Spam, spam, spam, spam....

Oh dear.

I particularly like the bit at the end about the stealth spamming software that apparently gets past any firewall, any anti-spamming software and best of all, it comes from two dodgy blokes in Romania! Let's hope he gets totally screwed over on that one....

Greetings!

I like the fact that the writer hates him so badly that, while he promised not to make public the new address, the writer blandly says exactly how he (and anyone else) could find it, giving the county records where his real estate transaction is in the public record...

Anyone living in Oakland County that is feeling bored and sick of spam???

The bastard.

There was a DJ for a morning show that would always brag how no one could find his house because he lists his phone number with a fake name that only people who he knows would know what to look for. I found his address in one minute and sent it to him. He replied that at least his security cameras are working, then proceeded to mention on air how much the houses for local big name celebs cost...
Public records have always been available in the US, it's just that you used to have to go down to the courthouse and physically look them up before it all went online...

Ralsky has other ways to monitor the success of his campaigns. Buried in every e-mail he sends is a hidden code that sends back a message every time the e-mail is opened. About three-quarters of 1 percent of all the messages are opened by their recipients, he said. The rest are deleted.

Where by "hidden code" I assume he means "a header that certain popular email clients honor".

wHATEver.

No, most SPAM nowadays is sent as HTML, containing an image or two - simple statistical tracking can be done by looking at the http servers referral logs.

More advanced SPAM software, such as that used by large corporations for 'legitimate' SPAM include such niceties as a zero-sized transparent gif with a unique per-email name - the http server matches the request for the gif to the email address...hence validating the email address.

Here is the page for the department that will do property searches based on name. You have to request the search in person or through snail mail.

http://www.co.oakland.mi.us/clerkrod/division_committee/register_of_deeds/grantor_grantee_unit.html

Here's more general info.

http://www.co.oakland.mi.us/clerkrod/division_committee/register_of_deeds/fees.html

-Dylan

I have this crap on my home computer right now. I am sure my girlfriend must have picked it up somewhere ;-) I haven’t put too much effort tot remove yet, but I did try AD-aware ver 5.83. Unfortunately, It did not get rid of these random popup about fake university diplomas. Anybody have a suggestion on where to look?

http://www.mynetwatchman.com/kb/security/articles/popupspam/

Or he means "trojan horse application". He says that the "technology" doesn't require one to be using an email program.

Well, this was the hidden code to allow him to see if you read the email. If you're not using an email application, most people(*) aren't reading the email.

* - I speak POP, so telnet is a mail client, but not really a mail application

Oh, you mean your mail client does HTML? See, if it looks like HTML-only I discard it

Fortunately for the spammers, the ratio of html mail clients to non-html mail clients increases every year. Sure there's always going to be a percentage of people using clients that will not play their tracking games, but I doubt they really care about that, as there's enough non-savvy internet users for them to target, "Hey cool, I can send pretty backgrounds and colors in my emails!"
And many corporations' IT departments mandate html capable clients [cough]Outlook[/cough] anyway.

I can think of one possible solution to the spam mess... at least, a general concept, but not the "nuts and bolts" of how it would be implemented.

What if sending emails were no longer free? A monthly reverse sliding scale could be assessed, something like:

1-1000 monthly emails: free
1001-10,000 monthly emails: 1 cent apiece
10,001-100,000 monthly emails: 10 cents apiece
100,001+ monthly emails: $1 apiece.

Who would assess these fees, who would regulate them, collect them, etc. I leave as an excercise for the reader.

tanstaafl.

That's the root of the problem... Who would collect the fees?

Internet service providers pay for their connection to the main backbones and for their namespace registrations, but the traffic they place onto those backbones is not metered by "type" (i.e., email vs surfing).

So although a given ISP might choose to charge its customers your suggested scale, spammers would simply move to a spam-friendly ISP that did not charge per email.

He says, "But I have to stay in business, " - do I need permission to disagree?

You opted in to agree with him staying in business, Please either reply to this message, or click here to opt out of any future agreements.

/me ducks for cover.

I can't see that working at all. As someone else has stated, spammers would just move to a spam friendly ISP. The only way to stop that from happening is to eliminate spam friendly ISPs from the internet, which would be a masterpiece in foreign relations, were it to happen. And if that *were* to happen, then the sliding scale would be pointless anyway.

The root cause of spam could be attributed to the (mislaid) trust in which the original developers of email protocols such as SMTP thought it would be used. The genie is out of the bottle.

As I see it, the current method of constantly battling spam through filtering and adminstrative actions is the only currently viable option. To completely eliminate spam, one of the following would have to happen;

1) The entire planet would need to come together in global peace, and submit itself to one legislative body that had the authority to string spammers up with Cat5. I guess that by the time that happens, we'll be dealing with alien-orginated spam anyway
2) The smtp protocol gets superceded by one that *requires* strong authentication of the originator in order to deliver the message. The problem with this is that it puts too much power in the authenticating body, which is likely to be subverted by government and/or big business for their own ends.

I can't see the problem going anyway anytime soon, and it's unfortunate that Big Business has to be blamed for a lot of the problem. Two examples;

About 6 months ago my ISP changed my email domain from mediaone.net to attbi.com. I rarely had any spam before that happened. Within a week, and before I had forwarded my new email address to friends/relatives (I had been out of town), I saw multiple spam messages to the new address. Disconcertingly, the headers showed that all the recipients were attbi.com customers, and all within a very narrow alphabetical list.. ie if my email was [email protected], all the recipients would lie in the range of eg [email protected] and [email protected]. This suggests to me that the recipient list was merely a subset of the entire attbi.com subscriber list, and that someone in attbi.com had either intentionally sold the list or had unintentionally made it publically accessible - neither of which is acceptable.

Despite that, my spam count remained relatively low (2-3 a week) up to about a month ago, when a friend emailed me from a hotmail account. Overnight, the spam increased, and is currently at about 5 a day. Hotmail has been shown to be suspect before - their 'privacy' protection only extends to their subscribers, and not to anyone that their subscribers may email. Try setting up a pristine email account, and sending only one message to it from a hotmail account..

Both of these spam issues have been caused by Big Business...

5 a day. hah!

i'm up to 50 a day and growing. Thank jeebus for SpamAssassin Pro.

Overnight 65 or so on average and usually about 30 over the course of the day for me. I've been using Mailwasher, works pretty well for me.

You know, i didn't even factor in how many i get during the day since i usually use webmail from work and delete them as i go... so add another 30 or so during the day.

I used to use mailwasher but it still required too much intervention and another step to email checkin'... SpamAssassin Pro is pretty much behind the scenes and so far i haven't had a single false positive. Their support is pretty good too.

SpamAssassin Pro is pretty much behind the scenes

I'll say! I DL'd the trial version, so far I like it much better, I'll give the 14 day trial a go and then I'll probably order a license. Thanks!

In reply to:

---

http://www.mynetwatchman.com/kb/security/articles/popupspam/

---

Exactly! Thank! I guess I am slipping on 'homeland security'

Now this was a year ago, but I had a coworker who set up a hotmail account and do nothing with it. He was receiving a ton of spam before he event had anyone legit send him and email.

A "Web Bug".

Well spotted that man!

I guess I'm very lucky. I've gotten only about 15 messages a day for the past 6 years on my long-term address. Long live pure text based mail readers.

But seriously, aren't there any bright anti-spammers who could just take down this guy's servers? Can't a small army of anti-spam hackers just track the mail headers back to the sending servers and take those servers down? It could be a counter-spam hacking movement. I mean, all these hackers are so busy writing viruses to see which can score higher on Symantec's Security Report, why not write viruses to toast spam friendly ISPs?

Filtering, blocking, and ORBanning is just a temporary fix for a solution that could be reached just as deviously as the problem it is attacking. If spammers use advanced smtp exploits and insane bits of code, why can't hackers do something like that to bring down the beast.

Right here.

Aaaah! Justice!
The best part I find is that he wants to sue the anti-spammers! Talk about the pot calling the kettle...

FireFox31 said:

But seriously, aren't there any bright anti-spammers who could just take down this guy's servers? Can't a small army of anti-spam hackers just track the mail headers back to the sending servers and take those servers down? It could be a counter-spam hacking movement. I mean, all these hackers are so busy writing viruses to see which can score higher on Symantec's Security Report, why not write viruses to toast spam friendly ISPs?

Um, you should not fight abuse with abuse. Do the right thing -- report the spammer to his/her ISP and have the account terminated. If the ISP is spammer friendly, learn to add them to your blocklists.

For more anti-spam info, check out:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&group=news.admin.net-abuse.email

as well as:

http://www.spews.org/

_owen

Oh, those naughtly people!!

"Revenge is a dish best served cold"

But seriously, aren't there any bright anti-spammers who could just take down this guy's servers?

If you read the article, you'll find that he's using multiple servers all over the world.

Theoretically, one could launch multiple massive DDoS attacks against these spamming servers, but most of them are probably already hardened against that sort of thing. I would imagine that spam servers are among the most frequently-attacked type of server there is.

Do the right thing -- report the spammer to his/her ISP and have the account terminated.

Most of these spammers are their own ISP.

If you read the article, you'll find that he's using multiple servers all over the world.

And many, many hijacked open relays, and open proxy servers, In most cases, you'd only be attacking computers that don't have anything to do with the spammer.

Most of these spammers are their own ISP.

Well...That's not fully true, they have to get their internet connection from somewhere, and that means a connection with at least one other ISP.

Spam Assassin requires Outlook... I'm not about to start using Outlook on my home machines just to use Spam Assassin.

Mailwasher seems to work very well but needs a few features (at least the older version I'm running). I'll update to the new version and see if I can have it work as automated as I need it.

My domain host (using my own email domain) has also updated their web mail program - it now supports a couple of dozen spam lists and servers as well as manual spamcop forwarding. Out of the 60 emails sitting in my inbox this weekend, it left only 3 SPAM messages after turning on a few of the lists (I'll have to go through and turn on some of the others).

I could easily eliminate most of my SPAM with procmail on the host server, but I've been ultra-lazy to set this up. I get mail to two domains in my account, both of them supporting catch-all addressing. Most of the spam comes to a few addresses, so even matching those eliminates most of it (it's a good idea to create throw-away addresses when using your email address for something that doesn't need a permanent record).

Bruno