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Where Does Spam Come From? No, Really? 310

Posted by CmdrTaco from the researching-the-devil dept.
jnazario writes "The Center for Democracy and Technology has recently put together a really neat paper studying the methods by which spammers get your email addresses. The report posted otherwise unused email addresses in a variety of locations, using different techniques for visibility (ie HTML encoding vs plaintext) and then watched what accumulated after six months. They generated some interesting results into the methods by which spammers can track you (with publicly available websites containing your bare email address being the most popular method) and even some techniques to stop spam, such as HTML encoding your email address. A very interesting read."
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Where Does Spam Come From? No, Really? More

Where Does Spam Come From? No, Really?

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  • Woah (Score:5, Funny)

    by mr.henry ( 618818 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @09:34AM (#5780877) Journal
    This seems [slashdot.org] familiar [slashdot.org].

  • Everyone knows.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Chris_Stankowitz ( 612232 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @09:35AM (#5780884)
    that Spam comes from a 'SPIG'. Cousin to the pig, but has to be mechanically seperated before being canned and served.

  • Dupe (Score:3, Funny)

    by blackmonday ( 607916 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @09:35AM (#5780891) Homepage
    Is it April Fool's again? I'm waiting for the story on the evil bit now.

    • Tripe (Score:5, Funny)

      by s20451 ( 410424 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @09:39AM (#5780939) Journal
      It's not just a dupe. Better yet, it's a tripe.

      tripe n.
      1. Stomach tissue of a ruminant and especially of the ox used as food
      2. Something poor, worthless, or offensive

      • It's not just a dupe. Better yet, it's a tripe.
        tripe n.
        1. Stomach tissue of a ruminant and especially of the ox used as food
        2. Something poor, worthless, or offensive

        Hmm, apparently the editors think that we are "Grade A morons" who graduated from "Bovine University".

  • Where Does Spam Come From? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Gossy ( 130782 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @09:37AM (#5780918)
    From those damn Spamers I'd guess.

    No wait, better - it comes from those companies who profit from the utilisation of bandwidth. People who sell email servers marketed as coping with massive volumes of email too. Oh, and lets not forget the people spam filters!

    Cynical? Me? :)

    • Re:Where Does Spam Come From? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by sketerpot ( 454020 ) <sketerpot@gmailLION.com minus cat> on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @11:05AM (#5781651)
      Speaking of the people making spam filters, there is sometimes talk about a conflict of interest since the companies that sell spam filters don't have much incentive to make spam (and hence the need for their filters) go away. Here is where the hole in the argument comes: spam filters are sometimes made by people who don't stand to make money from them, like POPfile (it works excellently for me). And that, my fellow slashdotters, is why you should use open source spam filters.
      • That sounds very similar to the dynamics of the anti-virus market in windows. The optimal profit strategy for a virus-scanner vendor is to perpetually be slightly behind the arms-race between stealth malicious code and malicious code detectors. I'm not saying that any real businesses operate this way, but it is a way that revenue could be generated.

  • hrm (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Vej ( 199488 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @09:37AM (#5780921)
    But what explains the amazing spectrum of sources?

    Even with a black-list implementation, spam has been through the roof lately, almost too much to keep up with submitting even.

  • 3rd time: charming (Score:5, Informative)

    by rakerman ( 409507 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @09:38AM (#5780924) Homepage Journal
    If Slashdot posts the same [slashdot.org] report [slashdot.org] three times, is that slashspam?

  • Definition: SLAM (Score:5, Funny)

    by kvn299 ( 472563 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @09:38AM (#5780926)
    SLAM: An unsolicited duplicate Slashdot story.

  • Duplicate of March 19th article (Score:3, Informative)

    by richard-parker ( 260076 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @09:38AM (#5780931)
    This article is a duplicate of one posted on March 19 back when the CDT report was released:

    CDT Releases New Report on Origins of Spam [slashdot.org]
  • Just need to vent a bit anger.

    Just had one of my domain names used in the fake from address (you know, siusd3874@mydomain.com) kind of thing, where the bit infront of the @ changes in an attempt to combat filtering.

    Pain in arse - i've even had to put a page up on the website trying to explain that the SPAM is nothing to do with me.

    Noticed a sharp rise in non-referred hits to the www.mydomain.com - which I can only assume is people trying it - probably to find out who spammed 'em.

    This is despite the SPAM
    • The problem with this is that sometimes the spammer will say the same thing. like "no I didn't send you the email about my amzing penis enlarging pills, but if you want to by them click here". It is just another level spammers will shrink to.
      Some of these guys think that saying this will protect them from the lawsuits they so richly deserve.

      Oh and it happend to me too.
  • "'These antispammers should get a life[...] Do their fingers hurt too much from pressing the delete key? How much time does that really take from their day?"

    "By contrast, she said, '70 million people have bad credit. Guess what? Now I can't get mail through to them to help them.'"

    The whole story is available at:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/22/technology/22S PA M.html?pagewanted=print&position=

    Also available at

    http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/busines s/ 1877197

    Is Alyx Sachs the female Alan Ralsky?

    • Re:On a related note, Alyx Sachs, spammer, says... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by gbjbaanb ( 229885 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @09:56AM (#5781075)
      at least we get a new spam story from /. - shame it wasn't the one posted by the editor.

      I liked the quote from AOL: America Online says the amount of spam aimed at its 35 million customers has doubled since the year started and now approaches 2 billion messages a day, more than 70 percent of the mail its users receive. I make that 2000 spam messages per user per day! (even if you use the American Billion, and not the British).

      Thank god for ISP filters, I don't quite feel so bad about the 20 or so I get per day now. (not that I use AOL, so I don't know if those spams get through to their users).

    • Re:well look what I found! (Score:4, Informative)

      by rhadamanthus ( 200665 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @10:03AM (#5781120)
      And she's hiring:


      http://www.hcdonline.com/jobs/DisplayJob.asp?ID=32 572 [hcdonline.com]


      Category: New Media


      Job Title: eMail ad designer


      Job Description: Need a techy or ad person who can jam out killer ads using front page for eMail campaigns. Easy gig for someone who knows how to write and cut and paste. Good op for freelance, college, or veteran Internet or Advertising guru


      Job Location: Los Angeles


      Phone Number: 323-871-2000x11


      Fax Number: 323-871-0625


      Email: yurontv@netglobalmarketing.com


      Enjoy!

      --rhad

    • At my expense... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @10:16AM (#5781224) Homepage
      "By contrast, she said, '70 million people have bad credit. Guess what? Now I can't get mail through to them to help them.'"

      Tough luck. I pay for my Internet connection, you have no right to cost me money. Does telemarketers call collect? Does the postman demand cash for delivering me mail? No. Why the hell should I let you run a business at my expense?

      Kjella

    • Re:On a related note, Alyx Sachs, spammer, says... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @10:16AM (#5781227) Journal
      Nice...

      "The legislation introduced recently in the Senate would try to make many practices used by spammers illegal. It would force commercial e-mail to identify the true sender, have an accurate subject line and offer recipients easy removal from marketing lists. And it would impose fines for violators.

      For her part, e-mail marketer Sachs says that any such move will only end up making it harder to run a legitimate business."

      So Ms. Sachs, tell me, what kind of "legitimate business" necessitates hiding the true sender of those email?
      • Tis sort of thing has always made me think that we need a national who it's from law.
        Junk mail can't look like notices from bill collecters
        Spam must be labled as an ADV: filtering made easy
        telemarketers must not block caller id and need an ADV: tag in their id
        door to door sales people must wear bright red targets (especially if selling religeon)...

    • Re:On a related note, Alyx Sachs, spammer, says... (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Would that be... this Alyx Sachs???

      Alyxsandra Sachs
      112 Catamaran St
      Marina Del Rey, CA 90292-5769
      (310)578-1728

      (Courtesy of Switchboard.com)

    • Y'know, it wouldn't be very nice if, say, somebody posted a link [netglobalmarketing.com] to this scumbag's website...

      Or, their site's WHOIS record...
      Registrant:
      Albert Ahdoot (NETGLOBALMARKETING-COM-DOM)
      Net Global Marketing Inc.
      18375 Ventura Blvd
      Suite 326
      Tarzana, CA 91356
      USA
      3238459660
      2069841344
      aahdoot@yahoo.com

      Domain Name: NETGLOBALMARKETING.COM

      Administrative Contact:
      Richard Stewart support@usmnet.net
      219 North Main
      Suite 210
      Bryan, TX 77803
      USA
      97

    • "'These antispammers should get a life[...] Do their fingers hurt too much from pressing the delete key? How much time does that really take from their day?"

      I wonder if we should see if Ms Sachs fingers would hurt from throwing away all the physical junk she would get should someone post her address here... hmmmm.
  • I saw this story floating in the mysterious future and tried to warn Malda. I would theorize that he needs to make "The Mysterious Future" a little larger window if he really wants to get help in preventing dupes. Or are there really THAT few subscribers seeing pre-post stories?
  • It's an IT guy's job to stay on top of current trends and technology. Any spammer would be remiss in not reading articles like this. I can't help but wonder how many of them actually do.....

  • All SPAM comes from.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Znonymous Coward ( 615009 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @09:44AM (#5780978) Journal
    Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf (aka Baghdad Bob). He's always telling us that:

    "Americans are not in Baghdad"

    or

    "Loose wieght in just 2 weeks"

    or

    "Make money fast"

    or

    "Requested information"

    • No, spam comes from terrorists.

      HEY! thats what we need to do, we need to convince our politicians thats where spam is from, that spamning is terrorist attacks on the US.

      I mean, they are technologically inept enough to get suckered into accepting DMCA, this ought to be nothing. If all spammers are terrorists, then spammers can be hunted down with terrorists.

      The slogan could be "When you spam, you spam with Saddam!"

    • Re:All SPAM comes from.... (Score:5, Funny)

      by jpetts ( 208163 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @10:43AM (#5781452)
      Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf (aka Baghdad Bob). He's always telling us that:

      "Loose wieght in just 2 weeks"

      He was misquoted: he actually said "Lose Kuweight in two weeks...
  • the readers of /. are being spammed with reports about spam...
    /. editors come on guys make up and start talking to each other again.
  • Spam should clearly have the Evil Bit set to on.

  • Where do dupes come from? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @09:46AM (#5780994)
    Where do duplicate slashdot articles come from? No, really?

  • Slash code addition (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BMonger ( 68213 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @09:47AM (#5781006)
    Maybe SlashCode should be set up to look through the links for the past X days/months/whatever and see if there are any duplicate links. Then it could bring up a little warning saying that the link has already been posted so somebody can do a quick check. It wouldn't keep all of the dupes out but it'd help. Of course, thats a rough idea and I'm not going to code it... dupes don't bother me all that much...
  • About half my spam comes to the email address that I use on slashdot, most of the other half to the email address I use on google groups. There's a small amount that comes to my main email address that is on my web site, and a small amount to email addresses that I registered in other places that I expected might spam me.

  • Mirror, of the conclusions... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @09:48AM (#5781012)
    Conclusions

    1. E-mail addresses harvested from the public Web are frequently used by spammers. By an overwhelming margin, the greatest amount of spam we received was to addresses posted on the public Web.

    When an address has been posted on the public Web, it can potentially be viewed by hundreds of millions of users. People who develop spam lists exploit this feature by using address-harvesting programs to surf across thousands of web sites, collecting any e-mail addresses that they encounter. Most users have no idea that their addresses have been harvested until they begin receiving spam.
    2. The amount of spam received by an address posted on the public Web is directly related to the amount of traffic that Web site receives. The more visitors a Web site has in a given period of time, the greater the likelihood that an address-harvesting program used to send spam will scour it. As a result, addresses posted on high-traffic Web sites are likely to receive a greater amount of spam than address posted on smaller sites -- popular Web sites are more frequently "harvested," and addresses posted on those Web sites are added to a greater number of spam lists.

    3. E-mail addresses harvested from the public Web appear to have a relatively short "shelf life." When e-mail addresses we posted on the public Web were removed, there was a pronounced drop in the amount of spam they received each day. The change was not absolute -- on a given day, an address might receive a few spam messages even months after it had been removed from the public Web. But such spam was on the order of 2 or 3 messages per day, compared to the thirty or more messages received by addresses still on the public Web.

    4. Addresses posted in the headers of USENET messages can receive significant spam, though less than a posting on the public Web. Like most Web sites, USENET postings are publicly accessible and may be targeted by e-mail address-harvesting programs. When a user includes his or her address in the heading of a USENET message, that address can be harvested and used to send spam. Our preliminary data indicates that some USENET newsgroups are more frequently harvested for e-mail addresses than others.

    5. Obscuring an e-mail address is an effective way to avoid spam from harvesters on the Web or on USENET newsgroups. Even when posted in publicly accessible areas, none of the addresses we obscured -- whether in English ("example at domain dot com") or in HTML -- received a single piece of spam. Users who want to avoid spam should consider obscuring their addresses when possible.

    6. Sites that publish their policies and make choice available to users generally respected those policies. A major element of the CDT project was to submit e-mail addresses to a number of popular businesses and other organizations on the Web. Many of these sites had privacy policies describing how they handle e-mail addresses and other potentially sensitive pieces of information. While the terms of these policies varied, we found that almost all sites followed their policies. In addition, when consumers were offered choices about how their personal information would be handled, those choices were respected.

    7. Domain name registration does not seem to be a major source of spam. Despite the fact that the WHOIS database is publicly accessible, our project received just a single spam message to an address that was in WHOIS for six months. This leads us to believe that, at least for some people registering new domain names, listings in the WHOIS database may not be a major source of spam. However, because our project had a relatively short duration, we were not able to examine whether additional spam would be received as a domain name approached its renewal date.

    8. Even when an e-mail address has not been posted or shared in any way, it is still possible to receive spam through various "attacks" on a mail server. In our study, a "brute force" attack on the mail server generated a t

  • What would have helped... (Score:5, Informative)

    by ajs ( 35943 ) <ajs@ajs . c om> on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @09:49AM (#5781022) Homepage Journal
    This is a consumer document meant to tell folks how to stop getting as much spam.

    Useful insofar as it goes, but what would be much more helpful is an objective take on how spam gets to the end-system. It's very hard to generate this information. You can come up with the list of final-hop relays, but that's not as useful as you might think, since most of the really crappy spam software out there finds open relays dynamically and routes through them.

    Slightly smarter software is now making it out there that performs some simple testing to determine how / if a given relay of choice can reach other sites. So for example, AOL's recent blocking of Commcast customers will help them in the short term, but over time they'll find that spammers simply stop using those relays and start using the ones that can get through. As new relays pop up, they will be used... eventually you would have to simply stop accepting mail in order to correctly prevent spam.

    Like I say, it would have been useful to have the data on where spam is actually originating, but even without it, you can block spam with a very high degree of certainty based on the sender and relays with a much lower false positive (failure) rate than any of the bogus blacklist schemes out there. I'm about to add a module to SA [spamassassin.org] to do just this, so stay tuned....

  • I'm down to two a week now (Score:4, Informative)

    by AssFace ( 118098 ) <`stenz77' `at' `gmail.com'> on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @09:52AM (#5781037) Homepage Journal
    I was getting 500 spam a day. Hot damn, that is a lot. I have a bunch of URLs and I was promiscuous with my e-mail address(es). I had them up in newsgroups, message boards (even slashdot), I subscribed to crap, I bought things online, I registered at countless sites... and never with a condom. I have a paypal account, and I have registered at a few casinos (not to play, but to look for security holes - but that doesn't mean they don't still spam the hell out of me). And then my friends and I go through periods of signing each other up for things when we are asked to fill out forms - so it is hard to say how much of that has happened.

    The bulk of what I was getting was from the URLs that I have registered - those URLs were setup to forward all mail at that address that didn't have an actual e-mail address to my address. So I disabled that feature to some extent, and it dropped my daily spam count down to a little over 120 or so a day.

    So I then got curious and went through and "unsubscribed" from a bunch of them just to see what happened. My spam went down to about 30 a day. Hot damn, it worked.
    But then it came back up over time - not sure if the unsubscribing just got my name on other lists, or if it just grew over time.

    So I installed spamassassin [spamassassin.org], at the time 2.5 was in devel, so I used that. Various builds were better than others, and it got me down to about 1 or 2 spam that snuck through everyday.

    Since then I have installed 2.6 and haven't kept up with the development builds as often since the changelog wasn't... well, wasn't changing much over the time that I was watching it.

    I run it as the perl script, not the faster c daemon. I am on a shared server and scripts have to time out after 30 seconds of cpu time. So if the perl script is doing a lot of stuff, it gets killed, and the mail gets sent through.
    So that was the bulk of the spam I was getting - not that spamassassin mistagged it - but that it was dying and letting it through that way.

    So I went in and changed my settings. I disabled all of the blacklist checks (score RAZOR_CHECK 0 and score RAZOR2_CHECK 0). I raised the autolearning threshold to be higher so that it would do that less frequently. I have my good contacts on a whitelist. I made the required_hits spam score to be 3.5 instead of the default 5. I went in and made the 90% bayes score 3.5 and the 99% score to 4. I skipped the rbl checks and made the max attempts on anything that would try multiple times if there was any failure to be low (1-2).

    As a result, it rarely kills the process now unless the server is under a lot of load - and now I get about 1 or 2 spam in a week instead of in a day.

    I am a very big fan of spamassassin.

  • Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2003 10:27:40 -0500

    From: [me]
    Subject: Duplicate Story in The Mysterious Future
    To: daddypants@slashdot.org

    The spam story at
    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/22/13 5421 5&mode=thread&tid=111
    is a duplicate of a previous story from April 12th at
    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/12/14 4220 6&mode=thread&tid=111&tid=95
    which was a duplicate of a previous story from March 19th at
    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/19/17 3624 9&tid=111

    Is daddypants [slashdot.org] ro

  • What gets me about all these dupes... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by juuri ( 7678 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @09:54AM (#5781060) Homepage
    ... is that slashdot only posts 10-15 stories a day. Some days we see two or three dupes so maybe over time that averages out to a little less than a story a day.

    What I find impossible to believe is that out of all the submissions that enter into the possible queue these are the ones that stick out so well they end up getting posted. That almost 9% of the time we see the same article get put up.

    Think of it this way, if your department at your company, hell if your company, messed up 9% of the time what would happen to you? In the case of slashdot nothing happens because no one is accountable and anytime anything shoddy happens everyone clamors about with "it's rob's personal site!@#!@#!@ he can post whatever he wants!@#". Except that isn't the case anymore and hasn't been for years. This is a FOR-PROFIT site with readers who create the value, yet time and time again we are shown and told (Hi Michael!) how little we are valued or mean to the staff at slashdot. Answer me this Rob, do you care so little about your creation now? Where is your sense of pride?

    Unfortunately just departing is a hard thing to do because of the absolute power in the meme of "/.". It is a lot like CNN, you know the news sucks, you know it is biased, but it is always there so in a moment of weakness you give in.
  • Now, I'm not saying they do this, But wouldnt google be able to generate one hell of a spamlist? Both from googlegroups usenet feeds, and just the google http cache picking up email addresses. Would be a lot more evil than paid placement, and you'd never know.

  • A Mummy SPAM and a Daddy SPAM (Score:5, Funny)

    by turgid ( 580780 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @09:57AM (#5781083) Journal
    You see, there's a mummy spam and a daddy spam. When they love each other very much they, well, sort of, get together, you know, and they make a new spam.
  • Theory 1: Hormel
    Theory 2: A mommy SPAM and a daddy SPAM, well...um...are you old enough to hear this?
    Theory 3: Giving out a real email address, or replying to SPAM.

    Sorry, that's all I can think of for now.
  • Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf (aka Baghdad Bob). just hired by slashdot

    "THIS STORY IS NOT A DUPE! IT IS NOT A TRIPE! IT IS ORIGINAL AND YOU WILL READ IT YOU FILTHY INFIDELS!!!

    I am still alive!!

  • Html encoding doesn't solve the problem (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Tired_Blood ( 582679 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @10:10AM (#5781176)
    This battle for email addresses will 'never' end. In order to use an email address, you need to publicize its existence. There lies the weakness that spammers exploit.

    Even the HTML encoding of addresses can not stand up to this exploitation. When scouring a website for addresses, everyone knows you look for all occurrances of '@' in the source. Encoding it with HTML merely substitutes one search character with the short string '&#064 ;'.

    Probably the best defense is to randomly insert undisplayed '@'s and '&#064 ;'s all over the place within a webpage. That way, there would be too many false positives for them to work out. People are lazy and won't bother with such garbage. The irony of this would be that spammers would need to use anti-anti spamming filters. Then we'd need anti-anti-anti filters, etc.

    Like I said, as long as addresses are advertised, this battle will 'never' end.

  • Millions of spam (Score:5, Funny)

    by Joe the Lesser ( 533425 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @10:16AM (#5781223) Homepage Journal
    Spam comes in a can,
    It was put there by a man,
    In factory downtown.

    And if I had my little way,
    I'd get spammed every day!...

  • I wondered the same thing (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jeroen94704 ( 542819 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @10:22AM (#5781266)
    I've been creating one-off email addresses for pretty much anything that requires an email address for almost a year now. At this moment, I have almost a hundred email addresses made specifically for anything ranging from Slashdot to job-sites to mailinglists. So far, the only addresses that generated any spam at all have been de one I used for Google Groups (well, DUH) and one that was published on a website in plain HTML. All the other ones, so far, have not generated a _single_ spam email. All in all, it seems like the companies and websites that require you to give them your email really do keep it confidential.
  • uh, from /. of course.....

  • Effect of Spam (Score:5, Funny)

    by rodney dill ( 631059 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @10:25AM (#5781302) Journal
    Just remember, SPAM doesn't kill people

    People who get spammed, kill people.
  • Increase your browser history size. Now... Before clicking "submit" look at the little linkies in your article. Purple linkies = BAD. Blue linkies = GOOD. ;-)
    • Dangit..."Increase your browser history size" - now that sounds like a piece of spam right there.

      I know I'll probably get modded to heck for this, but what the heck...

    • Re:Advice for Taco... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by 1u3hr ( 530656 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @11:57AM (#5782131)
      Purple linkies = BAD. Blue linkies = GOOD. ;-)

      except that the other articles were posted by Cowboy Neal and Michael, respectively.

      In any case, part of the problem is that in reading the submissions they will undoubtedly see the same story many times, so a link would show as visited if you'd scanned through a bunch of those, published or not. The same goes for just trusting your memory, there must be a serious deja-vu problm. But there's no fucking excuse at all for such unprofessionalism. Just type "spam" into the search box on the Slashdot front page and you see the earlier stories (along with both "AOL sues spammers" of a few days ago). More specifically, typing in "cdt.org" shows all three dupes at the top of the list.

      I can't think of any explanation except serious drug abuse in the workplace.


  • Home of SPAM [hormel.com]

  • To find out which sites actually sell your mail adress, fill in the name of the site (or a name that is obvious enough to know on which site you filled it in) in the real name part of the form.
    When you get mail adressed to Mr./Ms. Real Player then you know who is doing what with your e-mail, so far i received quite some e-mail this way, apperantly the sites that actually state promises about not sellign addresses seem to be doing just the opposite. More so than sites which don't state promises.

  • Short addresses (Score:5, Funny)

    by Mikey-San ( 582838 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @10:53AM (#5781539) Homepage Journal
    * Short e-mail addresses are easy to guess, and may receive more spam.

    For further information, please contact Ari Schwartz at the Center for Democracy & Technology, 202-637-9800, ari@cdt.org.

    Did anyone else find that rather funny?

  • Let's make spammers spam each other (Score:5, Informative)

    by DocSnyder ( 10755 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @10:55AM (#5781557)
    The vast majority of the spam we received -- over 97% of it -- was delivered to addresses that had been posted on the public Web.

    So let's beat them with their own weapons. Sugarplum [devin.com] is a WWW spambot poisoner feeding them with lots of email addresses which are faked, spam traps or addresses of known spammers and spamfriendly people - collected from spam emails or experience with spamfriendly ISPs. As a motivation, a lot of spamfriendly institutions don't see the problem "spam" as serious until they get a really high dosis of unwanted email per day.

    My Sugarplum installation gets scanned really often. At the moment, the French superspammer Artmarket is coming back almost every day, harvesting my Sugarplum site and dumping about 100 spams each time into my spam trap box. My ratio between spam trap and spammer is 1:50, so each time Artmarket will spam about 5000 spammers.

    Some German dialer operators who had a really big spam problem half a year ago are actually trying to hire people to fight against spam they are getting on their own - no wonder, their domains were about the first to be spambaited massively in Usenet newsgroups and on WWW sites. Some 419 scam gangs who spamvertise their email addresses have to change them about once a month, as they will get flooded with "counterspam", and what is worse, they rely on the availability of their email addresses to get replies from their victims - that's why they spam.

  • Here is my mirror [emdx.org] in case of extreme slashdotting.
  • Heh...

    Before the days when SPAM was a big problem, my Mom already didn't like getting physical "junk mail" through the USPS. She knew different organizations were selling and trading her address, but she decided to track it to see who was passing what info. She started using false middle initials when she subscribed to magazines, bought things from catalogs, etc.
    So when she subscribed to Cosmopolitan (I know, but it was the 70s and she's a woman. What can you do?), she used the name "June C Cleaver"
  • I know I have seen something like this but does anyone know if work has been done on a spam trap that displays random bogus addresses for the crawlers (web component) to reap while making a blacklist of servers (SMTP server component) that actually mail to these bogus addresses?
  • .. on Slashdot. I made a throw-away address and set it to my profile here. Then, I disabled the 'Spam Armor Plating'. Sure enough, within a couple of posts I had unsolicited mail coming in.

    The bizarre thing was that one of the messages I got was for a volunteer FireFighter meeting in California. I'm in Oregon. Heh.

    I want email to work like ICQ. I want to have an authorization list. When somebody contacts me, they have to request permission first. Right now, I'm manually doing that.

  • How I solved my spam problem (Score:5, Informative)

    by Luveno ( 575425 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @11:42AM (#5781978)
    • I registered my own domain.
    • I signed up for ZoneEdit DNS service that has transparent MX records for email (*@mydomain.com forwards to MyRealAddy@MyISP.com).
    • I use a new address for everything I do on the web (amazon@mydomain.com for Amazon.com, paypal@mydomain.com for Paypal, etc). They all get forwarded to me anyway.
    • When I get a spam problem, I make an entry at ZoneEdit to forward the spammed addy to the ether (this@wont.work). As a bonus, I can tell who leaked my addy.

    Works for me, anyhow.
    • The problem with this method is that bulk spammers also send to all possible names@domain.com hoping to get a few through.

      I use a similar method, but without the wildcard address. I specifically add the address(s) to the forward list [yes, zoneedit also lets you do that]... Just be sure to be rfc compliant... {postmaster, abuse, etc to forward to your ISP box as well} :-)

  • How do spammers find open relays and open proxies? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by minas-beede ( 561803 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @12:09PM (#5782221)
    If you are concerned (angry, assigning blame, whatever) about spam through open relays and open proxies you might like to know how they find the systems to abuse. If you are concerned and know how they do it you could do something to make it harder for them.

  • What spam? (Score:3, Informative)

    by chrisatslashdot ( 221127 ) <spamforchris@yahoo. c o m> on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @01:22PM (#5782887)
    Several years ago I set up a spam account, spamforchris@yahoo.com. Everytime that I register for a web site, register software, subscribe to a newsletter, etc, I use the spam account. And when I give a friend or family member my personal email adress, I ask that they do not include me in their chain-emails. I have had less than 20 spam messages in any of my real email accounts since college.

    Moral: If you are careless with your email adress, expect spam.

  • E-Cloaker for HTML-encoded addresses (Score:3, Informative)

    by aquarian ( 134728 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @02:39PM (#5783527)
    So according to the article, HTML-encoding the email addresses on your web pages can keep them from being harvested by spammers. E-Cloaker [codefoot.com] is a nice little free utility to do this for you.

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