Spammer Apologizes

radarsat1 writes "The Globe and Mail reports that Canadian professional spammer Eric Head, after being sued by Yahoo!, has apologized formally for his behaviour and vows to mend his ways by teaching others about the dangers of the internet. Let's hope others begin to take his lead."

Comments

*Sniffle*

[SkiddyRowe]

I can imagine what it looked like

"I'm sorry, I didn't realize it would be such a problem!" *wipes nose with C-note* "I only wanted to make a couple extra dollars a month, put an extra bread roll on the table..." *lights cigarette from burning $50*

He may be sorry, but I'm sure his bank account isn't...

How to make a million dollars

[Ridgelift]

Wow, now I know how to get rich:

1) Setup massive spamming operation
2) Make millions
3) Get sued and settle for a mere six figures
4) Stop spamming operation
5) Tell world you going to help children

So within the scope of a year or two, everyone will forget how this man made his fortune, and revere him for his good works helping children.

Sounds a lot like the Carnegie Legacy

Re:How to make a million dollars

[GPLDAN]

Like Carnegie, spammers understand critical aspects of cost accounting. As in, it doesn't cost them very much to distribute the message. Carnegie drove fixed costs down by looking to verticalize the means of production. Spammers are free riders on the fixed cost of the Internet infrastructure.

Carnegie drove millions of men to early graves with horrible working conditions and an insane desire to work them until they dropped. Spammers work the lines, pounding out messages 24/7 until mail servers die of exhaustion.

Lastly, Carnegie and Frick had assasination attempts on them for trying to smash unions. Spammers could get killed if they showed up somewhere where Microsoft hotmail exec's could get ahold of them.

Spam sucks

[hackstraw]

I admin a small mail server and trap mail with spamassassin. On average we get about 100 spams per day for only 7 active email accounts.

To check for false positives, I review all of the trapped mail from time to time, and I'm starting to get discusted with the whole spam thing. Here is some of the crap that I get:

GET VALIUM AND MANY OTHER DRUGS 4 L j
China World Trade Corp making major breakthroughs
GET YOUR UNI.VERSITY D|PLOMA tqlylsrvi
Take advantage of low interest-rates!
Powerful weightloss now available where you are.
Fwd:re:Home del.very on all meds.


I'm also starting to get amused at how easy it is to identify spam with enough rules in spamassassin. These guys suck at sending mail.

I just can't believe that some people actually respond to some of the mails. The ones that get me are the mortage and loan ones. Who in their right mind would give all of their financial information to someone who randomly emails you with junk like this:

HellWo dear hom5ke oUwn5er,

We have b\eeQn notified that y<oiur mortgMage rate is fixed at a
vet6ry hoyigh interesNt rate. Therefore yhqou are current overpay[ing,
whick7h sumsRs-up to twhXo+usaEAnds of dollXLarws an5RnudPal0ly .

Lugckily for you we can [1]guoGaranteze th@e lowest r{ates in the U.S.
([2]3.50%). So hSVu=rry beQ0caNuse the ratHe f.orecast i|s not
l;oobrkincNg good!

Thesgre is no obligations, an6d i^t FykREAE

Locnk on the 3.50%, even wHSith bad credit3A!


Where all of the urls are behind a yahoo redirector, and its barely legible from all of the obfuscation techniques?

Fuck spam specific laws, it just should be illegal to try to get money from someone under the pretense of deception. Clearly mails like this are deception, and its getting out of hand.

Re:Spam sucks

[Mordaximus]

That's exacly why I usually only need two steps in my handy spam finding recipe :

1) Check the header for the usual.
2) Pipe the subject and body to a shell script that returns the number of spelling errors (via aspell etc.).

Too big a number from #2 means spam, l33t, very poor spelling or an email that is not english at all. None of which I care to read anyways!

Re:Spam sucks

[Mordaximus]

"That isn't going to work..."

Well, it IS working! I respect the time and effort you put into your study, however I have an Inbox and Junk folder that tend to disagree with your findings and conclusions.

Like I said, step 1 is checking headers. You can find alot of spam just by looking there. Also keep in mind that I said pipe to a shell script, not to aspell. I do alot of massaging before passing the body on to aspell.

I question the values you have for 'ham'. I can think of no one that I correspond with that has spelling as atrocious as your samples would indicate. Not even Slashdot is that poor at spelling as a whole. I often deal with people who use English as a second language. And while the grammar might be off, the spelling is usually passable.

Anyways I suspect that there might be text being processed by your script that isn't part of the sender's message (for example HTML, although a quick look at your PERL shows that you are looking for tags.)

It would be nice to see the emails that scored poorly on your test, to see if there is some other culprit skewing your results.

FWIW, this post contains 7 errors out of 235 words, 5 of which would have been in my custom dictionary. Giving either a 2.9% or 0.9% error rate.

Re:Spam sucks

[rossz]

What kind of false positive rate do you get with spell checking?

The high rate of bad spellings for nonspam on my server is most like because of:

1. Technical mail lists with lots of "non-words".
2. The occassional Hungarian email.

The former could be fixed by skipping the spell check for anything coming from the list servers. I purposely left those in the spell check step to see what would happen.

The second is trickier. There is no sure fire way of knowing the language of an email. My wife gets Hungarian emails from the U.S. and English emails from Hungary, so deciding by country of origin (when that even works) will fail half the time.

I may do another spell check test after I refine the perl script. Improvements to the code would be welcome.

Why an apology?

[tcm614ce]

Why is it that everyone has to apologise these days? If you are a serial murderer all people care about is that you have remorse. Who cares if the spammer apologised. As long as justice is done.

I'm a firm believer in...

[timlee]

Too little, too late.

This won't reduce the amount of junk mail I get. Like music sharing, spamming will only go deeper underground now that it has become illegal (well, at least restricted). I will continue to get spam until the internet has advanced enough to allow me to reach out and stab spammers in the eye.

Re:Not Bad

[EssTiDee]

Well, he's not exactly moving to Thahiti... Something tells me his rock band isn't exactly multi-platinum. More like, something to report to the probation officers when they call and ask if he's lawfully employed. "Uh, yeah, i'm a drummer for a rock band" Right.

Spam King Richter going straight as well

[YrWrstNtmr]

Or so he says.

I'll believe it when I (don't) see it.

Re:opt-out is still wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

While I agree with a lot of what you're saying, your numbers are bogus. Why? Because almost all business are small businesses, mainly sole proprietorships doing only local business. Spamming would not be cost-effective for them because (a) advertising in general usually is not cost-effective for a small operation and (b) there's no way to target customers in such a small geographic region. Of those 28 million firms, maybe 100,000 could potentially benefit from a typical spam run - untargeted, worldwide, and fairly costly on a per-impression basis. This is why spammers and/or their customers are usually running (a) mail-order operations and (b) selling illegal or shoddy products or simply scamming people. Otherwise the margins and volume aren't high enough to make spam worthwhile. Since most businesses ell products and services of reasonable quality in a relatively small area (city, county, or perhaps a small multi-state region), spam costs too much per new customer to be of any value.