Spam Fighters Losing Ground

September 21, 2006 (IDG News Service) -- Computer security analysts who fight spam face the same thankless task as goalkeepers: They don't get much credit for the unsolicited e-mail they stop, only demerits for the ones that get through.

But those few messages that wriggle past increasingly sophisticated filters constitute the greatest threats on the Internet.

The messages range from relatively harmless pitches for human growth hormones to ones with malicious code attached that could steal passwords or documents from a machine.

The sheer volume of spam still threatens to bring the Internet to a crisis point. Up to 90% of all e-mail traffic is spam, a figure that has crept upward in recent years. The forecast isn't good, either.

"We see spam just going up to the point where Internet servers start having difficulty," said Steven Linford, chief executive officer of Spamhaus, a London nonprofit organization that generates a list used by technology companies and organizations running e-mail servers to block spam.

"Spam will tend to increase to where it will be 99 percent of all e-mail on the Internet," he said. "At that point, governments will start to take notice."

"Every day I have 12-45 new spams, almost all with no text. I guess the spammers are simply looking for good email addresses."

That's where they get you. If you respond they know they have a good address and then your goose is really cocked.

There is not a day goes by that I don't get a half dozen of them with all these crazy fonts; different colors and all, saying exactly the same thing. They are trying to sell Viagra, low interest rates on my home, etc. It's all a bunch of hooey. I delete them all. I once responded and then I had a bunch of lenders calling me to refinance my home. That taught me to be more careful.

But and this is a big but. Watch out for that phishing. That will really put you into the soup. I spend a lot of time searching (and buying) on ebay. A good tip is to change your password often and also change your paypal password often too. They should not be the same. And NEVER, NEVER, NEVER reply to an e-mail from ebay. Go to your ebay account and change it there. Never provide your sign-in and password in response to an e-mail. NEVER, NEVER, NEVER.

Anyway, I believe capital punishment is the appropriate punishment for these crooks. They should be hung in the town square and left there for the buzzards to pick their bones clean. They are lower than pond scum.

Your idea advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) 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
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) 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
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) 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
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) 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
( ) 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
( ) 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
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) 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.

I use Verizon DSL for my ISP but maintain my att.net account for e-mail. I get about 4-5 spams a week in my e-mail and about 10 in my bulk folder.

I maintain a dummy e-mail folder for sites where I have to register but don't want to give out my real e-mail address. I get very little spam in that account as well, about 30-40 a week but that is why it is there.

Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)

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