Internet Is Losing Ground in Battle Against Spam

NY Times ^ | April 22, 2003 | SAUL HANSELL

[Johnny Gage]

Can anyone track down contact information for these two pipsqueeks.

Maybe we can turn the tables on them like people did to Alan Ralsky.

[zeugma]

I already do my own whitehat filtering. It has made a big difference to my inbox clutter. I almost never have spam in my inbox, though I do have to occasionally do a quick look at my spam folder to see if someone I haven't added to my filters yet has sent me email.

One interesting thing about manual whitehat filtering is that you get a good feel for how many people/orgs you are actually communicating with. I get so much spam now that it was almost impossible to deal with my inbox in an efficient manner prior to implementing a whitehat list. This is the down side of having the same email address for 6+ years.

[Obi-Wandreas]

There's another way they do it. By assigning a unique url for the images for each email they send (basically putting a lot of copies on their server with slightly different addys), they can know simply by which images are accessed which individual emails were read, and therefore which addys are real. At least, this is what I've heard from some on the anti-spam front.

Of course, I find email in any format other than plain text to be obnoxious in general, and an ugly waste of perfectly good bandwidth. (And don't even get me started on how AOL encodes it's emails......)

Thanks for the advice on anonymous ftp!

[Sender]

"Ms. Sachs says her e-mail blitzes are not spam because she sends them only to lists of people who have agreed to receive marketing offers over the Internet."

Not true, you spam villains. I hereby certify that I have never agreed to receive marketing offers over the Internet. Spam is not what America stands for, spam is obnoxious and vile and someday we will come up with a reply weapon that will seek out and damage these creeps. I had to change ISP's because I was getting over 50 spams a day for porn, diet pills and get-rich-quick scams. I dreaded getting my mail because it took so long to download and delete this crap.

[zeugma]

The Center for Democracy & Technology conducted a study about spam. Covers what attracts it and how to avoid it. Published last month. Pretty good read.

[TechJunkYard]

I use sendmail at home to post outgoing mail.

It's easy to redirect mail bound for Earthlink/AOL through your ISP's server, using these rules in the "mailertable" file.

aol.com esmtp:your.isp.smtp.server
earthlink.net esmtp:your.isp.smtp.server

They'll accept mail from your ISP every time.

For RoadRunner, the only answer is to tighten up your server and/or firewall them out.

[B Knotts]

If you append a "?email=blah@somewhere.com" to the end of every URL in the email, then, yes, you will know which email addresses are good.

[TechJunkYard]

The POP protocol was fine back in the day, but it doesn't quite satisfy anymore. It is going to be hard to replace though...

I agree with you to an extent. Since POP and IMAP are storage and retrieval mechanisms, I think what's needed is a major redesign of SMTP itself.

Spam and e-mail virii weren't a problem back in the day; as uses for e-mail have evolved over the years, so must the tools. If we can limit what gets injected and transported through the network to begin with, there will be less crap that the users need to filter out.

[TechJunkYard]

Oh yeah, forgot about that trick. And it's real easy to automate.

[Revolting cat!]

I said on another thread last night I'd post a piece of spam I recently received advertising spam services.
Since this is the live thread I am posting it here:

DOES EMAIL ADVERTISING WORK?

It just did.

Email advertising is the most effective method of marketing
 your product. No guess work about how many people will see
 your ad. They all will. Your ad delivered directly into
the inbox thousands, even millions of people.
 
We can help you advertise your service or product from as ow as $399.

We can send your ad to up to 55 million email users. 
250,000 - $499 *Special $399
500,000 - $649 *Special $499 
1 million - $999 *2 million for $1000 
3 million - $1999 *Special $1499 
10 million - $4999 *Special $3499
Specials end on Friday at 1 pm Pacific.
 
ATTENTION NETWORK MARKETERS:

Let us help you generate biz op leads. We can help you
 generate quality leads. When the sales rep calls you ask for details.
Want your own opt in list? We are selling a double opt-in
 list of 185,000 people who have opted in and are known to
 have purchased through direct email marketing. We are only
 selling this list to 10 people for the very low cost of $3500. Won't last.

Note: This is national advertising only. We cannot target
or segment in anyway.

To learn more about email advertising, print this form and fax back to:
(702) 447-5895 and a representative will contact you shortly.
Name:_______________________ Telephone:(_____)_____-_________
Fax #(_____)_____-__________ Email address:____________________
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To be removed please send an email to unlist20031@inbox.lv
Please note this is the only way to be removed. 
Removal request via fax or telephone will NOT be honored.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

esutrust jdgfd yi  bzcnbccn

By the way, this string, variations of which you see on most spam,
and which I changed to protect the innocent, identifies the spam batch, or what?
esutrust jdgfd yi bzcnbccn

[Revolting cat!]

Here's another recent one:

Bring your business back to life with Email Marketing

Ever wonder why you get all those email ads in your inbox?
Is it because people just love wasting their time or is it 
because it really works? You're reading this email
which will likely result in a sale for us. Don't you think 
your business could benefit from this service too?
Just imagine if this were your ad. 
The law of averages guarantees that you have to sell something significant 
out of millions of email ads. Also, we get past spam filters
because we can send 1 million emails in a space of 
only 3 hours! Who else can do that?

Guaranteed results or we'll run your ad again free.

Call us today 1-831-302-6700 or email us by clicking on this

aZXroQuF

(Again, I change the string at the bottom.) 'clicking on this' opens up your mailer with the following address: harrisford@levski.com

[zeugma]

Thanks. I'll see about setting that up.

Your other point about he SMTP protocol is well taken. Whenever I look at RFCs, I always think of the IP by Carrier Pidgeon RFC, and the fellows who managed to send a successful ping by it.

[zeugma]

FYI, I couldn't get anything using several everse phone number lookups off the numbers in the spam you posted

[Hacksaw]

For a second, I thought the title was "Internet Is Losing Battle Ground Against SPERM"

Lets you know what spam I have been getting!

[B Knotts]

I believe the random characters are to avoid detection by things like razor, which compare an email against checksums of known spams.

[BearCub]

The solution is extremely simple:

Every commercial e-mail can be traced to its origin - it's whoever the thing is advertising stuff for. Who cares who sent it. In most cases it's easy enough to find out who they are - just go to their web site. Sometimes you'd have to call a number and let them call you back or send information via postal mail. But whatever - it can be done.

So enact legislation containing:

(1) a rebuttable presumption that e-mail advertising a product/service was sent by the person offering that product/service,
(2) a requirement that EVERY commercial e-mail begin its subject line with the characters 'ADV:',
(3) a national opt-out list paid for by e-mail advertisers,
(4) a requirement that e-mail advertisers check the opt-out list before sending mail,
(5) a presumption that: if an e-mail advertiser sends mail to someone who was on the opt-out list when the e-mail was sent, the advertiser willfully disregarded the list,
(6) a requirement that commercial e-mailers take out a bond and file it with their home state - the bond in favor of anyone who brings a successful action for spamming,
(7) recovery of either actual damages -or- statutory damages (i.e., no need to show actual damage) of $1000 per violation of #2 and $5000 per violation of #4, plus costs and attorney's fees,
(8) criminal penalties that include jail time for failing to do #6.

With such legislation in place, consumers could sue spammers into oblivion - or into jail.

[Pagey]

People who send vast amounts of B.S. E-Mails, therefore intentionally using up the earths precious bandwidth,(and wasting my time) are heinous individuals, who should lose their civil rights and should be drawn and quartered on Cable TV.

[TechJunkYard]

Okay, lets take a look at 4 spams that my spambox collected today after I cleared it last night.

• This one originates from 65.240.228.80 which block (65.240.228.0/22) is owned by VNOC Space of Pembroke Pines, FL. Appears to advertise a web site in Taiwan (www.mamababy.com.tw) with a bunch of baby pictures on it. That IP (61.221.39.155) is owned by HINET in Taiwan, and assigned to Green Jie Technology in Taipei.
• Here's one from 210.58.27.94 which is owned by ETWebs Taiwan, a broadband ISP. Contains an attachment with a .mht extension. No clue about the content, using an asian character set.
• This one from 61.216.75.62 hosted by HINET and assigned to "Chunghwa Telecom Data communication Business Group" in Taipei. It's a porn spam, with multiple links to www.latinaskins.com (65.240.228.97) hosted by (surprise!) VNOC Space in Florida.
• And finally one from CDW's server (12.32.90.120) in a block owned by AT&T and assigned to CDW. They're under the impression that we've got a business relationship because I orgered ONE thing from them years ago.

So we have a spam/porn operator in Florida that we could go after, but that's about it. Taiwan wouldn't be subject to US law, and CDW has a loophole. And, of course, these "businesses" are probably just hosting companies; whomever pays them for their services is probably hidden behind a maze of NDAs and contracts and front companies intended to obscure their ownership.

Soooo... tell me again how we're gonna do this?

[tiamat]

Stop Legal Plunder wrote:

Perhaps the best spam filter on the market is the one included with Apple's free Mail client for MacOSX. It's superb and constantly improves in spam recognition.

Combine that with Apple's new Safari browser--which blocks pop-ups and is compact and elegant and faster than IE--and the Mac platform's near-absence of viruses and you have hassle-free Internet surfing and communications.

************************

I agree. I've been using both the Mail and Safari for about six weeks now and love both of them.

Tia

You can have my Mac when you pry the mouse out of my cold dead fingers!

[Oztrich Boy]

actually i'm going to defend yahoo.

I use it as my public address and it's been pretty spam-free. Now hotmail, OTH. I have *never* given out that adress and I get more spam per hour than I've gotten in a yahoo year.

Every time I go to hotmail it's "Now who is Jennifer_Anderson and why is she telling me that she wants to cheat on her husband?"

Actually I don't ask. Global delete of all mesages good.