Spamfighting Since the Death of MakeLoveNotSpam?

vacuum_tuber asks: "The now-defunct Lycos anti-spamsite screen saver, MakeLoveNotSpam, was extremely well received despite the whines and hand wringing from the no-one-should-ever-actively-defend-themselves crowd. There was speculation after its demise that Open Source spam-punishing tools would emerge. Other tools such as SpamVampire, LadVampire (punishes fake bank sites), Spam Research Tool and others were mentioned with increasing frequency, but there has been no coherent followup to gauge what people are doing since the death of the Lycos screen saver. What are you doing that you think is effective in punishing spammers or their spam-site sponsors?"

Comments

Unsolicited Commando

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice tool to jam spammers...http://www.astrobastards.net/uc/

Turn images off

[Neil Blender]

Turn images off. And filter on <img src=. And tell your Mom to.

Don't "unsubscribe"...

[skammie]

among other things in the spam that you already get. Use Thunderbird for your email. It turns off images in email by default, so you can delete those unwanted emails. Use fake info, or use BugMeNot when you need to register for news sites. Run Ad-Aware at least once a week. Install a good anti-virus program, and scan for virii weekly. Don't sign up for contests. Resist the tempation to smack the monkey. You won't get a free anything. Don't give out your real email. Use a Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail account. Use Firefox with Adblock or Nuke Anything extensions, or both. Just don't fucking click on those ad-banners. You don't need Bonzai Buddy!!! arrrgh

Re:Spamvampire works

[Matt Perry]

I use Spamvampire almost constantly. It works great. It sucks up their bandwidth, and while it doesn't DOS them, it does make the business of spam a hell of a lot less financially viable.

Wouldn't local, transparent HTTP proxies put in place by ISPs, such as DSL and dialup providers, prevent SpamVampire from being effective?

Re:Spamvampire works

[Anonymous Coward]

No. SpamVampire never requests the exact same image more than once, by making it appear to be a dynamic URL. This is how it also prevents a local cache from being used.
Request: image.jpg?1
Request: image.jpg?2
etc.

Forward the spam, but not just to the BSA

[IrishMASMS]

There are a few organizations & companies that would love for you to forward on your spam; and Spamcop [http://www.spamcop.net/] would love to help you LART the headers & spam web hosts.

You can tell where the spam comes from; or at least identify the web sites they are spamvertizing. Yes, it is sometimes a BPITA - hence why I use spamcop to help auto LART the headers/email for me. I know with squirrel mail any spam you can auto forward to your spamcop account to be LARTed.

Normally I LART anything that gets past the spam filters, thinking that anything that does get caught is by the big spamhouses. I also report my spam to the Feds for action:
"FTC" uce@ftc.gov,
"US Postal Inspectors service" fraud@uspis.gov

These folks ask for spam, to either tweak their anti-spam tools or for internal investigation:
"junk_brightmail.com" junk@brightmail.com,
"SendUsSpam" spam@sendusspam.com,
"Spamarchive" submit@spamarchive.org,
"Spamrecycle" spamrecycle@chooseyourmail.com,

Specific countries have anti-spam efforts:
"Spam from China" spam@ccert.edu.cn,
"Spam from Korea" spamcop@kisa.or.kr,

As already mentioned - any spam offering grey market (aka cheap) software?
"BSA" software@bsa.org,
"SBA" piracy@spa.org

Any 419 scams?
"419@nigeriapolice.org" 419@nigeriapolice.org,
"Central Bank of Nigeria" info@cenbank.org,
"thoselads_scamorama.com" thoselads@scamorama.com,
"Treasury Nigeraian scam reporting" 419.fcd@usss.treas.gov

Child pr0n?
"FBI" iitf.tampa@fbi.gov,
"FBI_Child_porn" complaints.detroit@fbi.gov

Any stock or securities spam?
"cyberfraud@nasaa.org" cyberfraud@nasaa.org,
"nasd Penny stock fraud submittal" ombuds@nasd.com,
"Securities fraud SEC" enforcement@sec.gov

Any food or drug spam?
"FDA_Complaint" webcomplaints@ora.fda.gov,
"FDA_Complaint2" webmail@oc.fda.gov

FYI: there are some anti spam groups I am a member of, where a little bit of research dug up these agencies. It is easy enough to set up an auto forward on your spam folder to report & LART the spammer scum. ;)

HTH!

Re:Respond to them

[Anonymous Coward]

This is also what is best to do with telemarketers, if you have time. Ask lots of questions. Get lots of information. Waste as much time as you can.

BTW, remember that they called you. When they won't take no for an answer, hang up. Yes it is rude, but it the telemarketers who is being truly rude, forcing you to take drastic action. So, they called you. Take to them. Find out the pitch. Find out what they are wearing, if they had a good night sleep. How many kids they have. Get references. Have fun.

Re:Kill their mailing lists

[SlashdotMeNow]

Ok, maybe I'm missing something here.

You are indeed. The 0wned zombie machine is the spammer's friend. By emailing trojans to millions of Outlook users I can 1) Get a massive list of valid email addresses and 2) Recruit loads of PCs to spam others.

I don't use my regular email address for anything on the web. Yet I still get spam. Why? Because someone that had my email address in their contact list got 0wned. I get LOTS of spam that's customised with information gathered this way.

The VAST MAJORITY of spam (everything I've recieved in the last few weeks certainly) comes with forged headers. You can do some research if you want. Send all your spam from all your boxes back to the 'sender' for a couple of weeks and see what happens. Answer? NOTHING. Spammers don't maintain mailing lists. They just supplement them. You can kill your email address for months, and when you create it again I guarantee you'l get spam again immediately.

And about your 'if the address is bogus don't read it' comment. Are you saying that I should send a 'Are you real' reply to every email I get from a new address? That would sure piss off my clients. I know some companies that does that, and it's irritating as hell.

Leave the thinking to the professionals kid.

Re:You forgot some lines

[doublem]

Replying to my own post is bad form, I know, but this version continues executing after fatal errors, and as a result can skim past the autoflush error that killed the last one after 160 iterations or so.

Be aware, it may have to go through several errors before resuming operation.

my @domainlist = ('website1','website2','website3');
use IO::Socket::INET;
my $x=0;
while (1)
{
foreach $domain (@domainlist){
eval{check_site($domain);}; warn $@ if $@;#End eval statement
}#End foreach to loop through domains

print "$x\n";
$x++;
}#End master while to run until program crash

sub check_site{
my $site = shift;
$sock = new IO::Socket::INET (
Proto => 'tcp',
PeerAddr => $site,
PeerPort => '80',
Reuse => 1
);
$sock->autoflush(1);
push @sockArray, $sock;
#print "$site\n";
}#End Sheck Site Sub

Re:Make it illegal.

[FatRatBastard]

But violent crime (per 1000 head of population) is worse in the UK. I believe England and Wales have just topped the charts for industrialized nations in that statistic. And ~50% of all burglaries there are home invasions (i.e. the residents are home during the robbery), as compared to about 15% here. You tend to have problems like that when you take away the right for a person to defend himself in his own home.

(Second hand knowledge of this as my cousin in Bristol did time for defending his house from career criminals with a knife).