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FTC Declares Can-Spam a Success
TheSixth1 writes "ZDNet is reporting that the FTC announced in a recent report to Congress [PDF Warning] that the Can-Spam act is 'effective in providing protection for consumers.' The report boasts that the substantive provisions of the Act have mandated adoption of a number of commercial email "best practices" that many legitimate online marketers are now following. Second, the Act has provided law enforcement agencies and ISPs with an additional tool to use when bringing suit against spammers. The more than 50 cases brought to date by the FTC, the Department of Justice, state Attorneys General, and ISPs demonstrate CAN-SPAM's enforcement efficacy."
Errr... Last time I checked I was still getting about 50 spam messages a day.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
I was wondering why we all stopped getting spam.
... we'd still be relying on SPEWS to bully innocent bystanders into bullying ISPs into shutting down spammers after the event.
Virtually serving coffee
...a successful penis extension with your Viagra order
"Mission Accomplished!"
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
...but the county producing the most SPAM is still the US.
__
Adult Funny Videos
... the Nigerian who sees it necessary to email me once or twice a day.
That's right my favourite type of Spam comes in a can.
The report boasts that the substantive provisions of the Act have mandated adoption of a number of commercial email "best practices" that many legitimate online marketers are now following. Second, the Act has provided law enforcement agencies and ISPs with an additional tool to use when bringing suit against spammers.
It then went on to offer Congressmen a pre-approved war loan, before asking for its help in liberating $25,000,000 (TWENTY-FIVE MILLION) from terrorism.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
oh wow! can spam! no way to go man! i slam the spam and say to the man...er....oh balls to it. spam sucks for teh win.
According to my inbox, I could have a penis 4 miles long that can be as thick as a tree. i also have tons of hot 18yo babes just wanting to be with me :) I guess its not spam anymore and its real, the success of this act says so!!
I still get 50 spams or so a day and only 25% or so are even in english.
SPAMMERS...what a joke. I'm getting more spam than ever.
Karma: a simple way of silencing those with unpopular views regardless how correct or just that view might be.
Members of Congress:
I am Mrs. Branson, a wife of embattled President of war torn
Liberia, Mr. Branson. My husband just stepped down as President
of Liberia some months ago, but matters were not helped when UN
Special War Crimes Court for Sierra Leone indicted my husband
for war crimes in June last year, demanding his prosecution.
Currently I and my husband have been granted asylum in Nigeria,
but I relocated my two sons immediately in July 2003 to Sao Tome
(a small oil rich island off the coast of West Africa).
Early last year, he entrusted some large quantities of diamonds
to me. He told me if anything happened to him, I should use it
to take care of myself. Fearing its detection due to the volume,
my son (Williams) traveled to South-Africa with the diamonds...
I work for one of the major email security companies. I can't say that CAN-SPAM has had much effect at all on spam and the spamming spammers who send it - we see just as much spam as ever, and it's just as obfuscated as ever. If anything, the spammers have evolved to be better at hiding their identities than ever before, to avoid CAN-SPAM prosecution. When the law took effect, zombies were out there, but there were also still a lot of netblocks handed to spammers by providers; now, zombies rule the day and static netblocks used by spammers are becoming rarer all the time. Defined in those terms, CAN-SPAM is a bust.
:-)
However, if you want to define "success" as "Good for us and our competitors, who are all signing up lots of new customers every month and seeing better revenue streams all the time" then yes, CAN-SPAM is a resounding success
"Our new blindfold program has proven effective in preventing the rising and setting of the sun each day. We celebrate the tremendous achievement this program has completed."
:)
Wow... talk about delusional.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
My e-mail address has a spam filter on the server, which detects pretty much 98% of all garbage that comes in and labels it [SPAM], which is then sent to my junk mail folder upon download. You can pass a million acts and laws, but it's really things like this that are actually effective.
How come it is when I hear the words inept and idiot I immeadiatly think FTC!
"I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google"
1 year ago 1 spam message per day in my mail, now in the old account 10+ (80% from US, 20% from china, rest of world: NONE) per day. So, yes it is a succes that legal marketeers are keeping the rules. But the legal ones are not the problem, so is the law a succes? No!
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Last time I checked I was getting something on the order of 5000 to 10,000 spams a day, including the bounces from people who get joe-job junk on which my name has been forged as the sender.
Can Spam has not been helpful, or, if it has, it has at best taken the edge off.
My guess is that the basis for this report was caused by some distinction between "spam" and phishing and joe-jobbing rather than simply counting the amount of junk that enters people's mailboxes.
Personally I prefer a rather more satisfying solution - something from the past. Now I don't mean anything as crude as "Goin' Mideaval on 'em" (from Pulp Fiction) but rather something from the classics.
Herodotus wrote about Xerxes or Cyrus (Persian kings) who treated evil-doers to a short, all expenses paid trip: The evil-doer was dragged by a horse over a bed of wool cards. There probably weren't many repeat offenders (or survivors either.)
The title of the paper is misleading, it stated that the "FTC staff conducted interviews with 98 individuals," which suggests that with the "enactment of CAN-SPAM, spam volume has begun to decline as has consumer frustration". Of course, the paper is written in such a way that CAN-SPAM was responsible for the "technological and marketplace developments in email since the enactment of CAN-SPAM." In other words, this is nothing but a government agency trying to hide the uselessness of a law they passed by taking credit for the technological advancements that combat spam.
How could you doubt the government who brought you the DMCA (which has virtually eliminated software and music piracy), capital punishment and gun control (which together have virtually eliminated murder and other violent crime), and mandatory car insurance (which has virtually eliminated insurance industry bankruptcy)?
I find your lack of faith disturbing.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
I think the Government is proud is what is has stopped so far but I think they have a very long way to go, possibly for ever in trying to end the war on spam. Glad to know my tax dollars are going to fight spam lol ! I think the U.N. should start helping in funding anti spam efforts since it is a global issue!
...White Star Line declares Titanic a success.
At our site we have about 100 users. We get around 65000 messages a day with about 0.5% being real emails. Each day we get email sent to about 4000 different user names. So I guess the can spam act does work after all.
About 70 percent of the world's e-mail messages continue to be spam. But the number is leveling off,
No way. I've got more than 95% of spam and have had so in years.
[sig]
It was never the legitimate online businesses you had to worry about, anyway. The impetus to comply with the law only means increased operating expenses for legitimate businesses, and working overseas for the rest.
Man, talk about your misnomers...
I get just as much spam in my inbox as I did before this useless law. It does absolutely nothing to punish or restrict anyone outside of the United States (or who uses botnets and the like). That coupled with the fact that many commercial retailers bury their stupid opt-out in the bottom of several pages of spamvertisements in their emails (hey, they are technically complying after all) pretty much make this a useless law. Google's filters don't work for shite in this matter either, and they don't seem to care when you complain about it. C'est la vie.
When oh when are we ever going to get some techinically savvy politicians elected...
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
Tell that to MY junk/spam boxes.
Youse can spam!
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
What if there actually was a pair of hot 18yo lesbians longing for me? I'd think it was spam and delete it. I'd be spam-damaged.
[sig]
for any stories about Linux, open source, or the GPL from now on...
[GPL Warning]
[Linux Warning]
[Open Source Warning]
Those should be quite useful in spreading my biases across the Net from now on.
Next you will be telling me that the USA has achieved peace in Iraq and the war on drugs has been a success.
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. - Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.
The FTC must love Viagra and degrees from unaccredited universities.
I don't keep a lid on my coffee so when I walk around I look busy -me
I'm using postfix/Amavisd-new/Spamassin setup at work, which works well enough, and will be moving over to a new box soon. I was going too set it up from scratch becauise I want to move it from OpenBSD to FreeBSD. I'll have to give Exim a look. :)
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
What is the penalty for lying to congress?
the UN would can a different type of meat now, I'm getting bored of spam.
#!/bin/bash
login root
chmod 775 universe://
Note: If you hate ads, please do not read or 'badmouth' this post or mod it down in 'anticommercial retaliation'. If you hate email spam, please read this post.
/pt/
Fed up with email spam, I wrote my own filter
Now, at iamcf13@hotpop.com, where I have 'max filtering in effect', I only get spam that looks like this:
+OK 406 octets
Return-Path: <ikoey8y36vihioyt@yahoo.com>
Received: from 222.115.40.214 (unknown [222.115.40.214])
by mx3.hotpop.com (Postfix) with SMTP id 27CC51B0D23E
for <iamcf13@hotpop.com>; Sat, 3 Dec 2005 10:01:01 +0000 (UTC)
Received: from by ; Sat, 03 Dec 2005 05:55:12 -0400
Message-ID: <[20
Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2005 10:01:01 +0000 (UTC)
From: ikoey8y36vihioyt@yahoo.com
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: (CF13-SMTP [SpamByte=000:]) no subject
X-MTA: CF13-SMTP(TM) / CF13-POP3(TM) http://www.cf13.com/
X-CF13-SMTP-ID-Message: <20051206190956.CF13-POP3@69.168.168.192.in-addr.a rpa>
.
or like this:
+OK 1061 octets
Return-Path: <heated@libel.org>
Received: from c-24-11-215-156.hsd1.mi.comcast.net (c-24-11-215-156.hsd1.mi.comcast.net [24.11.215.156])
by mx1.hotpop.com (Postfix) with SMTP id 02C6BE8390
for <iamcf13@hotpop.com>; Tue, 6 Dec 2005 01:34:51 +0000 (UTC)
Received: from unknown (HELO arguably) (192.168.212.39)
by c-24-11-215-156.hsd1.mi.comcast.net with SMTP; Mon, 5 Dec 2005 20:28:21 -0500
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Message-Id: <11581682156.87374113983@c-24-11-215-156.hsd1.mi.c omcast.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
To: iamcf13@hotpop.com
From: Joyce Mcgee <heated@libel.org>
Subject: (CF13-SMTP [SpamByte=000:]) Expand your Penis 20% Larger in weeks
Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2005 01:34:53 +0000 (UTC)
X-HotPOP-Delivered-To: iamcf13@hotpop.com
X-MTA: CF13-SMTP(TM) / CF13-POP3(TM) http://www.cf13.com/
X-CF13-SMTP-ID-Message: <20051206191144.CF13-POP3@69.168.168.192.in-addr.a rpa>
World first Patch Technology for penis Enlargement
Contraceptives should be used on every conceivable occasion.
Change is good, but dollars are better.
It's hard to work in groups when you're omnipotent.
When you have loved as she has loved, you grow old beautifully.
.
From 2005-11-30 to 2005-12-19, my POP3 client 'ate' 2,109 spam emails on iamcf13@hotpop.com while allowing 6 'null spams' (see first example) and 1 'bozo spam' (see second example) to get through. This equates to a 'failure rate' of about 1/3 of 1% --in other words, for every 300 spams 'eaten', one would get through...
Since my approach has been ridiculed and belittled here in the past I'll just let the facts and figures in this post speak for themselves. It would be nice if I could use my SMTP server and then I could block or drop the email spam at the SMTP level instead which would be much more efficient. Since [variants of] Bayesian filtering is still popular in antispam software today, my approach could be used as a 'pre-processor' to cut down the input to the Bayesian email filtering module by droping 'obvious' spam and processing only 'suspect spam' (see second example). As a benefit, such filters wouldn't be inundated and waylaid by normal 'Bayesian busting' spam email that is only a carrier unit for the spammer URLs, email addresses, contact info, and shiping and pricing information contained within them.
With my approach, spammers will have to be painfully and obviously verbose in order to get around my filtering method. In fact, to do so, would make it impossible for the email recipient to easily surf to the spammer's site.
Isn't that the
They're winning the war on drugs and the war on terror. In order to protect us, friendly agents are monitoring calls so we feel safer. And don't forget, to preserve the sanctity of marriage, where we now have an amazing record of almost 50% of marriages not ending in divorce due to family values, our government is keeping gays and lesbians from getting any kind of toehold by denying them economic, social, and legal equality through marriage or civil unions. Hurrah! We still have people we can send to the back of the bus! And speaking of buses and second class citizens, New Orleans is recovering just nicely; those big contractors who help us out in Iraq so efficiently really stepped up to the plate when we offered them no-bid contracts.
Get off my launchpad!
The more than 50 cases brought to date by the FTC, the Department of Justice, state Attorneys General, and ISPs demonstrate CAN-SPAM's enforcement efficacy.
Since when did a simple number demonstrate efficiency? They got 50 spammers.. out of how many? 500? 5000? 50,000? Who knows.
We eliminated the two major drug cartels in town. Great JOB! I'm sure that there won't be even more rising from their ashes, and maybe even a turf war.
There still is a need for SPAM, so spammers will still exist.
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
The below piece of the article is so correct. Anyone here receive junk mail which actually cites that it is can spam compliant, despite the fact they illegally obtained your e-mail address to spam in you in the first place? I don't trust opting out of something I never signed up for in the first place.
Some critics of Can-Spam, which requires an opt-out approach rather than a stricter "opt in" standard, have even suggested that the law may have increased the amount of junk e-mail. That's because Congress intentionally killed tougher state laws, such as one in California that had required recipients to opt into commercial mailing lists.
It seemed to me that Can Spam was 100% government corruption. A few have been prosecuted, for show. However, spam has increased.
The purpose of Can Spam was to stop U.S. states from enacting their own legislation. Can Spam made all the laws in the states invalid.
I hear they had a giant banner hung in the US Capitol saying:
'Mission Accomplished'
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Anyway, flogging the dead horse, but you can't solve an economic problem with technical or legal solutions. The root of spam is division by zero--the spammers think their costs per message are effectively zero, so sending out another million is nothing. If they find one sucker to send them $39.79, the RoI looks infinite, given this delusion.
You know, I think we should blame Al Gore. He was one of the guys who got them the seed money so they could be so idealistic in their protocol designs. Nice guys in those days, but the Internet is now quite well populated with not-so-nice guys.
Solution? A non-free economic model for email. I happen to have such a design here in my pocket, but...
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
and the walking flowers are soooo beautiful!
Well, whatever a bureaucrap calls "success". Propably more like "We successfully pretended to be working" than any other definitions for "success".
Here, the number of spams per day went up from 100000 to 150000 over the last year, with a constant 200-300 legitimate mails dropped in for good.
Thank heavens for a good spam filter...
After the war on drugs
Then the war on terror
We are proud to announce that the war on spam has been won!
These three victories in a row just go to show how good I am at this pres. thing. Vote for me again. I promise oil prices will go down if you elect me again. If you give me a large public vote majority I may even consider a war on corruption in the administration and hey! why not a war on lection fraud.
GW
realkiwi
OK guys and gals, the gist of the offer: this guy provides a filter that will throw off emails containing file attachments, HTML (assumed by the use of both characters in the email), quoted printable content, percent signs, dollar signs, numbers, URLs and email addresses (includes items like.this and like@this).
Since we all know that no legitimate emails ever contain those items, this is sure the way to go.
The report boasts that the substantive provisions of the Act have mandated adoption of a number of commercial email "best practices" that many legitimate online marketers are now following.
Say that there is "legitimate" online marketers... these are not the ones that are the issue here. Laws like this have never affected the ones that it is intended to, it just creates more work for legitimate operations.
This is so futile on so many different levels I can't stand it.
Of course the government is going to congratulate themselves on a job well done when they haven't done anything.
Cripes they just did this with the "Do Not Call" registry as well.
What cooks my noodle the most, however, is:
1. Slashdot thinks it's news. I feel like I'm getting poked with a stick here.
2. There isn't anything we could do about it even is we wanted to.
and 3. If it's so trivial and "ridiculous" why did I just take the time and effort to respond to this nonsense.
Mitchulskus
Yep, I call bullshit. I'm still seeing spammers hitting the mail servers at home, for work, and for the LUG whose server I admin. It's not the same old spammers, but it's mostly Russians and Chinese, which really is kinda the same, when you consider that the American spammers have all outsourced and moved their operations offshore to these two countries, both of which have lax laws re: spam that are never enforced. The only thing that's improved in my situation is that I've become more familiar with filtering methods, so I don't see as much of the spam. I'm still seeing bounces from Earthlink's idiotic confirmation crap, which it sends forged addresses in spam runs. I continue to have my vanity domain forged in spammer's drek, so I'm seeing the backscatter from that.
Sure, CAN-SPAM has been successful in that it's shut down Scott Richter and a few other players, but has it quelled the problem entirely? Not by a long shot.
[sarcasm]
Apparently you don't like freedom. You know, my grandfather went to war at age 9 and died so that you could have your freedom, and I for one don't appreciate your complete hatred for our freedom and liberty. You should wake up every morning and thank the good Lord for blessing us with all this freedom and liberty. The terrorists hate us because of the high amount of liberty that we possess, and all you can do is trash that liberty. You make me sick. You should move to a Europe where they don't have all of the freedom and liberty that we have here, then maybe you would truly appreciate what the great President is doing to make sure that our freedom is protected.
[/sarcasm]
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
In the period 11/1/2005 through 11/30/2005, I received:
81 legitimate emails (3/day)
4339 SPAM emails (144/day!)
398 Virus emails
Yes, I would call that a COMPLETE success
My inbox seems to declare it a failure.
an email to everyone letting them know.
On the other hand, CANSPAM has "worked" for me in one respect in that a lot of the sexually explicit spam I used to get is now identified in the subject field as SEXUALLY EXPLICIT (as required by the law). Other than making it incredibly easy to filter out people like me are still receiving this shit so the spam level is the same.
Whatever.
Success???!!! I still get tons of spam everyday and NONE of it complies with the CAN-SPAM act. I get ads for drugs, porn and mortgages. The return addresses are all false. The subject is cryptic so as to pass by filters. The removal links are bad links. And I also get phishing emails. If this is a success they clearly have low standards. Considering the way this country runs things it really comes as no surprise, but the least they could do is if they are rubber stamping crappy legislation to not rub BS in our face that it works when it really doesnt. FTC must stand for "Free The Criminal"
How about we all start redirecting/fowarding spam to the FTC to celebrate their amazing success?
Where I work, I convinced the mail admin to open up a shared spam folder for certain people to contribute their spam. Every night, this folder is scanned and my spam, which actually comes from several different off-site accounts via one mail app, and beefs up the filtering for everyone. This is good, but limited.
We can't trust too many people with this, of course, because emails from our President would quickly be marked as spam.
But what about on a larger scale? Not my company, but on the Internet in general? Is there any way to accomplish something similar? A global spam folder? Or is time and energy better spent just tracking down the spammers once and for all? What does the little guy do in the meantime?
To finish, a story about the last spam that fooled me. It had the subject "Save the rainforest." Wow, that seems like a good cause! Sure! I open it:
"WITH YOUR ENORMOUS FIREHOSE!"
Had to give them points for that one.
They passed the can-spam law nullifying the more powerful state laws that were comming into effect.
Told the overloaded FTC to enforce it.
Yet spam has increased (tripled or quadrupled) since they implemented it.
But it's working?
Yes, it's working for the groups that are following it. These are the respectible companies that actually were'nt spamming in the first place.
Sadly, our congress isn't smart enough, or the green lining on thier pockets is to thick to allow them to see what a failure it's been. Until we elect representitives that won't give in to greed, the problems we have won't solve themselves. This is one of many issues that we as an electoral body need to address. The 2 party system has failed, as Thomas Jefferson predicted. People need to quit voting for democrats and republicans. But we also need to get someone other then bozo's to run in these parties. Ow Well
I take no responsibility for what I say. Even though I'm never wrong
Looks like you have just Slashdotted yourself.
Also, your numbers don't mean a thing without the number of legit emails passed and the number of legit emails falsely identified as spam.
- Email in: 24,852
- Of which were spam: 16,186
65.1% of email was spamRoll on to the last 7 days in 2005...
- Email in: 24,843
- Of which were spam: 15,842
63.7% was spam.Disclaimer - we're a UK company with a
1) Clever Sig 2) ????? 3) Profit!
I've come up with a good way to fiol the mortgage spammers:
1. Set up a catch address to receive replies.
2. Go to Google and get an address and number. This can be done in the way similar to
phonebook: John Smith Arizona (That will pull in every listed number and address where there is a
John Smith in Arizona. An alternative is using the name and phone number of someone who hates spam
and has a lot of political clout
3. Visit the spamvertized mortgage site (using a proxy) and type in the info you obtained from google.
Use your catch address to receive replies.
4. Harvest any information provided (especially toll free numbers) and post it on antispammer websites.
These mortgage spammers make their moneyby selling leads to lenders. When these lenders reach a
bunch of pissed off consumers and get into trouble, they will quit using that particular lead
generator. Someone with political clout may also sue the calling person and cause even further
trouble.
I have received several spams advertising the following website http://www.homeadvantagefunding.com/
The address matches the registration info. However, I have a Toll free number to post on antispammer sites: 866-937-2646 ext 115
I think the definition of "success" is that spam is now mostly someone else's problem (i.e. China, Russia, Korea) rather then our own.
In a way it's a success for very small values of success.
BTW Does anyone else wonder if people at real mortgage companies can even use email? I would think a significant chunk would end up trapped in spam filters.
The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer. - Edward R. Murrow
The War on Spam has been just as effective as the War on Drugs and the War on Terror!
I hate printers.
*shrug* Honestly, it's been about as effective for me as the Do-Not-Call list. You still have people claiming exemptions and people who just plain ignore the rules, but my amount of spam has decreased. Right now, the only spam I get is either companies who did business with two years ago who're still sending me commercial literature and recently I've been getting a spate of classic Nigerian scam letters.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
They obviously haven't seen my hotmail account, which is 99% spam. But that's why I have it, so when I order something from an internet store they don't start spamvertizing at me or selling my email address to anyone and everyone else that wants to do so, and my "real" address stays relatively clean due to obscurity.
And 95% of the spam I get at my hotmail address does NOT have ANY remove-me method listed, regardless of if it might work or not, it just ain't there. Isn't a remove listing an absolute requirement by CAN-SPAM, and one that works at that??
I have got a few of the viagra style spams at my work email, but haven't paid enough attention to see if there's a remove link or not in those. But I'm sure that our IT group has its hands full keeping email filters up to par to make what I see only a few of them, and that credit most likely should NOT be given to the CAN-SPAM guys either.
I've also noticed some leaking into my "real" home email, I think mostly because I recently decided to move my email folders on disk off my NTFS partition onto a FAT32 partition so I can run Thunderbird in either Windows or Linux, and in the process of getting that to work the filters that it had learned got hosed and I have to start over.
By my observations, it's a dismal failure, but I've only got so many email accounts of my own to collect my empirical evidence from. The yardstick they used for measuring the level of success of this law must be flawed, or at least bent in half or something.
"It would be nice if I could use my SMTP server"
Errr, so why don't you?
A genuine anti-spam law consistent with legitimate free speech concerns (e.g. severe penalties for the fraud of disguising bulk e-mail as non-bulk) is still needed.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
How much spam
Would a spam clan spam
If the CAN-SPAM could can spam?
State troopers accross the country celebrate the toughened speed limits. "We are confident people are speeding less", says State Trooper D Onut and quotes the 1000 daily speeding tickets state troopers hand out each and every day. Speeding violations are up from 300 / day since the toughened speed limits.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Let's slashspam them and show them how well it's working.
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. - William Gibson
What with the great digital HD TV coming, and the ability to buy things without leaving my bedroom...life is great!
Blar.
It's always good to see someone else picking up the fight to eliminate spam, but honestly, your process seems like it will have me fishing through my spam folder looking for legitimate emails just as much as I fish through my inbox looking for legitimates.
All your criteria seems to be something that I regularly see in (legitimate) emails...
Snooze and you lose your sushi.
So they live with dial-up. If the only provider of cable television in my area is NAMBLA, then I'll live with the seven local broadcast channels rather than give NAMBLA my money.
What do you have against Marlon Brando?
Verizon Wireless almost but does not completely comply with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. Being a patriot, I contacted the Attorney-General's office in my State. A very nice woman informed me that she did not have the authority to send Verizon a letter about CAN-SPAM. She told me to call the FTC Consumer Action Center. So I did, and they took my complaint. I then realized that I had lost the incident number which I was going to use to forward the offending e-mail (my billing notification) to spam@uce.gov. So I contacted Verizon's Government line and convinced them to get someone on the line so that I could pass on the information.
For me, CAN-SPAM when it is followed helps me. No business can conceal their address and phone number from me, if they want to send me e-mail. Unfortunately, the one e-mail that I would want to reply to is e-mails concerning billing and the billing notices don't comply with CAN-SPAM (no address, no phone number, no valid reply-to address).
But with the Attorney-General lacking the authority to provide Verizon guidance, I'm left at the mercy of the corporation or the FTC -- neither of which I have much confidence in.
--Sam
being used to prove FTC point.
Now all I need is a way to screen out the 5-6 machine generated political calls I get each day in the week before election day... but yeah, overall, it's been a pretty decent setup. Beats the hell out of some of the answering machine credit card announcements which featured a breathless message of "This is Jim Smirethers of A1 Bank and I need to talk with you immediately about your account" or the like. Borderline fraud, those were.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
The law is a success depending your definition of success.
The FTC is taking the position that if the end user does not see the spam, then the law is successful. That filtering is part of the solution, and the filtering stops the spam, so therefore it is successful.
Of course, this is the wrong position to take.
I'd suggest contacting our reps, make a pain in the ass of ourselfs until they add a labeling requirement of "ADV:" at the start of the subject line for spam.
Fight Spammers!
Reality check: the amount of spam my local filters are catching hasn't changed significantly over a year ago. I still get about the same (largish) number per day, and it's about the same percentage of my total mail count. That's only local, though. At my ISP, the spam filters are blocking at least 50% more than they were a year ago. I'm sorry, FTC, but if a 50% annual increase is your idea of "working", you really need to go read this book by Merriam-Webster...
Programs like these are used to move control of technologies like the net from engineers to government types. They get a little more control and announce it is a success. I would rather see a technological solution to spam rather than a legal one.
I just checked iamcf13@hotpop.com via their browser interface
This is a small sample of the 121 messages there...
Sender / Subject / Date / Size
Dannie Dempsey / Get ready for love in just 15 minutes / Yesterday, 12:15 AM / 1.3 KB
jsk58 / Do you want to know what Erectile Dysfunction means? / Yesterday, 12:38 AM / 0.8 KB
Mrs. lucienne / FW: Heya hows it going? / Yesterday, 1:13 AM / 27.0 KB
Minna Hinton / Personalising technology solutions. / Yesterday, 1:22 AM / 1.0 KB
Lotto Success / GlobalWon is ALIVE...And you're invited to the party / Yesterday, 1:49 AM / 7.8 KB
zteacy / With our Super Viagra you will be able to chop the wood with your penis. / Yesterday, 2:01 AM / 1.1 KB
berating / news alert / Yesterday, 2:05 AM / 22.6 KB
Overall, a varied mix of
Foreign, non-English messages/spam rendered in in unreadable chararcter sets.
Phishing/ID theft attemps.
Pharmaceutical spam.
Sexspam (Cialis, Viagra and the like - the intimate version of Phamaceutical spam)
Stockspam (Market tips / 'pump-and-dump')
Gambling spam (see above)
Mysterious subject spam (to get you to click and open to read the spam/comeon inside)
I ran my pop3 client and it downloaded, scanned, and completely deleted all of them in about 1.5 minutes
temcat, being (needlessly) fascetious, said/quoted:
OK guys and gals, the gist of the offer: this guy provides a filter that will throw off emails containing file
attachments, HTML (assumed by the use of both characters in the email), quoted printable content, percent signs,
dollar signs, numbers, URLs and email addresses (includes items like.this and like@this).
Since we all know that no legitimate emails ever contain those items, this is sure the way to go.
No legitimate email from people contacting you for the very first time at a Internet-wide, public email address
do not need to use any of the 'spammer character set' to send you a email. The 'bozo' email I got
is proof that email communications is possible under such extreme filtering conditions. And anyway, if you don't
want to risk losing an important email mistakenly marked as spam, the POP3 client can be told to save them as 'spam' so
you can go through such messages at your leisure. So all you've lost is some time and hard disk storage. If you don't
want to wade through the spam or store it on disk needlessly, have the POP3 client do the task for you. Had a concientious
email correspondent honored your SpamByte code and not used a free email service that is apt to tack URL's to the ends of
messages as promotional signatures, you would have gotten email from them with no problems, even with a 'zero tolerance' SpamByte of 0.
Ridicule/belittle me or the software I wrote to quash email spam if you want (I'd rather you'd not in the interest of common courtesy) -- I am available by email at iamcf13@hotpop.com
for initial contact by the Internet public at large (English only, please). Serious discussions can be conducted via an alternate means from there if need be.
Before July, 2004, I was 'horrendously angry' at spammers. It was this seething, all-encompasing anger that motivated me to write the software in the first place.
After July, 2004, I now pity spammers and continue to collect the currently scant few null/'bozo' spams I get from them at iamcf13@hotpop.com as
curiosities as well as proof of the effectiveness of my method.
Spammers can bombard me with 'bozo spam' as mentioned earlier but why waste their effort sending me spam for websites that are difficult/impossible to navigate
to without the convennience of URLs and/or email addresses for starters? All that would do would be to motivate me to add some sort of Bayesian filtering to my programs -- something I wanted to avoid doing in the
first place as I decided t
You might disagree with them. You might sincerely believe that a gay lifestyle is healthier for a homosexual than celibacy or a warped marriage. You might feel that an individual should be able to choose to be gay or to drink or smoke regardless of the cost to the rest of society. But redefining terms is not helpful when it comes to scientific studies of how healthy or unhealthy various lifestyles are. It makes it hard to word the questionaires when you are looking for correlations. It makes it hard to even talk about the subject without both sides misunderstanding what the other is saying.
SLOWED THE GROWTH. Not stopped. Not shrunk. Not tamed. Slowed the growth. On top of which, given the lack of serious enforcement of the CANN-SPAM act, one wonders if it actually contributed anything to this, or if the credit actually goes to the above mentioned technologies. OR, (as I think most likely), growth has slowed simply because the market has reached saturation.
"The operation was a complete success, as the autopsy will clearly demonstrate."
This "success" reminds me very much of how the Vietnam war was declared a "succcess", so they could pull the troops out of Vietnam and go home.
I'm sure there are other examples.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
SPAM: 35
HAM: 63
VIRI: 6
Blocked connections: 239
That was yesterday.
It's slowed down?!? Really?!? Wow, I guess the 20+/hr pieces of porn e-mail I get is all legal because I signed up for porn somewhere. Uh, come to think of it though. I never signed into a porn site so why is it I keep getting it? CAN-SPAM hasn't slowed it down for me in reality I've seen the # of SPAM go up in recent months.
Someone should tell them that.
Save Pangaea!! Stop Continental Drift!!
In Sendmail:
FEATURE(`greet_pause', `1500')dnl
define(`confBAD_RCPT_THROTTLE',`3')dnl
define(`confPRIVACY_FLAGS', `goaway,restrictmailq,restrictqrun')dnl dnl define(`confTO_QUEUEWARN', `4h')
INPUT_MAIL_FILTER(`mimedefang', `S=unix:/var/spool/MIMEDefang/mimedefang.sock, F=T, T=S:360s;R:360s;E:15m')
In your mimedefang script in the filter_sender subroutine:
In spamassassin:
Optionally, add milter_greylist to the mix. Greylisting REALLY cuts down on the traffic sent to your servers and hits spammers where it hurts...requiring them to use THEIR resources to queue temp-failed messages.
some stats from my current mail log (home server, not huge volume, but I use the same methods at work with great success). The current log is for Dec 18 - 21.
So, you can see that of 733 spammy messages in ~3 days, only 260 had to actually be analyzed by spamassassin. In the case of rejections, the sender is notified, so if they are *not* a spammer, they can contact you to resolve their misconfiguration. I reject on the spamhaus lists, and no others, because it is very easy to remove yourself from those lists if you find yourself on them for some reason. The other lists are used in scoring, however, when spamassasin does its thing.
Run the POP3 client in 'wantspam' mode and sift throught the emails yourself.
Visit www.ftc.gov and look for e-mail addresses. I found OIG@ftc.gov.
Then visit ANY sweepstakes website, shopping website or just about anywhere that might have a pop-up and submit that e-mail as a contact.
Granted the voluntary submission is not what CAN-SPAM is about so the results won't be visible right away. When that e-mail gets sold or scanned, THEN they'll see how CAN-SPAM is working.
On an interesting side note, I see how the FTC controls spam: they hardly put any e-mails or contact information on their website. About all you can do is fill out a form for them to contact you.
Delusional indeed.
I suggest everyone fight spam the way I do. Every few years change your ISP. In the process create your primary account with an obscure name that has nothing to do with your name or any real name that a name generator might hit. Then create a secondary account for shopping, sweepstakes, etc. NEVER give out the primary account e-mail address.
I can't afford a business-grade Internet connection at the moment to run one or else I would. Otherwise, the ISP will (usually) block port 25 outbound to all ip addresses except their mailserver and will frown upon/crack down on 'running servers' on a non-commercial Internet connection.
Do what I do: Use the POP3 client to check multiple email addresses using multiple SpamByte and 'wantspam' settings, I have (semi)private email addresses that have a more relaxed SpamByte code that the 0 I use for my public, Internet-at-large email address iamcf13@hotpop.com
>Solution? A non-free economic model for email. I happen to have such a design here in my pocket, but...
This is the Internet. You're perfectly free to implement your very own non-free email protocol and get people to use it. If it proves superior, the users will come.
---- Take the Space Quiz!
Remind anyone of a certain Bush speech?
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but the last statistics I saw still showed something like 80+% of email is spam.
You can forward your spam to the FTC by forwarding your mail to spam@uce.gov
From http://www.ftc.gov/spam/
If you get spam email that you think is deceptive, forward it to spam@uce.gov. The FTC uses the spam stored in this database to pursue law enforcement actions against people who send deceptive email.
The forward button has never been so fun! Now if only it could be something like that joke-commercial for what happens when you send an error report on Windows after a program fails. For those who haven't seen it (I can't find a link, I'm sorry), when a program crashes you send an error report and it finds out who's fault the error was if it was a programmer in Redmond, and if so you get to choose a form of quick torture that is controlled by the programmer's chair.
$fortune
Tomorrow has been canceled due to lack of interest.
How many times has GWB said "we've won the war in Iraq"?
... from the aircraft carrier appearance to last Sundays speech ...
... net $500 billion expense and US 2200 soldiers lives so far ...
Anybody struggling to keep a webserver running in today's climate knows this for the complete self-serving lie it is.
I can't even believe how out of touch they are with reality. The only thing can-spam really did was legitimize the spammer business. I worked for a company (past tense thankfully) that was "can-spam compliant". Before can-spam, everyone there was afraid of getting sued over spam. After can-spam, with it's giant loopholes and vague "compliance" language, everyone there was relieved because it provided protection if they became "compliant." A company can become can-spam compliant without even pretending to stop spamming people.
Did it even marginally slow down the amount of spam they were sending? No. In fact, it increased.
The spam problem is a dicey one, but ultimately it really will have to be a technical solution, with whatever unfortunate consequences following that.
This is pretty much BS.
The Do-Not-Call list and the Junk Fax laws could be considered a mild success. At least they resulted in a noticeable reduction of junk getting through to me.
The CAN-SPAM debacle, however, has done absolutely nothing. I still get over TWO THOUSAND spam messages per day to my mail account. The FTC can jump in and "regulate" all it wants but it won't get anywhere because unlike with Do-Not-Call it can't govern foreign communications in the same way. There is no reason to waste time and money on this.
How about this: ALL sending mail servers must have a special DNS record. Similar to an MX, we'll call it an SX record. So, when a host contacts my mail server, I query DNS, "Does 1.2.3.4 have an SX record?" The reply will be 1 or 0, yes or no. DNS replies with 1.. "okay, mail will be accepted", DNS replies with 0, "Sorry, your not an authorized mail server!" This will cut down on zombies FOR SURE, because Joe Clueless Cable-User does not have access to Comcast's DNS servers. Therefore, ONLY ligit organizations will have SX records (those that have control over thier DNS.) This WILL cut down on SPAM and virus garbage, I'm sure you would agree. The flaw, is that the spammers that DO have DNS systems as well, can add SX records to thier hearts content... and to that, we can reply on our standard mechanisms. I use strict SMTP, spamhaus RBL and Postgrey, myself. Horray for Postfix!!! But still, smtp needs some help and I think this would do it. -Ponga
The organization whose funding depends on the success of CAN-Spam has declared that CAN-Spam is a success? Why, that would be as absurd as a President who needs to win in Iraq to get re-elected giving a speech under a great big banner that says "Mission Accomplished."
This is not my sandwich.
The government is intrusive and bad, except when it is needed to stop monopolists from exerting too much power. It did not create the Internet. Coders working in the dark corners of universities created it all by themselves without any government interference. The physical infrastructure of roads, sewers, and power systems that form the basis of the American economy were also created without any meddlesome government interference. In fact, it is very obvious that except where needed to stop overweening corporate actors or to guarantee personal freedoms, the government is a horrible monstrosity that never does anything right. The baby *must* be thrown out with the bathwater, for all our sakes.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
In a recent test, researchers attemped to drain the Pacific Ocean by caryying buckets loaded with seawater to the Arizona or Utah desert where water was dumpped on the dry sand. The ive gallon buckets were decleared 100% effective. Each bucket tested did in fact carry up to five gallons of water, exactly as designed. Due to the success of the test program plans are being made to procure 25 more buckets for use in 2006
hahahahahahahahahahaa
sorry, I assumed this was a joke.
My 200+ spams a day would indicate otherwise.
Legislation will only affect legitimate marketing firms under US jurisdiction and can never do anything about the unscrupulous ones or those outside US control. The only true answer to spam will be technical, when/if the current smtp system is upgraded/augmented.
- Much spam is routed through China.
- I do not correspond with anyone in China.
From those facts, I can safely conclude that blocking all incoming email from China will reduce my spam load without causing any collateral damage. That the spam came from the US to the US by way of China is totally irrelevant."Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
"but you can't solve an economic problem with technical or legal solutions"
Of course you can.
Example--Worldwide food stores in the last 40 years were increased because of a specially bred kind of wheat that increases harvest rate and density. Without it, nearly a billion people would be starving.
Another--The crackdown on smoking has alleviated a ton of load on the healthcare industry, as well as fattened government coffers from liability settlements and high taxation.
If what you said were true, there would be little incentive for R&D.
Actually, I'm not, due to the policies of my employer. I've sometimes felt that if I really wanted to change the world, the first thing I would need to do is...
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
The only appreciable effect I've seen from CAN-SPAM has been that instead of coming from the USA, my spam now comes from Korea, China, and Nigera.
2 cents,
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
It's that whole "Mission Accomplished" thing all over again...
"The more than 50 cases brought to date by the FTC, the Department of Justice, state Attorneys General, and ISPs demonstrate CAN-SPAM's enforcement efficacy."
Well, I suppose that's good. OTOH, I recall reading on SPAM-L a few years ago an estimate that there are 3,000 spammers in the USA. I suppose these cases now leave 2,950 spammers. It's been two years since the Can-Spam Law was passed, and at this rate (arresting 25 spammers per year), it will only take another 114 years to get rid of all the spammers in the USA. Gee, I hope no spammers move outside the USA in that time. Let's close the borders to make sure that doesn't happen, so we can keep these criminals in the US until we can arrest them, or until they die of old age, whichever comes first.
Any comparison of the Can Spam Act to US military actions in Iraq is totally unfair. Even Democrats will admit that the US has done more to bring freedom to Iraq than the Can Spam Act has done to stop spam.
Tag lost or not installed.
Must be different in your area. I have quite a large list of ISPs I can do this with. Only the cable companies and telcos seem to block port 25 around here. I've hosted my own domain on both dynamic and static IPs on residential DSL. My current ISP charges CAD$30 for 3Mbs service, with an extra $4 charge for a static IP address. I can just about do what I like with it.
How odd. I find SPEWS quite easy to understand. It's very simple: you go onto NANAE &/or NANAB, ask politely, and ignore flames. There are at least a dozen regular posters who can tell you exactly what you need. -F.
Huh? Where the #3(( does that come from? SPEWS' goal is pressuring spam-friendly ISPs, in the form of irate customers who might leave. End of story. If the cost of being on SPEWS is higher than the value of your pink contracts, then you stop hosting spammers. Simple free market economics.
And you have no (valid) grounds to sue for using SPEWS. When packets want to enter my server, they must obey my rules.Sorry for the late reply. I was being sarcastic there. I'm just getting a bit tired of hearing the same quasi-libertarian, noodle-brained bullshit on Slashdot. People want to cherry-pick. They love the Internet and GPS. When the courts deliver the smackdown on Creationism or overweaning corporate behavior, they cheer. But at the same time they talk about how governments are passe. I've heard endless variations on the theme that representative democracy is hopelessly fucked up.
These people seem to think we can all effortlessly self-organize in meatspace the way we do online. Of course, judging by the MySpace bashing I've seen in Slashdot, alot of Slashdotters don't even have much tolerance for self-organizing online communities that aren't of their liking. Working together with other people takes compromise and hard work.
Government is intrinsically screwed up, but in my opinion that's primarily due to apathy, and the alternative is something most of the denizens of Slashdot haven't ever seen or even contemplated. If you don't have some mechanism for protecting the rights of the few, the people with big enough guns and fat enough wallets take everything. I've seen that environment up close, and it sucks. Life in places where there is no collaborative structure for peaceably sharing power is so far removed from daily life in our gilded world as it would be on another planet.
I've read posts where people actually compare limitations on copyright fair use to physical enslavement. That's how distorted the dialogue becomes when you're living in a cyber-bubble.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ