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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."
He's nothin' but a low-down, double-dealin', back-stabbin', larcenous, perverted worm!! Hangin's too good for him!! Burnin's too good for him!! He should be torn into little bitsy pieces and buried alive!!!
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
we go through the Sunday Newspaper looking for the ad circular from our favorite store so we can see what's on sale without having to go there.
That 'looking for' is the key. If I don't want to, I don't have to read the ad section.
Plus, everybody knows how fradulent these spam schemes are. Atleast, with the newspaper, if the frauds start creeping up, the newspaper company has to step up and tighten the noose.
Free XBox, PS2
On page one of the article:
And on page two:
If he ain't scared, why hide behind a false name?
Life is like a sewer; what you get out of it depends on what you put into it...
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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...
-
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?SPAM will continue to exist until people stop making spam profitable.
SPAM will continue as long as spammers percieve that spam is profitable.
I have never read an article where a spammer actually gave solid documentation of how much money he or she made. I've always read that "for a successful campaign, I get between this much and that much on a sales rate of this much or that much on a click through rate of about this on a distribution of about that."
Sending spam is a get-rich-quick scheme, and the people participating lie about how much money they make, just like every other stooge in every other get-rich-quick scheme. Spam will continue to exist as long as shitheads who live in trailers with high-interest credit cards will agree to "spend money to make money" by buying scam email proxy servers and scam bulk email software.
...allow me to pimp two of my favorite projects. First up is the Unsolicited Commando project. It's a little java app that spends its day quietly and merrily filling out forms on spamvertised websites with completely bogus - and yet totally real looking - data. It's especially effective against - surprise! - mortgage/refinance spammers, which seems to be the specialty of the dirtbag mentioned in the article. Go check it out, and the source code is available just in case you think something fishy is going on.
The second page I'd like to point you to is here. It's a 'Lad Vampire' antispam page that also targets spamvertised websites, but in a different way. The page links to individual images on the sites and constantly reloads them without caching, thereby burning up the spammers' bandwidth and driving them out of business (or at least costing them some money and forcing them to sell their children on the black market). Be forewarned that the page has no help, no documentation, and *only* works in IE, so don't yell at me about that. The source code is available for that as well, so here's hoping someone can make it more usable in Moz, Opera, ThunderFireBunnyChicken, or whatever browser is your fave.
I think many people aren't quite clear on the first amendment. It says roughly that we have the right to say what we want. However, it does not say that we can force people to listen or that we have any right to be heardd.
It should be noted, before I say anything else, that corperate speech does not fall under free speech. General unsolicited email might be covered under the first amendment, but spam advertizing something business related isn't.
Additionally, sometimes what people consider free speech crosses over into things which are illegal. You can tell something, but if you follow them around and continue telling them, that could be considered harassment. You can put up a protest, but if you threaten people or indimidate others or keep people from getting to work or cause a large disturbance or many other things, you're protest has crossed the line of what is legal.
The point is that you can say whatever you want when it doesn't affect anybody else, but we don't live in a vacum and your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.
The actions of spammers are destructive and cost people time and money, even if you ignore fraudulent spam. To say that it should be legal by first amendment is to ignore much of the issue.