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Four Big ISPs File Six Anti-Spam Suits
ackthpt writes "Wired is carrying news that Microsoft, America Online, Earthlink and Yahoo are filing suits against spammers under the CANSPAM act. They will 'follow the money' to find the perpetrators and shut them down. Suits currently filed against John Does will have actual names attached once subpoenas get the names of the actual persons. I wish them all the luck, as I clean about 500 pieces of drek a day from my mailboxes." Other readers point to coverage from the BBC and from the Associated Press (here's the AP story as carried by the Boston Globe).
This is really excellent news - according to Spamhaus.org, 7 of the top 10 (including the top 2) spammers worldwide are from the USA. Looking at the list of the top 200, I'd say about 80% are from the USA. It needs action within the USA to stop this, and for once I can say I really approve of something AOL, MS and Yahoo are doing [don't know much about Earthlink] - See, I'm not biased at all :-))
Today I received 1681 emails, 137 of which are non-spam. Now I have good anti-spam filters, and I probably only opened about 300 of those, but that's still a major pain where it hurts. String 'em up, I say, bring back lynching - mob justice for spammers!
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Use Mailinator and avoid the spam in the first place!
Several years ago this spamdemic map was quite popular. It's an attempt to have a poster that would allow you to figure out who's behind all those "get out of debt" messages in your inbox. Some of that is still relevant nowadays.
Since they started the Microsfot Network? MSN started as an AOL style dial up service back around '93-'96.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
As one of my responsibilities I admin and camp the spam filter at work. We get a few thousand emails a day into a company of 80.
.Soma. $ Pnte:r:min LV0J2" anyways?
Much of this spam has had to resort to making their emails unintelligible to try and bypass spam filters.
Others like Aphroditie Marketing have atleast 2 class C licences with full dns for each address that they send email out from. I've had to firewall off entire class C's to block their emails!
C'Mon...who is going to read email with a subject line like:
"Order Meds V@1|um - XA:n:az ; V|@grA & %RND_MED_VIC+0DIN $
At some point of obfuscation it has to just become a giant waste of time to try and send the email out.
up 12 days, 22:30, 2 users, load averages: 993.20, 994.21, 994.56
*makes note to limit user processes...
Its always entertaining to see the anti-lawyer anti-corporate crowd actually agree with something that a lawyer heavy super corporation does.
I'm not anti-lawyer or anti-corporate. I'm just pro-common sense, which means I oppose the actions of "lawyer-heavy super corporations" on a fairly regular basis. However, even "lawyer-heavy super corporations" do the right thing more often than not.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
To poison the filters you have in place?
"My parents were strict, but they never pitted me against livestock" - Doug Stanhope
MyWay.com carries all AP and Reuters articles with no banners, popups, or any kind of registration. Just a couple inobtrusive Google-provided text ads at the bottom. They also have reg-free referal links to NY Times, USA Today, CBS, FOX, and MSNBC stories.
A detailed study by the Center for Democracy & Technology concluded "CDT received the most e-mails when an address was placed visibly on a public Web site. Spammers use software harvesting programs such as robots or spiders to record e-mail addresses listed on Web sites, including both personal Web pages and institutional (corporate or non-profit) Web pages." It has very little to do with the mailing lists you're on, and is driven by where your address has been published on the Web.
I should point out the article I reference with that 7%... Written by Deborah Fallows, Senior Research Fellow at Pew Internet & American Life project. "SPAM: How it is Hurting Email and Degrading Life on the Internet". Available here.
Another point is that the 7% statistic may be skewed, because some of the people surveyed didn't consider all mail to be SPAM (ie, they requested the special offers / catalogs / etc by email)
AOL is the domain of the clueless user, no doubt, and their marketing is a little annoying, given the plethora of discs they send to everyone, their grandmother, and their dead relatives.
On the other hand, their spam stance has been pretty solid for a while now. Despite the large number of clueless users on AOL, I can't remember the last time I got spam from them, and they've been remarkably good net denizens in this regard -- they were the first large ISP (to the best of my knowledge) to start using SPF, for example.
On the spam front, I think they're definitely whitehats. More than that, they're 800lb gorillas wearing white hats. This is a very, very good thing.
Oh, and Microsoft? Spawn of the devil.
Only by that most subjective definition of spam that goes like this: "Spam is what I don't want to get."
The problem with spam is its cost-shifting. Snailmail doesn't have that problem. They're paying to send you stuff. You're not, typically, paying to receive it.
Oh, and have you considered contacting AOL and asking them not to send you any more CDs?
Six spammers is probably a drop in the desert, and shutting them down won't cause a noticable impact, but at least it's a start.
From the AP story:
"they filed six lawsuits against hundreds of people who were accused of sending millions of unwanted e-mails"
So it sounds like more than just 6 people.
I'm willing to bet it will have more effect than you are giving credit for. Most of the spam on the internet is cause by a realitivity small group of people. Taking down even a few of them might make a noticable impact.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
According to the article, it's 6 spammers, not 6% of spammers.