A Day In The Life Of A Spammer

kaip writes "Internetnews.com has a story of a spammer. The individual sends 60 million spam emails for four days worth of work and claims that one in 19 of AOL users clicks the links in his mortgage spam (this number should however be taken with a grain of salt, see rules 1 and 2). Maybe not everybody has heard of the Boulder Pledge... The article also tells how the CAN-SPAM Act, which legalises spamming, is turning the US into the spam haven of the world. Currently, 86 percent of the total spam volume is coming from the States."

Comments

My spamproofing

[Clueless Moron]

I use postfix, but sendmail can do the same:

1. reject_unknown_client is on. This means that a connecting client MUST have a reverse-dns lookup for its IP, and the resulting name MUST resolve back into that IP. This alone blocks most spammers before their client can even begin to send a message.
2. I use xbl.spamhaus.org. This is a wonderful thing. This blocks not only any box known to spam, but also any box found to be infested by some virus, ie zombies. Once again, this stops them dead before the message even starts.
3. In the unlikely event that they get past those hurdles, I have a homebrewed filter that watches for bogus HTML tags, since they like to intersperse bogus empty tags in the middle of words in order to foil content-based filters. This simple filter actually blocks 90% of anything that made it that far.
4. Spamassassin. The few brave soldiers of spam that got this far rarely pass this. I leave this filter near the end because it's rather CPU intensive...
5. Finally, a simple procmail rule: If my name isn't in the "To:" or "Cc:" line, file it as spam.

I haven't seen a spam message in, uh, maybe a year or two?

Re:Our love-hate relationship with business-scum

[Robmonster]

6 months!!! If I had to train a filter for 6 months before it becase effective I would go insane.

You need K9.

http://keir.net/k9.html

RM