Online Marketers to Stamp out Spam? 263
CodeHog writes "A group of online marketers want to get rid of spam and are proposing a registry base system for transmitting email. They are calling the project Lumos. Computer World has an aritcle on it Online marketers offer new antispam initiative
. Doesn't it seem like these are the same businesses that profit from spam? Even better, this is being proposed by ESPC. The member list doesn't look too anti-spam to me." The obvious issue of course is that most spammers won't follow the rules anyway. My spam is up 20% over the 1st quarter of 2003! Yay!
Show of hands (Score:2, Interesting)
How many others use (something)@slashdot.org for all the email entries for anonymous ftp servers, web downloads, pron logins, etc, etc?
Thing is, Taco, you and your editors are easy targets, and not all that highly respected. Your spamload is completely atypical.
The company I work for gets very little spam, on the scale of a couple dozen a month for hundreds of users. We have no filters in place at all, it's not a problem here.
It isnt random. You're just the internets chump.
Email is more useful then the phone (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,11040
"80 percent [of IT professionals surveyed] said they see e-mail as a more valuable communications method than the telephone, and 74 percent said they would have more difficulty if they lost e-mail access for five days than if they lost phone access
Give them spam back (Score:5, Interesting)
A number of people here have mentioned the extremely low response rate to spam. This is what allows it to survive. Imagine if their response rate went up something like 5000%, but 99% of those were fake, but realistic responses. This would *instantly* kill the profit motive. More staff will be required to process the fake orders/replies, and they'll have a devil of a time weeking out the true from the false responses. Eventually, the profitability scale will tip, and that is when spam will end. No program, list or change in technology is going to stop spam until everyone stands up and gives it right back to them.
The plan is backwards (Score:4, Interesting)
And would you entrust your email address under any circumstances to an organization who's entire business is sending marketing email?
Image Makeover (Score:5, Interesting)
However, they don't show any sign of being willing to bite the bullet and accept a pure Opt-In model -- which is the only way they can avoid the name "spammer".
It is now escalating out of control (Score:5, Interesting)
That of me receiving SPAM to my personal email account(s), _AND_ that of my domain names being used in the from/reply-to addresses of SPAM email.
The latter I actually find more frustrating. What makes it worse is my domain name is being used in HTML emails - your average [l]user has no idea that it is HTML, and in the message body sees only "EXTEND YOUR PENIS NATURALLY CLICK HERE" in big bright purple letters. The fact that the link goes to http://www.iamascumbagspammer.com/ is not apparent - what they do see however is my domain name in the from line of their email client.
I actually think that the we would be better off if the anti-spammers stopped pursuing their cause and just let spam take out the Internet's email system.
Then we can start again from scratch.
Surely SMTP's time is up.
Re:cannot stop spam. (Score:3, Interesting)
You stop your own spam when it comes to you. You stop the spam for everybody when you let the spammer send relay spam to a box you control. To see if you are qualified to do this take this simple test:
If your system receives relay spam do you:
(A) Deliver it
or
(B) Not deliver it?
If you answered (B), Not deliver it, you have passed the test.
The spammers are looking for open relays and open proxes all over, every day. Right now they don't know the difference between a real open relay and a fake. This is an opportunity. Create a fake open relay, let them find it (which means you allow their test message to be delivered) and then watch to see if spam rolls in [remember the correct anser above was (B).]
ESPC Link -- Sure, I'll give my E-mail address (Score:2, Interesting)
Do they think turkeys vote for Christmas ?
The IETF has an anti-spam research group (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps because that that is the very last thing these people actually want?
Faking Google Link Popularity. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Give them spam back (Score:3, Interesting)
How is responding to their spam and asking for more information fraud? This is actually a decent idea, and I'd like to setup a script to do it. You send me spam, if my bayesian filter marks it as such you get a response from a freshly created mailbox on my mail host asking for more information on your product. If there are web links to be had, to a wget on those to grab some bandwidth.
That'd be kinda fun, actually.
The key is to find a way to make Spam expensive. After all, the problem is that these people can send out 80 million e-mails and the total cost is the price of a list and a few dollars in bandwidth. We need to find a way to fight back and make the cost of transmission higher.
The bandwidth doesn't matter. Bandwidth is cheap. Getting personal intervention is what will do it. Create throw-away email addresses to ask for more information. If there isn't a valid reply to email in the spam, find their webpage and write a script to scour for sales@, contact@, support@ and send them a nice form mail.
This would be hysterical, really. Then, when they respond to the throw-away email address, you can have a human intervention step. If they respond, then start asking much more questions about their product until they give up on you as a piker.
They just can't leave me alone. (Score:2, Interesting)
It wasn't that long ago you could search for 'Lumos' and get one hit (me). Then it was some company [lumos.com], then a Harry-Potter-ish font [geocities.com], (then a hundred other Harry Potter things) and now I'm a spam registry.
Anybody else out there with extremely rare last names but the domains are all taken by companies anyway?
I guess I should be grateful that they opened up .us and I was able to jam myself in there before somebody else did.
Some people do want the marketing information (Score:2, Interesting)
At issue here is what each person calls spam. To some people, anything that is not personal mail from a friend or family member is automatically spam. Not everyone is this stringent about considering any and all marketing to be spam.
What if, because of laws and technology to eliminate spam, you were unable to get nearly instant quotes for auto insurance or mortgate rates? What if, because of laws and technology to eliminate spam, you could not get price notification from a favorite vendor?
In reality, I would like the chance to opt in knowingly for certain things and be on the mailing list for information that is relevant to me. That doesn't mean I want registerng for a site to mean I am added to 5000 third-party mailing lists for everything from Viagra to vacations in the Carribean.
If you actually review what the referenced system would do, it may be a step in the right direction ... without (sorry for the cliche') throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Re:Give them spam back (Score:2, Interesting)
Hmmm, you know a lot of them have on-line ordering, including a step where they validate your credit card number. I wonder, what's the effect of an invalid card number being entered? Obviously they have to check w/ the card company to see if it's valid. Is there a cost associated with that? i.e. does the company have to pay 0.01 cents or something per query?
If so, that could be a way to directly increase the cost of sending spam (or of hiring a "marketing firm" to send spam). You go to the spam-sponsor's web site, fill out the order with bogus information, including dummy credit card info, then repeatedly hit "send". Could a script could be set up to do this? Hmmm.
Re:Like this is going to save the world (Score:3, Interesting)
We send them text only, one page only, very quick bullets with links in plain text. The real newsletter is on the site, and we just use the email to say hi and direct them to the site. We explain why we do it this way in the email. We get a great response, good feedback, and less than 1% unsubscribe per cycle. We go out of our way to be and look responsible. Each email has an opt out link and our toll free phone number, that is answered by a real human being.
We have never gotten a complaint by going these extra steps. The way we use it, it is legitimate. We don't send to all customers, ever. Only to those who opt in. Yes, we want email marketing to become more legitimate because most of us are. The only way achieve this legitimatacy is to get rid of the real spam.
Most companies are responsible with commercial email, its just the few who use it as the sole business that make it look bad for those of us who it only plays a small but important role in our marketing.
Re:cannot stop spam. (Score:3, Interesting)
That's short-sighted - amusing for the tar-pit owner but short-sighted. The strengths of tar-pits is that they keep a spammer occupied for the one session he's using it. He is more likely to recognise a tar-pit than a fake open relay, and thus more of a chance he'll move on.
What happens when a spammer finds that an open-relay is too slow or only accepts x emails at a time before slowing to a crawl - he'll move on to other "proper" open relays.
With -bd's suggestion and implementation of fake open relays, the spammer _thinks_ he's emailing millions, so he continues using this "open relay". The relay doesn't forward the email on, just forgets it. That equates to less spam being delivered.
-bd has been doing this on a 486 for well over a year. Maybe he can give us an accurate figure of how much spam it has not delivered?
Once in a while the spammer will send a test email - once this pattern is recognised, allow that email and no others through, and the spammer is none the wiser about this "open relay".
IIRC one of the regular users of -bd's relay is Alan Ralsky himself.
Re:Marketers (Score:3, Interesting)
I recently got spam from Panda entitled "HOW TO FIGHT THE NEW E-MAIL WORMS (Advertising)". Do you think that because Advertising was in the title its OK? Wrong. Tell your marketing friend that he is no better than the rest of the scum that he professes to hate. Or maybe they'd like to add some validation to their sign up, plus leaving the please forward this to anyone who you think might like it crap off the bottom.
Re:it's a lie. (Score:3, Interesting)
It does help. In places that junk faxes get you fined, there are few if any junk faxes. Anyone trying to sell you something will make sure you know who they are and how to get in touch with them. Laying down the fine is not hard. Few companies wish to risk their reputations and cash that way. Everything else has been a failure.
Re:I don't believe you (Score:3, Interesting)