Spam is Back With A Vengence

Ant writes "The Red Tape Chronicles reports that just last December (2006), the FTC published an optimistic state-of-spam report. It cites research indicating spam had leveled off or even dropped during the previous year. It now appears spammers had simply gone back to the drawing board. There's more spam now than ever before. In fact, there's twice as much spam now as opposed to this time last year. And the messages themselves are causing more trouble. About half of all spam sent now is "image spam," containing server-clogging pictures that are up to 10 times the size of traditional text spam. And most image spam is stock-related, pump-and-dump scams which can harm investors who don't even use e-mail. About one-third of all spam is stock spam now."

Stock scam spams - 3n14rge yur SC0X ...

And most image spam is stock-related, pump-and-dump scams which can harm investors who don't even use e-mail. About one-third of all spam is now stock spam

Until the SEC hasn't gone aggresively against one of the most blatant pump-and-dumps. nothing will change.

Re:Stock scam spams - 3n14rge yur SC0X ...

I don't see why image spam should be such a problem. While accurate OCR is difficult, detecting the presence of text in an image is quite easy. Given that 0% of images with text on them are genuine it shouldn't be hard for a spam filter to detect these messages and dump them. As long as the error-rate is low this can be done on the server, rather than the client and cut down on the bandwidth used.

Re:Stock scam spams - 3n14rge yur SC0X ...

In that case, the spammers have won. A lot of captchas have become so distorted these days, it takes me 2 or 3 attempts before I pass. Especially when they're case sensitive or use zeroes and ohs (0 and O). If the best OCR system known to man (the human brain) can't process it, god help technology.

Right, but if the spammers have to make their images that hard to read, the spammers lose. The idiots who actually buy stock based on "omg buy this stock" spam won't be able to decipher it either.

Re:Stock scam spams - 3n14rge yur SC0X ...

I don't see why image spam should be such a problem.

• 1000 text-only spams - 20k
• 1 image spam - 200k
• Your mail quota and network responsiveness - pricelessly f*cked over

Re:Stock scam spams - 3n14rge yur SC0X ...

Old fashioned 'pump and dump' scams were fairly easy to track, as they would go after the brokers who pushed the stock, and then it was a simple task to just follow the money. As we all know emails can be awfully hard to trace back to their creator.

I used to wonder why people would fall for such scams, 'how could they fall for these things time and time again?'. Well, a couple of years back I was having a conversation with a woman who was distressed that an 'old friend' of her husband had contacted him again. Apparently, this guy has sold (taken) her husband on a variety of pyramid schemes, 'mlm's, and many other 'get rich quick plans. Later, ss nicely as possible I confronted him on 'why' he let this happen. He was a little angry with me, but without any hesitation, he told me that 'one day it will pay off' That day I learned a little something about some people's nature. He knew that these were scams, but he worked them anyways. To the best of my knowledge, he wasn't a crook, and he never approached me with those affairs. So I'm guess that he had hoped that if he just participated, someone else would do the dirty work which would make him rich.

I suspect that the reason why these latest 'pump-and-dump' scams seem to work (otherwise why would you be seeing so much of it), is not action by those easily duped, but by those who hope that they could exploit the 'opportunity'.

Use FuzzyOCR and be mostly done with image spam

Last month I installed the FuzzyOCR on my Spamassassin setup it and I can now testify that rare is the image spam that gets through. I wrote a article about it if you want more detail : http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2006/12 /19/fuzzyocr-hits-debian-unstable-and-eradicates-i mage-spam [ruwenzori.net]

Filtering is wrong

What you are doing to filtering, it is wrong because all it does (when it works) is to keep you from reading spam and cost you CPU time.

The bandwidth already been spent once the spam reaches your filter.

A much better approach (IMHO) is to use greylisting along with a few fast spamtrap driven RBLS, this way the mail doesn't even get transmitted to my server and I save both CPU, bandwidth and time.

Since I switched I have gotten a max of 2 spams pr. day, some days the count is even zero.

There are two reasons this approach is so great:
1) The greylisting on its own will weed out all the non-compliant MTAs, most spammers use zombies that don't care if their payload gets delivered, so they never retry.
2) The real MTAs that spam might get to me before hitting a spamtrap, but the greylisting tells them to come back a bit later, by that time they have hit one or more spamtraps and get blocked by an RBL.

I have yet to think of a way for spammers to defeat this scheme and the cost to legitimate mail is a 10 minute delay the first time someone sends me mail.

Greylisting is intrusive; unknown fp rate

One of the great features of email is immediacy. I want that receipt for my airplane ticket right now, not in a few {minutes, hours, whatever}. If a colleague in Europe or Asia sends me a message and it gets delayed a few {minutes, hours, whatever} it can easily cost a day's delay in our correspondence. I'll tolerate none of that.

We have no way of knowing how many legitimate delivery failures are caused by greylisting. That's because, as the parent points out, messages are rejected a priori and there's no quarantine to check. If you reject and for whatever reason it is not retransmitted, your mail is lost. Maybe this "shouldn't" happen but it does, and it happens often enough that it is not entirely obvious that its false positive rate is less than that of a spam filter.

It is also trivial for a spammer to defeat greylisting. Perhaps they don't at this time, but at any moment they could flip a switch and render your approach useless. Contrary to popular belief, state-of-the-art spam filters aren't so easily defeated.

Blacklisting doesn't suffer from the immediacy problem of greylisting, but it shares the problem of an unknown false positive rate, and mediocre false negative rate.

Re:Greylisting is intrusive; unknown fp rate

One of the great features of email is immediacy.

Whoever sold your email as a realtime medium clearly has no idea what he was talking about. Or he did and you fell for it. Want to buy a bridge?

Failure Notice (Mail Sub-System)

I'm sorry but your message from articles.slashdot.org was REJECTED because it has been flagged by our system as spam. You may not be the source of the spam, but our servers do not respect SPF flags and therefore accept, process and then bounce almost any old slutty slice of bits that get hucked our way. We blame you, the owner of the spoofed domain.

To get a hard copy of this message please send $1 to Happy Dude, 742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield.

Promotional consideration has been provided by the Russian Mob.

SpamAssassin still works

In spite of the rise in spam, you can still keep everything but the stray message or two a day hitting your inbox if you configure SpamAssassin [apache.org] well. Get a guide like McDonalds' SpamAssassin [amazon.com] and follow the steps for the usual configuration based on examining headers and referring to Razor. Then, take a massive collection of all sorts of spam, from text pump 'n' dump to image spam, and feed it into sa-learn, SpamAssassin's Bayesian training system. A good setup with extensive Bayesian training will cut out almost everything. And it's not too hard. If you can install a Linux distro, you can configure SpamAssassin.

However, this is obviously only to filter spam coming into your own box. When I am travelling, I try to force myself to leave my laptop behind in order to truly relax, but that means that I have to use my e-mail provider's web interface. And when I see that my Inbox has 500 messages after just 36 hours, then I start to understand the grumbling that SMTP is broken and we need a drastically reformed protocol.

Re:SpamAssassin still works

SpamAssasin is great, but it only solves part of the problem. We installed SpamAssasin where I work in July and it's a good thing we did it then, we have seen the spam we receive on a daily basis rise at an exponential rate starting in August(we have maybe 100 or so users). It does solve the spam problem from the end users point of view, SpamAssasin has almost no false positives or false negatives, but the increased volume of spam has still caused headaches. The bandwidth is obviously one, but another is that we installed spamassasin on an older server, naively thinking we wouldn't see said exponential increase in spam. However, now that 90+% of the messages that we receive are spam, the machine is starting to struggle. We are still ahead, but the fear is that if this rate of growth keeps up, the messages will come in faster than we can process them, which means more spent on hardware, manpower, electricity etc. The costs of spam are really being forced on the users of email.....

Re:What can I say?

That applies to most guys on Slashdot.

Comment Spam

Akismet [akismet.com] is what a lot of Wordpress users (and many other bloggers) use to prevent comment spam. They've got a pretty neat stats [akismet.com] page that shows the volume of spam they have blocked from their creation. They are relatively new, so the fact that the graph trends upwards so quickly also has to do with the fact that their userbase is still growing. But it's unquestionable how large a spike I saw in the end of November and December. Particularly over the Thanksgiving/Christmas holiday weekends. I have a personal server in my house that was MELTED by the amount of hits to my dinky little blog. It would go up and then 30 seconds later would be unresponsive and have to be forcefully rebooted. It even killed my D-Link router.

I'm posting AC so slashdot doesn't melt my server again...

Stock Spam

Well, spam is a technical issue driven by human nature and social ills, IMHO. So I think it would be good to have the various trade and exchange regulators deal with it, at least somewhat. For example, the SEC or various national/international trade blocs could have a task force which more actively does something about stock spam. For example, company XYZ appears in a spam message in country ABC. If the company originated the spam or paid for it, then they are barred from trading in country ABC for a length of time. If they did *not* originate the spam, then the task forces would track down the originators with assistance from local law enforcement. The overall idea is to remove the incentive to spam.

Re:Stock Spam

While it's nice to think regulators would fix it I found there were a few reasons why this wouldnt happen. I did a little research on those stock spams. since there had been so many, it got me curious as to what was going on to stop them.

1) many of the companies that are promoted in the pump and dump schemes are not involved and often dont know for months that they are also victims of the spam. basically its hard to know who really is (spam coming from open relays etc)

2) most of these stocks are what they call pink slip or OTC (over the counter) stocks not traded on exchages like the NYSE or CME, thus not falling under the SEC (i think, please correct me here im no stock expert)

3) it appears that these spams are more of a scam to drive people to brokerages, or stock advisors. if you google one of the symbols in the spams, you will find very shady looking, hastily constructed sites who's sole purpose is to grab the #1 google ranking for the word "spam" and the symbol in the email.

I could be wrong about the purpose but I think there is more to this scam than pump and dump. ymmv.

Re:Stock Spam

I see you did your homework, and I would mod you up, but I don't have mod points today.

it appears that these spams are more of a scam to drive people to brokerages, or stock advisors. if you google one of the symbols in the spams, you will find very shady looking, hastily constructed sites who's sole purpose is to grab the #1 google ranking for the word "spam" and the symbol in the email.

I wonder if these "pump and dump" schemes are still working? This round of image spam has been going on for months now, so I'd expect that people just delete them. Even shorting these stocks may not be profitable at this point, which is why I think you are right, there is something else going on here. I wonder if this is some type of money laundering scheme?
As for retribution, if these are "shady looking, hastily constructed sites", then they are your targets. If I was more skilled and so inclined, I would be "analyzing" those sites.

Re:Moo

and i'l bet they will be *happy* to know they're a problem, and how to get better.

I can see you've never worked at an ISP. A customer who is cut off could not care less about why, all they want is to be reconnected immediately and with no work on their part. They will threaten leaving your service, lawsuits, and practically death threats if you do not reconnect them.

Seriously, why won't this work?

Primarily it becomes an issue of volume. One call to a customer with an abusive machine will eat up the profit from that customer for months. You can't just call them and say "fix it", you have to handhold them through the process or you will almost certainly lose their revenue altogether.

new spam methods

There's an interesting artical at Extreem tech about the wave of spam that hit us last year:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2060277 ,00.asp [extremetech.com]

Most admins were able to find ways to eliminate that eventually: http://blog.fastmail.fm/?p=580 [fastmail.fm]

but now I notice a new trend. Some spammers are actually putting news headlines in the subject field.

On top of that the black hats are now finding ways to spam emule search results.

Every search you make in Emule will return a fake hit... something like *_using_emule_multimedia_toolbar.exe. If you exectute that program your machine will be infected with a virus.

Spam filters can still cope

The volume of spam is definitely up, and most of it is pump and dumps from a very few distinct sources. In December, about 20% of the 30,000 spams I received were for one particular stock.

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/21/231 4241 [slashdot.org]

But it is wrong to say that this new spam requires radical new filtering techniques. That's what the spam solution vendors (whose press releases drive these /. articles) want you to believe so you'll buy their products. In general, word salads, obfuscated words and image spam do not defeat state-of-the-art statistical filters.

See, for example, the recent TREC tests: http://plg.uwaterloo.ca/~gvcormac/trecspamtrack06 [uwaterloo.ca]

These results show that filters achieve about the same results on 2006 spam as on 2004 spam, and those results are pretty good. Ongoing tests show that the effectiveness of filters is unchanged for 2007. In general, the volume of spam has increased, and spammers have tried various methods of defeating spam filters. But their efforts have not been particularly successful against statistical filters.

Make money from spam without spamming

I think an interesting study would be to harvest spam,
scan for pump and dump, and buy stock based on verious
factors. If you refined you algorithm perhaps you could get
an application that would buy and sell pump and dump
stock on your behalf, and make money in the process

I would practice with virtual stock at first.

Could an application buy and sell stock without
human intervention?

block .gif images?

Why not just block e-mails that contain .gif attachments?

Let's all cripple our email!

Here's an even more effective method: almost all spam contains one of the letters {a, e, i, o, u}. Simply write a grep filter to reject all such messages!

What I just don't get..

Who is even dumb enough to make their purchases based on spam mail. I mean, surely everyone must know what spam is by now? How can one be so dense as to trust a completely random, badly worded, illarticulated e-mail full of spelling mistakes from someone you don't know to make informed decisions about what stock they should buy?

It simply makes no sense to me. As long as people remain so completely clueless that they will fall for spam, there will be spam.

Re:What I just don't get..

Who is even dumb enough to make their purchases based on spam mail. I mean, surely everyone must know what spam is by now? How can one be so dense as to trust a completely random, badly worded, illarticulated e-mail full of spelling mistakes from someone you don't know to make informed decisions about what stock they should buy?

Well, a lot of it just has to do with the psychological wiring of homo sapiens. We have to think that our actions are meaningful, that our victories are entirely our doing and that our failures are caused by bad luck. Failure to think this way will make you feel very very depressed.

So, in the case of these stock options scams, there's a lot of people that *know* it is a scam, but, if they're quick enough, they might profit as well from the clueless hordes that will buy the stock later on. My bet is that the largest stake of these stock buyers thinks along theses lines. People might try that a couple of time before they realize they loose every time - and by that time new clueless humans come along.

Then, there's that pitfall of familiarity. We tend to like things we already know. This is what advertising is based on. Show me 10 advertisements for 'Toothpaste Brand A' and none for 'Toothpaste Brand B' and when I'm in a shop, I will pick brand A (even if I very consciously know that that preference is based solely on advertising). A lot of people will think along the lines "It can't be that bad if they offer it to me this often - it must be the real thing" I once read an interview with a women that suffered severe dental problems after buying teeth whitener form a tell-sell channel, and she literally said "I thought: they advertise so much for it, it must be a good product".

And then there's just basic greed: "This offer is so good, I don't want to spoil it with disbelief."
And shame: "I can't ask Viagra to my doctor, this might be a rip off, but it might also be the right thing. I won't know until I try it".
And the-only-change: "They don't sell penis enlargment kits in my pharmacy, I know it is shady, but I can't get it anywhere else"
And the list goes on... We are o so great in fooling ourselves.

How often do you hear of spammers getting busted?

It happens, but not that often. When they catch one, law enforcement does a dog and pony show and we applaud wildly. But they just keep coming.

Arrests don't seem to happen that often. Do a google for "spammer arrested", and most of the hits are about the Buffalo spammer. He was arrested back in 2003 to much fanfare. However my mailbox is still full of. Maybe there is more than one of them out there?

I'm guessing spammers spam because they know the chance of them being caught is nigh on zero. Yet, this is a criminal racket just like any other criminal racket. If some serious money is put into law enforcement, then spammers might finally get the shakes. Apart from pump-n-dump stocks (get off yer asses SEC), spammers aren't hard to catch. Consider Mortgage spammers. If you reply to a Mortgage spam (I am told) you will later be called by a seemingly unrelated mortgage agency. They have bought your contacts off the spammers. Everything can be traced, and if we have the feds seeded spammers with 1-use-only phone numbers, buying stuff and tracking it just like they do any other illegal contraband, of course they can bust it. Make receiving spammed contact details an offence too: The recipient must be reasonably confident that the leads they received are not spam. Harder to prove, but if there is a reasonable chance of prosecution buyers of spam harvests will become shyer and the market dry up. Lets make it a legal requirement that ISPs have to report spamming users to the feds.

And let's get beyond "fines" for offenders. Fines for any profitable business are merely an operating expense. What really scares company directors is Jail time. This has been used in L.A. to force companies comply with laws they'd otherwise have simply paid out. If a spammer thinks there is a 0.0001% chance of him being caught (and then let off with a warning), they will do it. If they think they probably can't sell their harvest, have a 50% chance of being caught and will definitely go to Jail, they won't!

So why isn't this happening? (1) It's not an issue for politicans. I want to see Obama/Hillary/McCain arguing about Spam!!! and so... (2) The money isn't budgeted for law enforcement. With some Elliot Nesses on Spam, I reckon we can crack this. How do we let the politicians know this is an issue for us?

Solution to stock spam?

Perhaps the SEC could require stock brokers and other companies issuing penny/OTC/pink sheet stocks to log whoever buys or sells them. There should be a discernible pattern among pump-and-dump traders that the SEC could backtrace to identify the perpetrator. I would imagine the perpetrator would not purchase the stock too far in advance, as market fluctuations during that time could make their scheme fail. They probably buy the stock only a few days or maybe weeks beforehand, and then sell immediately after the spike. Their initial purchase is probably sizable as well, more than your average investor. For most people who never deal with OTC stocks, their privacy is ensured. For those who do choose to deal with these types of stocks, it would be part of the cost of business for dealing in such a risky and crime-ridden market. The SEC needs to figure this one out sooner rather than later...

SURBL

I implemented SURBL [surbl.org] recently, and it's helped a lot. Your filter extracts url's from the *body* of the e-mail, and checks them against SURBL's blacklist. The idea is that most spam is trying to get you to click on a link, and although they can forge the From: line, they're still constrained to give the address they want you to click on. This has been amazingly effective for me, and it's really nice because there are essentially no false positives. It won't necessarily work with pump-and-dump scams, though, since it's possible for them to say "buy SCOX," without giving a URL.

stock pump-n-dump

Well, one can only hope that this leads to some wider sweeping reforms, because as it stands now, the market is way too influenced by widespread fraud and insider trading. It's not anywhere close to being a legitimate market, it's more like a casino where a few favored gamblers get the nod, and even fewer just get lucky, and the rest lose, and maybe this wave of spam will spur some real change on the law enforcement side.

Or maybe mail servers will just start rejecting all binary attachments.

Single user spam filters are too limited.

A big problem with most spam filters, especially the open source ones, is that they're single user. They're trying to work out from the content what's spam. Systems like gmail (and Spamcop before IronPort bought it) look at spam addressed to a large number of addresses. When roughly similar material starts showing up at a few hundred different addresses, the probability that it's spam is very high.

Here's a thought. Mail servers should, on receiving an SMTP connection from an IP address, probe that IP address to see if it's a Microsoft consumer-grade operating system. If so, reject the connection. That would put a dent in the zombie problem.

end of no-permission email

Spam will effectively destroy email as we know it. Too many people, too many messages, and too easy to get to people.

We will migrate to a system where a sender must have a "key" before email is accepted, and those keys are under the control of the reciever.

This kind of system will work much like email, as it is so popular and so useful people will only migrate from it slowly. Default keys for new email users will be simple (like a "1"). Once someone is getting enough connection, enough email, then mail clients will communicate automatically with known good senders and create an individual, bidirectional keypair so that future communication with known friends continues, while spam is shut off. In the future, sharing someone's "contact" will be more akin to sharing the private key they have to connect to a person. Once you see a new email address use a known key of someone else, you would accept it once, automatically regnerate the key for the original person, and watch the behavior to determine if it was spam or a legitimate introduction of a friend to a friend. To most users this system could work exactly like email now - just need to add more functionality to the mail clients' spam processing ability.

Re:The solution

The problem with punishing the firms advertised is that it is very hard to prove. It could be that they hired an advertising firm which represented itself as legitimate. It could even be that someone spammed in their name to try and damage their reputation.

Re:The solution

Your post advocates a

(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
(x) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(x) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
(x) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
(x) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

Re:The solution

I HATE these stupid 'form letter' responses. They make the poster look like they know-it-all, and they preclude any REAL thought or discussion about the idea. That said, I have a simple, foolproof idea to help eliminate spam.

Email certification.

If you want to be able to send Certified Email (CE), you apply for Certification from the company that gives you internet connectivity. They check you out, and 'Certify' you as being a legitimate emailer (ie: not a spammer). Then, you generate a private/public key pair and give them the public one. In the headers of all your email, is their certification, and an encrypted header line that's createdusing your private key.

When email arrives at the recipients server (or this could be done at the client level, as well), the server sees the certification, and connects to the certifying server to get your public key. It attempts to decrypt the header line. If it does it marks the email as 'certified', if it cannot, it marks the email as 'uncertified', and the email client can be programmed to filter messages based on that.

Due to the public/private key cryptography, there can be no certified email spoofing. (Assuming the private keys are secure, the keys are of decent length, etc.) All emails are traceable back to the originating server. CORRECTION- all CERTIFIED emails are traceable. Anonymous email is still possible. People can still set up email servers for mailing lists without "having" to get them certified. And people can still receive non-certified mail.

If an email server sends out spam, the complaints go to it's certifier. They can drop the certification, deleting the public key from their server. When this happens, ALL the email from the spamming server is now 'uncertified', and gets handled accordingly by email clients. If nothing is done, complaints go to THEIR upstream, etc. Individuals and groups can keep their own blacklists, if they wish, and anyone can choose to filter emails according to those lists.

Now, I've looked over that 'form email' that people like to post to shoot down anti-spam ideas. And nothing applies to this idea. (If something seems to apply, it's because I either left out details, or explained something wrong.) This idea does NOT need to be universally adopted, nor does it need to be adopted by everyone all at once. It's primarily a way of reliably tracing (certified) emails back to their originating server. The anti-spam part comes later: if you receive certified spam, complain and get the server un-certified. If you receive un-certified spam... well, just have your email client dump all uncertified emails in the trash. (Not nessisarilly, you could just use it's un-certifedness as a factor in filtering your email.)

This idea does not require anything be changed with SMTP. It simply requires a second connection be made to the certifying server. Now, before you bitch about the extra bandwidth, I'd like to remind you that, once this idea catches on, spam will be greatly reduced. This reduction will MORE than make up for the slight increase in bandwidth created in querying the certifying servers. Also, the certifying servers can set time limits on when the certifications expire, and need to be re-downloaded (kind of like DHCP leases). A 'new' company that just applied for certification might have it's certificate set to expire almost instantly. This way, every email they send requires a download of the certificate. This allows the certificate to be pulled rapidly if they start spamming. After a month or two, it could be set to expire weekly or monthly.

To sum up: Email Certification is reliable way of tracing the certified emails back to their originating server. This allows spammers to be identified unequivocally, and have their certification pulled. Email servers are NOT required to be certified, and anonymous email is still possible. Email recipients can, if they choose, set up their client to send uncertified emails to the trash, or to handle them however they wish. White lists and black lists

Re:Spam spam spam spam. Lovely spam! Wonderful spa

Score:1, Redundant

By definition, shouldn't any post about spam be marked redundant?

Anyway, I run a mailserver. What I see is surges of email for whatever happens to be the current scam. Last year it was mostly mortgage offers (Get a cheap, misspelled mortqaq3 today!!!) Spamassassin + RBLs eliminate about 70% of the flood. Image-only email is flagged by spamassassin. Now random text is added to get past the Bayesian filters. The arms race continues.

BTW, if you are the type to send copies of spam to abuse addresses, I advise you to remove identifying info and post it through an anonymous account to avoid retaliation. ISPs tend to forward it to the spammer.

Re:The solution

1 - death ( yes, death, not jail ) for conviced spammers ( oh, and make it painful and long too )

Please try to size the punishment to the size of the crime. Most civilized countries don't even have death sentence for serial murder. Also, your American laws don't carry much power over other jurisdictions, and convincing others to share death penalty for something like this would be hard.

2 - any company caught knowingly using spam as a way to advertise is forced to shut down and they lose all thier assets ( including personal )

Well then I know what to do about my pesky competitors, just have some spammers send spam in their name! Problem solved!

3 - anyone caught buying from a spam ad should be humiliated in public.

So who do you want to monitor everybody's commerical actions? Actually, to know that the person bought a product because of spam, we'd need to monitor them whenever they check their email. Big Brother go! :DDDDDDD

In the name of Karl Popper, though, I appreciate your proposals.

Re:The solution

Just like with the war on drugs, eh? Yeah I see how raising the punishment really helps. No wait. Shit, it doesn't. I guess we're fucked now.

What I think would help is ISPs taking confirmed zombie machines offline. It's done in Sweden by some ISPs, and most people don't seem to have a problem with that.

Re:The solution

My ISP (www.ntlworld.com) doesn't allow you to use www if your connection has a high amount of outgoing port 25 action. I know this because a PC here got infected with a mass-mailer trojan once. Instead of seeing the webpage you're trying to see, you are shown a page telling you that you've been infected, along with access to several tools for removing these kind of infections. If ALL ISPs did this, I would think that spam traffic would be heavily reduced.

Re:The solution

I know of no good ISP that bans such servers. Nor would I use any that did - that's retarded... I'm paying for the bandwidth and it's mine to use.

Ok numbnuts, that's exactly the kind of attitude that spammers have. That they can do anything because they pay for it. You pay taxes for construction of roads and for schools, but that doesn't give you the right to drive 100 mph through a school zone. You have to have limits. There have to be rules.

Penology 101

If you want to stop crime, the penalty should be,
and perceived to be:

    - certain
    - immediate
    - more costly than the benefit of the crime

"Law and order" advocates generally advocate
draconian punishments, but there is no evidence
that they help, beyond counterbalancing the
benefit of the crime. Increased detection speed
and likelihood are far more effective.

You might think that draconian punishments increase
the expected cost, even with haphazard and delayed
detection, but they don't increase the perceived
cost nearly enough to counter the tacit "I will
beat the odds mentality" to which criminals and
lottery-ticket buyers cling.

In the case of spam, I'm not entirely convinced
that any of the three criteria are met, but
cranking up the third is certainly not "a solution"
as the parent indicated.