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Hotmail Implements Spam Filter System
emerson writes "News.com is reporting that Hotmail has finally taken the plunge and decided to implement the MAPS RBL spam "blackhole" list. The article notes that they have seen a marked decrease in spam in just a short time. Read the whole article." More and more ISPs seem to be jumping on the MAPS RBL bandwagon. It's a very good thing IMO, especially for the "free" e-mail services that attract spammers the same way picnics attract ants.
Because this is still a good thing. Not everything that Microsoft does is bad. Their OS monopoly sucks, but all prejudice aside, they have some really nice products. I have quite a few pieces of Microsoft hardware, and they are all excelent. Powerpoint is a fairly good product. Though I'm somewhat afraid of the flames I'll get for saying it, Internet Explorer (4 or later) is pretty good. Running in windows, it's fast and way more stable than Netscape.
I think it's unfortunate that many people seem to lose sight of many of the main objections to Microsoft and just slam the company as a whole. I think Windows leaves lots of room for improvement. However, that doesn't bar them from releasing other quality products. We don't like Microsoft because of some of their business practices, but how much better are we if we just automatically say "It sucks because it's from Microsoft," without even investigating what "it" is.
A spam filter on hotmail is a good thing. I'm not above saying, "Way to go, Microsoft!" when they do something good.
Way to go, Microsoft!
Cheers,
Perrin.
-Perrin.
Now I want you to go in that bag and find my lightsaber. It's the one that says bad mother-fscker on it.
Well you know, *everyone* should have a Hotmail account. It is an excellent address to have you SPAM sent to ;) After reading this article I checked my hotmail account. 9 messages in the last two days. All SPAM. Is this really a decrease as of late ? R.
because the RBL becomes more effective the more systems implement it. If an ISP suddenly finds it has been RBLed, and therefore it's customers can't reach half the e-mail addresses on the planet, it'll shut down its spammers or secure their mailserver pretty sharpish ;-)
Gerv
This means ISPs who have been lazy about closing their spam relay holes will have to take the RBL seriously now. If you are running a server and want to make sure you don't have any holes that will put you on the RBL telnet to mail-abuse.org
-- Virtual Windows Project
Wow. Hotmail just shot up 10 points on my esteem-o-meter. Basically, the last paragraph sums it all up: "Functionally, the RBL is a way of saying you're not holding up your end of the bargain. Isn't that a good reason for you to fix what's wrong with your system?" This whole issue has nothing to do with freedom of speech, it's a technical matter: if you haven't configured your server in a way that prevents abuse, you should expect to be shunned by other providers. Hotmail adopting this viewpoint may well give the anti-spam movement a push in the right direction.
hrmm.. still as long as any dude can just get a hotmail account or anything of that similarity we will be plagued but the sin called spam. and what a forum to recice spam, I beleive this isnt an improvement
Wow. Hotmail just shot up 10 points on my esteem-o-meter.
Basically, the last paragraph sums it all up:
"Functionally, the RBL is a way of saying you're not holding up your end of the bargain. Isn't that a good reason for you to fix what's wrong with your system?"
This whole issue has nothing to do with freedom of speech, it's a technical matter: if you haven't configured your server in a way that prevents abuse, you should expect to be shunned by other providers. Hotmail adopting this viewpoint may well give the anti-spam movement a push in the right direction.
ObSneer: Something good from Hotmail. What next, pigs with wings?
My hotmail account has been getting about 10-30 spam mails a day for a while. Usually I will use spamcop.net to report offenders - but hotmail has allowed the spammers to send mails with no sender, no recipient - basically, no headers but the subject and a fake from line. No way block those has existed. Wonder if they will do something about that now ??
Wouldn't it be neat to have a centralized database that would collect the hashes of various spams. Email clients could query the database to see if a message was spam before presenting it to the user. When a user receives spam, just forward it to the database and it would be blocked for everyone else. 'Course its probably been patented already.
I have an account that i use to filter all my spam through.. the account that i use when i need to get a mail.. but i know will get sold to spammers.
That account is usually getting about 20-40 spams a *DAY*.
That same acount was empty when i checked it this morning.
That has never happened before. Thank you RBL.
--
rJames.org - illustration
Well, I guess in one way it's nice, but wouldn't it be better if hotmail customers can decide for themselves what to filter? OTOH, hotmail accounts are free, so people get what they pay for.
It isn't making me removing hotmail.com from my procmailrc file though...
-- Abigail
So, just trying to make it as painless as possible yields you at least 5 spam emails, all trying to unsubscribe. They sure don't waste their tim with that.
All spam starts with the line: "THIS IS NOT SPAM"
God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ --1Thes5:9
Well well, i noticed my ISP is on the list, (eu.net), no wonder my inbox is spam-free, except for newsletters i sign up for. I didnt even know about this before this /. link. It all makes sense now.
I had a hotmail box for anonimity reasons. It is spammed to hell and back (mainly becuase I made 2 mistakes in the early days - I put the unmangled email address on a web page, and I wrote angry replies to spam).
About a month ago I moved over to webmail.co.za becuase I was sick of deleting 40 useless messages every week. Praise to hotmail, it's just to late.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Spammers using Hotmail will be happy to have a mailbox that won't fill up with their competitor's spam right before it gets canceled.
Maybe from now on all spam will be from Hotmail.com to Hotmail.com.
"Who needs open relays when you can get a free mailbox in 96 seconds?"
- Create a rule to move all mail that doesn't contain your email address in the "To" header.
- Create another rule (with a higher priority than the one above) to skip certain messages that you do need (mailing lists, etc.)
- Voila! Enjoy a spam-free life!
If you're afraid that some important email may be accidentally deleted, make the messages go to a temporary "Spam" folder, and check it once in a while.Actually, my Hotmail accounts are the only ones I didn't do this with, as Hotmail doesn't allow filtering by the "To" header.
--
I logged in to one of my old hotmail accounts after reading this article, and if there's really been spam reduction efforts, I haven't noticed. I have about 15 spam mails dating from last week (I did not sign up for any mailing lists or register anywhere with this address. I did sign up for webspace at some odd site, but I put its spam domain on ignore already). I took a look at the domains and saw about 8 emails from various obscure/unlisted domains which I assume to be open mail servers. Moreover I had 2 emails from RealNetworks, which had supposedly been blocked according to the article. Another problem I noticed is that the rest of the spam came from major 'legit' domains like yahoo.com, aol.com, and hotmail itself. There's no way hotmail will block these huge domains off, and since a LOT of spam is generated by such sites, the spam problem will still be in effect. Despite hotmail's and MAPS' best efforts, I really don't see anything a e-mail provider can really do to fully prevent spam.
:)
:D )
So I guess spam handling is still more of a personal issue than anything. My advice for spam control would be as follows:
1. Don't give out the adress for your main ISP account... I never even use mine since I learned my lesson with my old ISP. I gave out the account to every sleazy signup site and ended up with about 100 msgs on the server at one point... which is a real pain when on your main account.
2. Either use an extra e-mail account from your ISP, an account on a friends domain, or a low-profile free mail service for your main email adress. You most likely won't be placed on any mass spam list if you only give the adress to people you intend to communicate with. Plus you have a greater level of anonymity should you need it or desire it.
3. Hotmail accounts do have a purpose after all. My advice would be to register one or more and keep it/them as a spambox... use it to sign up for accounts, mailing lists, newsletters etc. You'll expect spam anyway, and if it gets flooded to hell, it's just a free hotmail account, so no big loss.
4. If you don't need to recieve a reply email (like website passwords or account verification) from a site that expects you to give them your adress, use a fake one. It's easy, and allows you to exercise your creative juices... I always like using root@
Let's just face it, spam is always going to be an issue regardless of the efforts of MAPS and the like. It can be annoying, but if you just use an extra moment of time and some common sense, you'll save yourself a lot of annoyance. (I'm actually to the point where I check my hotmail inbox just to see all the new spam since I never get any mail in my personal box
I've kept a hotmail account for awhile now as it's nice to have web-mail when on the move or when I don't want to give out my real e-mail for whatever reason. I only access it every week or two, and good god, the spam is amazing. After two weeks I'd easily have over 100 spammed e-mails to sift through - it was barely usable. Hopefully this will help out...
Actually hotmail does have its own share of filter options. Just log into your hotmail account, go to options, and you will find a filter option. There, you can add e-mail adresses to a list of "blocked senders," and any e-mail from the specific sender will be sent directly to the trash can. Also, you can also direct incoming e-mails to a certain folder (including trash can) by telling it to look out for certain keywords in the subject, sender's name, or sender's e-mail. Or if you're really lazy, and you already have some spam in your inbox you can just go to the messgae and tell it to block the sender of that message from now on. Granted, it won't keep your hotmail account spam-free, but the option is there should you wish to use your hotmail account for standard e-mail purposes. But personally I would stick to one of my current POP3 accounts instead of bothering to configure my hotmail account :)
Choose My-Deja as your free email provider, and don't worry about spam--they've used spam filtering for a while now.
The only thing wrong with it is that I don't know what their filter criteria is, nor can I ever peek at those filtered messages. I use that account as my newsgroup account. I use a usa.net account as a sign-in account that nobody ever needs to contact me at, but I can check if I ever forget a password somewhere and need it sent somewhere.
And of course a main account that isn't listed anywhere except for my friends' addressbooks.
<tim><
Same token, I opened up my account today that usually receives 3-5 spams a day, and today, no spam.
The disturbing part is that the account I created to specifically give out as a semi-bogus e-mail address for registrations and whatnot gets less spam than my preferred mailbox.
"Defenestration" is to throw out of a window; what's a word for throwing 'Windows' out of something?
There's a really easy way for an ISP to protect itself against people using it to send spam: introduce a one or two second delay before accepting each message. This is insignificant to the normal user --- my mailer, exmh, takes about five seconds between my pressing `send' and control returning to me --- but would stop spammers dead. Two seconds per message means 30 per minute, less than two thousand per hour. It means that they can no longer blast thousands of messages into the server. If you like, you can also implement something that checks for, say, more than a few hundred messages in an hour and automatically disables email.
The effort needed to implement this is trivial.
(You would need a normal mail server to handle mailing lists, of course. But that's not a problem as mailing lists tend to be handled purely at the server end, without the messages been sent down the dial-up link.)
Actually, hotmail.com is in my SPAM list. That means that in my domain nobody can use hotmail.
;-)
When hotmail.com wasn't forbidden there thousands
of spam messages coming from them.
Hard for my users, but they have learned not to use hotmail
-- "Life is easier since I have excluded JonKatz stories from my homepage"
Great! Now maybe they can work on there customer service and support a little! I've been waiting almost two weeks for them to fix my account (or the machine it is on), contacted support about 12 times, and I keep getting "We're working on it; don't know when it will be fixed...." SO WHO CARES ABOUT SPAM FILTERS IF THEY CAN'T EVEN TAKE CARE OF THEIR ACCOUNT HOLDERS!
So talk to the MAPS people about the offending domains -- subscribing to the RBL is no guarantee of spam freedom -- the RBL has to be maintainted constantly by volunteers and people in the community.
If the RBL isn't decreasing your spam, it's at least partly because you're not doing your part to help MAPS.
--
However, my biggest "spam" problem has never been the pure spamming (gee I compiled this adress list from a web spider. I bet they all want to hear about my amazing new porn site) All of you who reads /. allready know how to deal with these jerks. No, my problem is those who abuses the fact that I actually signed up for some mailing list at one time. I might have bought a server component at one time, and of course I want to know of any upgrades or bugfixes to it. However I don't want them to send "valuable information" about their other products. In the same manner there are a lot of mailing lists with some really valuable info, but a low signal to noise ration. And then there is that nice feature "company wide messages" Oh thank you mister manager for sending your 3 meg power point presentation to everyone here! I really loved to wait for it to pass through my modem. Unfortunalely there are some really valid uses for that group adress so I cant just block it out.
Any of you who have any nice solutions to this sort of semi-legitimate spamming?
All opinions are my own - until criticized
bandwidth == money (at least, here in the UK, where my co-location deal is £50 per month for 1Gbyte data transfer, and that was the best one I could find).
As for spam, my yahoo site has been taken to being spammed by yahoo addresses, my hotmail one has loads of @hotmails, and my usa-net account is ridiculously full of porn spams (I only put that address up on one silly free page and that's what I get for it!) Actually, I wondered if usa-net was actually giving out my address to spammers because the amount of junk was so excessive, so I set up a spam-box account there a while back, checked it yesterday, still not a whimper.
The most annoying thing about spam e-mails is that half of them say 'to get off this list, you must phone 1-800-AMERICANNUMBER', and I'm like, er, yeah right! So I have a filter at yahoo that gets rid of e-mails containing American phone numbers and the permutations of the phrase 'Zip Code'.
At least web-based accounts don't actually spend hours downloading the spam onto your machine, (significant while we still pay for dial-up calls in the UK).
I was so excited when i got outlook express 5 from microsoft, which allowed me to both download my email directly from Hotmail just like POP mail and also to do spam filtering. I was a little worried at first that the spam filtering would go too far, so I just set it to highlight spam and let me do the deleting. The first piece of spam i received was from Hotmail itself! Even Microsoft's own email client can recognize spam when it sees it...even when it's from Microsoft. I assume Hotmail is exempt from its own spam policies, which given the large user base of Hotmail, might make this more of a problem than a solution. suddenly Hotmail is the most attractive service for spammers, as they filter mail from everyone else, but not themselves...
Owen
I use hotmail as a spam filter like just about everyone else. Heck even the one posted here is a spam account, but it doesn't get spammed. I have been going into my hotmail account everyday and if anything the amount of spam has increased. If they implimented anything I sure as hell can't tell. I guess it's time to use my mail filters on hotmail again, they don't work but they worked better than this RBL thing.
Good is never enough, when you dream of being great!
I was getting a lot of spam via my Bigfoot address which I do tend to give out, but it now diverts to my web account at www.msgto.com which checks for 'human' senders by sending them a picture where they have to pick on a given word. You can also manually add people to your acceptable list. I use their POP3 facility to pick up my mail in Outlook and I don't see any spam there now. I just check the spam folder once in a while in case a mailing list ends up there and just delete the spam.
msgto is still in beta, but so far looks good.
According to a survey by ZDNET of webservers used by major companies microsoft only uses NT IIS.
Then you're lucky. I've received some. Not a lot, true, but the address doesn't have wide distribution.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
For this kind of requirement, I use and recommend the Spam Receiving Service at www.tinaa.com/spam/index.html.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Problem with this system: it punishes the 'little users' for their ISPs mistakes. I was more than a little irked to find that I couldn't send email from my professional address to my mother of all people because my hostname was on their 'blackhole' list. I went through the site and the mail server I had been using was abused by some spammer through an open relay so it was put on the blacklist.
Now, this is a big place, and the wheels of bureacracy only turn so much so far, and this event happened months ago and our sysadmins haven't gotten around to fixing this little nuisance yet. So now because some people don't want to use procmail or hit the delete key when they get UCE, I can't email my freakin' mother.
I hate spam as much as the next guy, but this banding together and automatic trial-by-fire via 'intelligent systems' is going a little too far. I have a feeling these RBL guys have a pang of glee as they happily restrict an entire domain from sending email somewhere... "That'll teach 'em"... that'll teach 'em what? To pester their poor sysadmins to "do something"? _They_ didn't send the spam.
The only spam I've been getting at my hotmail account has been from hotmail/microsoft. When I read any other message I am given the option of blocking the sender. This option is curiously missing from MicrSpam.
"pull my finger" - Uncle Chuckles
What's really funny is that currently Microsoft itself is VERY close to being RBLed for their massive spewage of Y2K related junk E-mail. They are spamming every last E-mail address they have their hands on, and, as a result of that, are really pushing the edge of the envelope.
So, if microsoft.com gets RBLed, we'll just pop some popcorn, and watch what happens when Microsoft ends up RBLing itself...
--
If thier sysadmins are so apathetic to not fix open relays, don't you think you should switch ISPs? I would never use a service in which the provider did not care about me personally.
Orbs blocks all open relays. Use Orbs! THAT is the really effective thing against spam.... Of course some providers, like roses.de, are either too incompetent or too ignorant to secure their servers and remove themselves from the orbs... Only took a friend of mine 7 months to get them to fix their servers... :-)
Since there is not one valid reason that open relays should exist, the more people use orbs the better. Fight spam, shut down open relays, and draft all spammers into the landmines removal service. That way, everybody will benefit.
I signed up for an account with them just for the hell with it a while ago....I login like once or twice a month.,....and I've never used the email address to send a message, however now I 20 spams a day, its pretty damn useless in my opinion!
My netscape.net address receives nothing but 30-40 messages of CRAP every month. I would dearly love to not see such junk but the Netscape junk mail filter is so lame. Basically it expects the user to enter the email addresses they don't want to see email for.
It sounds like the MAPS RBL would be an ideal way to slash such junk. I hope Netscape (and Yahoo!) follow suit and implement this scheme too.
Actually, almost no spam originates from these domains. They are, however, among the top favourites for fake From: addresses in spam messages.
You need to know that the From: address in an email is purely cosmetic. The old postcard analogy can be used again when saying that the From: line says no more about the sender of a message than the signature (or lack thereof) on a postcard.
Instead, as on a postcard you look at the stamp to derive information of the true origins, in an email you look at the "Received:" lines. Or you can simply download some script to automatically extract the information and complain to the proper addresses on the guilty relays.
Bottom line: Ignore the From:-line and instead complain to the real senders! It works. I routinely notify the relays of all the spam I get (it's a one-key operation with scripts like the above) and that results in the closing of about one open mail server per week. Less open servers means more difficulties for the spammers, which is a Good Thing.
My ISP's connectivity provider, Teleglobe, has started using the RBL in a special way. They simply router blackhole every host on the RBL, instead of denying incoming e-mails.
That has the unfortunate effect of making sites such as http://members.home.com unreachable from my ISP, and all the other ISPs that use Teleglobe.
After arguing with my ISP's CSRs, it's clear that they will do nothing to restore connectivity to such sites.
Teleglobe provides connectivity to many large ISPs, including JA.NET which is huge in Europe, I believe, and Videotron Telecom (my ISP) which is the only Cable Modem provider is many areas of Québec.
I've been forced to use a proxy to access some sites, which is a pain... I wish they'd use the RBL the way it was intended to, blocking E-Mail only instead of denying access to legitimate web sites.
Ah well. Life is hard. ISPs are Evil.
How do you wash dishes? The answer: you hold them under the faucet and run water, a great deal of water, across them, and whatever was on the dish that you want to get rid of gets swept away in the flood.
This is my system for dealing with spam. All I do is subscribe to two or three mailing lists, which deal with interesting subjects (for me, art and economics). From these mailing lists I get about eighty emails a day. In addition to those, maybe three times a week someone sends an email directly to me, and of course every day anonymous spammers throw a few slices of spam in the mix.
Before I subscribed to those mailing lists, there were times when I'd log in to my mail server and almost all the new mail - say, four emails out of five - was spam, and like everybody else I found that quite annoying. But now if I get four or even ten spams in a day, I barely notice and I don't care.
The only downsides are: 1.) if I don't log on and download the email it piles up to an alarming height; until just now I haven't logged on to my personal account since Saturday, and I had to download over four hundred messages, and 2.) that's an awful lot of stuff to think about; from where I sit at my desk I can see three open books, face down, which I am reading to try to keep up with the the current threads on the two economics lists. Beats the Hell out of watching TV, though.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Yes, Redmond is an evil monopoly out to destroy our freedoms. But even a broken clock is right once in a while. Hotmail using RBL is a GREAT thing that will benefit EVERYONE -- an awesome boost for an underused public service.
Hopefully the resulting buzz will be sufficiently positive that the other free email services (like my dear old Yahoo) will follow suit. I've been requesting it for years and Yahoo never replied.
Ah, to imagine the day when I never get another email from Andrew Conru or Sam Khuri...
Assuming the toll free numbers are legit - why don't we just set our modems to autodial the voice number all night long - every connect will add to their phone bill - we could bankrupt somebody in a hurry!
Seriously - why would this not be a good idea?
Boo, hiss! Go use something like intelligent filtering. It works a helluva lot better than the RBL, and innocent people aren't caught in the line of fire.
--
Boo, hiss! Go use something like intelligent filtering. It works a helluva lot better than the RBL, and innocent people aren't caught in the line of fire.
--
Aha. This is exactly why Hotmail using RBL is such a good thing. Your local sysadmins may not care much about email being unable to reach a few small domains. But what happens when your company can't contact thousands (or millions) of clients, because your sysadmin is allowing spam?
The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and a mountain of refusals from Hotmail will be very squeaky. If another big name like Yahoo or Earthlink joins in, the squeak becomes a roar, and your bureacracy will move quickly indeed. Which is precisely how RBL is supposed to work.
I own an ISP and have used the RBL with Qmail since mid-1997. It is a great service, and DOES catch many spammers - and lets them know about it.
...Steve
Hey Mr. Moderator and people get it clear. This forum says "News for nerds. Stuff that matters". Meaning any news that is interesting is worth posting here.
This isn't a strict Linux-lover Microsoft-hater site. Just as people can say they love Linux, someone can too say he likes Microsoft products. Such a post isn't a damn flamebait cause it has its f*cking basis! Furthermore he stated it nicely without offending any other OSs.
Lame mentality going on here.
I run an ISP and used to have my sendmail configured to filter out MAPS RBL spam.
I found that it also filtered good traffic... because many other isps are black listed because they've had spammers in the past, etc.
If all ISPs maintained their systems correctly, and kept themselves off the list, I would use it. But I lost too much business due to it.
- Hugh
- Hugh Buchanan
- Userfriendly.com
This was a perfectly reasonable post. Why did it get moderated down? It is NOT flamebait.
Moderator: If you don't like Microsoft, than reply to Fuhrer's post in a reasonable manner. He did not post flamebait, he posted a message saying that Microsoft occasionally does good things. Would you moderate me down for posting flamebait if I said that I think Redhat does good things sometimes? I seriously doubt it.
I sincerely hope that somebody comes along and moderates that post back up at least to 1 where it started.
Cheers,
Perrin.
-Perrin.
Now I want you to go in that bag and find my lightsaber. It's the one that says bad mother-fscker on it.
Most spam has a forged sender address, which you can determine by looking at the message's headers. Instead of unfairly blocking hotmail, you should simply forward the spam messags (with all headers) to abuse@hotmail.com and have them deal with it whether it is a forgery or not.
Marko
The hypocracy of anti-spammers is astonishing. Put a tire iron upside that parasite Wallace's head? Heaves no, why, that would be a criminal act of violence! Crack into his servers and badblocks -w on the root partitions? Goodness no, that would be illegal computer hacking!
No, what we'll do instead is use coercion on innocent third parties, punishing them for the alleged failings of yet another batch of innocent third parties exercising a perfectly legitimate option to operate their servers as they see fit. Oh, lets run D.O.S. attacks on the spammers upstream providers, too. Do our dirty work, or else!
While we're at it, let's not only bash people for mere association through unwittingly using the same servers as some asshole, let's preemptively punish dial-up users for running their own mail servers. Obviously they are just spammers waiting to happen. There. MAPS, DUL, we've got it all covered.
The beauty of all this is that we get to say: "Oh, don't blame us! We're not doing anything to anybody! We just maintain lists that sysadmins can choose to use or not, as they see fit. (Or else.) Don't bitch to us, talk to the sysadmin at xyz.net or where the hell ever. Life's a bitch, blah, blah.
Fuckin' cowards. Shitheads. Bullies. What's that word? Oh yeah, Nazis. I'm ashamed to be running BIND.
For effective anti-spam measures, they should not only use MAPS, but also the ORBS database and the Radcliffe database as well.
ORBS is effective at fighting spam. And the nice feature, compared to MAPS, is that it's automated. ORBS automatically tests an SMTP server to determine whether it has known holes. If a hole is found, that server is blackballed right away by the software; the only way to get out of ORBS is to fix the problem. A convenient web sumission form lets you report suspected open relays, and you can track the progress that it's making in probing the site.
To protect myself from spam, I use a procmail filter that pings *four* databases.
The only rare spam I get nowadays is from the true ``whack-a-mole'' spammers: mostly amateurs who spam directly from dial-up accounts. The last time that happened, I complained to the ISP in question and they supposedly took action. Additionally, very rarely, I get a spam through a hitherto unknown open relay, which I promptly report to ORBS.
The delay won't help against spread spectrum attacks, whereby the spammer sends a small number of messages to a large number of servers.
Also, you are forgetting that spammers don't send to your ISP directly; they usually get someone's insecure relay to do the dirty work of delivery. The relay has all that time in the world.
A one or two second delay wouldn't be enough anyway; a spammer could send mail to two hundred people in just over three minutes. That's enough to bother a small ISP.
The delays imposed by distinct mail servers are going to be consumed in parallel, so your scheme would not do anything to stop the overall spamming. In three minutes, the spammer could send a hundred messages to a hundred different ISP's in parallel, even if each of those ISP's had the delay mechanism in place.
The number one reason is administrator cluelessness. Mail servers don't relay because their admins want them to, but because the admins who set them up don't have a freaking clue on how to operate a secure mail site. At least, these are the ones who have ``wide open relays''.
Even admins who think they have closed their relays often have left some obscure hole, due to bugs or quirks of programs like sendmail.
For example, some sendmail servers will properly refuse to forward a mail with the envelope recipient address like but if it's wrapped in quotes, like they forward it, thinking it's a local address. The deeper rule that operates after the quote stripping doesn't enforce the no relay policy or something like that.
The ORBS system performs about a dozen or so different tests involving various obscure holes that permit mail to be routed. If you want more information, surf www.orbs.org.
Why in the hell was this marked as flamebait?? Hey moderators, please refrain from showing your personal bias's.
/. has dropped. Instead of calling it "score", how about "pro-linux rating"?
To me this is another reason why the quality of
Beating people, not just an evening adventure anymore!
Is there any reason Hotmail (or any other email service) couldn't make use of the RBL a user-selectable option?
Here is how it will work: You will require that any email which is sent to you be accompanied by a small payment. If the email is not spam (as defined by you) then you send the payment back, otherwise you keep it.
Test 1 2 3 4
The problem is that the toll free numbers might be legit, but belong to someone other than the spammer. So first you would have to do a careful check to find out that the operation behind the toll free number does in fact correspond to what is advertized in the spam.
Secondly, by doing the auto-dialing, you are participating in criminal activity. The means by which you got the phone number does not clear you of wrongdoing. The spammers could find out who you are and take some sort of civil action against you, for the amount racked up by the automatic calls and possibly other damages.
And, of course, you have to watch out that you don't call numbers which cost YOU money.
Shouldn't you have learned not to trust ZDnet? They tried NT, and they crashed and burned....
--
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
http://www.despammed.com http://www.despammed.com
Yes, that's really my e-mail. Don't change a thing.
...as people around the internet stop receiving e-mail from any Hotmail accounts. After installing the spam filtering software, all mail sent from Hotmail gets deleted before it even leaves the Hotmail servers! Hurray!
Well if you were really serious,
Maps offers 3 type of spam reduction
1: RBL (based upon net numbers of known spammers)
2: DUL (Dial up pools of users cannot send mail directly to your SMTP server. (Instead they should send it through their ISP's smtp server instead and it will send it along)
3: RSS (Similar to ORBS, in that it restricts open relays, but an entry in the RSS is because someone received relay spam from your domain and referred you to the RSS, where as ORBS, iirc, they go and try every address out on the net to see if its an open relay. (This might have changed)
A combination of all 3 of these can do wonders.
RBL: Stops most hardcore spammers who spam directly
DUL: Stops the dial up trespassers,
RSS: Stops the people with open relays who wont fix them.
Anyways most of this is documented on:
http://www.mail-abuse.net/
-- C
I can think of some reasons why Hotmail wouldn't make use of the RBL a per-user option.
For one thing, it would require some programming in order to make a hotmail configuration web UI affect the back-end. The SMTP servers that handle incoming mail would actually have to accept connections from spammers, take the envelope address, resolve it to a user profile, retrieve the preferences and then make a decision whether to drop the connection or accept the mail. This is extra overhead that could perhaps impact the existing scalability of Hotmail.
Anything is doable with software, it's just a question of time, money and overall feasability. Would the cost of adding frills to the service be justified, given that it is already free? Another aspect of development is the management of risks; hotmail is a live operation. Any fundamental changes have to be thoroughly tested before being deployed, even though this is being run by Microsoft. Someone also has to estimate the performance impact that the change might have.
It's easy to forget that the function of Hotmail is to spam its users anyway---with advertisements. The real clients of Hotmail are the people that pay to have their crap appear on your Hotmail page. Thus it would probably be necessary to convince these clients that giving users extra frills would bring in enough additional revenues to justify the development costs and risks.
A lot of spam does in fact have your correct e-mail address in the To: header. The spammers know the address; how do you think you got the spam?
My procmail filter does reject a big portion of spam by your simple rule, but not all.
Here, let's grep through my current junk log. There are 72 spams in it. Eighteen of them have the correct address. So your rule would have been only 75% effective on that set. That isn't bad, but not good enough for me.
Of the remaining 25%, many were caught by consulting the ORBS and RBL databases. A few were from connections with no reverse DNS so were rejected for that reason even before my filter got to them (the SMTP server added an X-Reject: line). And some were caught due to using an internal-looking From: address, or an internal-looking message ID. Many were rejected based on more than one of these rules.
That still leaves the very few that got through despite the filtering.
This is no big deal for the clued in among us who would use the correct methods for assuring anonimity.
But I am concerned about the less clued in average folks who use the net today. They would likely be misled by all the privacy BS on the site and think it would require a court order or something for them to be identified.
Could you or someone else please post a procmail script that does this in order to enlighten the less informed?
sending their spam back as a FAX to their VOICE toll free number (some use for the otherwise obsolete modem). Set the retries to the max. You can probably get away with this once per spam, and even have it done automatically in the middle of the night.
You can always explain it away as a mistake (it may even fool the spammers), and who wants your "fax" number anyway?
To protect yourself, it never hurts to have caller id with automatic rejection of blocked calls.
Having been the unwilling participant in the MAPS RBL's insufficient adherence to protocol, I have a few things to say about them.
Not too long ago, the company I work for was blackholed because a customer sent an email to a list of people, not using our service, which contained a URL which pointed to our system. One of the people who received it was on the MAPS board. He took personal objection to this email and recommended blackholing us.
He said that he tried to contact us, but all of his excuses were entirely unsatisfactory. The fact of the matter is that if he did a 'WHOIS' on the domain in question, he would've found out that we host the domain, and could have called the number we have listed, and paged the on-call admin.
All of this took place over a weekend, in which none of the on-call staff were notified.
The MAPS RBL protocol which they follow says that the entire board has to agree to block somebody. The real truth is that it works this way:
There is a mailing list which members send 'nominate' requests to. Paul Vixie then takes the request, is supposed to double check everything, and then updates the RBL.
The reality is that a member sends a 'nominate', Paul grabs it, and posts it.
There is nothing so noble as a 'double check' or a peer review of the nominate request.
Before you stand behind the 'RBL', you should truely understand the consequences of giving control of a significant portion of the Internet, to a few, not neccessarily rational, people.
I won't post the person's name who nominated my employer, but rest assured he is not a person that I would entrust absolute power over most of the Internet, to.
For one thing, it would require some programming in order to make a hotmail configuration web UI affect the back-end. The SMTP servers that handle incoming mail would actually have to accept connections from spammers, take the envelope address, resolve it to a user profile, retrieve the preferences and then make a decision whether to drop the connection or accept the mail. This is extra overhead that could perhaps impact the existing scalability of Hotmail.
Actually, the way I would implement this is to have the SMTP program add an extra header to these emails (ones from RBL'ed hosts) before forwarding it to the user account. Something like "X-RBLStatus = TRUE", and then have the user's filtering software sort the mail based on that header however they want.
not that close to first post!!!!
This makes me ashamed to be a slashdotter. This is NOT flamebait. I can only hope with the help of metamoderation, this guy never moderates again *wanders off because he hasn't 'MetaModerated today'* :)
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
How about a Slashdot poll:
I have
...And I'm not even going to post as an A.C. ;}
First off: I hate spam as much as the next person. I've called ISPs about their spammers before.
Here's where I say "BUT"...
BUT.. I don't think the RBL is a good idea, for the same reasons that most of the Slashdot community doesn't think that things like CyberPatrol is a good idea.
How many of the ISPs tell their customers that they filter the customer's email? Not a single ISP I have ever subscribed to has disclosed that to me, a paying customer. And all of them (save 1) used the RBL.
A while back I had a fun experience with the RBL. The ISP that I use for my email account is also an upstream provider for other service providers. One of those providers, which used my ISP, had a customer which sent some spam out (the bastard, right? I agree, but he was also within the bounds of the law...). The RBL got wind of this, had their little discussion, and since they couldn't reach anyone at the spammer's provider, they decided they would just blackhole the provider's provider - my ISP. I was in the middle of trying to coordinate a move across the country at the time, and now I can't get in touch with anyone via email.
My ISP resisted this, and so it was a drawn out effort. But I support my ISP in this; they're good people, and they keep their servers configured correctly. They know what they're doing.
Their objection was that a small group of individuals does not have the right to decide who will and will not recieve email from whom. Who monitors the actions of the RBL?
A lot of individuals will bristle at the very mention of the word "Cyber Patrol", or one of its cousins. But those products, and the RBL, work the _same_way_. Except that people rally behind it, because it's "fighting spam", and spam is a big, bad, evil thing.
I don't have a problem fighting spam, but this is not the way to do it. There could just as easily be a way for individuals to download a constantly updated set of email filters, or a program a la McAfee, that would filter their email based on the latest set of spam codes. The point is, it should be an individual's responsibility to filter their own email; it shouldn't be the self-delegated responsibility of some small group of unmonitored people that decide who gets what and when.
Ever since hotmail got taken over I wont even consider getting an account there. Now you just can't spam my MailCity account! The spam filtering rule is no one can sent you any mail except he/she is in your address book or you have sent them mail before - that pretty much spam free. Better still MailCity dont use cookies anymore...(unlike yahoo) Another thing is hotmail has been spammers favourite mail drop point so filtering mail coming from outside hotmail is only half as good. Forgetting spam coming from hotmail is a serious mistake.
let me see my filtering rule: # The rest of them beam into space >>> $FILTER -A input -s 24.0.0.0/8 -d $LOCALNET -l -j DENY echo "Kick lame ISP..." whahahahahaha
2: DUL (Dial up pools of users cannot send mail directly to your SMTP server. (Instead they should send it through their ISP's smtp server instead and it will send it along)
"Should" here disagrees with the relevent RFC's. Unless someone has yet found an RFC which says "always relay".
DUL: Stops the dial up trespassers,
As well as people running an MTA which complies with all the standards.
Dunno which is worse.
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
DUL is Evil Evil EVIL!!!!
I am surprised to hear that Hotmail is using software and are claiming that a lot of the spam is been filtered out!
Frankly, I have not seen much improvement at all! I still get the usual 5-10 messages from unsolicited senders, (today I have already cleared out 5 messages) or with a completely missing heathers - a definite sign of spam or mail that is meant ot avoid standard filtering. Sometimes the messages are repeated, i.e. same message, same sender = 3 times... I do not think it was only me who recived it and when one has that multiplied by the number of users geting it, we land at a number of identical messages crying out to be qualified as spam.
What I think is M$ is palying its usual game of publicity and still selling off actve e-mail addresses of their subscribers to third parties! (as I said I suspect it and have only circumstantial proof.)
There should be a better way of spam protection! It proves expensive for me and my company as well. As they are paying for the time I'm trying to access my e-mail and/or clear out the junk in my inbox.
dzak.comI guess you are not a Hotmail subscriber. I can copy for you the list of e-mail addresses that are barred in my account (over 90). + I have 9 out of the 10 availble filters set to deflect messages from servers that have proved to be spam originators...
Removing Hotmail from your .rc file is not the solution as there are much, much more people who are trying to send messages to friends and family than there are spammers!
One last comment: Yes, people get what they pay for, however, Hotmail may be starting to compromise itself with the amount of spam coming through. OTOH, it is the promiss of the site to let only solicited ads coming through ASWA not disclosing the e addresses of their customers, which they fail to do. A promiss is a promiss no matter what you pay for it!
dzak.com