Is the net about to choke to death?

The Sunday Times ^ | May 4, 2003 | Martin Wroe

[Neenah]

I DON'T EVEN HAVE A PENIS !!!

[lizma]

he thinks twice about his two young children using the family computer. “Some of the material is sickening.

My 8 yo daughter just started a few weeks ago getting porno spam. The only websites she has given her email address to was Harry Potter and Barbie.com. Makes you sick.

I use two address, one for family and friends, one to order stuff. In three years I've never recieved ANY spam on my personnal address, ordering address is a different story.

My mail domain is only 5 people and not worth targeting.

The only spam I get is from the companies I've given my address to and then they appear to sell it.

[69ConvertibleFirebird]

...the number of e-mails we don’t want to receive will overtake the number we do.

I think they are a little late with the prediction. I get about 75 SPAM e-mails at work over the weekend and about 25 per work way. It costs the business money. Plus I'm tired of "Your Credit Debt," "Be 4 Inches Larger," and "Massive Hooters" e-mails showing up at work. The spammers have everyone at work's e-mail addresses so we all get the crap. The Internet really does need some kind of e-mail authentication method, blocking SPAM.

[69ConvertibleFirebird]

I just don't see why finding these spammers should be so difficult, I suppose.

I trace the origin of the IP address of SPAM that I get every once in a while. It is usually from the Carribean, Brazil, or somewhere in Asia. Good luck getting companies, in countries that could care less, to come clean.

[TaRaRaBoomDeAyGoreLostToday!]

Congratulations!!! You Are the 16,000,000 Person To Say This, You Won a Free, Quick, Trip to The Bahamas!!!

HERE IS YOUR TRIP, YOU HAVE ALREADY LANDED, YOU-ARE-THERE!!!

[69ConvertibleFirebird]

Do these people really make any $$ from this stuff??!!

I've gotten SPAM telling me the reats for sending SPAM (a company trying to get more SPAM sending business). It was something like $250 for one illion e-mails. I'm guessing that the cover the $150. THey only need a few responses out of millions.

I also went to the web site of a SPAM advertisement (for anti-virus software) and started poking around. I found the directory with a list of their buyers. It was relatively long. About 200. So, yes, SPAMers make money. I refuse to buy anything from a SPAM ad. It's a shame a few in a million buy.

[tortoise]

I've gotten SPAM telling me the reats for sending SPAM (a company trying to get more SPAM sending business). It was something like $250 for one illion e-mails. I'm guessing that the cover the $150.

You'll probably be interested to know that the cost of sending out one million emails, at retail transit prices, is less than a buck. Yep, you heard that correctly: sending a million emails costs under a dollar.

The spammers usually work in cartels of a half-dozen to a dozen spammers with their own specialties, In my experience, the average cartel is generating an honest gigabit/s of email at any one time, multi-homed across multiple backbone providers. To put it another way, one of these cartels is constantly sending enough email to saturate 1,000 T-1 circuits (my math isn't bad, you lose about a third of your effective bandwidth on T-1 circuits due to protocol overhead).

I think people underestimate the scope of these spammer cartels. These guys have bandwidth that is on par with the biggest corporate Internet sites. And they don't make chump change either. A cartel can pull in a couple million a year (net!), split among a several guys. And that is why spam is bad and only gets worse, and the cost of doing business is getting cheaper with time as well.

[stainlessbanner]

Spamassassin is pretty good, but I have been using a new one called QURB - it relies on "whitelists" of senders you communicate with. I periodically have to go thru a junk folder, but at least it's not so intrusive.

BTW: McAffee (SpamKiller) bought the company that marketed SpamAssassin, so it may be end of life pretty soon.

[Neenah]

This is HUGH are you SERIES ??

[stainlessbanner]

See post 68. I had the same problem as you - it's a "hush" issue at work. Everyone hates it, but nobody wants to discuss it. I never get embarassing emails in my inbox now.

[TaRaRaBoomDeAyGoreLostToday!]

Yes, scroll back up to your trip in post 65. Do you see the tall grass by the plane? There is a small silver box hidden go find it and you will have the suite key for your King State Room.

[Brad’s Gramma]

Use a modern web browser and you need never see a popup again.

Such as?

[philetus]

Here you go Dave

9) Anti-Spam Bayesian "PopFile" For Outlook

We've discussed "PopFile" several times before (
http://www.google.com/search?as_q=popfile&as_sitesearch=langa.com) ---
it's an antispam tool based on intelligent, statistical analysis of
email rather than crude, brute force black lists and such.

Frequent contributor Robert Perry ( http://favoriteshomepage.com )
writes of a PopFile-related development:

Hi Fred, I've been using PopFile for several months now, and
it's the best anti-spam tool I've come across to date. The
Bayesian approach is definitely the way to go.
My only gripe with PopFile has been it's lack of integration
with Microsoft Outlook and the inconvenience of having to
start two programs to get my e-mail. Well, my problem has been
solved by A. Ghandhi with his elegant and free Outlook
component Outclass. Here's the author's description of
Outclass:

"Outclass Mail Classification for Outlook with POPFile:
Outclass provides POPFile's functionality natively to Outlook.
What does this mean? It means that you can use the power of
POPFile to classify any email you receive using Microsoft
Outlook. This includes IMAP-based email and Exchange-based
email as well as any other types that may be supported via
Office add-ins (theoretically, anyway). Outclass has been
tested with Outlook 2000 and Outlook 2002 using Exchange,
POP3, and IMAP mail, on Windows 2000 and Windows XP and with
POPFile v0.18.1. Outclass can manually handle Hotmail accounts
in Outlook 2002, but does not automatically classify Hotmail
email at this time."

By the way, I've tested Outclass in Windows 98 with Outlook
2000, and it works great! Here's the website:
http://www.vargonsoft.com/Outclass/

Sincerely, Robert Perry

Thanks, Robert!
Click to email this item to a friend
http://www.langa.com/sendit2.htm

[philetus]

Here you go Mike. FREE


POW! http://www.analogx.com/files/powi.exe) v1.58 214k





With all the cool things about the web (like my website), there's an even greater amount of really lame things, like those popup advertisements from sites like GeoCities and Tripod. After a late night of closing those damn windows, I couldn't take it any more, and AnalogX POW! was born! A simple utility, just run POW! while browsing on the net, and when one of those nasty popups appears, POW! will automatically close it for you... It's that easy! And that's not all... You can configure POW! to close any new popups that you run across, so if it doesn't close them already, you can easily add/remove them at any time. This is an absolute must for anyone who spends any reasonable (or unreasonable) amount of time surfing the web.


Version Changes

1.58 Added pause/unpause feature
1.57 Added support for NeoPlanet browser
1.55 Expanded pattern matching to support wildcards
1.50 Added counter for total number of windows closed
1.41 Added ability to specify custom window type
1.26 Fixed problem with window list under NT5
1.25 Tolerance feature expanded to support Netscape
1.20 Tolerance feature for IE5-varients
1.13 Added 'import' feature to Add/Remove
1.00 Initial Release

[1FreeAmerican]

This is AL GORE'S FAULT!! After all- he invented the internet!!

[Richard Kimball]

Bill Gates had a suggestion in his book, The Road Ahead: that we charge people for the privilege of e-mailing us. Basically, if someone wanted to send you e-mail, they would have to pay about a dime to you before your account would accept it.

If I understand Bill Gates, what he actually wants is someone to pay MICROSOFT 10 cents for sending an email. I don't blame him, if I was smart enough, I'd do it.

[Richard Kimball]

Have I just got a filthy mind or is the bottom right illustration really suggestive? Not that there's anything wrong with that.

[Lester Moore]

Really? You must be proud of being a presumptuous pompous ass.

I wonder why you responded with such venom? Are you thinking some vague insult was intended?

[snopercod]

A clear case of PWI.

[Landru]

"Go to Drudgereport and then click on View in your IE menu (assuming that you're using IE6) and then select Privacy Report. You will see a list of cookies that Drudge uses. Right click on each one and select 'always reject cookies from this site.'
That should end Drudge's annoying popup ads for you."

Excellent!

...thanks x 1,000,000.