Mega-ISPs And Spam Support 200
WH writes: "Over at CNET there's an article about how PSINet and other huge ISPs have been secretly signing deals to provide spammers with internet connections." The other one I've seen is AT&T signing a contract with someone -- there were restrictions, but it's still troubling to see people's appetites for money overwhelming their ability to discern good vs. bad business practices.
spamming.. (Score:1)
wish i could do like pitr in userfriendly [userfriendly.org]
How do we fight this? Sick the cops on 'em... (Score:2)
It also returns the mail to whoever sent the spam. That ties up the line in two directions. What I'd like is for sendmail to return the first message from a location and to swallow all further attempts to forward mail from the same location. I'm looking at "sendmail for Linux" to figure out how to make it do that. That takes care of my end of it.
The other end is to make spammers pay for each message they send. You saw the numbers: Up to 20,000,000 emails in one night in a single mailing. That's $660,000. that they don't have to pay the post office.
They paid a mere $27,000 to PSI Net for the priviledge of saving themselves over $500k+ per night and annoying the sh*t out of us?
Sick the authorities on them for email fraud and depriving the post offices of the world of up to $234,960,000 per year in revenue.
Even a paltry 5% sales tax on this amount is $12,500,000. Stolen straight from government coffers. And that's just from one of these ghastly Bozos. There plenty of them. This is a big enough crime to get the FBI, Interpol and governments from around the world interested.
PSinet may be in trouble. (Score:1)
Well.... (Score:1)
Yeah, it's damned easy to forge From: fields, but it's worth a shot at least.
BTW, if you DO get spam from an earthlink.net or mindspring.com address (or a fullon hostname from either), send that stuff off to spam@mindspring.com. My buddies in AUP need work to do
Re:Here's how to get them to leave a message... (Score:1)
I should have previewed, sorry! :)
Idiot (Score:1)
Bullshit. The dial-up accounts get canceled. The dedicated customers get wacked when they generate complaints and refuse to resolve them. The 63.x.x.x netblock is not all UUNet. Please get your facts right before posting.
I really don't care (Score:1)
I absolutely, unconditionally believe in the right to be left alone. So, if I ask you not to send junk mail (you can do that here with a simple entry in the phone book, it's widely respected): Don't!
If I ask you not to call me for any sales pitch: Don't!
If I not explicitely authorize a commercial entity to contact me by email: Don't!
The major difference is that junk mail doesn't arrive postage due and telemarketers don't call reverse charges. But with spam I'm forced to foot the bill and I don't care if it's for barely legal fisting teen sluts or for KDE2 from a "Linux Software House".
Re:Free Speech (Score:1)
Re:Government control (Score:2)
Here's why I disagree: if government is to step in, then that means that society wants it, right? But if society really wants it, then society can fix it itself. Just use blacklists, or require crypto sigs on mail that you receive and look it up in a trustworthy-vs-spammer database, etc.
IMHO, the only advantage that is gained by using government for this, is not that it forces society to deal with the problem (since, if government is involved, then unless there's corruption, it means that society already wants to deal with it). Rather, it forces society into a consensus of how to deal with the problem. The problem I have with that is that when government tries to dictate how to deal with a problem, they come up with crap (e.g. DMCA).
You may think that your government solution for how to deal with the problem is perfect, but it has holes. For example, if the spam doesn't have a valid return address, and you trace it to having come from a relay outside of USA, what can you do? You just end up with an unenforcable law. I hate unenforcable laws.
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Re:Another option for dealing with spam (Score:2)
But if enough people blacklisted those people's ISP, then those people whose mail you risk losing, would go to another ISP (or their ISP would do what it takes to get off the blacklist).
This reminds me of the prisoner's dilemma. If everyone adopted the blacklist strategy, then it would become the best strategy, and mutants who didn't use the blacklist would be the ones who suffered (they would get spam, but no additional legit email). But if most people don't use the blacklists, then the few people who do use it, end up losing.
Argh.
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Re:Even virgin accounts are spammed (Score:1)
nitehawk1@home.com
nitehawk2@home.com
nitehawk3@home.com
nitehawk4@home.com
nitehawk5@home.com
etc...
no wonder @home's email servers are so faulty...
-nite
Re:How do we fight this? (Score:1)
Boycott spamming telcos (Score:1)
The only thing that have to do is keep it at a level where it doesn't stop people from using email altogether. But untill that limit, as far as they are concerned the more spam the better.
I was about to change my long distance company from MCI-WorldCom to ATT last week in an attempt to boycott telcos that promote spam, but then the ATT spammer deal emerged. So, I guess it will be Sprint, which seems to have cleaned up its act.
Re: (Score:1)
Behind Enemy Lines - a veiw of a spammer (Score:2)
I found this site a while back and found it very interesting. Check out Behind Enemy Lines [freewebsites.com].
Re:I've known this all along.... (Score:3)
According to the SpamCop statistics [spamcop.net] the biggest sources of spam are currently:
UU.NET wins this contest easily... :(
Popsite.net! (Score:2)
Re:PGP only accounts could help... (Score:1)
How about mailing lists - I'm a member of many of them (including spamtools [abuse.net]), and it just wouldn't be possible to encrypt each message (or digest) per person. Some lists have several hundred valid subscribers.
Richy C. [beebware.com]
--
Whats so bad about spam? - This (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:How do we fight this? (Score:3)
This will still cost you legitimate traffic, but there's no way around that. You simply have to bite the bullet and suck up some short term costs for the long-term health of the net.
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Re:So what's new? (Score:1)
Re:Even virgin accounts are spammed (Score:2)
A hotmail acount I never used, is spammed by +- 30 emails a day.
Same here, I created a Hotmail account intending to use it while my-deja.com was down for upgrades. The upgrade got postponed, I didn't use the Hotmail account for a while, but when I went to first send mail through it, the box was full of spam.
The account name is only 4 letters, thus I suppect that the spammers spam form A to ZZZZ.
Well, my account name was 14 letters long, so I suspect rather than Hotmail sells the addresses themselves as an extra revenue stream.. ;-)
Just wondering... (Score:1)
How many people think that perhaps we need more free (or minimum-pay) services like SpamCop [spamcop.net]? I forward spam to them on a fairly regular basis, with an average of one out of eight spammers' accounts being reported closed by their ISP. And to date, after a year and a half of usage, only two spammers have managed to avoid identification, the last being about seven months ago.
Questions, comments, flames? Operators are standing by...
Re:Whats so bad about spam? (Score:2)
Sometimes it seems to me like we're headed that way with spam as well.
Besides, with TV / magazine ads, I have the option
to completely forget about them, ignore them.
Not so with spam. I have to invest time and effort
to filter and delete all this junk.
If someone was to ring you up 20 times a day to
throw different salespitches, you would probably
want to outlaw phone sales, wouldn't you?
Spam needs refinement (Score:1)
Re:So what's new? (Score:1)
However, in both cases, the existence of the "pink contract" constitutes evidence of classic "simple conspiracy," which is also a criminal offense, and since it crosses State lines in both cases, it's probably under Federal jurisdiction.
Free (but not as in beer) Speech (Score:2)
I'm absolutely for free speech, but I draw the line at being forced to accept collect calls from anyone with something to sell.
If I sign my business up with a cheap hosting company, and I end up with the same IP address as goatse.cx, I can expect to get blocked by censorware. If I think my customers are the kind of people who use censorware, then I have to find a different host.
I personally think MAPS is the right way to go. You're free to use it, or not, or use your own list. The spammers can keep making their collect calls, but now I don't have to pick up the phone.
--
Which also blocks listserv. (Score:1)
if the same message is sent out to more than X number of people where X is fairly low, KERPOW! No account.
Which also keeps legitimate (listserv/majordomo) mailing lists from being operated from behind their connections.
Re:Government control (Score:1)
The catch is that the government would have to get out of the way of society's efforts to fix the problem. How about old-fashioned outlawry (i.e. the protection of the law no longer applies) for spamming? (That is, if you can prove that X spammed you, turning X's box into a $2K doorstop is legally treated as self-defense, not cracking.)
/.
Re:Even virgin accounts are spammed (Score:1)
Re:Even virgin accounts are spammed (Score:2)
Oddly my main ISP email address got on a Chinese spam list a few days after joining, and I still get chinese spam to this address two or three times a week.
I now use this email address for all web activity where security is not needed.
Re:Some People have no clue (Score:5)
I understand. the advantage is that the small fry cannot go over seas. and other countries may get into the act.
[insert visions of KGB agents hunting down russian spammers]
Well. there is always the following option, as posted on Segfault [segfault.org] back in april 99 [segfault.org]:
USPS has been doing this for eons... (Score:1)
Difference, of course, is that you can still choose your ISP in the US, so free market economics should sort the issue out in the end. Doesn't seem likely that you'll get your choice of postal carriers any time soon...
Re:Popsite.net! (Score:1)
I am the Raxis.
SMTP server registration. (Score:1)
I believe a very effective way to stop spam is to regulate that each ISP must specify valid SMTP servers much in the same way there is a whois database with all the DNS servers listed. If we do this, then organisations can easily choose to deny all messages coming from dialup connections and it leaves spammers with only one method of sending spam. They would have to use their local ISP's SMTP relay to get their spam out. This would be trivial for the ISP to find and shut down. It would also bring stronger incentives to monitor and stop such activity if their own SMTP servers were being hit.
The idea is to create an SMTP server registry.
Reasons against (off the top of my head):
1.) There's way more SMTP servers out in the world than DNS servers. Maintaining the list would be a nightmare. And how will we validate who's a valid ISP and who's a dirty spammer?
2.) This would block tons of legitimate mail servers. Dialup ppl who couldn't register because of dyn IP's, small businesses who don't know how to register, but bought MDaemon or a WhistleJet or some other out-of-the-box mail server, etc.
3.) This would add an onerous registration process to the setup of any small business network, if they wanted their own SMTP server.
4.) Some (many?) ISP's don't provide SMTP relay for their customers.
5.) This would impose a time delay in getting mail servers up & running. Do you want to wait a week, 2 weeks, a month for your SMTP server registration to go thru before you can send mail?
Etc...
I hate spam as much as anybody but this is a yucky idea.
-david
So what's new? (Score:1)
Re:Even virgin accounts are spammed (Score:1)
Even virgin accounts are spammed (Score:3)
MCI and Spammers (Score:3)
I've known this all along.... (Score:4)
Your e-mail has been received by [insert isp]'s abuse investigations. You have been assigned ticket number #SpammersAreCoolXorAndRot13. DO NOT REPLY TO THIS E-MAIL. It's automated. So shut up.
Then, almost like clockwork, a follow up letter arrives:
This is a follow-up letter from [insert isp]'s abuse team. Ticket number #SpammersAreCoolXorAndRot13 has been dealt with according to our AUP, and action has been taken against the individual.
This means, the "individual" gets a gentle slap on the wrist (if that), and they go about their business. PSI, UUNet, and all the big ISPs don't give a rat's ass about spammers. That's why a *very* good percentage of spam you get has 38.x.x.x or 63.x.x.x in the headers. 38 being PSI, and 63 being UUNet. Try it sometime. It'll suprise you.
As for this article, it comes as no suprise to me. UUNet and PSINet have been known to forward your abuse@ complaints to the spammers themselves, and are both well-known spam harbors.
DIE SPAMMERS, DIE. (Oh, and please take a few Spam-Friendly ISPs down with you. Okay?)
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
Re:So what's new? (Score:2)
My understanding is that if there's money to be made off of it, corporate America will do it and grease congress to make it legal and then justify it by saying "we're in a legally sanctioned business".
Anybody who thinks that "business ethics" means anything more than "lying or stealing without getting caught" is living in fantasy land. Of course I think it *ought* to mean more than that, but the hard reality is that it doesn't.
Re:How do we fight this? (Score:2)
(With its oh so memorable FLA name!)
My "ISP" has the following 550 messages waiting for you if you connect to its SMTP port from the wrong location
550 We do not accpet mail from Yahoo.com a known spammer domain.
Anyone with their own SMTP port can implement this.
FatPhil
Kuro5hin also had this (Score:2)
Some People have no clue (Score:2)
This is why I support the idea of a spammers license. This point of the spammers license is not to legalize spam. The point is to get a legal address where they can be billed for spam, and make it legal to bill the spammers for the traffic at each step of the chain, including the recipient. Enforce the collection via you favorite government agencies - say the IRS and the ATF for example (take your pick). Sufficiently high billing rates would make it rather unprofitable.
.
"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem"
Let yourself be blackmailed? Dumb, dumb, dumb. (Score:2)
--
Re:How do we fight this? (Score:2)
ISP's that do this sould LOSE BIG! (Score:2)
That would teach 'em!
MAPS (Score:2)
Of course, suing MAPS seems to be coming into fashion, and I could the the shit really hitting the fan in this situation. Hopefully, though, things would go the right way and a precedent would be set in favour of blocking prominent domains.
And it would be fun to watch the telco suits squirm like the worms that they really are.
Re:Government control (Score:2)
So instead of enforcing a law that says everyone must identify themselves (or at least their originating address), you would have us work at one level removed from the problem. After half the people in the world have been spammed, the spammer's name can go into a blacklist. Of course, what will be blacklisted if no name was sent, and what's to stop them from using another throw away account.
IMHO, the only advantage that is gained by using government for this, is not that it forces society to deal with the problem (since, if government is involved, then unless there's corruption, it means that society already wants to deal with it). Rather, it forces society into a consensus of how to deal with the problem. The problem I have with that is that when government tries to dictate how to deal with a problem, they come up with crap (e.g. DMCA).
e.g., traffic laws (what we have now is so much worse than the early days of the car when people could just cross the intersection whenever they liked, isn't it?).
e.g., environmental control laws (it is much better when companies get to decide when their waste is too toxic for the environment, isn't it?)
I could go on with a long list of good laws that lead to an orderly and civil society, but suffice it to say that not all laws are bad. Your slander of the entire legal system supported by a single example pushed through by powerful individuals in a manner that, if not corrupt, is at least questionable, does not give due credit to a system that has served us well for two centuries. Right now we have a tension in how people should interact. It is a proper role for the government (the organization appointed to add order to how we interact) to add order to this interaction.
You may think that your government solution for how to deal with the problem is perfect, but it has holes. For example, if the spam doesn't have a valid return address, and you trace it to having come from a relay outside of USA, what can you do? You just end up with an unenforcable law. I hate unenforcable laws.
If it becomes too much of a problem, you can block the entire domain at the US borders? We can nuke that country? How about, we exercise trade sanctions or even enter into a treaty with said country? Since the citizens of that country would most likely have the same problems that we are, maybe we could get them to implement a compatible law.
BTW, when was the last time you got a fax without the transmitting number being printed on it? All fax machines, and programs automatically add the originating phone number because companines large enough to make a profit selling these consumer products don't want to run up against the law. A lone spammer on AOL may spurn the law, but do you think PSINet or AT&T would do it openly without getting paid some fairly high dollars? And if they get paid that much, that means that the cost to the spammer will be increased, which should cause a decrease in the quantity of spam. Which in the end is all that we really want anyway.
Why are they not on the RBL? (Score:2)
Molog
So Linus, what are we doing tonight?
Re:I've known this all along.... (Score:3)
If the institution of higher learning that I am at got some backbone they could probably finance their entire IT budget off the spammers, because it is illegal in this state [slashdot.org].
Re:PSI I don't understand, but with AT&T... (Score:3)
ATT Called.com [attcalled.com]
Re:Spam wouldn't be so bad if... (Score:2)
If they had gone other ways than spamming, I would've supported them. But, by spamming, they made me one of their enemies.
--
That's what I did (Score:2)
Re:I've known this all along.... (Score:2)
In the small town I live in, four different ISP's that I know of use the same UU.NET dial-up server. The only difference is on the users end when they dial-up. Logins are [ISP code]/[user login] (i.e. - MSN/luser). There is no way to effectively add UU.NET to RBL because a LARGE chunk of IP's would be blocked.
Re:How do we fight this? (Score:2)
Another option for dealing with spam (Score:2)
I found a procmail recipe set called "SpamBouncer" [spambouncer.org] which has catches for most common spams and can read from RBL and other sources for more spam goodies. Besides being able to install as either a machine-wide or a individual user setup, it can also have several options for dealing with spam: /dev/null, bouncing the mail back to the domain for possible spam dealings, or, my favorite, dumping all spam to a specific mailbox. This way, I can read through the spam that was sent and see if any messages were truly legit (and in a list of subjects which is mostly spam, it's easy to pick out the legit headers, as opposed to picking out spam headers in a bunch of legit mail).
Only drawback with this is that it is processor heavy; a long overdue fetchmail that pulled up a 100 messages got my CPU usage on a 200MHz to 15+. But the program is actively maintained, usually with weekly updates.
Potential for abuse... some assumptions (Score:4)
There are over 3,000,000 businesses in the USA which are members of the United States Chamber of Commerce (a href=http://www.uschamber.com/_About+Us/Who+We+Are /default.htm>source). Now, assume that spam becomes an accepted business practice, and 10% of these small businesses decide to send out 1 spam a month. Assume you are only on 10% of these companies spam lists (a generous estimate, since once you get on one, you tend to get on them all).
Now, if you received 1,000 spams per day because spam was legitimized, just how useful is email to you anymore? I'd say not very.
Re:How do we fight this? (Score:4)
How to Stop Spam (Score:3)
But Grey (I hear you cry) we still get junk mail despite the postage. True, but THEY actually have something to sell you. Spam alienates most of the target audience so only shifty companies advertise that way. If they can blast out 2 million E-Mail for free and have 10 or 15 people they can bilk respond, they've made a profit. Require bigger hardware for encryption, plus the time it takes to encrypt to 2 million public keys and all of a sudden, spam gets a lot less economical.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:How do we fight this? (Score:5)
Also subscribe to the MAPS RSS [mail-abuse.org] and DUL [mail-abuse.org] lists. Out of the spam that I get here, 99% of it gets blocked by RSS and DUL, and the other 1% by RBL. I've not received a single spam since installing these.
If you have sendmail 8.10 or later, do this in your sendmail.mc file:
FEATURE(dnsbl,`blackholes.mail-abuse.org',`Mail rejected, see http://www.mail-abuse.org/rbl/')dnl FEATURE(dnsbl,`relays.mail-abuse.org',`Open relay rejected, see http://www.mail-abuse.org/rss/')dnl FEATURE(dnsbl,`dialups.mail-abuse.org',`Dialup rejected, see http://www.mail-abuse.org/dul/')dnl FEATURE(`delay_checks')dnl
You won't see any more spam, and your log file will show the address they tried to send to (this is what delay_checks is for).
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Spammer Quote (Score:2)
OBInfo: I maintain a FAQ for figuring out the origin of forged spams and how to complain about them here [claws-and-paws.com]. I hope folks find it helpful.
Re:I've known this all along.... (Score:2)
Yep. PacBell is a 63.xxx.xxx.xxx
Re:Spam wouldn't be so bad if... (Score:2)
Re:Even virgin accounts are spammed (Score:3)
I own a small webmail company (fastworks.com [fastworks.com]) and we routinely get spammed. There are a number of methods people use and a number of ways to combat them.
Spammers will go out and get a dialup account, start spamming after the ISP's abuse department has gone home (usually a Friday night) and continue until someone finally pulls the plug.
These spammers will either send the spam by connecting directly to the victim's SMTP server or by using a 3rd party relay.
We combat this by subscribing to the RSS, RBL and DUP services at mail-abuse.net [mail-abuse.net].
Mail sent via a dialup connection is often denied at the outset because many dialup connections are in the DUL. Open relays are often in RBL and RSS.
These two measures alone cut out more than 80% of our incoming spam.
Another popular way (among spammers) is to try the brute force method. They connect to a service with a few million subscribers and blast away with a dictionary-type attack. This usually causes the most problems on a network side because the victim mail server has to contend with 100,000 plus bounces in a few hours. This tends to fill mail queues quite fast.
Some of the most popular mail systems (which shall remain nameless) combat this problem by not bouncing after a threshold has been reached. This, although a simple method still allows the spam to get through.
I refuse to believe that I'm any smarter (maybe faster, but not smarter) than the folks running yahoomail and hotmail, but it makes a lot more sense to me to have the delivery agent blackhole (delete) this spam as it arrives based on the source IP, email address and even the content. It doesn't take much logic to detect a host that sends you 100,000 messages in an hour where 90% of them bounce.
This cuts out 99.9% of bruteforce spam. It saves us on disk space since the spam is never delivered, and it saves on CPU cycles since the SPAM lands in /dev/null as soon as it is received rather than bouncing all over kingdom come.
I believe a very effective way to stop spam is to regulate that each ISP must specify valid SMTP servers much in the same way there is a whois database with all the DNS servers listed. If we do this, then organisations can easily choose to deny all messages coming from dialup connections and it leaves spammers with only one method of sending spam. They would have to use their local ISP's SMTP relay to get their spam out. This would be trivial for the ISP to find and shut down. It would also bring stronger incentives to monitor and stop such activity if their own SMTP servers were being hit.
Now if only we can stop ICQ spam...
-Michael
Re:RBL on a Windows Client? (Score:2)
Make supporting spammers cost them money (Score:2)
Yes, which is why we should filter out ISP's who support spammers. This will cost them customers, and thus money.
Re:How do we fight this? (Score:2)
And when MAPS refuses to RBL spam sources like uu.net (likely via msn.com dialups without port 25 filtering, but uu.net refuses to identify their rogue resellers), and dialsprint.net (Dialsprint took ~6 months before it finally cleaned up its act and blocked port 25), and att.net (who denied the existence of pink contracts right up until the news broke)?
RBL is a good start.
But the /. article is about how you deal with institutions that appear to be "too big" to RBL.
I say - block 'em yourself. If uu.net gets RBL'd (which will never happen), then they only have to twist one arm to get themselves unblocked. But if 1000 sysadmins independently drop uu.net traffic on the floor, they're well and truly fscked.
There are still AGIS netblocks from 1997 that remain on the DENY list. May uu.net suffer the same fate.
Re:So what's new? (Score:2)
I do understand Yin and Yang; there is an element of formal ethics study in largely ethical professions. I know that there is a 'code of ethics' for professional engineering; but that is something that lawyer and business types created so that the engineering profession would remain forever in its place as a sacrificial profession for the consumption of business men and the law.
It is not something that ethical engineers saw that they needed to impose on their unethical fellow engineers to clean up their profession. In addition, from Yin and Yang it is predictable that there would be unethical fields where there are no ethics classes available; crime comes to mind - nobody can take classes in 'criminal ethics'.
Formal stated ethics usually occur in 'Con job' professions like the law or business where it is important that people believe that the fields are ethical when they are not.
Government control (Score:2)
PSINet, AT&T, et. al. will think twice about these contracts once they understand that mass spamming will result in a righteous DoS attack. The spammers will have to either pay higher rates, or find a legitimate job. Either way I won't have to delete 30 bogus emails a day anymore.
Re:Even virgin accounts are spammed (Score:2)
I suspect this is true, because I've experienced the same thing. A Hotmail address that I gave to nobody has received an incredible amount of spam. The only conclusion is that the spammers got the address from Hotmail itself. (Oh well, you get what you pay for, I guess...)
What I wonder is whether this actaully backfires on Hotmail? In one of my accounts I get upwards of 30 spam messages a day. Multiply this by a few million accounts, and you need some serious hardware to store and process all these messages. Surely in the long run it would have been cheaper not to sell the addresses in the first place?
Re:Spam needs refinement (Score:2)
>From: spammer@foo.bar
>Subject: Make money fast
>I saw your webpage, and
No you didn't... I'm pretty sure, since I dont have one. then there's ofcourse the old "lotsa money! (if you're american)", and the classic 'here... have some doodles in japanese/korean' which could fall in earlier mentioned categories but I cant read it so i dont really know. Good thing my autoreply is still the DeCSS source..
//rdj
Good vs Bad business practices (Score:2)
At the moment, I'm not sure that it's truly established in their minds that spamming is a bad business practice. From their point of view, it's CHEAP advertising, so cheap that it doesn't matter if the business rate from it is REALLY low.
If you really want to stop ATT from spam-related behavior, either permitting it or doing it, then drop them as a long-distance carrier. Do it by mail, and tell them why you are doing it.
Corporate spam won't stop until we, as consumers, manage to change it from a good business practice into a bad one.
Either that, or we'll get into the "JC Whitney" business. When I first moved to Vermont, there was a JC Whitney catalog waiting for me in my never-before-used mailbox. I was even the first occupant of that apartment, so it wasn't bulk mail for the previous resident. But JC Whitney and Sharper Image catalogs are a fact of life. We all get them, and several others. They've degenerated into background noise. As we get to more sophisticated mail handling, maybe spam will assume a level of normal noise, too.
How do we fight this? (Score:5)
- Take your business elsewhere, and tell them why.
- Refuse to carry their traffic.
(1) doesn't apply to me. I am not one of their customers, nor is my company. (2) is very difficult. Can anyone afford to reject all traffic from ISP's this size? I certainly can't. I get far too much legitimate traffic from them to do that without a sever degradation in my service. So how do we fight this one WITHOUT LEGISLATION? (I'm not 100% sure, but legislation sounds like a losing proposition to me!)annoying to the customer (Score:2)
More than one or two (Score:2)
I think the users generally got a warning first, so if they had an open relay they could close it without getting cut off.
Spam wouldn't be so bad if... (Score:2)
Has *anyone* ever seen a spam that wasn't advertising:
Gambling site
Loans/credit for losers
Accept credit cards
Sex site
Weight loss/nutrition supplement
Get anything on anyone
Spam software
Sheesh!
Re:How do we fight this? (Score:2)
"If ignorance is bliss, may I never be happy.
Blame Canter and Siegel (Score:2)
Now if someone had walked up to Canter and/or Siegel in the street and just shot the fuckers in the face, the net wouldn't be in such a sorry state as it is now? The warning would have been heard and this pissants would have moved on to a less dangerous profession like running a crack house.
Or maybe little 8 year old Timmy REALLY enjoys receiving emails advertising "XXX RED HOT FISTING NECROSLUTS" Do you want your kids getting such filth? Of course you don't. So take action!
Protect our children - Shoot a spammer in the face with a high calibre handgun!
Re:Which also blocks listserv. (Score:2)
Re:Whats so bad about spam? (Score:3)
than a TV add.
Each message comes in and takes a small part
of your hard-drive space and time. It would
as each producer of each tv ad came into
your house and took a single grape and a single small slice of cheese.
While each grape or slice of cheese doesn't cost much, the collective mountain of foodstuffs
would be quite expensive.
I added up the sum of the cose of HD space and
time I wasted on spam once (took an average week and projected it out over a year). It came to
something like 1 day(deleting my junk folder repeatedly) and about $15,000(obviously the space was deleted and reused) in HD space.....
And I'm very careful who get's my home address. (I have about 3 different spam addresses though.)
---
RobK
Policy from HostPRO (Score:2)
Does this mean I will be spammed at will with no recourse?
Re:Even virgin accounts are spammed (Score:2)
This would account for why Hotmail accounts regularly get tossed from mailing lists... they bounce with a 554 ("Permanent" disk full) every few weeks. It's gotten to where my disconnect notice has a special piece for Hotmail users explaining why they should switch.
Re:uu.net (Score:2)
I report Usenet spams from UUnet more often than not; all I get back is unrelated automated crap from them, with no personal followup later - ever. UUnet ought to have their plug pulled until they wise up.
(General point: go easy on spamcop, btw. Speaking as a sysadmin at a site that occasionally sends out bulk mails, it *is* still the case that bulk mail is not unsolicited, ie reporting us to spamcop.net just because you can't be arsed unsubscribing will not endear you.)
~Tim
--
Re:So what's new? (Score:2)
Once again - from Yin and Yang, a largely ethical profession like medicine will have unethical elements to it; medical experiments and things like abortion do present ethical dilemmas.
Conversely it is possible to be an ethical businessman or an ethical lawyer, and I do personally know examples of each. However it is extremely difficult to be an ethical business or legal practitioner who is very rich - I don't know either of those. All of the wildly successful people in both of those fields that I know are unethical. I am sure that there are exceptions to those observations - somewhere there are successful businessmen and lawyers who are ethical - I have just never met any.
Re:Viagra! (Score:2)
Could be worse. I get them, and I'm female.
Re:I've known this all along.... (Score:2)
Re:How do we fight this? (Score:2)
/.
PGP only accounts could help... (Score:3)
Or does someone already offer this service. Strictly PGP encrypted ONLY.
Re:How do we fight this? (Score:2)
But that's just the point: You wouldn't find it as useful, if whatever mail you sent from there had a tendency to not be delivered. Then you and everyone else who uses Yahoo would find another service, unless Yahoo did something to correct their problem. As long as Yahoo is convenient for you (and everyone else), then Yahoo has no incentive to behave and the problem won't get fixed.
---
Re:Policy from HostPRO (Score:2)
~Tim
--
Re:PSI I don't understand, but with AT&T... (Score:2)
I know, I should ask them to put me on their "do not call" list. Hopefully they won't sell that list(of legitimate phone numbers!) to someone else.
how is spamming a bad buisiness practice? (Score:2)
spamjammer - having fun on the jerk's nickel (Score:5)
Hunting/identifying/shutting down spammers' freemail address and geocities/angelfire sites is not that satisfying - you know the jerks are just going to start another one.
Fight fire with fire!
I've been having fun saving the 800 numbers in my Palm V and calling them from public phones - and leaving the 800 number of other spammers in their voicemail. Call 800-555-1219: "Hi, this is Mark Miller, and I'd love to make $10,000 from home each week. My number is 800-555-4492. Look forward to hearing from you!"
Call 800-555-4492: "Hi, this is David Logan, I'd be very interested to talk! 800-555-1219"
Alternatively, I've left messages pointing to my home fax line. And I KNOW those thieving motherfuckers call back - there's always a few call-and-hangups after each phony voicemail I leave.
The idea of jamming up hopeful get-rich-quick idiots gives me warm fuzzies at night. Sure, it's a cheap thrill, but they are gratifying nonetheless. That 800-number "duck quack" meme cost the company over $10,000 in long distance charges [cnet.com] per day. Don't just ignore spam - run up their telephone charges and drive them out of business. Your country is counting on you.
- The Mischief Commitee
(a wholly owned subsidiary of Project Mayhem. Member FDIC)
-------------------------------------------------
-- If the blues don't kill you, brother, they'll make you a mighty, might man.
Re:Even virgin accounts are spammed (Score:2)
Here's how to get them to leave a message... (Score:4)
How does it do that? It listens for a pattern in the sound when answered. Typically, an answering machine has a message like "Hi, you've reached so & so, please leave a message" - basically a long, uninterrupted pattern of sound. When a person answers, they generally just say "Hello?" and wait for a reply - a quick pulse of sound, then nothing.
That's what the predictive dialer listens for - a quick pulse. If a long string, then it hangs up, so they don't waste their phone bill on an answering machine.
How do you take advantage of this? Instead of putting "Hi, you've reached so & so, please leave a message", instead put something like "Hi" "you've reached so & so, please leave a message"
This will fool the dialer into thinking it's a real person, and transfer the call to a telemarketer. Sure, the telemarketer will hang up, but you've just consumed an extra five or ten seconds of their time, and a few cents of connect time. This impeded the amount of time they can spend bothering other people, and when it happens in the thousands, it can actually have an effect.
Do it, try it!
The war is already there (Score:2)
This site uses some very tough filters:
The negative impact is that there is about one piece of mail per week SpamCop holds back. And people who send email to me are often people who cannot understand the confirmation request.
So I think that this war cannot be won. After my experiences with ORBS, MAPS and SpamCop, I must say that having a nearly spam-free mailbox has severe disadvantages, and I think that there are lots of people who will accept SPAM in the end; simply because it is too difficult to build filter software that filters most SPAM and is user-friendly at the same time.
Re:How do we fight this? (Score:2)
I'm perfectly willing to drop large networks into my network filters. Like AOL. Never seen a useful mail from AOL. Right in the filters. Same thing with the assorted free E-mail sites.
While it may not be a big deal if one site filters out all that, it gets more important when bunches of sites do. If you can't get to a significant portion of the internet because your backbone provider is a known spammer, you're going to take your business elsewhere, even if you're a spammer.