Spammers, you're going to jail!

The BBQ Pit
21

Read_Neck, while your points are stated in a somewhat inflammatory way, I concede that some of them are valid. I am mostly Spam free, and it is because I am very aggressive about managing that aspect of my communication with the outside world (I also tend to not get much telemarketing calls or junk mail).

However, I do understand why folks want to get something done about it. When you consider the vast amount of resources that Spammers waste, the mind boggles. Those servers could be put to much better use. The average person does not want to waste time downloading special utilities, managing several email accounts or other covert ops just to get by on line. They are going to seek regulation.

And really, I think that your anger in misplaced. It is true that once we get the government in the business of regulating the Internet that the very real danger of it becoming more restricted exists. But really, we have tried to be nice about it. We tried opting out (until we discovered that this just tags our address as live and opens the floodgates wider), we tried utilities (until we discovered that we keep having to upgrade them to stay ahead of the curve) and so forth.

So, yeah, send the fuckers to jail and take their money.

22

This is a perfect analogy, best I’ve ever seen. Well done!

Read_Neck, you suck. There’s different kinds of freedom, and most sane people value freedom from spam above the freedom to send it.

23

Thanks,I needed that.

The problem with the bandwidth is indeed a valid concern. The “Chicken Little” answer to any problem just grates on my last nerve. I’ll go away and let the whining continue unabated.

24

I would say 99% of the time it’s painfully obvious that it’s spam. Do any of your friends send you emails titled “That information you requested”?

As far as spam and junk mail, some idiots must be reponding to it, lest it wouldn’t be done. Perhaps if we sent our vitriol towards said stupid fucks, something might change…

25

If anyone cares, I solved my SPAM problem by opening a new address with Hotmail and using the allow only feature- this only allows through messages from Hotmail and from people I specifically put on my allow list. I have yet to get a single solitary SPAM at that address.

What gets me is the porn spam. I shudder to think that my neices get the kind of stuff that shows up unsolicited in my public mailbox- complete with moving graphics, no less (and this is using a Yahoo spam filter)

26

Why is Virginia’s new law not a restriction on interstate trade?

27

Spam isn’t trade, it’s advertising - and often for illegal products, at that.

28

I was wondering that myself.

29

I get spam because I’ve had the same email address for over ten years. I used it, for example, in Usenet posts before spam was a major concern, and since my posts are archived for all eternity it’s quite easy for spammers to harvest my address and send junk mail to me.

I filter my spam, and it’s quite effective. I get one or two a day that sneak through, not enough to worry about. I redirect the rest of them to a specific folder and go through that one every couple of days, deleteing as I go.

I keep a Yahoo account for use online, knowing that it will get spam. I don’t care. I don’t really even bother to filter it. I just accept it.

I work in IT and while I’m not personally involved in spam filtering I can attest to the fact that it is a big concern and colossal waste of space, bandwidth, and labor at my organization.

But I am hesitant to get the government involved. Like Read_Neck, I am very concerned about freedom with regards to the internet - any restriction, to me, is one too many. Plus, like laws against guns and illegal drugs, I doubt they will solve anything - as long as there is money to be made, greed will supercede laws.

Unlike Read_Neck, I am not a belligerient asshole who mocks people who may be less computer literate than myself or those who don’t consider their choice of an operating system to be a key element of their lives.

You had to mention that you’re a Linux user, huh? Just when I thought the stereotype of the aggressive pro-Linux asshole who mocked the Windows-using “sqares” was dying out, you’ve gone and proven me wrong. Way to go, fucker.

30

No, but my friends often send messages titled “Hey, what’s up?” or with no subject header, and if I don’t happen to recognize the email address I’m likely to delete it as SPAM. I have one guy who will not read emails unless there’s the name of a specific bar in the subject header. Why should he have to deal with that and why should the people who he wants to hear from have to deal with that?

I don’t care if someone wants to buy Viagra online or look at teenage monkey munchers or whatever else. But I do mind it very much when I have to delete out dozens of shits to get to the real email that I actually want to get. And I damn well expect that if I take the trouble to tell someone I don’t want their shit that they stop sending it to me and don’t sell the address to anyone else. Fuck them, fuck their business and let them rot penniless in prison if they break this law.

Of course it will be totally unenforceable because the fucking spammers are all based overseas beyond the reach of VA law enforcement. No, the only way SPAM is ever going to be stopped is if the people who buy server space in bulk tell the people who own the servers that they will not buy their server space if they allow spammers to take up residence. If no legitimate business will share server space with a spammer then SPAM would become completely blockable as I understand blocking technology. And once again, fuck spammers and let 'em rot.

31

Once upon a time I was “ADHunter@aol.com”. I was inundated with so much spam that I created a new AOL screen name, abandoned the other, and for years I was “AHunter3@aol.com”. Right around the same time, I got a regular ISP and my email address there was “ahunter@earthlink.net”. Within a couple of years, I had changed the settings on the AOL account so only specifically itemized senders could send me mail, and I had contacted my ISP and obtained a second email address, “ahunter3@earthlink.net”, and abandoned the previous one – because of spam.

For years I reliably forwarding the offending email to postmaster@spammerdomain.com and abuse@spammerdomain.com every time it came in. But spammers increasingly had their own domains and/or faked the email headers, not to mention creating new accounts automatically.

I was using Netscape Navigator’s built-in email to handle my email needs and when “ahunter3@earthlink.net” started getting inundated with spam I got tired of running and asked around and based on what I was told I switched to Eudora and started setting up spam filters.

I get perhaps 400 pieces of spam mail daily, 99.5% of which is caught and trashed by my filters. I hate it with a passion and I’d love to see an effective crackdown against spam.

I’d like to see a fine assessed on a per-bit basis that escalated exponentially with every repeat offense.

32

Get an email client (I use Eudora) with a preview feature, that will take the surprise out of opening emails.

**

You’ll have better luck being careful with your address. I rarely get spam, most likely because I don’t fill out online forms and such, unless it’s absolutely neccessary.

**

Or you could blame the sheeple buying the x-10 camera and other things. I hate spam just as much as the next guy, but there is obviously a market for it, otherwise they would find a different yet equally annoying method to shill their crap off on us. That said I agree with the overall gist of your post, and they spammers should have their balls cut off.

33

Whoops, I hit submit 'stead of preview.

Oh well.

34

I can’t remember where I read this, but I recall seeing something about a proposal to offer a bounty for tracking down spammers? I.e. some percentage of the fine goes to the person that tracked down the spammer, the rest goes to “The Man” ?

35

Last night, I had a nightmare about pop-up spam windows. Couldn’t close them for anything. Eventually I turned off the computer but they just kept coming! I woke up in a sweat.

I am, unfortunately, not joking.

36

Mr Wolf showed me a simple way to filter spam with Eudora.

Create a filter for incoming mail - header is “From:” and option is “doesn’t intersect with address book”

Set it to go to a spam trap box (or the trash). Put it at the END of your filter list.

All of your spam will go there, and if someone inadvertently winds up in the spam trap, add them to your address book. Otherwise, delete the contents of the spam trap.

On another note, I was entertained as hell the other day to get an email from myself. Different address, but my name.

37

I will dissent against some of the amateur netadmins in here offering their opinions about spam… Read_neck, especially. There are many kinds of UCE (unsolicited commercial email) you just can’t avoid, filtering software or not. I know this, because I’ve worked for commercial ISP’s in the past, writing code to help get rid of the crap.

I use a two-pass filtering method for my mailboxes, including a) active spamassasin parsing, and b) Bayesian filtering. I still get 8-15 spams a day, in with the 15 or so ‘real’ emails. Every day, though, my filters catch about 250 spams.

So, how do these people have my address? Simple, I own multiple domain names, and have since 1994 or '95, and my valid email address of registry has been in the public WHOIS databases for nine years. Every spammer on the planet has me in their mailing lists, and likely will, for years.

I also use white lists, black lists, and more… and still I get spam, and not only do I work with technology for a living, I’ve modified the spam catchers I use to work better for my particular needs.

The real problem, however, is the bandwidth and computing time required to filter ou spam. For every message I get, I have to make two outbound network connections, for up to 2-3k of data, to properly block spam by way of the active filtering. Add to that the size of the mail itself, and you’re talking about maybe a couple of megs day of added network traffic. Add to that the fact that the mailserver has to process all of those filter recipes every time mail comes in (about 2 secs of process time each, plus disk access for writing out queue files, mailbox files, logs, et alia), and you can very easily see how anyone not hosting their own mail resources is getting machines absolutely slammed by UCE.

One hint in managing spam… you might try is to send yourself an email with an extended address, ie. if your email is fred@somewhere.com, try fred+testing@somewhere.com. If the email still gets to you, congratulations, your mail server handles extended addresses as defined in the RFC’s. You can use addresses like fred+ebay@somewhere.com, fred+amazon@somewhere.com, and the like when you have to enter an email address on a vendor’s web page.

This makes it much easier to find out who is selling your email address, and using it for spamming… for most people, at least. Plus, if you start getting spam on a particular extended address, you can write a filter to block that extended address. At this time, spammers don’t seem to be stripping out the extended address info.

In any case, accusing the afflicted of being the cause of their own spam is just silly, not to mention just plain rude. Spammers harvest everything from newsgroups, to this message board, to X.500 directory services in order to get email addresses. Beyond that, many of them randomly try common first name + last inital, first initial + last name addresses plus the names of MX hosts as listed in DNS servers to get their spam out.

One other note: Computers are tools, not religions, and it’s not only perfectly acceptable that people use tools with only a modicum of knowledge about them, but it’s to be expected. I certainly don’t see anyone shouting at people to quit driving until they know how to rebuild an engine.

Cheers,

38

  1. You mean “spam”, not “SPAM”. Capitalized, the word refers to a product from Hormel that is, ostensibly, “luncheon meat”.

  2. You mean “you’re”, not “your”. Normally, I pay attention to the point of a post and not the spelling and grammar. However, when there appears to be a paucity of point, I am left with few options.

  3. You do not own the Internet. The Internet is not, and never was, an idyllic Eden needing to be protected from being spoiled. It began as a government project. It has always run off of infrastructure owned by big business and the government. It used to be, and largely still is, closed off from those not fortunate enough to own a computer. It has used and will continue to use standards and methods which we, not being members of standards committees, have no say in or control over.

It is a new form of communication, nothing more, nothing less. Just as there are rules and laws regarding other forms of communication (which is a good thing), there should be rules and laws regarding the Internet.

39

Damn Zenham–there you go being all logical and stuff. :wink:

40

Right. So, as per this responsibility, I am in favor of legislation that wouldn’t require me to “walk on eggshells”, so to speak, with regards to the Internet.

In other words… the average user should have just as many teeth to bite the spammers back. If they can use automated programs to harvest E-mail addresses, I can have their asses thrown in jail for sending me “BIG TIT FAT COCK BARNYARD SEX BARELY LEGAL” E-mails.

Tell me how that’s unfair. Go ahead. Feel free to expound as to why I, someone who is responsible for my actions, can’t take control over the content that I am exposed to.