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Spam Replacing Postal Junk Mail?
TheOtherChimeraTwin writes "I've been getting spam from mainstream companies that I do business with, which is odd because I didn't give those companies my email address. It is doubly strange because the address they are using is a special-purpose one that I wouldn't give out to any business. Apparently knotice.com ('Direct Digital Marketing Solutions') and postalconnect.net aka emsnetwork.net (an Equifax Marketing Service Product with the ironic name 'Permission!') are somehow collecting email addresses and connecting them with postal addresses, allowing companies to send email instead of postal mail. Has anyone else encountered this slimy practice or know how they are harvesting email addresses?"
As a lumber company executive I want to make aware our great misfortune, and hate to have to do this but Mr. Obama... We need OUR bailout too!
Every time I buy something on-line I have to provide my billing address so now the e-mail address I use and possibly more (can it read cookies?) is known to the vendor who can turn around and sell that information to others. How easy is it for some Javascript or something to poke around for e-mail addresses when you are at a site? Also, my e-mail providers know my address - i.e. yahoo, google, aol, apple and comcast. Could they be selling that information? I wouldn't be surprised.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
I have my own domain- EVERYONE except family gets a different email address
one gets caught by spammers- the address gets killed.
I understand gmail allows using a + in the address line to sort mail in a similar fashion
googleid+identifyingstring@gmail.com and you still get it-- only you know the source.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I use 2 emails, one for spam and one for private mails.
Now both my emails are full of junk, but while google spam option are working my old yahoo email is beyond saving.
Just keep clicking on "this is spam". It's not worth your time to understand why it's happening, and even if you do understand, you will find out it's impossible to avoid.
Hell, I can't even check my old SMS because it's full of spam.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
first person I would suspect is the ISP or your webmail
without knowing any details of even the country your in it's kind of hard to guess...
but ISP's use deep packet inspection and even easier I am guessing you fill in your email address for their webmail and they bill you...
regards
john jones
I just handle electronic spam like normal junk mail. Hit Ctrl+P and then throw the damn thing away. Good riddance.
I use a special domain name which maps all aliases (*) to my mail box. Nearly every email I use for online purchases or registrations is custom for that site so when I receive email from an unexpected source I can trace it back to where I originally used it. I also always opt out of companies sharing info. I recently caught out SCE having passed my email to a government energy program and called them out on it. If I get spammed on one 'channel', I can reroute it to the /dev/null mailbox.
Yahoo lets you create temporary addresses that you can disable at the drop of a hat.
I use those for most of my business correspondence.
Your mail provider may offer something similar.
The only way you get spam is if a) you give your email address to businesses or b) if you use a service like hotmail where spammers send emails to random addresses and record the ones that don't get returned.
Businesses and spammers can't magically conjure your email address out of thin air so the cause must be one of the above. You've either signed up for a service and not unchcked "allow us to share your details with select partners" or you're using a popular email service that spammers target. Given that you're getting emails from major companies it sounds more likely it's the first possibility.
I registered a domain and use that for my email address and I'm careful to read what I'm signing up for so I get absolutely no spam at all. My opinion of spam is the same as my opinion of viruses - if you ever get any it's your own fault.
Although it would be best if email marketers were simply swallowed by the earth and sent directly to wherever it is the bad people go, if they are going to continue annoying us then I would prefer that it be through email and not postal mail. At least with email they are competing on our playing field where we have a decisive technical advantage in filtering. If the choice is between them stuffing my post box with paper or trying to stuff my inbox with spam (they will fail due to ThunderBayes among others. What's the word? Thunderbird) then I say bring on the spam, we are ready.
It is a hell of a lot easier to deal with digital spam than the paper kind. The paper kind accumulates in my house and clutters the place up. It wastes dead tree and plastic. At least with the digital kind I can press a button and *poof* it's gone. I can only hope that more businesses will switch to 100% digital spam.
On a related note this is pretty much the same reason I don't get my news from a paper newspaper (well, among others). I got sick of having newspapers piling up in my home. I get 99% of all of my news through online sources (the other 1% is radio) and I'll never go back to having a paper delivered to me again.
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
What's happening here is that there are companies that aggregate profile information, and they're able to link your email to your profile information. They then sell append services so the marketing company can add that email to your existing full name and address (FNA).
It is wrong for companies to append an email address and then market to it.
Companies do a lot with their (your?) customer data, including hygienization, appends, completion, profiling, etc. Most of this happends under the sheets, and most customers don't really want to know the details.
However, I advise clients to NEVER use an email append service for a variety of marketing and spam/technical reasons. Most clients will listen, some will choose not to. However, I'm seeing that more stupid companies will forge forward like its nothing, and companies with dwindling budgets are too suckered in by the cost savings.
Its only going to get worse.
Once again, GMail is my solution to this. Prior to GMail, I used spamgourmet to keep my inbox clean. The oldest email I have used to get 30,000 emails per month that were all SPAM. Right now, it's getting about 11,000. (I haven't really used that address in a long time.
I have had maybe 10 SPAM emails in the last year make it to that inbox. (It's hosted under Google Apps.)
So once I found out how well Google's SPAM filters work, I quit caring about giving out my main email address. I give it to everything now, and if a company SPAMs me, I just mark it as SPAM. When enough people do that, it seriously hinders their ability to contact their legit customers, and they learn a valuable lesson.
There's a little bit of fallout from people who use the SPAM button incorrectly, but I think Google does its best to account for that, too.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
E-stamps are the only effective way to reduce spam. Bulk spammers will go from paying something like 0.1 cents per message to say 25-cents, making it uneconomical, and more trace-able. When you buy an e-stamp, 1/3 of the amount goes to the recipient (usually as credit), 1/3 to the ISP, and 1/3 to a monitoring agency. "Approved" recipients could send for free.
Table-ized A.I.
Why tech savy people should be making tech policies in government. How many politicians know what data mining is other than that magical sheet of paper their advisors tell them will turn into votes when they mention specific words at a specific news conference. This was one inevitability of marketing / data mining to reach even further into our lives for the sole purpose of persuading us to empty our wallets in their direction.
Like any other scumbags, they will exploit it for all it's worth until enough people complain in a strong enough way to force change, at which point they will find ways to circumvent the law in reality while on the surface changing to stay within the law....like outside contractors handing reports with a "nudge nudge"....not unlike the CIA torture facilities.
This is one more example of why the system itself is broken. Government ruled by corporations and special interest groups will always ride rough-shot over everyone for a buck.
I haven't got a single spam since the late 90's. I don't mean that I have something filtering it out for me. I don't have any filters at all. A few simple precautions are all that's necessary to be spam free.
Spam is a 20th century problem.
Is your special purpose email address @ a popular domain name? I noticed that when I opened my Gmail account, I was getting unsolicited spam within a few hours, and I had not shared the email address with anyone at all.
My main email address is at a university's domain. I've used it for years and give it out on any half reputable site, but I get absolutely no spam on it. I know that my university uses blacklists and some heuristics to delete spam before they get to any inbox, but I've heard it only gets about a third of incoming spam.
So, does Gmail post any new email addresses in a sort of anonymous phone book, or was my user name easy to guess (I had used the same set of letters and numbers on very many sites before I got the Gmail account)? I don't know, but in my case, the popular domain seemed to bring spam.
This doesn't address the fact that it's main stream companies that you do business with that are spamming you. Have you used the user name of your special purpose anywhere else, or attached the email address with your personal identity in any way ever?
Everytime I got a new email adres, there is always that one clueless git that adds my address to one of those cute 'send something funny every week' sites.
Never got that funny, but the spams just starts flooding in.
Now I'm a lot more picky about who gets to see my real address. The rest goes to my temporary catch-all of the month.
It's a service called an "email append", offered by the major credit reporting companies. The purchaser gives them a list of names and addresses, and the credit reporting company finds matches with email addresses. They send an opt-out mailing, and the email addresses of everyone who doesn't opt-out are returned to the purchaser.
In the UK, junk mail does subsidize the postal service, so although you can opt out, they plead with you not to, as it would increase the cost of normal post by quite a margin. How much of this is real and how much is just them desperate to hold onto an income from companies paying them to shovel shit through our letterboxes is open to question. I do accept it in principle though.
If that switched en-masse to email, those contracts would expire, meaning snail mail prices would increase. The Royal Mail don't have any way to transfer delivery from paper to email, so they couldn't recoup those loses. Since email is free, nobody would make any money from these mass email contracts.
On the other hand it would cut down on a LOT of wasted paper, which 99.99999999999999% people take from door to bin, bypassing the eyeballs, some people do recycle but not enough.
While email is great for most communications, snail mail is sometimes required so it can't be allowed to die. I doubt it would die if they lost the junk mail contracts.
For me, the worst offenders are the magazines and newspapers you have to pinch at the spine and shake over a bin before opening, to release all the leaflets stuffed inside. Is it not enough that for every 5 pages of a publication, 3 pages worth are adverts? If that's the state of the magazine industry, maybe it deserves to die too. The internet has already steamrolled over many business models, what's another one to add to the list?
Perhaps a solution would be a commercial / personal email distinction at an ISP level with a legal backing. Personal email is always free, commercial email costs say 1p per email. Charities / schools etc would be exempt from charge too. Make it something you have to declare with your ISP and legally stand by. Spammers using botnets wouldn't be affected since they operate illegally anyway, but it'd regulate the "normal" "legal" marketing companies. Make it a legally enforceable requirement to ONLY email people who have opted in, and fine them for ALL breaches.
you did not misunderstand me, I just worded that poorly. Using "+" does not break the specification, it just extends it in an non-standard manner.
Junk mail (kills trees), spam (kills brain cells), and robo/spam phone calls (kills my sunny outlook)... I think its time that we, the geeks of the world, found out where these shitheads (the CEO's of the companies in question) live, what their email addresses are, and their phone numbers. Then we inundate them with junk mail by the ton, spam email by the drive full, and 3am robo phone calls. Turnabout is fair play.
I'd much rather just set something to a spam filter than deal with all the waste that junk mail creates. Damn presorted standard
I have recently noticed spam coming in to an invalid email address in one of my domains. Since I was curious abut this, I redirected these emails to an actual mailbox. I was the first registrant of the domain that receives these (the TLD only became available 3-4 years ago), so the address has never been valid.
What is really odd about these emails is the the "To:" address (not the envelope address, but the To address listed in the header text of the email) is a valid email address in another of my domain names. Both domains have private whois data, so there is no connection that can be made through the whois information. The only public link between the two domains is the common mail server (highest priority MX record).
In summary, the emails have an envelope address which is an invalid address in one domain, but the header address is different and valid address in a second domain. Note that any address that is valid on one of my domains is valid in all of my domains. Curious, yes?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Email filtering company MessageLabs reports that Egham, Surrey, on the suburban outskirts of London, is the town that receives the most spam in Britain.
"It's not like there's much else to do," said Boris Busybody, 77 (IQ), of Egham Hythe, idly whirling his four-foot penis around his head in a desultory fashion. "Expanding your manhood, growing your breasts, increasing your sperm ... the Lib Dem phone calls get a bit much. That's Doctor Busybody, by the way. My Ph.D arrived last week."
Spam has revitalised the local economy. Mr Busybody has given up cab driving and is now working a lucrative job processing payments from home after he sent them his bank details in response to an urgent security message. "I had that King Otumfuo Opoku Ware II in the back of my cab once. Very generous and helpful fellow."
The Egham Tourist Board has seized the day, with plans for a 50 foot tall penis sculpture at Junction 13 of the M25 on the exit ramp to the town. The sculpture will be encircled by a genuine imitation Rolex and spray a fountain of Spermamax, obtained at a very reasonable rate from a Canadian pharmacy. "You will search an hour for your underwear in the ocean of our spam!" is to become the new town motto.
"I did get a good one the other day," says Busybody. "Barrister Matthew Sergeant Busybody of MessageLabs said we could promote our town to millions of people just by sending them an advance fee to process our incoming email. The stuff they try! 'Scuse me, V!k@grk@ kicking in, got to go have sex again. Sorry."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
If you are not getting spam sent to webmaster@yourdomain.com, info, sales, majordomo, help, feedback, advertising, accounting, admin, and billing@yourdomain.com and you have had yourdomain.com for a modest length of time, then something is filtering your spam for you.
These are being generated without any kind of harvesting outside of domain registration.
shut up faggot.
I also use crafted email addresses so that I know that any junk that comes to 'myname-netfilter' or 'myname-openvpn' for example, must have been harvested from these public lists. But I do this everwhere anytime I have a contact and put in an email address, the -extension tells me to whom I gave it.
So the story goes that one day I got junk mail from a company advertsing wireless products like antennas, wireless cards, cables, and the like. And when I look at the headers I see that it was sent to 'myname-someothercompany', that happened to be a contact who also sold wireless gear and so forth, and so it quickly became clear that this new company had taken the email contacts belonging to the other company, probably to seed their customer list. So I contacted my supplier and told them it looks like they were robbed, and yep, it turns out a recently fired employee and one who had went to work for this new company, had taken their email database (amoung other things). Although they denied it the evidence was simply overwhemling and in the end they paid up and that was that....
Dearest kdawson,
Please kill yourself.
Thanks in advance!
Love,
Mom
Yes, I think you've hit the nail on the head. Experian eMail Append overlays deliverable email addresses onto your active customer file and contacts customers via email on your behalf to obtain permission to communicate with them online.
By "permission" they mean they send you email until you complain. If they happen to pick an email address that is normally not read by a person, they don't get any complaints. (Not that I opt-out of spam; I block it.)
Further on, they state Retain your customers by keeping your brand top-of-mind through consistent, relevant and interactive email communications. Yeah, good luck with that. I know four companies that have just lost my repeat business.
Thanks to all for an excellent discussion.
(Let us assume, for example, the sender uses software or a mass-email account with a company:)
Suppose an email Recipient receives ve$0.02 credit for every message reported as spam, debited against the Sender's account and payable to the Recipient's email account, in increments of ve$10;
Further suppose, the otherwise legitimate source of said software or mass-email account must by regulatory restrictions through CAN-SPAM register for the purposes suggested herein; and
(among other things,) pay the Recipient, as the Service is commercially benefiting, and/or restrict the Sender'(s) account - bear in mind, no one wants to set up or install commercial email routines every 100 messages while racking up $50 expenses, but it takes money to make money, and customer satisfaction...
Although the following is very much the clear and present reality, Heaven forbid even one person, objecting to spam, should receive the following notification-
"You have received a collect spam from [nobody]; do you accept the charge(s)?
Painfully, this indeed is what is currently going on, but to put it in those precise words, well, you get the idea.
What ever happened to the thing about, "...it takes money to make money..." anyhow? The internet gives only spam the right to negate that? Yeah, right... get a life, you lawbot.
And why, for goodness' sake, hasn't it been the case, all along.
Anything else is simply a case of WHOIS harrassment through a third party.
A no brainer, out-of-place, casts a lot of pennies the wrong direction, and were talkin' a lot of pennies, here.
There is nothing to FEAR but NOTHING itself; and I fear there is a whole lot of nothing going on. --scorpivs
I'm assuming you didn't see the humor in Matt Perry's post. I hate to sound like such a pessimist, but your solution and response is naively optimistic. Let's examine why.
ISPs already have a lot on their plate insofar as legislation and (potential) filtration goes. Forcing them to operate as a collection agency simply won't work. I also doubt anyone would advocate or appreciate giving credit card companies (i.e. banks) even more control. They've already demonstrated a certain incompetency in recent years that has most certainly been making news!
If you have to ask this question, you don't understand the problem.
E-mail has been effectively "free" since the inception of the Internet (more on this in a moment). As it stands, spam is killing e-mail, and fees intended to kill spam will only succeed in killing both.
We should also consider those ISPs which charge their customers on a per megabyte basis. In effect, users of such services are already paying a tax on e-mails they send; it's just that e-mail is often times such a small chunk of data that it would hardly go noticed, unless of course you were about 2KiB from a threshold that would require paying a little extra and happened to send an e-mail that bumped you over. In either case, charging on a per e-mail basis simply won't be accepted by users. They'll feel they're already paying for e-mail as part of their service plan.
And let's not even mention the technical aspect of it being "mostly automatic." There is no such thing. If you forcible turn off non-payment e-mail services, you kill e-mail as we know it. Without a great deal of unprecedented international cooperation (and good luck getting those governments who are probably influenced by people making money from nefarious deeds), this sort of thing simply will not happen. In fact, I predict two things will happen before any significant change is made to e-mail: IPv6 rollout or Duke Nukem Forever's debut.
No, the semi-humorous post in reply to yours is correct. It doesn't require the cooperation of a "few big [companies]" or a "[government] project." It requires cooperation from hundreds of individual businesses, ISPs, organizations, and governmental cooperation on an international scale. You can't just simply rewrite SMTP and say "here, everyone download this. This will fix the problem with spam." For one, you're assume the new system would be impregnable to spammers and two that it is a wide-sweeping, multi-platform solution that can just be fitted in place.
Here's a hint: It won't happen.
Not if, say, several dozen European countries (rightfully) decline to participate. Then what do you do? Shut off e-mail to all of Europe?
Remember, just because someone doesn't find it fair to tax their people more doesn't mean they're a "'shady' foreign" operator. They could be mindful of the rights of their people to freely exchange information. (See my comments earlier on "free.")
He who has no
Cylons dipped their hands into the water of their ship's Datastream to reach the collective knowledge and try to find what's important to them. Humans simply open their inbox and try to get past the SPAM to find what they want.
The last year or so i have seen a big rise in postal spam. For a long time it was almost nil.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'm seeing a bit more "semi-legitimate" spam, that is, spam from senders who properly identify themselves. Much of it seems to be associated with the domains below. The sending domain varies, but messages will contain the following domains in the body:
These outfits find some vaguely legitimate business relationship and then open the spam floodgates. "Constantcontact", for example, is spamming me because I'm listed as once having attended a Chicago public school. Anything with those domains belongs in the "bulk" folder.
Some of these outfits have made deals with ISPs to permit them to send spam. Ask your ISP for a copy of their "whitelist", and use it to create your own blacklist.
How can anyone sound so "tech savvy" yet be so incredibly misinformed.
They don't need to "find" your email to send spam to it. They find the domain, and then they have the spam computer send test spam messages to the most common addresses at that domain (ie. webmaster@domain.com) and possibly even a few thousand (possibly even millions) of the most likely email addresses and/or permutations. Remember, a lot of spam comes from botnets, so they're not even using their own resources to do it. They can certainly afford sending wasted test emails to millions of invalid addresses to find a couple valid ones.
And then of course as others have mentioned, friends and/or family members entering your email address on ecard sites, joke sites, etc.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
One, can you live without email? I know I could.
Two, if email was a new idea, how would you build it from the ground up, to prevent this sort of abuse?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
> Further on, they state Retain your customers by keeping your brand top-of-mind through
> consistent, relevant and interactive email communications. Yeah, good luck with that. I
> know four companies that have just lost my repeat business.
Did you tell them why? They won't stop doing this unless a) they lose business because of it and b) they know they are losing business becuase of it.
Prediction: lots of people will complain loudly about this to everyone but the companies involved, and almost all will continue to do business with those companies. They may even do more business with them: after all, they will be "top of mind".
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Believe me, I hate spam as much as the next guy. At least trees don't die for it. San Jose must hate them, I am apalled at how much junk mail I get.
Wrong tense.
Of COURSE it was going to. The economics are just better (from the spammer's POV).
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I always find it interesting how interested people are in reducing the amount of paper we use. While I find it wasteful in and of itself, I don't think it's a net negative. Firstly, as to trees, we can and do grow more to handle paper production. As to waste in landfills, paper being a natural living material breaks down better than almost everything we put into landfills and the byproducts help to break down other materials. I don't really see much point in recycling paper, as it's costly to separate and sort, takes chemicals to breakdown paper, bleach it and re-bind it again. It just irritates me that the hand blow dryers get pushed as an environmentally conscious choice, where a lot of energy in the country comes from non-renewable resources, where paper is inherently renewable. That people push recycled paper products that cost more than growing more trees, and use chemicals that aren't any better to dispose of than the additional paper that would otherwise be used. I'm all for cutting down on waste. In fact, the transportation exhaust, and additional energy wasted in delivering junkmail vs. spam is probably a far better argument imho. Using less paper is admirable, but avoiding it for its' own sake seems a bit silly. Recycling paper opposed to putting more resources into getting better recycling options for other materials is also, imho silly. I just wish people put a little more thought into their environmentalism, so many ideas 'feel' good, but aren't nearly as good when you think about them.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Are there any free domain that will let me use multiple e-mail addresses?
I know on my EarthLink dial-up account, I can get five random disposable e-mail addresses, but I can't name it as "slashdot@antdude.edu" or whatever.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I get a fair amount of "legitimate" spam to an email address which I only ever had in the InterNIC database. So, there's at least one company tying addresses to emails based on domain name contacts.
The new system would slowly REPLACE the existing system. Companies would start advertising that "we support E-stamp system also, in addition to traditional email". People will WANT to use e-stamps when the cost of cleaning spam is greater than the cost of E-stamps. ISP's may even subsidize it for their customers to avoid having to play cat and mouse with illegal spammers.
That's their problem. Plus, foreign governments are less happy about infected messes than the US. If those PC's want to use the new system and their machine is a zombie, they will either be forced to fix it, pay the "zombie tax", or not use the new mail. We don't want to do biz with such infected machines anyhow.
Email used to be wonderful before spam ran ragged over it. I'd pay a little more to get those days back.
Table-ized A.I.
My car dealer did something similar to me. They never had an email address for me, but one day they sent me an email about my car which I have serviced there.
The problem is that it came to "cuntlicker@.com"
I called them up and asked them where they got the address. Turns out they hired people to try to link harvested addresses to their customer list, and so they fucked up in that way.
I had to call them THREE times and threaten to take my business elsewhere before they got my real mail address correct. I gave them quite a lecture about how they got ripped off by these mailing list harvesters.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
My standard email address for sites I dont wish to give my real details to is bill@microsoft.com
I like to use nospam@foo.com or abuse@foo.com, where "foo.com" is the actual domain of the site I am entering my info to. (For example, microsoft gets nospam@microsoft.com).
Knowledge != Intelligence
ISPs already have a lot on their plate insofar as legislation and (potential) filtration goes. Forcing them to operate as a collection agency simply won't work.
They wouldn't be the collection agency. The e-post-office and credit companies would. It's like taking a $20 package to the PO now. If your card is bad, who pays? (In fact, perhaps the ISP is not needed for this.)
I also doubt anyone would advocate or appreciate giving credit card companies (i.e. banks) even more control. They've already demonstrated a certain incompetency...
If they give a mass spammer credit and he/she/it does not pay, it's their problem, not yours. They voluntarily take that risk. See $20 analogy above.
In either case, charging on a per e-mail basis simply won't be accepted by users. They'll feel they're already paying for e-mail as part of their service plan.
First, I personally would not mind paying more for spam reduction and tracability of sender. I'm sure many agree. People hate spam. Second, if you are the kind of person who "likes a deal", by voluntarily accepting spam, you get the "send" credits to use for sending. Thus, those who are cheap or poor and have the time have options.
If you forcible turn off non-payment e-mail services, you kill e-mail as we know it.
I am not advocating that. The existing system will stay in place for those who want 200 spams a day and lots of penis pills.
Without a great deal of unprecedented international cooperation
The existing paper postal system works with only limited international coorporation.
You can't just simply rewrite SMTP
It will be parallel to SMTP. And it could be done via only HTTP. We don't need to invent new internet protocols for new services anymore. That's old-style.
Which would raise everyone's bill by a dollar or more to make up for the people who send a lot of mail.
No. People who send a lot of mail pay more into the system. (And remember, those on your "freinds" list require NO payment.)
As far as the zombie question, infected PC's would be charged for all the bogus messages it sends. To reduce risk, one can set a limit that requires a phone-call to change. Thus, if your PC got infected by zombie-ware and started sending out messages which you get charged for, at worse the zombie can only send up to your pre-set limit. It's sort of like a credit-card limit. It works for CC's, and can thus work for e-stamps.
And you'd then be forced to deal with your zombie infestation, rather than ignore it, like is done now, just like a stolen credit card.
You mustn't have ever owned a business. Businesses get deluged with junk mail. Is it traceable? Of course it is, but guess what? The Post Office is making money from the junk senders, so they haven't much motivation to quell the flow. And if you want them to put a hold on mail coming from a specific sender, you have to foot the bill.
With electronic systems, blocking would be easier because each sender would have to register, and thus have a unique "sender code". Plus, I'm not focusing on business, but consumers. If biz has the same problem under the new system, then nothing gained and nothing lost.
Part of the reason why paper junk mail is cheaper than regular mail is because the PO gives discounts if its prepared a certain way to make it easier to process. But such won't exist with e-stamps because the processing cost is a very minor component. Most of the cost will be fraud investigation.
Table-ized A.I.
If I had to guess, the special purpose of the email address you're recieving spam at is in the WHOIS contact info of a domain you own.
1) Scrape WHOIS database
2) ???
3) SPAM!!!
and I throw away junk mail before I walk in. I am my own Bayesian filter.
Bite me
I have my own domain too, and there have been times it's been nothing but embarrassment.
Experian eMail Append overlays deliverable email addresses onto your active customer file and contacts customers via email on your behalf to obtain permission to communicate with them online.
I don't fully understand their business practices around this service.
Fortunately, there is a number I can call for more information: 1 888 414 1120.
This number sounds like a great resource for those who don't fully understand their offering.
I've recently received collection-agency calls, for a guy who used to own the place I bought (foreclosed), but never had my phone number.
Apparently, someone sells a database with second-order correlations. They match the address of the debt to all phone numbers associated with it. Stupid, horribly inaccurate use of the Equifax data mining idea. But I can't make them stop calling me for this unknown guys debt.
I don't understand all this talk about blocking and avoiding.
When I get spam from legitimate companies I raise holy hell.
I just had Soft Surroundings decide it would be OK to send me marketing after I ordered something online. As far as I know, Soft Surroundings is a legitimate company, my wife has been buying stuff from them for years. When they decided it would be OK to start spamming me, I emailed all the standard addresses (sales@, president@, postmaster@, etc.) and told them what I thought. After they promised to stop and didn't I called their 800 number and started yelling. They did stop.
I don't expect spam from legitimate companies and when I get it I figure that's what they have 800 numbers and sales departments for.
Don't let these guys get away with this crap.
It's only a matter of time until I have you back in Arkham where you belong.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
I've found a good "idiot filter" to keep the serial forwarders at bay is to have an email address composed of a non-colloquial latin phrase (though one which a literate person would know).
However, I do have one anomaly resulting from this. An intelligent, yet elderly professor-friend of mine keeps sending me forwards. Granted, they are usually funny, as he's no slouch - but it's still irritating.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Every time someone asks a question on how to stop spam, there's always some smartass expert that say's, "This is the year 200X, you should be able to filter it." Yet the reality is not everyone can lock down their exim, sendmail, etc. It is complex, and spam is still a vector for hell of problems.
A sysad could have all the orbs, dnsbl, spamhouse, etc filters in their system, and still the spam will make it through.
There's a lot of reasons the "volunteer" experts in irc on #debian, #ubuntu, #suse advice is bunk.
A user who has an exploitable web form mail script.
Outdated server software on unmanaged server. (ex: Fedora Core Version 4 running)
cPanel exploits.
Rootkits.
Broken SMTP server.
No Iptables firewall. (Don't laugh I've seen servers like this, with no firewall at all!)
Financially impossible.
Multiple binaries. killall -9 exim exposing extra binaries running.
Unless your willing to sit down 24/7 and monitor your /var/log looking for patterns, and flushing the /var/cache/mail to see what came in, searching through all your users directories for exploits, the chances are these experts advice will not work. Many hosting companies, individuals, have no idea how to deal with email servers, in fact they should just shut the port off and remove the server. Having hundreds of spam connections to your email server every second, doesn't make grepping the logs any easier. CIDR blocking networks of the top 100 spam connections, can ease it some. Blocking entire countries can help also.
I have watched spam destroy a hosting company financially. From trying to get off blacklists to forced outsourcing.
Frankly, the free advice and elitist attitudes for help isn't working.
At the same time, people should be able to send anonymous mail --IMO
And furthermore, the same volunteer experts are helpful with nearly everything else linux.
Anyway what works for you in your setup may not work for others.
CAN-SPAM has not worked. (if you ask me it's a place for a spammer to build a list)
In my final opinion here, I am not going to leave you without a potential solution.
My solution is, put your fucking unmanaged server behind a firewall. For example ipcop.
Somebody from germany hitting your FTP server every morning at cron time? iptables their ass and never see a packet again.
This goes contrary to the popular APF, BFD scripts. You could get a user complain they can't get mail from some server in china or .br but ...... You can always OPEN that back up for them, as opposed to the hundreds of hits every second, taking your entire server (with low ram) into PEGGED HIGH CPU, with the fucking exim/processing/var/mail snafu.
truth be told, I have not personally ever found a way to stop spam from a server, except by CIDR'ing their entire network's ass up until they behave. Not a fucking packet from them after that. Yeah hundreds of thousands of other piddly ass fucking servers IP from countries on the entire planet still come in. Get rid of the TOP ones though...
The other thing is, even if you do catch, or ping some fucking server in the USA, you can't stop them. Or get paid. I was told I could get paid for each spammer I caught. Problem is there's no way to legally stop them and prove you caught them. (That's a LAW problem) Or I would be doing this every day, as my primary source of income!!!
On one server, I blocked, .Cn, .Ru, .BR, .FR Some germans..um, the bogans, and using log statistics to sort the top spam sources . I managed to get the CUSTOMERS HAPPY, and the CPU from 99% to 2% idle. Not one complaint about an email not reaching the Falun Gong.
A user who fucks up and hits an email list accidentally is not spam. (though assholes out there try to make it like it is, with solicitors and lawyers) But at the same time ANONYMOUS should pass though, and at the same time the real spammers need LIFE in prison.
There is a fairly large chance that I read a spammer message dropped into my physical mailbox before I throw it away in the paper recycle bin. There is almost no chance that I read one sent by email: they just don't get into my mailbox and even when they do, I spot them by the subject/sender and delete them without reading them.
Furthermore, paper spammers usually do business close to me so there is a better chance that their message is of some interest. Email spammers from the other side of the world usually have nothing to sell me anyway.
Summing up the two things, it is true that sending me an email costs very little but it gives zero return so it's not as cost effective as sending me a more expensive piece of paper.
Your friends must post in some wierd places. My email address is wide open: it's posted in the clear on my website, right here, and even on usenet. Yet I only get ~3-400 spam a month. Lord knows why :-/
[FUCK BETA]
If you're game for an experiment, please send a few greetingcards from a few e-card sites.
That seems to do the trick for me, within a few days the spam avalanche commences.
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
Rainbow tables FTW. Also, the whole estamp infrastructure could be DDoS'd to death, either forcing the email system back into a failsafe mode where the stamps aren't verified, or worse - no mail is delivered. Then there's the question of how soon before someone does a man-in-the-middle/dns poisoning and starts siphoning off valid email stamps for fun and profit? The senders' email never gets sent, but a spam with their paid-for estamp does, and it's tied to their estamp account.
Cattle prods are a much better solution to the spam problem.
It is also why I don't have a DDJ / CUJ subscription any more. They connected my wife's e-mail to my name / address and started sending her spam, and couldn't consistently stop it. It would stop after a complaint, then resume. After the second resume, I completely canceled everything I had with them.
It was completely pointless for them to do this too. They already HAD my e-mail address, freely given to them.
I suppose it's a "slimy" practice because it uses fewer resources to send an email than send snail mail? You're too lazy to click the delete button?
Meetoo! And I get cold calls from Verisign and Comodo. Assholes!
On the other hand, I get *zero* spam sent to me from legitimate companies that is not related to my NIC handle, so I don't think the OP describes a 100% confirmed trend.
I went to a free Network World conference once and somehow got on the mailing list of every exhibitor there, but the opt-in links from all those spammers seem to work and pretty much all that spam has stopped.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
If by chance you actually need some piece of information that's going to be sent to you (i.e. a tracking #), try Explode Mail. It's all I use for crap like this....either that or my dummy Yahoo! email account that I use exclusively for spam prone registrations.
projecthoneypot.org