Spam Bits

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Posted by michael on Friday March 12, 2004 @08:01AM from the spam-and-eggs dept.

Let's mush a few things together into a nice pink rectangular solid: ipandithurts writes "The FTC Chair Timothy Muris doubts the ability of the "CAN SPAM" law to stop SPAM." ElementCDN writes "The Ottawa Citizen has a story on Bernard Balan the King of Spam. Bernard has closed up shop and moved to cottage country near Huntsville, Ontario." CactusMan writes "CTV (among others) is reporting that a Ontario trio has been named in a suit filed by Yahoo under the new CAN-SPAM legislation. Yahoo is claiming that the father and two sons were 'responsible for sending millions of unsolicited messages to users of the company's e-mail service.'" ilsa writes "According to this AP article, as much as 19% of e-mail sent by commercial entities never reaches its destination. 'Promotions and greeting cards were the types of messages most likely to disappear, the study found.' Although this study may have been intended to be alarming, forgive me for thinking this may not be a bad thing." Reader chrisbtoo responds to an earlier spam story: "In today's story about Spam solutions, monstroyer challenged people to crack the Spam Interceptor Captcha. Turns out it was pretty easy." Finally, we can't fail to mention an attempt at making the world's largest spam musubi.

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19% of commercial email? At least! by neiffer · 2004-03-12 08:07 · Score: 4, Informative

I run a small publishing firm that relies on email to sent updates to our materials. Every email we send to customers has at least 10% bounce (sometimes as high as 30%); many of which worked a week before or a week after. However, I think the 19% number mimics my personal mail as well: messages allll the time get lost in the shuffle!!
Wow, they requested this? by Faust7 · 2004-03-12 08:07 · Score: 4, Insightful

e-mail recipients risk losing newsletters and promotions they've requested.

Who with an ounce of sense would request any sort of e-mail promotion, given the tendency those things have to multiply of those accord? Don't answer that.

--
The coolest voice ever.
1. Re:Wow, they requested this? by IO+ERROR · 2004-03-12 08:14 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  The truth is, SOMEBODY is buying penis enlargers and breast kits, otherwise nobody would bother sending out such spam in the first place.
  
  --
  How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
2. Re:Wow, they requested this? by squiggleslash · 2004-03-12 08:16 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Set up an email address for each entity you do business with, and this becomes possible and easy to control. There are some entities I do like to receive newsletters etc from on a regular basis, simply because I buy enough from them for it to matter and they've put a lot of work into making them relevent - Amazon.com is one that springs to mind. People I know subscribe to things like newsletters from airlines that highlight specials, as another example.
  You know, if ISPs made it easier to implement this particular solution, rather than requiring we run our own email servers to do it (or even doing what they can to prevent us from running our own incoming email servers - many ISPs block *incoming* port 25) the spam nuisance would end overnight. Businesses would stop selling email addresses because they know that their ability to contact you stops the moment they do, and people wouldn't buy them because they'd know the email addresses are blocked immediately on receiving the first spam.
  I note Yahoo! is implementing such a scheme. More power to 'em!
  
  --
  You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
3. Re:Wow, they requested this? by schon · 2004-03-12 08:24 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  SOMEBODY is buying penis enlargers and breast kits, otherwise nobody would bother sending out such spam in the first place.
  
  OB Simpsons quote:
  
  "That's specious reasoning, dad. That's like saying that this rock keeps tigers away."
  
  "Really? How does it work?"
  
  "It doesn't! It's just a rock! But you don't see any tigers around do you?"
  
  -----
  Even if nobody buys it, spam will still exist, because spammers think exactly like you do..
4. Re:Wow, they requested this? by Phroggy · 2004-03-12 08:26 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Who with an ounce of sense would request any sort of e-mail promotion, given the tendency those things have to multiply of those accord? Don't answer that.
  
  Each time I sign up for something with a particular company or organization, I create a new e-mail address at my domain, and give them that. That way, if I start receiving spam at that address, I know who sold my address.
  
  What I've found over the few years I've been doing this surprised me a little. The results: legitimate companies do not sell my e-mail address. Never. None of them. There have been times when an e-mail address has gotten listed on a web page in cleartext (e.g. on an eBay auction page) and those get spam because spammers harvest addresses (I believe eBay has stoopped listing e-mail addresses for this reason). The address I actually use as my return address when sending mail to friends gets spam all the time. Once an address is harvested from somewhere, I'm sure it gets sold on CD-ROM or whatever. But the addresses I create for companies and organizations to use (I've got about a hundred of them) simply do not get spam.
  
  --
  $x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
  $x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Return Path numbers are low by attaboy · 2004-03-12 08:10 · Score: 5, Interesting

The AP/ReturnPath story is interesting, in that the actual number of messages that never see their intended recipients is probably even higher than 19%.

The study was based on a snapshot of messages sent by 100 Return Path customers. Return Path set up test mailboxes with 18 major Internet service providers and monitored about one-fourth of the 120,000 marketing campaigns from those customers.

This wouldn't even begin to account for the number of messages filtered by larger companies, universities, and other entities that maintain their own spam-filtering and spam-blocking systems. It also wouldn't account for the growing number of individual end-users who are installing and using commercial or free spam-blocking software on their local machines. Anti-spam software isn't just for geeks anymore. According to download.com, the top 25 results for a search on "anti-spam" have been downloaded 2,493,051 times, in aggregate.

Well isn't that a good thing?

If you are an end user, and missing a message doesn't matter that much to you, then no. If you are a company using E-mail to communicate with your customers, but you aren't sending anything critical, then no.

If you miss the electronic notification from your bank, credit-card, or student loan company that your last payment is late, or the notification from your airline that your flight was cancelled, then it does matter.

And if your one of the,"oh, it can't be more than five or ten", companies in the world that is using E-mail as part of your business processes, whether for sales, marketing, customer service, CRM, purchase or account notifications, etc... well then, hell yeah it matters.

Things are probably going to get worse before they get better, but E-mail for business has so much potential that I can't but hope that we will solve this problem.

--
The facts have a liberal bias. --The Daily Show
1. Re:Return Path numbers are low by tanguyr · 2004-03-12 08:21 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  And if your one of the,"oh, it can't be more than five or ten", companies in the world that is using E-mail as part of your business processes, whether for sales, marketing, customer service, CRM, purchase or account notifications, etc... well then, hell yeah it matters.
  
  Well, if you are using e-mail as a *critical* part of your business process then you must have a back up plan: like it or not e-mails get lost, there is no guaranteed delivery (e-fedEx?) ,no standardized way of handling return receipts, not to mention the whole grey area of whether emails represent legally binding documents. Check out those disclaimers in your inbox. Any e-commerce site sends you email notifications on your order's status, but they're also available on your account page - ssl encrypted, password authenticated. And you can call customer support for the same info. /t
  
  --
  #!/usr/bin/english
Yet another "King of Spam" by AndroidCat · 2004-03-12 08:17 · Score: 4, Funny

So Bernard Balan claims to be the (ex) king of spam and "one of the best programmers around"? Oh wait, spammer rule #1.

--
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Dutch supreme court rules that ISP may forbid spam by MathFox · 2004-03-12 08:18 · Score: 4, Informative

The Dutch supreme court (Hoge Raad) ruled today (March 12) that an ISP can forbid a spammer to make use of their machines. (press release in Dutch). "XS4ALL has exclusive rights on its computer capacity" and "Freedom of expression doesn't allow infringement on the rights of others".
Summary of the verdict: An ISP can demand that a spammer stops (ab)using the computer systems of the ISP for sending unsollicited email to its customers. If he continues after that, the spammer is infringing the ISP's rights.

--
extern warranty;
main()
{
(void)warranty;
}
Monstroyer says congrats! by monstroyer · 2004-03-12 08:27 · Score: 5, Interesting

Wow, my challenge has been answered. Seeing is believing. For the record, someone else beat it using JAVA. Here's the email i got:
Hi Simon, I just accepted the challenge that (presumably) you laid on a recent Slashdot thread to create an automatic registration agent for (again, presumably) your Spam Interceptor software. This is the result. If you can see the log of registered email addresses you will note that some few hundreds of addresses have been added for of the form "AutoGenerated_@i.am.spamming.you.com". You are welcome to review the code that I used, although there really isn't much to it... some 300 lines of java. The approach that I used should be adequate simple variations of your defence, but would be readily defeated by simply improving the algorithm that you use to generate the random background noise in your image. Feel free to email me at: [removed]@recalldesign.com
As a user, here's hoping a fix to make the image more complex is on the way. Thanks for the insight.
300 lines of Java? by Wee · 2004-03-12 09:08 · Score: 4, Funny

You are welcome to review the code that I used, although there really isn't much to it... some 300 lines of java.
So that's like, what? 25 lines of Perl?
I kid because I love.
-B

--
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.