Stichting Spamvrij (spamfree.nl foundation) Closing

TeVi writes "Stichting Spamvrij.nl (Spamfree.nl foundation), the authority on spam in The Netherlands, has decided to stop. Spamfree.nl gained international attention for their fight against the CyberAngels spammers. More information can be found on their website regarding the shut-down." It's the classic story of too much work to do, not enough time; meanwhile another reader notes: "Some new anti-spam products out there - but everyone seems to agree that even Sender ID ideas and laws won't do much."

Comments

English text

[Karamchand]

is available here.

They were good at something.

[Killjoy_NL]

From what I read this morning in the dutch news, they did find out that a notorious dutch spammer didn't stop spamming, so they got him into a lot of trouble. There was also something about some more "detective" work that they were good at, but I can't remember what it was at the moment.

Re:They were good at something.

[LuSiDe]

Agreed. Rejo (from Spamvrij.nl) really did a lot of good investigations. When the accused ones attacked him, accusing Rejo for e.g. libel, he was always able to back up what he said, or did so later because he still depended on some details. His succesful research made various big spammers shitting in their pants.

Martijn Bevelander, Akin Franks, Patrick de Bruin among others, they really got bashed away in the media. Even when they tried to defend themselves, Rejo was able to be too smart, providing details which mattered and looked suspicious. And these discussions were sometimes even live, e.g. on Webwereld.nl. Search of Webwereld.nl for 'Rejo', 'Spamvrij', or one those names i mentioned earlier. Its in Dutch though. Rejo also did some interviews and debates on the public radio in NL, discussing the spam problem.

Thanks Rejo. You'd be a good cop ;^)

Re:CyberAngels?

[TeVi]

short answer: http://www.cyberangels.nl/

SPF, Caller-ID and Sender-ID

[Zocalo]

Once again, there seems to be some confusion over this in the linked articles, both of which were written after the situation stabilised, so for those that don't know:

• SPF (Sender Permitted From) is one of the original DNS based schemes for verifying an IP was authorised to send an email. It is an open standard using text only records that was proposed by Meng Wong of pobox.com and is still going just fine with many big mail domains (Hotmail, Gmail...) using it.
• Caller-ID is the original closed standard Microsoft proposal that uses XML records. It goes beyond SPF in its scope, but is encumbered by numerous pending patents which Microsoft has yet to adequately disclose.
• Sender-ID is a derivation of Caller-ID, also by Microsoft, that was proposed to the IETF as a potential "standard" mechanism for acheiving DNS based sender validation. Owing to it sharing many of the same patent issues of Caller-ID and a failure of the parties in the MARID working group at the IETF to arrive at a compromise that open source developers were happy with, Caller-ID was rejected.

Caller-ID and Sender-ID are currently languishing in Redmond, with Microsoft yet to make any announcements about whether or not it intends to implement them anyway. SPF-Classic on the otherhand is still gaining momentum, with tens of thousands of domains registered as having SPF records, plus an unknown number of unregistered ones. SPF-Classis is also supported by most MTAs and anti-spam solutions, either directly or via a plug-in, and is most likely to become the "default standard" as things stand.

Spamgourmet solved my problem

[SysKoll]

At the risk of repeating myself, spamgourmet solved my problem. It's a free and open source disposable email address system that is traceable and also good for anti-phishing measures.

Let's say your spamgourmet account is joeblow. This gives you unlimited addresses of the form prefix.accountname_at_spamgourmet.com.You post on some web forum with the address web.forum.joeblow_at_spamgourmet.com. But you give your bank the address mybank.joeblow_at_spamgourmet.com. If a spammer collects the address from the web forum and sends you a phishing message, you can 1. disable the web.forum.joeblow address except for some selected senders, 2. immediately know that the phishing message is a scam because your bank would not write you to this address.

Note: Yes, I _did_ have to abandon my old email address because it was mass-spammed all the time. The spamgourmet server filters out the crap (spammed addresses are disabled) and then forwards my email to a private "secret" address.

There are also various features that limit the ability of a random spammer to attack your account.

The code is free. Right now there is only one public spamgourmet server. It would be nice if someone picked the code and created his own replica. And of course, the project could use more coders.