far too geek-typical (e.g. "insert deity here" jokes), made no interesting points, and yet postured as one with great wisdom to offer.
Exactly why the government needs to levy an infrastructure use tax on commercial marketing email, solicited or unsolicited. $.25 per email would be nice.
Make it not profitable, and they will go away.
Since they are putting a huge drain on the infrastructure, they should pay. We have commercial highway taxes...
Exactly. Normal advertising is responsive to consumers' wants, because marketing companies can't waste money on expensive advertisements for products that won't sell. On the other hand, spam is, by definition due to the economics, a flood of stuff that people likely don't want. The average person probably sees as much viagra spam as they see Coke and Pepsi adverts throughout the day, even though people want Coke/Pepsi a lot more.
...is the only way to really solve this problem.
urg, he couldn't have made this any more obvious. Imagine he was a company selling sendmail: what would they try and do? They'd try and make it look like they weren't the ones responsible for the spam, as they'd have money (in his case, ego) on the line.
The problem here is a fundamental flaw in smtp.
The solution here is to redesign smtp. Even something as simple as a 'trusted peer server' model would work and wouldn't need a complete redesign: each server is the trusted peer of several others (say 5, and all would have to be fqdn). After mail is sent, and before that mail is delivered, the server it is sent from is validified to be a peer (by doing a quick check on the 5 servers that it claims are its peers). If the server sent from doesn't have peers, then the mail isn't delivered.
While this wouldn't completely trap all spam, and some spam would certainly still get through from exploited networks, it would make the job of maintaining accurate RBLs much, much easier, and would functionally run spammers out of business, if (say) the next sendmail version were to impliment the feature, and people started using it.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Wait, spammers spam because it makes economic sense? What a bolt from the blue!
I've read the "tragedy of the commons" explanations of spam dozens of times already. Okay, I get it. Enough reiterations already.
I don't need the author of Sendmail to lecture me on Econ 101. I need the author of Sendmail to come up with workable solutions to the recoginized problem. What's the point of writing an article saying "Here's the problem that people have already pointed out, here are the unfeasable solutions that people have already suggested, the end"?
I think mailing lists are the wrong technology for discussion groups anyway. I have never understood why people prefer them over the news protocol that is perfect for that. If it is real news you want then rss is the solution. Both news amd rss are, IMO, far better protocols for this type od thing then mail is anyway. Not that I support the idea of charging for mails with money though -- I hope that fails, and I certainly won't use it.
Kill all the Marketing Majors.
Amusing, but seriously, marketing majors and *professional* marketing people are rarely responsible for problem spam. The kind of spammers we hate are usually people who never went to college, and became bottom-feeders instead. I don't think you'll find too many MBAs in the porn industry, the illegal drug/supplement industry, or the pyramid scheme industry.
His buildup is fine, but his conclusion is off by a mile and a half.
Firstly, he claims that our bandwidth and disk space aren't free... welp, he's right, but only barely. The marginal cost of the additional disk space, CPU cycles, bandwidth, etc is virtually zero, but certainly positive. Yet then he claims that a spammer's costs are zero. What about their computers? Email addresses? Bandwidth? Hard drive space? Those certainly aren't less costly than the same types of resources for each individual recipient.
But, more to the point -- why filters will make reduce spam by effecting the marketplace:
1. The filters have forced the spammers to degrade their own salespitch. By being forced to include extra characters, poor spelling, lousy grammar, etc in an effort to circumvent filters, they are serving to reduce their own credibility. By doing so, they are making their advertising less likely to attract any particular customer. Therefore, their response rate of the folks who might respond to spam is reduced, making spam less profitable.
2. By making spam filters more and more effective and easy to administer, they will find their way to more and more people's mail clients. For many of the new adoptees of filters, it won't be because the new users sought out the filter; it will be simply because the filter was part of the email program they happen to be using. Some of these folks are in the set of "spam-responders", that is, folks that might respond to spam. So, as filters proliferate, they will end up filtering spam away from potential customers -- again, reducing response rates and hence profitibility of spammers.
So, there's two ways where spam filters will reduce overall levels of spam by using the powers of economics against the spammer. Reduce the liklihood that somebody will respond to a spammed message by reducing it's quality, and reduce the liklihood that a potential customer will even see the email in the first place. Sure, the recipient will bear some costs in the short term, but the long term results will be less and less spam overall.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
The answer: the sender pays an email tax to the recipient instead of the gov't or the ISP. This means that the cost of receiving the email is offset by being paid to receive it. If you don't want to charge Grandma or your favorite mailing list to send you e-mail, then add them to your Whitelist, and they don't pay anything.
This way, if you get spam, at least you're getting paid for it!
Implementation could be handled at the e-mail server level - the sending ISP pays the receiving ISP. The sending ISP adds the charge to the sender's bill, and the receiving ISP subtracts it from the receiver's bill, after taking the cut for their storage and bandwidth costs.
Therefore, if spammers steal an account with which to spam, they are now also stealing money from the account holder, which is covered under strong, existing laws .
...the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Maybe I'm wrong but spammers do have the same free speech everyone else has. I'm sure no one will see this message because I won't get modded up, but maybe someone will. After all, I have the free speech to post this message.
A spammer does not pay to keep a web site or an email account?
By your logic, junk mail also uses your resources since you need to maintain a residence (or at least a PO Box) in order to recieve ads. Should advertisers also subsidize your television costs as well?
Your argument is wack.
But "basic economic sense"? What in the world happened to common sense? Oh, it must have gone out the window when the spammers started this neat little flood of "free this, free that, oh and we can enlarge your penis in 7 days"
Bah..
The world is changing agian folks, and spammers are effecting that change, only that the change will be to drop the Heavy End of The Hammer upon themselves.
Let's help them out with that, eh?
The bottom line is that marketing sucks. Period. It's best done in moderation and in good taste. Period!
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
This is to say, I'd have no problems if "junk" email was 2-5 emails a day from medium/large legit companies containing various sales info.
... That's ok."
NONE!
Oh Sweet Jesus I tire of these people. Intellectual Geldings hugging the leftmost curb of the bell curve all the way home. Utterly thoughtless and proud of it. Willing to speak in public. Hello World. I'm a dumbass! They can and often do, vote. Pity. Probably on a school board somewhere.
"Legitimate medium/large companies can send me 2-5 emails a day
Amoebas look down their nose at this critical thinker. Somebody forgot to close the door and Special Ed got out. Back in the room tard!
Jeez!
I wrote a paper about this a few weeks ago, but automatic cryptographic message signing would solve a lot of email related problems (i.e. spam and viruses/worms).
The basic idea I had was that every account would have an associate key-pair, and users would be required to send through an authenticated SMTP server provided by the account issuer. The SMTP server automatically calculates and inserts the signature, which the receiving SMTP server can then veify.
The only problem is that it would require widespread acceptance for it work reliably, and there's significant overhead (in message signing and verification).
---
Open Source Shirts
I think there should be a reward for ratting on a spammer. If you give the government a tip that 'such and such is a spammer', you get a hefty reward that's worth the risk. Then, the spammer (if proven to be an actual spammer) gets a very harsh sentence - 15 years and castration.
This way, spammers could soon go the way of the dinosaurs.
The basis of anti-narcotics laws in the United States stems from the food & drug safety laws enacted in the late 19th century.
These food & drug acts designated certain substances as "controlled" substances, which can only be dispensed to a consumer with the explicit consent of a medical practitioner. These laws were passed to protect consumers from slick salespeople peddling sugared water as expensive miracle medicines.
Spam is a very similar problem. Which makes it very attracive to the penis-pill peddlers and other modern-day snake oil salesmen.
The problem is in the case of drugs, the "controlled" object is a pill. In the case of spam, the "controlled substance" is speech.
Do you really want the government to be determining what is spam and what isn't? Turning spam into a form of "controlled speech" sets a very bad precedent.
Especially since spam really isn't the problem that we face -- in reality the problem is the archaic SMTP transport protocol, which provides NO assurance that the sender, recipient or mail servers are who they say they are.
Fix the protocol, and you have solved the spam problem.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Hard to define feeding an addiction as "voluntary". Drug dealers deliberately market addictive drugs knowing they are creating a market that is completely non-volunteer.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Here's an interesting article on spam filtering: Boykin and Roychowdhury: Personal Email Networks: An Effective Anti-Spam Tool. They describe an automatic system that can look at your emails and find out who your friends are. Its classification accuracy is supposed to be perfect (i.e., no false positives or negatives), but it will leave some email unclassified (i.e., "don't know"s), so it does need to be combined with another filter.
Until we find a way to learn about new products/brands that does not require broadcasting we will have spam. The difference between the superbowl commercials and my email inbox is only a media choice by the product marketers. Email adds to television, dvd, vhs, print, telephone, billboard, bumper stickers, magnetic car sign, window sticker, bandit sign and fax channels. The limitations being imposed on broadcast by telephone are spilling over into increased fax and email advertising. The spam problem goes away if you only accept email from sources who are in your contacts. Perhaps a chicken and egg problem in some cases. I do not have the same control over other media.
Aside: If drinking beer makes the farting horse funny, then I will never drink another beer.
When I was young, I had to rub sticks together to compute.
The routine is you give him some imformation that he can use to spam the spammers. Apparently he has a set of tools that will parse spam he gets and fill in the response forms with phony information. I think he targets mainly phony mortgage people and the like. He's crapping in their "valid" response bin. If I could remember his name I'd pass it on, dangit!
And who exactly is this helping? Insted of addressing the problem, you have a blanket solution that has many more negative consequences then positive ones, and as other's have said, a lot spam uses worms anyway, so what are you accomplishing but making Microsoft more powerful over our freaking lives!!! (ok, maybe not quite that bad...)
...make a martyr out of him...Lets kidnap the bastard secretly and torture him until he is no longer able to even think about sending more spam
This would work. First, you can always find the bank handling the transaction. Just put in a credit card number and watch where the transaction comes from in the credit card system.
Second, banks have strong merchant agreements with companies that accept credit cards, agreements that allow the bank to charge back transactions. So banks can enforce anti-spam terms of service on their customers. Once this gets into the regulations of Visa International and MasterCard, it's enforceable worldwide through the credit card infrastructure.
Third, the seller/spammer always knows, when the transaction goes through, where the customer is. So they are liable in the customer's jurisdiction, not the spammer's. If spam laws differ in different jurisdictions, the seller can block transactions from areas with strong anti-spam laws. Of course, if they have to block most of the developed world, they won't make any money, which makes spamming go away.
Sigh. This is the short-sighted, disconnected view of drug abuse that seems to typify the "legalize drugs now" crowd. Nothing happens in a vacuum. The parent comment isn't insightful or even interesting - it's tragic, if the poster actually believes it. When somebody busts out the window of a car to steal a stereo to sell so that they can buy drugs with which to overdose, then go to the hospital, have the bill paid for by the county, to whom we pay taxes, then off to detox, again supported by our taxes...then start the whole process over again. So either taxes have to increase or other programs get short shrift. Insurance premiums rise. Everybody who can afford it moves away. Worst of all, those "volunteers" lose opportunities...for themselves and for everyone else.
I've seen it in Los Angeles, San Diego, Boston and New York. I've even seen it in places that you've never heard of, like Nampa, Idaho and Portsmouth, Rhode Island.
If you really believe that the only resources that drug dealers consume are those of their customers, then you're just fantasizing.
-h-
What if an ISP did the following:
Email "light" - you can only send messages to up to 20 recipients - more than that will be met with an error message from the SMTP server
Email "plus" - $4.95 a month, and you can send mail up to 100 recipients at a time - again, an error message if limit is exceeded
Email "bulk" - you need to specifically call to enable this, and it allows you to send to as many recipients as you want, but every recipient over 100 people is $0.01 per person.
Thus, a spammer could not use a person's machine as a spam conduit because the person would be unable to send the spam! Now, the spammer could put a mailing list on their own server and then make a worm to send to that, but they'd still have to get and maintain a server for the mailing list, so what's the point?
Another nice note - it makes things a pain in the butt for people who want to send chain letters to everyone in their address book. People that do this are unlikely to either take the time to create groups of 20, and send the message several times, nor do I think they'll pay $4.95 for the ability to send junk messages.
I think the grandparent poster is absolutely right. Make SPAM cost something for the sender and then only people who can afford to pay will send SPAM, and the overall amount should decrease, probably dramatically.
Kevin
Conventional wisdom says that we have so much spam because:
(1) E-mail is so cheap that it's essentially free
(2) The low cost of e-mail makes Spam very profitable, which is why there's so much spam.
I think this may be wrong.
With the all out war being waged against spam, I seriously doubt it's all that profitable. I believe that spam is the result of greedy wishful thinking.
Think about state lotteries. A lottery ticket only costs a dollar and promises a chance to win lots of money. So, every week, millions of people spend a few dollars (or more) on lottery tickets. And even though they never win anything (or nowhere near the amount they spend), they keep buying lottery tickets, week after week, month after month, year after year.
Why? Greedy wishful thinking: a few dollars a week is a small price to pay if it will make me rich someday.
And I think that same basic mentality is driving spam. Sending out millions of spam e-mails costs very little and takes very little effort, so why not try it.
These are the same people who buy into all the various MLM and get-rich-quick schemes. They are convinced that they just need to keep sending out as much spam as possible and someday it will pay off.
Time and time again... They're like cock-roaches.
Why not just fine their clients? Advertise something using spam, pay a fine, per delivered message.
The market for Spamming would die out.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Let us all bitchslap them with our "invisible hand"!
Okay, accepting that everyone has a right to try to make a living, but the thing that irritates me most about spam is that I'll get the same email 6 times in one day to the same address!
Get past the issue of "content that offends me" and start thinking of it in terms of property rights and permission to use property. The content worriers are the ones who get us into first amendment trouble every time a bill is being drawn up.
It seems to me the economics of spam work not only because the infrastructure is cheap to the spammer but also because its not in the interests of the backbone providers to kill spam.
I can't find the story right now, but someone set up a bogus email account and replied to spam about a home loan.
.....).
He was contacted by big companies that had bought the "lead" from contractors (who bought it from sub-contractors who bought it from sub-sub-contractors who
The big companies say that they frequently purchase such leads from other companies and that if they receive complaints about those companies, then they drop them.
Of course, the spammer just opens a "new" "company" under a different name and starts selling to the big companies again.
Since the big companies don't "know" that they're dealing with a spammer.......
No matter WHAT they do. What laws they break. Most people think they are "good" and the "circumstances" or other people are "bad".
In this case, he thinks he is "good" for breaking "bad" laws written by the government ("bad" government?).
Now, expand the viewpoint. Look how the drugs are produced, distributed, etc. Look for the violence associated with each step. The issue is a lot more complicated.
(Apologies to those who have seen this before.)
You advocate a
( ) technical (x) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(x) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(x) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're stupid for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Nathan's blog
It's like asking people who have never been to prison if they've ever been to prison, and then determining that no one ever goes to prison since none of the people you've asked have been there.
If you grew up somewhere where drug dealers *DO* offer you drugs for free, you'd like be an addict, in prison, or dead, not posting on Slashdot.
paintball
The "Drug War" is now costing us billions of dollars a year and we are obviously losing. As long as there is money to be made there will be drug dealers.
The same is true with anything else, including spam. It will not matter that it is "against the law".
Remove proffit from the equation and the problem goes away.
You seem to be saying that spam is not ok because, unlike traditional ads, someone doesn't make money by charging to deliver it to the public.
You'd rather the TV or billboard company make money for using your resources? How is that better than spam?
An acquaintence of mine from high school was killed just this past weekend when he was run over by a 20-year-old gang banger driving a SUV in a car chase with rival gang members.
He's dead because gang members fight over territory from which to sell drugs. No drug users, no gang-bangers dragging people under their SUVs for 2 blocks.
paintball
Bandwidth, disk space etc are *not* the primary cost here - these costs are falling anyway.
What is not falling is the value of my time - the right to put a message in front of me. As people find themselves buried under 'information overload' the value of eyeballs is increasing.
This cost, the cost of my time, is the the most important externality that traditional email is underselling to spammers.
So I now have two types of email address:
1) A private address that I only tell my friends - it blocks mail from non-whitelisted addresses.
2) A public address that is pay-to-send using the sudonames.com system. This is the address on this comment, for example.
Mail to either address ends up in the same inbox, so it is really convenient. No mail is ever lost, and I never get *any* spam at all.
Problem solved!
[joke]
:p
:) ..or......have a law for the spammers to give me the emails of their buyers and I'll track them down myself!! ...All in the name of law of course
create a sniffer that keeps track of who actually respond or clicks any links in those darn spam email and fine them!
Anyone dumb enough to buy (as in buy and believe) their crap *deserve* such punishment
That'll cut their profit fast enough
[/joke]
'nuf said.
If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel. - Will Kommen
Why does'nt someone come up with the IDEA to fine the web site referred to in the spam.
Wouldn't that solve the problem?
If unsolicited spam was sent with out the approval of the site make the site owner track them down or pay the fine... just my 2 cents.
Please shoot holes in this idea if you see em...
What are we going to do, legalize heroine, crack cocaine and crystal meth? Are you going to pay the healthcare, welfare and other costs for the people who don't do anything but get high all the time?
There's a difference between prohibiting alcohol and prohibitting crystal meth, Mr. Ignorant Turd. Very few people turn into useless turds because of alcohol. Most people who use crystal meth turn into useless turds.
paintball
Several years of my life were spent doing support for various manufacturers' X.400 mail systems. At the time I disliked them intensely for being huge lumbering bureaucratic things and successfully predicted that lightweight smtp would eventually leave X.400 for dead.
BUT one thing that you couldn't do so easily with an enterprise X.400 network is send spam. Other benefits are all the other stuff that basically is just built in, billing, QOS, end-to-end integrity assurance, everything you could reasonably think of in a mail system.
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
I had essentially this exact same idea not too long ago. I use the analogy of a parking garage that is used by many businesses. You enter the garage and get the parking ticket. Some businesses will "validate your parking ticket" so you don't have to pay when you leave the parking garage. This same concept could be added to email, much like a return receipt is currently implimented.
:-)
To maintain SMTP compatibility new MTAs would listen to both the "old" SMTP protocol (RFC-822?) and the "new" SMTP protocol, maybe listening to different ports or using a different dialog. Reject all connect attempts that just spew, that is what SMTP zombies do. During a transistion phase (could be sysadmin defined) the new MTA would accept connects from both old and new SMTP engine. If the email recipient "accepts" the mail, the email ticket is validated and no charges against the sender. If the recipient "rejects" the mail the send is charged. Adjust your mailing lists accordingly.
There will have to be one or more "central repositories" for handling these payments. Also need to determine where the payments go, i.e. who gets the money. (Maybe a way to keep the USPO from sinking, at least for US based email.)
Getting us ready for a email stamp fee. I do hate SPAM but more than that I hate the thought of email just becomeing another cash cow for large ISPs.
Charging the sender for each email is not the answer. There are just too many ways that the spammer will be able to not pay while joe mailing list will have to stop providing a real service.
Who will pay when a worm places a mailer on your PC and then a spammer uses it to mail out thousands of emails?
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
From what I understand, a spammer selling, for instance, penis enlargement pills will sell three or four bottles from a spam run of 100 million spams. Let's say he makes $200 and assume it is pure profit (it is).
Let's further assume of the 100 million spams, 10 million made it to the Microsoft Outlook Inboxes of unique users. Let's say that each spam took 5 seconds to delete. If their time is worth $10/hour (assume half the victims are kids students etc, and half are professionals) the spammer cost them $100,000 of their time to make his lousy $200.
This does not take into account higher ISP fees, anti-spam program costs, credit card back charges, loss of business from lost legit emails, and the terabytes of wasted bandwidth for each and every spam run.
Spammers are conscious of this and their continuing to do it is an indication of sociopathic behavior.
i think a much overlooked fact is, that Spam is moving towards organised crime. Currently we have several trends working that way:
I think a lot of people look at Spam as a kind of nuisance. It is more. If the observed trends continue, we'll find Spam sent by those same friendly guys who offer the heroin to your kids. No joke or rethoric intended, i'm plain serious on that one. Take a look at Sobig, the backdoors it opened and what kind of Spam and how fast you got it.
Regards, Martin
The problem is that the open relay finding applications now try to deliver a couple of messages through the server before making large-scale use -- the spammers use basically the same open relay detection as do anti-spammers.
The workaround is to actually make your honeypot act as an open relay, at least for a few messages from any one IP address/subnet, and then after the spammer gets comfortable, start dumping to /dev/null.
The problem with this approach is that in order to stop spam, you end up running a (low throughput) open relay. As a hardcore anti-spam zealot I can't bring myself to do this -- it just feels too dirty.
One of the key difficulties in the war against spam is that while most spammers are complete idiots and most spamming is not profitable, there are still smart people making money writing and improving spam transmitting software and related programs.
Smart, evil people -- but no less smart for their evilness.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
In return, the commercial helps pay for the programming you're seeing. That's the trade; your resources in trade for entertainment / information and their message.
Billboards exist on private property - whether you're looking at them or not is your issue. None of your resources are taken up by their existence. Of course, some areas and communities do place restrictions (or outright ban) billboards and other signs.
A fair enough point. I have to agree - the majority of my "mail" these days ends up in a bin. Although the cost of mailing items does keep this somewhat in control. Email demonstrates how insane dealing with physical mail could be if it weren't for the associated cost.
You've missed on, by the way. "Junk" FAXes. Illegal. Why? Because the recipient is paying for the message in the form of toner and paper. And the incoming message ties up their resource - that is, the phone line.
You see - its not about who makes money. Its about choice, cost, and depletion of resources.
I think a lot of the actual practitioners of spam are simply id10ts who've been duped into believing that the economics of it are in their favor. ("Look at how many people are doing it!" "They said on TV that it doesn't cost hardly nothing"). So they buy mailing lists, spamware, etc. from folks dealing in such stuff... as Make Money Fast! scams. Spammers don't necessarily last very long individually; they seem so persistent only because of the ongoing supply of suckers.
If so, it isn't the cost/benefit of spamming that keeps the crap flowing, but the cost/benefit of selling spamming. It's not the open relays out there that are the problem, but the open (slack-jawed) mouths.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
The spammer is more than welcome to having their email account and web site. I'll contact them when I'm interested in hearing their "message".
The cost of getting that mail to my mailbox is entirely paid for by the mailer. That's what that whole stamp (or equivilent) business is about. In addition, commercial mail also helps subsidize the mail system. In this case, I am not paying anything for the mail and I am getting a service. Although I do have to put forth some time to actually finding the one piece of real mail in a stack of circulars and advertisements.
They do. Maybe you've heard of the system before. Its called "commercials". Granted - its sometimes hard to tell the commercial from the program. In any case, the outcome is the same. The advertiser is paying for delivery of the message and the programming you watch in between their message. To get that programming, you pay for the purchase and upkeep of a TV.
Where did I claim this was an automated process?
That would be pretty stupid considering how many links people e-mail each other.
So there's exactly zero risk of filtering out legitimate domains.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Where did I claim this was a fully manual process?
Ripping out links is automatic. Along with who it's from, who it's going to and the subject. That makes clearing out legitimate e-mails real easy.
"Spammers frequently use tricks to confuse humans reading links. spammy%2Ecom type hex, www.fake.com/blahblahblah@real.biz "
That only confuses people who are reading the message. Not programs that harvest links with the other forementioned info from the message source.
You can either depend on a computer to handle the whole process and have a 100% chance of getting false positives or do only the repetative stuff automatically and have a 100% chance of filtering only spam domains.
Every few days I have only a handful of domains to add to the filter.
Seriously. Did you actually think I'm that dense to fail to use the source of the message and not just what it renders?
-1 Insulting
Ben
Work Safe Porn
"When somebody busts out the window of a car to steal a stereo to sell so that they can buy drugs with which to overdose,"
I *know* you aren't talking about marijuana here. First of all, nobody has ever died of a mj overdose. It just hasn't happened -- and let's put a timeframe on it -- EVER. It's not possible. So please be specific when you say "drugs". Second, I would guess that 99% of people using mj would not be stealing stereos for pot money. While they may be stealing, it's more due to lack of character than the mj they use.
All we ask is that it be left out of the equation.
Once I got spam with an (800) number, with a live operator at the other end. So I told my modem there was a computer to connect to at the other end, and told it to redial until it got a successful connection. Then I left for the day.
Once I got a spam advertising toner cartriges. So I ordered a bunch. Told them to bill my fake name/address. This costs them money to figure out.
Some spam points to websites. Now, the spammers are hoping for a 0.1% response rate. Can you imagine if they got even a 10% response rate? Let's give it to them! The "slashdot effect" isn't limited to articles linked from here, you know. This is one of the methods that looks most appealing: if the spam-filter follows links, then any spammer will be subjecting themselves to a DDoS. Meanwhile the bayes filters are even more accurate.
My point: if someone cuts you off on the highway, don't swerve into the innocent person next to you, or into oncoming traffic, or even off the road. If you do, the bad driver will just continue on their way and cut off the next person. Instead, hit them. If their expenses match yours, the behavior will stop.
With that said, your idea is a good one. I would wonder about taking it a step further. Once you have a list of spam domains, you could have a script periodically check which ones are still available, compile a list of registrars for each domain, and then add extra SpamAssassin points to future spam at domains registered at the same registrar. Some parasite has been forging email from one of my domains and I've discovered that the spammers generally limit their registrars to those which appear to be totally out to lunch. For example, the spam domain TOUCHD4D.COM is registered at BIZCN.COM, INC., but the BIZCN whois server and web server have been down every time I have tried contacting them in the last week.
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
I never thought I'd get the opportunity to say that to a spammer! That was fun!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
People are often inethical, and will typically do what is best for themselves. Evolution made us this way. So what. Calling attention to this does not fix the problem.
If all people were truly ethical and non-selfish, we wouldn't need locks on doors, or police or even governments, money or the concept of property. Everyone would just be nice and share their stuff and not try to advance their own cause at the expense of others -- and there would be happiness and bliss.
Fact is, we aren't made that way, so we need practical solutions, not just figuring out who to blame.
i am thinking of a solution since long ago. It all comes down to follow the logic stream.
.email, where each company can request a name under this TLD ( like yahoo.com.email), get assigned a X.509 certificate bound to its each fixed MX server address. Each email sent from company X to company Y, would use a mechanism like IKE to authentify the sender. Goodbye, email spoofing.
goodbye, anonymous smtps. goodbye, worms that propagate over email.Goodbye Bayes and thanks.
Q:How does a spam email reach my inbox?
A:Because my email server receives it.
Q:How my email server receives it?
A:Because my domain MX record has an entry.
Conclusion: I will not receive email if i don't have an _public_ MX record.
But what if Company X and company Y are email servers are exchanging this information about MX in a more private way?
What if the whole email exchanger infrastructure will move from actual DNS to a specific naming service a la DNS but only to serve MX records. Imagine using a TLD
I hope somebody responsible really reads this. Because you see, the above solution is doable, and is also easy to implement. Heck, we can even implement it tommorow.
yours,
Costin Cozan
Hello, I'm Barry Shein, I run a sizeable ISP, The World, www.TheWorld.com. You've probably heard me speak or write about spam before (see: http://www.TheWorld.com/~bzs).
Spammers do not sell advertising.
What they sell is crime.
Let me give you an analogy:
Say my name was Tony S. and I said I was in the waste disposal business.
Now say that you have a small herbal viagra factory which produces a few drums of toxic waste daily which need to be properly removed.
You're paying a service $100 per drum. I come to you and say I'll do it for $20 per drum, an 80% savings.
Cagey person that you are, you realize that's a very good deal so take it and you're even smart enough not to ask too many questions.
Every night a coupla oddly well-dressed guys come by and take your drums away in a different pick-up, in the morning the now-empty drums are by your back door, and you pay your bills. All is right with the world, your bottom line looks better than ever.
Except for one thing, they're just dumping the barrels off the side of the highway late at night when no one is looking.
Are they selling you waste removal services?
Or are they selling you crime?
I contend that without the break-ins, exploitation of bugs in web scripts, PC's purposely infected by viruses which let spammers use them to send spam by the tens of thousands, etc., spammers could not operate.
Not any more than Tony S could remove drums for $20 each and dump them legally and stay in business when everyone else has to charge $100/drum.
Sure, you could IMAGINE someone underselling the $100/drum price, or someone spamming without egregiously breaking any laws.
But I say IT'S IMPOSSIBLE, you can't LEGALLY send (as someone gave as an example earlier) 200M mail msgs for a gross return of $200 legally, day after day and stay in business.
You can't afford the bandwidth on that price.
You can't afford the computer power.
You can't afford the lawsuits and other legal problems if you were so easily identifiable using stable internet addresses you bought.
You can't afford to be mobile as your victims block your IPs relentlessly.
You can't do it. You cannot do it legally.
And if you had to do it legally it'd look completely different. More like those commercial messages you get which you think are ok or tolerable anyhow from Microsoft or Sun or that magazine you subscribe to, rather than the immense deluge of filth and crime and questionable come-ons spam usually represents. Honest people can't operate like that, or not for long anyhow.
THEREFORE: Spammers sell crime, not advertising (or whatever they appear to be selling.) Just like the factory owner could dump his own toxic waste off the side of the highway for even less than Tony, the person hiring the spammer is hiring a criminal because for the relatively low price why take the chance or learn the tricks of the trade?
As Tony might say: Ya think dese spam guys are boy scouts or what? Wake up!
you're right...
- * note: from Bill Hicks
It's a social problem, not an economical.
...for the 3 weeks it takes the spammers to circumvent the system and find loopholes to either send mail for free or at someone elses expense.
Why is the USofA the #1 spam haven of the world? No, it isn't because it has the majority of users, that was 1998, by now Europe has passed the US (it has more population total, so that makes it easier).
The problem of spam will persist until one of two things has happened:
a) it has destroyed e-mail
b) we understand that it's not a technological problem and not an economical problem
We've seen dozens of solutions about how to completely redesign half the Internet so we can pay 0.10 cents per e-mail and get rid of spam...
I have a simpler solution: Shoot the top-20 spammers. On primetime TV. Not in the head, but somewhere painful and slow.
Spam would drop to pre-1995 levels within 48 hours. If it starts to rise again, shoot another spammer.
We know who they are. Our problem isn't how to deal with spam. Our problem is that we don't deal with the spammers.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
If people's ethical and moral qualms don't actually affect their purchasing patterns, why mention them? Running a certain business may be contrary to one person's ethics or morality, such that they place a greater value on not going to hell than on the profit made. If the operator of the business has no such qualms, the only real factor is legality (IOW, our collective normative view of the propriety of the business type). Legal concerns are a valid economic factor - the cost of litigation, legal defences, fines, risk of prison, all should be (and are) factored in to a proper economic analysis of any business. Don't agree? Ask long haul truckers about compliance with standards about hours worked. Ask the mafia about - well, everything. Ask every big company in the world about compliance with environmental standards. Whenever it is cheaper to break the law than obey it, people will.
MHO. YMMV. Any resemblance between this post and real persons, or reality in general, was accidental.
Back to economics - why do spammers go to all the trouble of sending zillions of messages advertising viagra, xanax, porn, scams? Because there are idiots that buy them. So let's try nailing the idiots. Make it a misdemeanor offense to purchase goods and services from spammers, with a $10,000 fine for each offense. The feds can catch the idiots by sending out their own fake spam (I know, lowers the signal-to-noise ratio even more) with links to honeypot web sites. If you go to the web site and try to buy some v1@6ra or whatever, you're nailed. The high fine is to encourage the small-town speed trap mentality - make nailing spam customers handsomely profitable. Limit the sting spam to a fraction of real spam, so if real spam dwindles, sting spam dwindles as well. Offer to cut the fine to $5,000 if the idiot gives the feds any information he has on spammers he bought products from.
Before long, the idiots won't know which spams are from "legitimate spammers" and which ones are from feds who want huge fines.
At the very least, it'll make me feel better knowing that the idiots who actually buy stuff from spammers are getting their attitudes adjusted.
/me ducks, knowing that this plan is most likely full of holes and will only make things worse...
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
Let me see if I can phrase this question the right way: when do the resources/computation time I have to spend filtering become so serious that it can be considered hacking or DoS? Ok so maybe that is a little extreme, but my feel is if someone sends a piece of mail to my server, unsolicited and I don't want it, that is an invitation for me to start sending mail back. And maybe lots. In fact since there are "more of us than of them" maybe we can flood their mail programs... send 100 port 25 requests for each one I get that I identify as spam. Sounds fair to me.
"he drew his sword Ringil that glittered like ice... and he wounded Morgoth with seven wounds..."
To rephrase the rude response, it's really just a matter of reaching equilibrium. You're saying that spam has peaked, that it has surpassed its carrying capacity, but this unfortunately does not mean that it will die out altogether. It just means that we'll get less spam than today, but more than 3 years ago.
What is being stolen? Your time, the bandwidth of your ISP/organization, their email admin's time and support, etc.
This is exactly why anti "junk fax" laws were created, and SHOULD have been applicable to this sitation (some states have done it, most have not): because junk faxes took up a limited resource (paper, ink, telephone time) which should have been used for purposes directly in line with what the person/organization paying for them intended it to be used for.
Instead, we are now forced to wade throu fourty hard-on pill or breast augmentation emails every day, as well as the links to pr0n sites, and all because of stupid legislators who cant identify theft when they see it. It is also forcing companies to waste money filtering out crap they dont want in the first place!
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Sorry - excusez-moi - but sir: there's a four letter word and you are so full of it you could build a monopoly market.
Criminals everywhere keep committing crimes because they see it as economically viable.
This is so totally non-topic it's unbelievable. We have the flamebait in the introductory referral.
Ugh.
The sad point of all of this is that I'm going to (sort of) defend the cocaine dealers and point out that they are responding to basic economic forces that we all respond to at one level or another. As long as coke dealers can take in more money than it costs them, they will continue to sell cocaine. This is "rational" behavior in the economic sense.
The sad point of all of this is that I'm going to (sort of) defend the child pornographers and point out that they are responding to basic economic forces that we all respond to at one level or another. As long as child pornographers can take in more money than it costs them, they will continue to rape children. This is "rational" behavior in the economic sense.
The fact is, engaging in kiddie porn, drug dealing, and spamming requires more than a profit incentive; It also requires a complete lack of any moral compass whatsoever, which we all agree that the three groups above do.
I am quite frankly amazed that no one has shot Richter or Ralsky in the head with a large-caliber shotgun yet. Once THAT happens, the tide of spam will turn.
At any rate, I could argue that they are NOT responding to basic market forces; Before spam inundated our inboxes, did any one want to be carpet bombed with offers to "3n14rge yur ===) and (.)?" NO. At a point in the not so distant past, the ratio of gullible morons on the internet reached a high enough value that it became profitable to defraud them en masse. When everyone but the aforementioned candidates for "You Are A Fucking Moron 9" (google for it) took offense, the spammers did the same thing America did in Vietnam: Step up the carpet bombing; You've got to hit one eventually, regardless of the number of innocents you hit in the process.
I'd like to bet about a milllyun dollars that about five minutes after this scheme came into effect, somebody (okay, me) would be spamming the entire world with an email that included links to images like this one, that one, maybe even this one, and because I'm a non-discriminatory irritant, this one. And you convinently block them all yourself.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Spammers are really winning this arms race. The latest method I have seen is guessing some address in your whitelist. Unfortunately, it is pretty easy to do: most people online have dealings with Amazon or Ebay. The only method I see succeeding is blacklisting IP blocks aggressively. Contact your ISP today!
As was pointed out in the article, the situation with spammers sucks right now. The only way it's going to change is if we can change the economics of the situation--this calls for novel ideas, such as Unsolicited Commando, which uses the idea of false positives to make it economically less profitable for spammers.
The idea is based around the fact that there are to places to attack the economics of spam: one, the sending (spammer) side, and, two, the response processing (employer of spammer) side. It's already been argued that making email cost money to send isn't really feasible, at least not in the future.
But you can increase the cost of the response processing: every time companies get a positive response to their spam, the company must put at least some amount of effort into validating the information and then processing it (such as a subscription, product placement, etc.) So, what if the company received lots of potentially valid fake responses (false positives) to spam, so many that the processing costs would actually outweight the benefits of advertising with spam? If companies could never figure out who their real customers were, it wouldn't be worth it.
That's the idea behind Unsolicited Commando, a small program that runs in the background on your PC and that receives "orders" from a central server essentially giving enough information for the program to go to a website and fill out a form with real-sounding but bogus info. If enough computers were doing it, bogus info would be coming from such a variety of internet addresses that there'd be no way for spam companies to filter it.
So far as I can see, this type of approach is our best bet.
Well if all that is said is true about spam just being revenue and "don't blame them" why are spammers SO damn aggressive? Why do they spam so unintelligently? I mean every spam I read is some kind of sales pitch which turns me off to what they're selling right away--they talk as if I can't see right through their BS.
What about the saying that you can catch more flies with honey? I mean, if spammers weren't so obnoxious, wouldn't we be a lot more willing to listen to them, or at least tolerate advertisements? I mean everyone accepts proper advertising. And the issue isn't that it's unsolicited either. All someone has to do to advertise is say "Hi. I would like to tell you about my product..." and keep it short. If they did that, we might not be so pissed off, and they might have had a bigger audience now--one who wasn't so concerned about filtering their IP addresses.
"he drew his sword Ringil that glittered like ice... and he wounded Morgoth with seven wounds..."
Many years ago, while doing a story on spam, I talked to Spamford Wallace who claimed a 7% response rate on spam which, if true (I had my doubts) would certainly make it worth one's while, no matter how badly it made you hated. I can only assume, now that I know how many small-dicked guys there are in the world (or, more accurately, normal-dicked guys who *fear* they're small-dicked guys), that penis enlargement ads are prolific because enough pindicks are responding to them. So that must mean others really DO think you can getrichquick, and refinance your home, or that you can order a nice Filipino wife who is dying to meet YOU!!!!! over the Internet.
It's a stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid world...
"In return, the commercial helps pay for the programming you're seeing. That's the trade; your resources in trade for entertainment / information and their message."
Incorrect. Your argument is a cleverly crafted fallacy spun by media companies to justify ads. In reality, YOU are the product (target demographic) being SOLD to the companies BY the media channels. Remember, the media companies are paid by the companies that advertise, so it is in the media companies' interest to ensure their target audience matches what the advetising companies want. Telling you that you get free entertainment because of the ads is just the way to make you feel better about having your favourite show broken up every five minutes.
Visceral Psyche Films
No, don't pay your ISP; pay the *receiver's* ISP. Paying your ISP is just silly (unless they then transfer it to the receiver).
Then your ISP can credit you for the amount of email you receive. If you receive more than the cost of providing you services (not just email but bandwidth), then you get free internet that month (a hundred pieces of SPAM a day would pay for $30 of internet a month; easily cover dial-up and cover at least half of most broadband options).
Note that this changes everything. Now, spammers will only want to send to people who will buy what they are peddling. Plus, they will have to be vigilant about ensuring this as people will want to receive filterable email (pays you money but you still don't have to read it).
Mailing lists would work through an opt-in system with the receivers' ISPs. You pay $.01 per email sent by the list who pays $.01 to send it. Net result: no money transfers. You can whitelist individuals the same way.
Another option is to make it simple for people who "manually" check if "tagged as spam" e-mail is real spam to report it to spamcop.net (or similar) service and make the service report the compalint to the relevant abuse address. It can be as simple as copying from one imap folder to another. Let's make ISP hosting spammers and spammers themselves face hundreds of complaints per day, let's blacklist ISP who reject valid spam complaints with no valid reason. Complaints processing costs money, ingoring complaints can costs being out of business :-)
anfi
By default I, the user, do not accept any email.
You want to email me ? So text me first with the address you are gonna use and convice me it's interesting. Then I will enable this address, and you'll email me as much as you from now on.
OK. Sounds heavy for me the user and for sender. Well, isn't it what we need, something heavier ?
Now, we could imagine something much more automated and simpler. The sender text (paying the price) and, this automaticaly enable texted email address. Would be transparent for me, the recipient. This service could be optional for me. And all ran at server level. (Certainly not on my box.)
This way
- I the recipient, am sure I don't receive anything unwanted
- I, the sender, am ok to pay the price of a text for 200/300 addresses
- I, the spammer, am screwed.
How about mailing lists ? Well, the old proactive systems works fine. I can subscribe to a list deliberatly. Then list address would be accepted. An already subscribed spammer can be removed. And this spammer would have to repay a text with an other email address.
Alltogether, this would keep the openness of SMTP for whoever wants. The payment question would be handled through well tested phone&text system. ( Hum... txt is fare from being generalized. That's a big hick up. ) The sapmmer would be slowed down.
A flaw ?
This could be perverted by back door system. A box is infected with stuff not only sending mail automaticaly but also automaticaly texting ? And back to starting point... Ooohh sh..ugar!
to use someones computer system without their permission, and to not give back total usage of the computer to that person is 'conversion'. which is one of the hardest arguments to support in court. but those who take computer usage away from others weather in the form of virus, worm, and email are taking from a person unilaterally.
i'm surprized this argument has never been used.
I'm a linux novice and i recently setup sendmail and qpopper. i noticed a repeated address to send mail to (lerrtyt@domain.com, domain.com being my domain). what in the world is this? has anyone else seen this? i keep getting it from multiple IPs, at least 20 times a day. can someone please give me feedback? thanks
Ever get any junk mail via snailmail?
There's more spam than junkmail because spam is so much cheaper to send out, but there will always be spam even if they charge for sending an email.
And, if they start charging for email, the ISPs will make money off of spam and will then have a motivation to encourage spam, not prevent it.
Read, L