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).

Comments

I wonder how effective this will be...

[Zone-MR]

I wonder what effect this will have on the number of spam messages we get daily?

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.

Re:I wonder how effective this will be...

[isn't my name]

I wonder what effect this will have on the number of spam messages we get daily?

I bet it will have an effect, but more than likely the long-term effect will simply be to move even more of the spam off-shore.

Re:I wonder how effective this will be...

[Like2Byte]

It'll probably be very effective considering that a few spammers are responsible for most of the SPAM anyway.

Re:I wonder how effective this will be...

[notque]

I bet it will have an effect, but more than likely the long-term effect will simply be to move even more of the spam off-shore.

This has been a trend that I've noticed for awhile. Soon all spam jobs will be moved off-shore, and our Government doesn't do anything to stop this.

Earthlink has personally been responsible for 3 severance packages I've recieved (3 ISPs, all bought by Earthlink, and my job phased out.)

Now they want to take away any possibility of me working to create, or to stop spam.

I'm outraged.

Re:I wonder how effective this will be...

[blurfus]

But then again, if it is like local auto-theft (in this city anyway) where 5 thieves are responsible for over 80% of the auto-related crime, it could make a difference

These six spammers *may* be responsible for (say) 50% of the spams. It is at least a good 'chunk' to make an impact (if that were the case of course)

imho

Re:I wonder how effective this will be...

[secolactico]

I bet it will have an effect, but more than likely the long-term effect will simply be to move even more of the spam off-shore.

Yes, but will the spam beneficiaries move off shore (like some of the online gambling operators had to)? Unless they are willing to move also, the "follow the money" procedure will get to them.

Re:I wonder how effective this will be...

[ackthpt]

I wonder what effect this will have on the number of spam messages we get daily?

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.

Do you think it's at least as good as doing nothing? Set some examples, drag some faces before the cameras, tell how their houses on Minnow Pond Drive have been seized, things like that. I've got no sympathy. I do hope they really nail the right people. I wish I could bill Alan Ralsky for all the time I've wasted deleting his deluge.

Re:I wonder how effective this will be...

[MadelineAlbright]

Moving offshore will only work to some extent. If laws can be created that allow you to go after the companies who pay the spammers to spam, and we manage to stop the the local companies from paying for spam to be sent, then the only people left are offshore sales companies. But they really don't want to pay for international shipping for a few bottles of viagra, so spam should diminish a fair bit at that point.

Re:I wonder how effective this will be...

[Albanach]

Spamhaus reckon less than 200 spam outfits make up 90% of spam. So 6% would be a bit more than a drop in the ocean - and if they get caught and face big fines (or jail time) we could see an even bigger impact.

Re:I wonder how effective this will be...

[Otter]

I wonder what effect this will have on the number of spam messages we get daily?

I realize I'm almost alone here in my sentiment, but -- the tide is turning on spam. It's simply making email unusable. Email is too useful and too important to ISPs, software makers and corporate users for them to allow a handful of morons to destroy it. Something has to be done and therefore something _will_ be done.

I keep saying that here and am always surprised by how confident everyone else is for the spammers. I just don't get you guys -- we're all helpless in the face of big corporations but a bunch of dirtbags flogging V*!*a*g*r*a and Par1s H1lt0n V1d30s! can spit in Bill Gates' face?

Re:I wonder how effective this will be...

[gnu-generation-one]

predicted responses to the announcement:

# "People will take their illegal business offshore, so we may as well not bother having laws"

# "I filter everything, don't know what you're all complaining about"

# "Only 6 spammers?"

# "I use a challenge-response system, and haven't got an email since.."

Or the usual best

# "But all spammers must be Korean because the proxies they use are in Korea"

Re:I wonder how effective this will be...

[bezuwork's friend]

"I wish I could bill Alan Ralsky for all the time I've wasted deleting his deluge."

You could try, if you really want to. File a lawsuit, class action if you feel like it. You could use trespass to chattels as one claim - see eBay v. Bidder's Edge for one example (only granting an injunction, but indicating that trespass would likely succeed at trial).

Maybe you could also try unjust enrichment. This generally requires a showing that the defendant recieved a benefit provided by you and that the defendant was unjustly enriched thereby - i.e. to let the defendant remain enriched without compensating you would be improper under the law. Courts in such cases can decide a contract was formed (a fiction) - called a quasi-contract, or they might use another legal construction, but this allows them to order restitution.

I'm currently researching unjust enrichment, unfortunately, it seems a difficult cause of action to prove sufficiently. My guess, though, is that with the bad public view of spamming, courts might be willing to go your way.

Re:I wonder how effective this will be...

[BobTheLawyer]

Trespass to chattels is a definite runner.

I can't, however, see any way you can make an unjust enrichment claim. It's a requirement for such claims (in all jurisdictions I've come across) that one person is enriched at the expense of another. But the connection between your loss (bandwidth and time) and his profit is just too indirect for you to be able to claim that he is enriched at your expense.

I'd also be surprised if punitive damages are ever available in a claim for restitution for unjust enrichment - you ordinarily just recover to the extent of your loss and the other party's enrichment.

Good for them

[Space cowboy]

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

Re:Good for them

[silas_moeckel]

I'm getting a similar volume of email with significantly less spam getting through running spamassasin at 4 with no false positives or whitelisting. What spam filter are you using it dosent sound like good spam filters to me.

Re:Good for them

[TwistedSquare]

according to Spamhaus.org, 7 of the top 10 (including the top 2) spammers worldwide are from the USA

Unfortunately from that list 7 of the top 10 spammers alphabetically are from the US, though I don't dispute that the general trend is the majority being from the US

Re:Good for them

[CaptBubba]

Look at the bottom of the page where they keep the stats. All but 2 on the list for Febuary are in the US.

I get spam from the #10 guy, but unfortunatly he's recently sold my address so now I get spam from some guy in Lativa as well. While the volume hasn't gone up, the content has changed from being viagra sales to being ads for beastiality. Plus the new spams seem to be harder to filter, loaded with many false html tags trying to get them through. Only 4 emails a day or so make it past the mail filters my ISP uses, but I still don't want that shit in my indox.

Huh?

[MachineShedFred]

Microsoft and AOL are evil.
Spam is evil.

Microsoft and AOL are fighting spam.

Microsoft and AOL are fighting evil?

My brain hurts...

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Think of this as a turf war between biker gangs.

You have the spammers muscling in on AOL and Microsoft's territory, scaring all their customers. And you have Microsoft and AOL retaliating by taking hits out on the opposing gang leaders.

Re:Huh?

[Cruciform]

It's not so much fighting evil, ask seeking to gain a monopoly on it :)

Re:Huh?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

God, this joke is getting old.

Look, people: there are no angels in this business, and everybody knows it. Microsoft is evil, spammers are evil, AOL and Yahoo! are only slightly less evil than the first two; also on the "evil" list are Apple, Sun, IBM, Dell, Oracle, Adobe, and, well, pretty much any company with yearly revenue in excess of $1 million. Every single one of them would dominate the entire business world, crush the competition, and eliminate all innovation that didn't translate directly into greater short-term profits if they could.

What most of us down here at the bottom of the food chain understand is that it doesn't matter. We support companies -- whether "support" means buying their products or just cheering them on -- not on the basis of their moral purity (because there isn't any) but on the basis of what's most useful to us. If Microsoft spends some portion of its ill-gotten gains on cutting down on the amount of spam I get, that is useful to me, even if everything else they do is not only useless but actively harmful. There's no cognitive dissonance involved.

Dispose()

[Anonymous Coward]

Use Mailinator and avoid the spam in the first place!

Spamdemic map

[prostoalex]

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.

Hope it works

[Elpacoloco]

Used to be spam tried to tell me something. Now it's so clogged with filter-defeaters that they can't manage to squeeze in a message.

Hope they recover at least their sysadmin's time.

Now this is...

[enrico_suave]

Now this is a witch hunt I could get behind!

Spammers are my inbox terrorists =(

e.

Re:Drek?

[annielaurie]

It's the Yiddish word for shite, which is the Irish word for shit.

Can-Spam is not far enough though

[RandBlade]

Good start, but it doesn't go far enough. Part of the law for Can-Spam they're being prosecuted under is the absence of addresses to get off a mailing list - but who is seriously going to click on a link if they are there? How do we trust them?

This won't stop until spammers start getting locked up for years and people stop buying off them.

spam

[vinit79]

What about the spam ( all those cd's ) AOL sends me via snail mail ?? Can they sue themeslves for it ??
Though I do hope the junk Cds dont stop I use them as disposable cup coasters.

Re:spam

[chimpo13]

You aren't paying the postage for those CDs unlike spam. Junk mail is paid for by whoever is sending it.

Re:Four Big ISPs File Six Anti-Spam Suits

[Kenja]

"Since when has Microsoft been an ISP?"

Since they started the Microsfot Network? MSN started as an AOL style dial up service back around '93-'96.

Great.

[Gannoc]

Now i'm going to never get out of debt long enough to afford that penis enlargement.

What is our role?

[ParadoxicalPostulate]

I'd like to bring up what I think is an interesting point here.

How does this type of announcement (and others like it) affect our role in this struggle? What can we do to make their efforts more fruitful?

I know people who in the past took it upon themselves to trace certain spammers and send an email with relevant data to the host mail provider (lets say, Yahoo for instance) in an effort to perhaps provoke some response.

My question is: does this work? Is it effective? Or will the spammer just as easily switch addresses? If so, was it worth it to give them that kind of trouble or are we simply wasting our time?

If, after this discussion, we determine that it is a worthy method of helping, how would you go about doing it? What type of advice would you give to people who would like to take action once in a while?

Obviously I can't take action against every piece of spam that hits my mailbox. However, there are certain, shall we say...habitual offenders. Looking at my hotmail account over these past few years (I use my optonline account for serious mail) its fairly easy to figure out that a large bulk of those emails are coming from a common source.

Anyway, I'd really appreciate some input - including technical details.

Push them underground?

[aynrandfan]

I can't help but wonder how much legal suits like this will force spammers underground. Making spam illegal and going after spammers won't stop spam as long as there is money to be made off the drones.

Re:Push them underground?

[Tripster]

Umm, they are pretty much underground now aren't they? Considering the spammers are almost exclusively using the trojaned PC network to relay their crap I would say it is as underground as you can get.

This "follow the money" routine will work, the spammers need to get paid at some point, and considering most of their income is based on amount of sales from the spam then you just need to have a nice chat with whomever is accepting the loot and sending the products.

10 years from now

[Anonymous Coward]

I expect my inbox to be filled with just as much spam and all the lawyers will be slightly richer.

Question...

[oldosadmin]

Nice to know that some of my DSL payments are being put to good use...

Can I, as a web admin, sue a spammer for sending mail to my domain? I'm on shared hosting. (cheap plug: my website is www.oldos.org -- go there. but don't spam me)

This should be at least amusing

[LordZardoz]

Most slashdotters seem to hate Microsofts army of Lawyers. Or, they hate lawyers in particular. Slashdotters also hate spammers

Its always entertaining to see the anti-lawyer anti-corporate crowd actually agree with something that a lawyer heavy super corporation does.

END COMMUNICATION

Re:This should be at least amusing

[Sloppy]

Most slashdotters seem to hate Microsofts army of Lawyers.

You might want to look back. Microsoft is hated, but their "army of lawyers" has been pretty low-profile. When was the last time that army really made any significant trouble for the good guys? Sheesh, even Slashdot was able to stand up to them.

It's the Microsoft lobbyists and salesmen that you have to worry about. Quit thinking of Microsoft as litigious assholes. It's not that I worry about people having ill-will toward MS, but if you think of them as litigious, you're just falling for a feint. That's when you get stabbed in the heart by their real weaponry.

So?

[A nonymous Coward]

Hitler fought Stalin. Nothing new under the sun.

Re:We all get spam but...

[MooseByte]

"How do people manage to get this much spam? I'm on about 20 Mailing list and I give my e-mail t a lot of those sites that ask me to sign up. I get maybe 3 a day."

Maybe you're lucky. Or maybe your ISP blocks it before you ever see it. Or maybe your addresses haven't been around long enough.

I own a few domains, have email links on them, belong to mailing lists, etc. I get around 80-100 pieces of spam each and every day. With MacOS X's mail filter I rarely actually see any of them in my inbox, but I still have to quickly scan the pile for the odd message or two that was legit.

They Can Do It!

[trolman]

Now that the SPAMMERS have moved from overseas to Domestic (USA) machines the lawyers can move in and hit these people hard, in the pocket book. This looks like an industry wide effort with Comcast shutting off the spigot this week. The denied loggings here, from comcast machines, dropped off significantly this past week. UUnet is still the top of the list percent wise. Now that we have them where we want them, here at home, Hit them hard.

When Will They Sue Uunet?

[Anonymous Coward]

They are #1 on the SBL! 155+ spam gangs are on UUnet. We need to sue UUnet to get all the spammer money that they have received from he spammers that they host. I keep sending mail to as many email addresses of thiers that i can find. Damn spam supporters.

Spam is just getting rediculous!

[AcquaCow]

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.

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 $ .Soma. $ Pnte:r:min LV0J2" anyways?

At some point of obfuscation it has to just become a giant waste of time to try and send the email out.

This is terrible.

[Gannoc]

This is an biggest outrage. The only thinging that these companies will accomplish is the suppression of the super legitimate business methods for 100% legal legitimate businesses. This is shameful.

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Love,
Jenny
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To stop these posts to slashdot, send your request toHollywood Plaza Rm. 1903, 610 Nathan Road, Mong Kok, Hong Kong

Effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

The spammers are partly to blame. Think about it, they are alfter the money. People who aid them (hosting, providing a proxy, or even buying from their advertisements) are also guilty. Companies who host their web pages should also be blacklisted.

In theory, their customers are also guilty of helping the spammers thrive (just like supporting terrorism economically) and in the future should be tagged in some way. The pill companies (or other cmpanies) who are benefitting from increased sales should also be included.

Call me antispam fanatic, but I hate wasting time every day figuring out what to delete and what to read. All the wasted time is basically lost productivity (think productivity in the health care field)

They should go for the death penalty.

137 non-spam???

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

137 of which are non-spam

You get 137 legitimate emails a day? How does that leave you with time to do anything other than read your email?

Reminds me of my brief stint at IBM, circa 1996-1997: I could have spent literally an entire shift doing nothing but reading the utterly inane, purposeless nonsense that the higher-ups foisted on us every day.

To this day, I contend that, for the vast majority of businesses, email [and instant messaging, and pagers, and beepers, and walkie-talkie/blackberry/802.11xyz thingamabobs] cause a net decrease in productivity.

What about us?

[Woogiemonger]

These spammers are being sued for damages to the ISPs? Why can't they include their customers in the law suit? We're the ones supporting every dollar they earn, and we suffer plenty because of spammers. The ISPs are footing the bill for the lawsuit, sure, but it'd be nice if we got a coupon or something.

Re:What about us?

[PhxBlue]

When was the last time the ISPs hiked up the rates explicitly because of the E-mail traffic they had to filter and handle? Call me old-fashioned, but I'd settle for the lower volume of spam that will result from this action The time I would save is worth more than a 50 coupon.

Re:We can only hope . . .

[nizo]

Well, if I understand this right, they are going to follow the trail to the actual person collecting money, so Jim Bob with his hijacked PC should be safe (until his connection gets unplugged, see earliers Comcast article). I can understand the ISPs being pissed at this, I mean imagine if they didn't have to handle piles of spam all day? It must be fun upgrading your mail servers all the time just to handle the 80% increase in spam.

Excellent News!

[netfall]

I have been doing a lot of research on SPAM lately for some of my undergrad work. One of the biggest reasons that SPAM exists is because the spammers actually make money! As reported on Slashdot back in November, I beleive, aproximately 7% of people actually buy things from SPAM messages. Given the extremely low cost to the spammers, this is a GREAT profit margin.
I will applaud this effort, if they are actually able to accurately trace the people responsible. By suing the spammers responsible, their cost of advertising will increase. Less profit. Less motivation to continue spamming.
GOOD LUCK to Microsoft, AOL, Earthlink, and Yahoo in this action!

Re:Excellent News!

[netfall]

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)

depends on how you shut them down

[Rai]

Lawsuits are too common, but something like driving masonry nails into their kneecaps would get more attention.

I should have been an inquisitor :)

Re:Special Treatment

[lostboy2]

Unless some has a better idea?

How about force-feeding them one can of Spam for every spam message they sent? You are what you eat, so maybe you should eat what you are.

Better link to AP article

[Patik]

Click here.

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.

I'd block you too

[Hayzeus]

I'd block your email too (I have spamassassin set up to score dynblock.bl relays as 5, with a spam threshold of 5). Sorry, but this has become pretty much a necessity -- not just because of the mass of incoming spam from dynamic IPs, but also because of the worm traffic.

I understand that you may not want to use your ISP as a forwarder (neither do I). My solution has been to set up a virtual dedicated server (jvds.com -- no affiliation, just a satisfied customer, yadda, yadda) and run postfix and all the other stuff I want connected directly to the internet there. I still run postfix locally, but it forwards everything to the remote. JVDS is remarkably cheap (I think they go down to $12.00/month, and offer a variety of linux distros as well as freebsd.

UsE BayEsIAn Filters NOW erxcyx.d3q 218 prolific

[vivin]

New bAyEsIAN sPAm FilTER just for you!!1!! is your inboX filled with spAM? Lose it all nOw!! this revoluTIonAry new spam fiLTErs w1LL st0p yoU from rEceIving spam EVER AGAIN! GET IT NOW!!

"I had lots of spam before. Now I have none! Bayesian Filters saved my life!
John Bismarck"

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And the war to create "good spam" has begun

[wayne]

Remeber that the You-Can-Spam act has penalties that are so small that only cost effective for the largest ISPs to can bring claims against spammers. So, only the largest ISPs can really decide which spam gets eliminated. Remember also that you can't bring any claims at all if you are not an ISP.

There is a HUGE potential market out there for "good" bulk advertising out there, if only all the pr0n and scams can be eliminated. These large ISPs have an "existing business relationship" with all their customers, and maybe arguably with those that send email through their servers. Just think of how much these ISPs could make by sending "good" spam from Ford, Pepsi, Pfizer, or PlayBoy.

Slashdot Interview with SPAM fighters @ Big 4 ISP'

[rearden]

I think this news opens up a great opportunity for Slashdot readers and Sys Admins in general. This would be a great time to be able to put questions to them such as:

1. What are you doing to track down spammes.
2. What can we do to assist? Is there some type of site, or address we can send information to assist in tracking down offenders.

Lets get an interview.
Just my thoughts.

Re:Special Treatment

[milkman_matt]

Unless some has a better idea?

How about just posting their info on /.? You remember what happened last time don't you? :)

-matt