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Real-time Spam Map
iggychaos writes "Mailinator, the free, temporary email service gets a lot of spam (over
a million emails a day). And with another cool application of Google
maps, the site now shows a Spam Map
indicating what sites are spamming mailinator in (nearly) real time. It's
oddly addictive to poke around and see where the spam is actually coming
from."
We're too busy spamming mailinator.com.au e-mail addresses.
although that isn't because we're more moral then the rest of the world. It's because we've yet to discover electricity.
I see one spam message from "The Middle of the Atlantic". Damn those spam sending cruise ships! On the other hand, it's perhaps the first spam message that I'm disappointed that I can't read the body of the message.
Looks like they count iTunes New Music Tuesday newsletter as spam.
Does this mean we sign up Steve for a bunch of catalogs and junk mail to be sent to his home address?
And why do almost all of the points on the map say 100 Emails received? Seems odd.
I think this is not exactly what it's cracked up to be.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
That the majority places shown also have the highest STD rates on the country?
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
That's verbal tech. You're downstat. Report for auditing.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
You see the spam coming out of turkey? "Enough with the Thanksgiving Jokes already" or something like that-- pretty funny
no god is good
...simply block the mailinator.com domain? Or websites refuse to take email addresses from that domain?
Otherwise, a good idea.
It means that people who are offended by certain combinations of the latin alphabet may not want to click on the subjects. I personally think anyone that's unable to cope with seeing certain combinations of the latin alphabet probably aren't mature enough to be surfing the web, myself.
More likely, this is a map of open relays and zombies.
Underholdning.info
This is your chance to put your village on the map.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
I think someone's having a bit of fun with the map. I got a spot smack in the middle of Greenland, with this message:
Subject: Um, the brochure said it was GREEN here
IP address: 1.2.3.4
DNS Name: greenland.aintgreen.com
Location: Greenland
Emails: lots
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
I personally think anyone that's unable to cope with seeing certain combinations of the latin alphabet probably aren't mature enough to be surfing the web, myself.
:)
Yeah, fuck them.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
What's the point of using mailinator to register if you can post without registering ?
No GNU has been Hurd during the making of this comment.
So THAT is where Cowboy Neal lives!
"You know if you give it, you're gambling with your privacy. On the other hand, you do want at least one message from that person. The answer is to give them a mailinator address." --from the website
Isn't that gambling with your privacy as well though, to store the email you want to receive in an inbox that anybody can access? Other than that it's a pretty cool site/idea; however, I think a lot of people have email accounts already that they dedicate to web usage.
According to that map, my country has disappeared off the face of the earth.
Subject: Um, the brochure said it was GREEN here
IP address: 1.2.3.4
DNS Name: greenland.aintgreen.com
Location: Greenland
Emails: lots
Something tells me they need to rethink their algorithm.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
Parent poster may have potty words in his post.
I'm surprised. Most spammer businesses seem to be based out of Boca Raton, FL (a fact that makes me pissed off, being a Floridian). No little pips in FL... yet. I guess I should wait a few days.
Either that or they still use open relays (or even zombie computers at this point), so they won't show up.
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
Awwwww... da liddle bitty commander-waander doesn' like da baby-waby talky-walky.
I don't see anything coming from Africa...
He, that's cool, China doesn't send any spam...
I gave up with the idea of an useful sig...
The one point I'd like to make from looking at the map (Nice work with Google Maps by the way.) is that most of the spam seems to originate from the northeast and the west coast.
This doesn't surprise me. Penetration of broadband is higher in those areas. But they aren't the true sources of spam. That comes from elsewhere. It's pretty easy to have a bunch of zombies spew your messages out there.
But here's the interesting part - the broadband providers are letting that volume of spew through because they don't want to actively filter email. I know for a fact that both Cox and Verizon only allow use of their SMTP servers and in the case of Verizon you have to authenticate against the server.
I think all the iTunes Store update mails are being considered as spam.
watashi wa bengoshi dewa arimasen!
What happens in China, STAYS in China.
Other interesting, and useful, fake email address webs are spam.la (my favourite) and trashmail (similar to mailinator).
--
Superb hosting 4800MB Storage, 120GB bandwidth, $7,95.
Kunowalls!!! Random sexy wallpapers (NSFW!).
Hosting 20G hd, 1Tb bw! ssh $7.95
Interesting -- one of the locations is Apple Computer, 17.254.6.20, the subject is New Music Tuesdays which is what Apple sends to iTunes Music Store customers. AFAIK this is legitimate mail sent to known customers. I wonder what the algorithm is they use to determine what is and is not spam?
--Paul
Use one of mailinator's alternate domains!
Are you a Candy Addict?
It is interesting that their domain has so few spam-mails every three minutes. My reading of the map (at 9:38 US-EST) is that they have about 20 spam (or 2000 if it is really multiplied by 100). My domain, used for about five addresses, gets one about every minute.
I would think that a domain that is actually used by people would get a lot of spam. As it is, there are too few points of reference to see where spam generally comes from. Perhaps making the time covered user configurable would help. I really tend to doubt that noone in asia is spamming at the moment - expecially considering many spam farms are completely automated.
Interesting though....
It might be worth donating to mailinator (who I'm not affiliated with). They seem to be the good guys, and their service it pretty useful. I can't imagine a slashdotting would really make their day (let that be a lesson for you next time you mention google on your website)
I am a spamcop user and for 3 months I noticed some stuff.
1) The legit businesses, e.g. Real.com, Allume.com or any company with a valid record does NOT spam. Its basically a lie.
2)Far East ISP's, especially China,Taiwan are kind of "allowing" zombied machines.
Not paranoia at all. A much more valid, checked realtime spam stats is at:
http://www.spamcop.net/spamstats.shtml
As a spamcop mail customer one thing bugs me is. People, especially newbies learned that service and they use bogus spamcop.net addresses when they sign up a legit service like product updates from Allume Systems (Stuffit etc). Result: As a customer of them I can't use my IMAP mail and have to use Yahoo.com as spamcop is simply rejected.
Ugh! Formatting! *slaps forehead*
There seem to be a lot of jokes on there. It must be by the mailinator staff.
Subject: Um, the brochure said it was GREEN here
IP address: 1.2.3.4
DNS Name: greenland.aintgreen.com
Location: Greenland
Emails: lots
(Pin in middle of Greenland)
Subject: Mom, a funny thing happened on the way to the store
IP address: 1.2.3.4
DNS Name: helpme.ocean.com
Location: Middle of the ocean
Emails: lots
(pin somewhere in the Pacific)
Then this one
Subject: Send money. I had a few beers then...this
IP address: 1.2.3.4
DNS Name: too.much.beer.com
Location: Middle of the Atlantic
Emails: lots
(pin somewhere int he Atlantic)
This is really an invalid survey because of tunnels and portals that most spammers use. This link gives a far better representation of the overall spam locations in the world. They actually trace backed the mail to its origin to map where it was coming from.
On a side note there are far better services out there similar to mailinator like shortmail.net and pookmail.com that should be checked out.
Did I just see what I thought I saw? There's an SMTP server responsible for relaying at least 400 spams so far. How interesting. Perhaps someone smarter than I could identify this server further to determine what it is running and if it has been hacked or is merely an open relay?
IP address: 17.254.6.27
DNS Name: chatbox-smtp-out11.apple.com
Location: Cupertino, CA, US
Emails: 400
"It's oddly addictive to poke around and see where the spam is actually coming from." "
Kermit agrees. Miss Piggy unavailable for comment.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Ummm so when Bill said that they wanted to give people the tools to organise the information....
How is Google not providing the tools? Seems to me that Google is providing better tools, just not requiring people to buy and operating system to use them.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
It needs a mod for a graphic of the source IP being destroyed (nuke?) when it recognizes it as spam and adds to the > null list. That would be awesome ;)
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
Anyone know why maps don't show up in Mozilla, just a gray box? Very annoying. Mozilla 1.7.2
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
Slick! Nifty! Wow!
Boys, they give us IP addresses of spammers! You know what that means?
Finally we can seek revenge! Where is my nmap? Let's teach them a lesson...
-- My name's Inigo Montoya. You killed my father, prepare to die!
42.
China is where the "bullet-proof hosting" services are mostly housed. You can't shake a stick at a group of spamvertised sites without hitting Chinanet. The emails themselves don't come from China because lots of intelligent mail admins block the whole country.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
But i still think it's more useful to know where i would stop if I dig a very deep hole
What is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women.
Gotta ask: what nationality are you?
J.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
Still nifty - wonder if there are any spam-law people out there who could use a map like this as a people-to-interview list? Imagine a version that maps all our spam, then sends itself to people who can actually use that information.
"Subject: You're in! Welcome to Yahoo! Messenger with Voice.
IP address: 66.218.66.53
DNS Name: n18.bulk.scd.yahoo.com
Location: London, UK
Emails: 100"
London???
Spam?
We only show the top spammers and we classify spam a bit differently than most - we are all about self-preservation. If one guy sends a Viagra email, that isn't spam for us. If he sends 1000, it's spam. It's not about the subject, it's the volume. p. Brian - a mailinator developer
Are you a Candy Addict?
Try our alternate domains
Are you a Candy Addict?
English, but I wouldn't like you to think we're all this abusive.
It's good that they don't also have a map of where the hits on their webserver come from. If they did, they could locate where the highest concentration of slashdotters are, and launch a pre-emptive nukular strike against them. Or was that in soviet russia that the server hits YOU? Anyway, Netcraft confirms Mailinator is dying. HAND.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
So, what do you really do with all that spam (besides mapping it?) Do you aggregate it, identify zombies, notify authorities, or just plonk every little byte of it? What kind of hardware/software do you run? What do you get out of it besides a bunch of very satisfied geeks?
John
Try to bring it up in Firefox and you get a blank screen... :(
This seems like a service surprisingly similar to what was Slashdotted about two weeks ago:
http://www.trustedsource.org/
Was there really a point in recommending yet another tool which does practically(-ish) the same thing?
My Linux - (L)ove (I)s (N)ever (U)tterly eXPensive
except there isn't - at the moment.
WTF? No mails in the slashdot@mailinator.com account.
Come on guys!!!!
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5
Nah, so am I mate, I just wondered if there could be a yank with such good grasp of abuse.
;-)
Now I wonder if the poor sod you called a fat knacker even knows he's been insulted
Cheers,
J.
PS: Admit it, we are all that abusive.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
Awhile back, some spammer list picked up my email address as someplace to fake sending spam FROM. (Not the mail servers, just the "from" line of the email.) Since then, I get more "Your mail has been blocked due to it likely being spam" and bounces from non-existant addresses than actual spam. Of course, I count all those emails as spam themselves.
Please, if you have an auto-replyer to spam, turn it off. You're just harassing other people with your meta-spam.
E pluribus unum
From the site: Subject: New Music Tuesday: Sheryl Crow, Cecilia Bartoli, ...
IP address: 17.254.6.51
DNS Name: chatbox-smtp-out19.apple.com
Location: Cupertino, CA, US
Emails: 100
How come we have spam servers sitting in Antarctica??????
Check out Antarctica for an easter egg.
Sounds like thier spam detection needs some fine tuning. It's catching opt-in mail and classifing it as spam.
So these sites that offer opt-in or opt-out policies are being subjected to the 'spammer' tag by these guys just because this company is not doing enough background on what they are checking and just wanting to be the first company to do something 'cool'.
How dare you stay that! I know someone who was once blinded for three days by unexpected pottywords.
You might want to check out http://www.spamgourmet.com/ instead.
It's kind of the same idea, but instead of holding the email for you in a disposable mailbox, it forwards it to your real address. After a certain number of uses though, the address "shuts down" and all messages sent there are eaten. You can log into the site and control the number of messages left on a particular address, set a dedicated sender, etc.
You go to the site and make an account, which requires a username, password, and real email address. From then on you can give out any address of the form:
someword.username@spamgourmet.com
Where 'someword' can be any word. You can also make ones of form someword.x.username@spamgourmet.com, where x is a number of messages from 1-20 that the address will work for, after which it shuts off.
I've signed up for some mailing lists using spamgourmet names. Initially the address is good for 5 messages. After you get the first one from the mailing list, you log into the system and set the mailing list email as the dedicated sender. Then, you can only get messages from the mailing list to that address. All others are tranparently deleted.
It's also good if you want to put an email in an eBay auction listing. You can set the address for 20 messsages, enough to keep it working through the auction, and then once the auction's over either close it down (by setting remaining msgs =0) or wait for it to run out. I've found by looking on the status page of my account at SpamGourmet, that those addresses have received a TON of spam.
It's also great for figuring out who's selling out your email address.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I suddenly got an urge to play a game of Global Thermonuclear War. >:-(
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
we need to be able to plug this into some nations nuclear launch capability.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
move along nothing happening here.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Oh, come on, moderators, that was funny.
You're not just classifying spam "differently than most", you're classifying it incorrectly.
What makes something spam is its being unsolicited, not the subject or the volume.
In the days before Mac OS X, Apple used to ship a Map control panel. If you have Classic installed you still have access to it. In it, look for a blinking dot located in the southern Atlantic. Click it, and you'll find it's labeled "Middle Of Nowhere."
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
The server spewing out spam in Northern California? chatbox-smtp-out19.apple.com! Straight out of Cupertino! Isn't this one of those, "Is this really spam?" situations? I think I got one of these after signing up for iTunes too. Clicked the link and haven't heard from them in 2+ years. It's weird to see them lumped in with Myanmar and L0wRateAdv1s0rs.
blarg.
by calling in air strikes on the locations marked, preferably with tactical nuclear weapons. Much better than trying to cope with a few muslim fanatics the US Army can't control....
or even dodgeit.com
If I had created the world I wouldn't have messed about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers
if it comes from Apple?
...
Subject: New Music Tuesday: Sheryl Crow, Cecilia Bartoli,
IP address: 17.254.6.46
DNS Name: 17.254.6.46
Location: Cupertino, CA, US
Emails: 100
I forgot what I wanted to say, but honestly, it was important.
Well the mailinator idea is nice and good for the technically challanged ....
...
....
....
... and filter/lookup mail coming to these
However with very small knowledge you can register a domain name for yourself, have a privacy guard (name differs by provider) on it that hides your registrar data adn than have all mails redirected to one address - be it yahoo gmail or your existing mail address or just one selected address on that domain.
Before people get scared of this process, a registration costs as low $5-$6 a year, and most registrars provide an easy web gui where you set up email forwarding.
Damn, some even give you free hosting (no scripting and db, but hey.... if you need better you already have it)
I always sign-up to services like this:
whateverdomain.com-sub@mydomain.com
-sub = subscription for something, but could be -aff , -download, -freepornpix , -whatever-else
It is not rocket science and you immediately know when someone stole/sold a database....
e.g. a test order in my private label affiliate store has whatever.com-testorder@mydomain.com..
when it starts receiving spam from other stores, the program is screwing me and sold my customer list, or their database has been compromised
note: happens a lot
if you are more sophisticated you can write a 50- line php script to create random emails for each service you sign-up to
Being nocturnal will work well with not going outdoors, and the hooked beak will be great for typing. The grubs'll make a mess, though.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
One finds it hard to believe nothing is coming from China. I thought they were a spamming hotbed. Some data must be incomplete.
And there you have the core reason. They do not have the right to spam anyone by default. That box should be presented as unchecked in the page. If a user does not explictly indicate (solicit) a request for it, they do not have the right to send it and it IS unsolicited commercial email and should be dealt with accordingly.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
And it's not even Patch Tuesday!
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
I'm a dwarf you insensitive clod. I will never be big. I hope you're happy now.
The user expressly solicits the mail by supplying an email address. The alternative is to uncheck the box and not provide an email address - this still allows you to download iTunes. Since the mailing is directly related to iTunes (it is an announcement of new music available through the music store) it is probable that a large percentage of downloaders would want to be added to the list. In this case, why should it not be the default?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I think my point was pretty clear, proper opt-in etiquette requires an affirmative action to request repeat emails like newsletters, announcements. I will buy off on providing an email address for validation purposes for the service. Any use beyond that SINGLE confirmation email is required to be UNSELECTED by default. The marketing droids like to think of all sorts of clever things to insinuate themselves into your life so they can claim that they are following rules of the "YOU_CAN-SPAM" act and then sell that information to others. Good-luck to them, I use http://spamgourmet.com/ to provide one-off and sender restricted addresses to foil their dastardly plots and relieve me of having to wade through their fine print. I currently have over 60 aliases still getting used of which maybe 4 are actually forwarding mail.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
brian
Are you a Candy Addict?