Web Resource on Netspam
Joseph Seanor
cibir at netcom.com
Sat Aug 24 21:21:05 PDT 1996
Another source for help in "spammers" is:
http://www.netcheck.com
They have helped to get some spammers accounts cancelled.
Joseph Seanor
CIBIR Corporation
Title: Spam (Not the Hormel product)
<a href="http://www.metareality.com/~nathan/visit.cgi/html.Spam"
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An honest
politician
is one who
takes your
bribe AND
votes as
you ask.
Spam (Not the Hormel product)
Anyone familiar with the usenet has seen it. It's the vile stuff that
brain-dead get-rick-quick scheme promoters and professionsal advertisers
foist upon us all with increasing regularity. There are (to date) two
species of spam, differentiated by the mechanism by which they are
delivered. Each has its own defining charateristics, each has its own
sub-species, but both have two things in common: they're made possible by
the workings of the internet, and they're both examples of the same type
of 'cost-shifting' that made junk faxes illegal. Contrary to postal junk
mail, where the sender bears the full cost of delivery, the spammer bears
only a fraction of the cost of delivery; the remainder of the costs are
borne by us, the recipients. It's a waste of your bandwidth, your disk
space, and your time.
email spam
Messages delivered by electronic mail to large numbers of recipients
who did not ask for or otherwise solicit the messages. It's the
junk mail of the 21st century, only worse.
usenet spam
Messages delivered by usenet to large numbers of newsgroups whose
chartered topics are unrelated to (and may even explicitly forbid) the
topic of the message.
Not enough people seem to
realize that there are constructive ways to deal with it, and to reduce
the chance that you'll have to deal with it again in the future.
What to do
What NOT to do
The most effective is to write some
polite email to the administrator of the site from which the spam
originated.
You'll soon learn that most system administrators are very unhappy
about users who spam the net. It's
always gratifying when they write back to tell you that the offending
account has been terminated.
Start reading <a
href="usenet://news.admin.net-abuse.misc">news.admin.net-abuse.misc
to learn more about how to deal with spammers.
If there's a 1-800 number, call it to express your displeasure.
It might please you to note that 1-800 numbers typically cost them a
small amount of money with each call. How much do you pay for your disk
space and bandwidth with each unsolicited bit of email? It's only fair,
right?
Grab your telephone, or even pay them a visit in person. You
generally have to have access to a unix command line to find the phone
numbers and addresses, unless you're dealing with the same <a
href="http://www.metareality.com/~nathan/visit.cgi/spam/html.Offenders">spammers that have been
bothering me. Why stick to email? If they're in your area, tell
them face-to-face that you object to their tactics.
Don't post a follow-up message in the same newsgroup. Do you
really think that the spammer is going to re-visit thousands of
newsgroups to see what people had to say?
The same goes for mailing lists. If you get spammed via a mailing
list, never reply to the list. Your words will just get
re-broadcast to everyone else on the list, thus doubling the nuisance
created by the spammer.
Fun stuff that doesn't get results, but might be good for a laugh
RecyclingIf they enjoy sending spam, then it only makes sense that
they wouldn't mind getting their own, right? Just for kicks, forward each
new spam to the spammers who have pestered you in the past. While I can't
vouch for its effectiveness, it does reek of
poetic justice, and it makes me feel a little better.
It usually makes people laugh out loud when I explain it, too. <img src =
"http://www.metareality.com/~nathan/images/SMILE.GIF">
A Pre-emptive Anti-Spam TacticWhy wait to get spammed, when you
can see them coming in <a
href="news:news.admin.net-abuse.misc">news.admin.net-abuse.misc? <a
href="http://www.metareality.com/~nathan/visit.cgi/spam/html.p.Pre-empt">Let the spammers know in advance that they
will be charged (insert dollar amount here) if they send you any junk
mail.
Additional references
Spam and Anonymous Remailing Services
Damien Lucifer (<a
href="mailto:ncognito at gate.net">ncognito at gate.net) operates an
anonymous remailing service. He's put together a page covering spam and
remailers, including how to get a remailer to stop spamming you, and
it is my pleasure to host this page for him.
mail bombing
For advanced spam-fighters only. Can concerted emailbombing be
employed as a legitimate spam-fighting tactic? Pros, cons, and related
issues.
About Junk
Email
Some of the hows and whys of junk email, and tactics you can use to
help rid yourself of it.
A press release from MCI
...with information about their
anti-spam policies. See also their <a
href="http://www.mci.com/aboutmci/news/nfr/spam.shtml">online policy
statement. Note that MCI's seriousness about these statements has
been severely questioned in light of their (mis)handling of the
Moneyworld/CHAG spammer. 30 days between announcing that the situation
is being dealt with and finally cutting off a spammer with
message-per-week spamming speed? This is pretty disgusting in light of
the good press MCI got when they announced their spam policies. It's
starting to look more like a PR stunt than a policy statement. I
can only take comfort knowing that at least their sysadmins are aware of
(and frustrated with) the situation.
I must disclaim that civil legal issues may be involved in the
MCI/Moneyworld dispute, so there may be things going on that the public
isn't aware of. Still, for MCI not to have covered its corporate ass does
not speak well of MCI's sincerity or the competence of MCI's lawyers.
Outlaw
Junk EMail Now!
Write your legislators, ask them to expand the
TCPA to include junk email! Note that as the law is currently
written, it is
unlikely to be applicable to email.
Fighting Junk
Email"
More information about junk email and related issues. Includes
pointers to mechanical tactics for dealing with junk email.
Spam FAQ
Everything you never wanted to know about net spamming.
Get that
spammer!Webified TCP/IP tools to aid in the fight against spam.
<a
href="http://techweb.cmp.com/net/issues/036issue/036law.htm">Litigation
to the rescue?
Use of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (47 U.S.C. sec 227)
to nail junk emails. The case described was settled out of court, but
the ideas is intriguing. This commentary, written by a lawyer, does not
seem optistic about applying the TCPA directly to junk email, but
doesn't rule out the possibility, either.
Litigation to the
rescue!
$500 fines for junk mail via the courts. Sounds like promising
tactic for dealing with intra-USA spammings. <a
href="http://www.metareality.com/~nathan/visit.cgi/spam/html.FaxLaw">Some commentary on this law was posted to
usenet a while back.
<a
href="http://www.usps.gov/websites/depart/inspect/chainlet.htm">The U.S.
Postal Service on Chain Letters
Contrary to what the make.money.fast crowd would have you believe,
these scams are illegal. See the aforelinked page for details,
and and consider talking to the appropriate <a
href="http://www.usps.gov/ncsc/locators/find-is.html">postal
inspector as well.
<a
href="http://www.bbb.org/council/complaints/consumerform.html">The Better
Business Bureau
These folks will be happy to be notified of 'improper selling
practices' via the aforelinked form.
Anti-Spam lists
This is a relatively new phenomenon. People are starting to offer
the 'service' of collecting lists of addresses of folks who do not want
to get spam.
I think this is a bad idea, since it attempts to legitimize
junk email, by implying that if an email address is not on the list, it's
prefectly OK to send junk email. The other problem with this idea is
that there are going to be several of them, and no junkmailer is going to
filter their list using each "service." Thus, it will be up to the
recipients to track down all of the "services."
Currently there are at least three running. One is at
http://dm1.com/Epreference/epref.html, one is at
http://www.kenjen.com/nospam,
and I don't have an URL for the last - it was sent to me via unsolicited
email, naturally.
Terms of Service and Acceptable usage policies
Most Internet service providers require that their customers agree to
a set of terms of service (TOS) or an acceptable usage policy (AUP). A
random sampling: <a
href="http://www.mindspring.com/aboutms/policy.html">Mindspring's
policy, Primenet's
AUP, MCI's
spamming policy, and the terms and conditions for my own ISP, <a
href="http://webfaq.halcyon.com/faq/nwn/nwntac.txt">Northwest Nexus
(a.k.a. halcyon.com).
I should note that while Northwest Nexus doesn't describe spamming in
their terms of service, they have booted more than one spammer in the
past. It surprises me greatly that they aren't explicit about this in
their published terms and conditions.
A spamhandling robot
This is very "under construction," but worth mentioning anyhow. I'm
putting together some perl code to automate
the spam-handling process.
Common flavors of net.spam
The MAKE.MONEY.FAST scheme
A direct descendant of the chain letters of old, this is the pyramid scam
of the information age... A quick look at the mathematics behind the
idea will expose the scam.
Phone-sex cretins
They post a couple of lines of text-mode heavy breathing, and usually a
1-800 number that you're invited to call. Call the 1-800 number.
Really. It costs them money every time you do! They make their money
via the 1-900 number that they ask you to call next. So just call the
1-800 number again. And again. And again.
<a href="http://www.metareality.com/~nathan/visit.cgi/html.Spam"
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Don't just browse here, say something!
Speak your mind in this space here:
<input type=submit
value="Press here to have your words added to the page.">
The true beauty of Usenet is the way it allows free communication.
You can be rich/poor/ugly/
religious/atheist or a member of any
race/religion or be young/old... That's the wonder - everyone can talk to
one another and share ideas.
Then spam comes along. It fills up
newsgroups with so much noise that no one reads it any more. That
wondrous method of communication has been lost. That's why I hate spam.
You just don't get it, do you?
No, deleting one piece of email doesn't take much. Then again,
neither does appealing to a system administrator to have the
spammer shut down. Two or three bits of junk a day really is something
I can live with, but I don't want to. So why should I?
Two or three bits of trash by the roadside won't mean the end of
the world. Tossing empty cans out the window costs less than having your
trash hauled away - what a great opportunity to save money! If litter
were acceptable, a public beach would be no place to spend an afternoon.
Postal mail costs the sender with each mailing. This keeps junk
postal mail to tolerable levels. EMail costs the sender maybe
$20/month, period. Are you so fucking stupid that you don't
realize what a cesspool the net would be if this were allowed to grow
unchecked?
-NW
People complain about spam and mass E-mailers. But my question is:
what's the big deal? Does it REALLY take THAT much PRECIOUS time out
of your day to click and delete a piece of E-mail? I think that the
people complaining about others taking advantage of an excellent
business opportunity ought to just relax a bit. And just HOW does it
COST you to deal with SPAM? With ISP's dropping access prices and
providing unlimited access to the internet, how could it possibly
COST someone to get an E-mail message? I think you people really need
to just kick back and relax already. Geeze, if it wasn't SPAM what
else would you find to complain about?
Spam isn't about content, spam is about quantity and cost shifting.
TV spam would be the same ad on every channel at the same time.
Print spam would be junk mail sent postage due or charge-on-delivery.
With the ads on TV and in newspapers, the advertisers pay the expenses
associated with publishing their ads. With net spam, the recipients pay the
expenses associated with carrying the ads. That is the key difference.
The costs of ads in traditional media help to support the very media that
deliver the ads. With net.spam, there are no costs, and the ads just
serve to sap the medium. All you need is a free trial account (AOL,
interramp, or earthlink, etc are famous for this), and you can broadcast a
huge amount of spam before anyone notices. Or, you can pay for an account
with MCI, and broadcast huge amounts of spam for 30 days after the
sysadmins realize what's going on.
-NW
Net-based spam is not the only form of spam. There is spam in print
and spam in TV advertising. Wouldn't you say every Calvin Klein ad
on TV, magazines or billboards is spam? How about Budweiser,
Lite beer, and McDonalds commercials.
If you see any type of advertising that offends your senses, you
should feel free to boycott the products, ask your friends to
boycott the products, etc. If the company has an 800 number or
web site, let them know that you find their advertising offensive.
I am really, really, REALLY tired of being solicited to buy things
whenever I log on to my computer. I mean, I pay for the phone line,
the software, the hardware, the accounts and my time is worth money
as well. I get a LOT of e-mail and a SIZEABLE portion of it is junk
e-mail. When I read news, about 10% of it is junk e-mail; more if it
is a small newsgroup. I want to know what uninformed idiot is selling
my address, or where these people are GETTING it. I have never bought
anything over the computer. I have bounced unsolicited junk back to
the people who send it. (I love how righteously indignant these people
are: they send you mail and expect you to buy something from them and
when you fail to perform as expected with joy and gratitude...if you
should, in fact, protest them wasting your time and resources...they
get downright rude and abusive. The presumptuousness of it just really
annoys me.) The capper is that I did some artwork for the anti-Canter-
and-Siegel "Green Card Lawyers" tees Joel Furr was offering a while ago.
The ultimate clue that I am not interested in spam of any sort, but how
could they know? It's just amusing. Let it be known that I am not a
test market, nor will I buy any of your crap, be it face cream, thigh
cream, green cards, stock options, modems, books, herbs, or the golden
goose itself. Not interested. I don't know you, I have no reason to trust
you, and you are spamming MY mailbox and expecting ME to reward this with
money. No, thank you. I've been online for more than 5 years, and I
really long for the "good old days" before the Net was "cool".
There ya go. My tuppence. Now...where do I go to put my name on the
"Don't Send This Person Crap Mail" list? (Laugh)
SPAM is only going to go away if we make sure companies learn that SPAMming doesn't get costumers to buy thier products and it does more to stop potential costumers from buying thier products.
I've heard a couple of different conflicting stories about the origins of the use of the word spam in this context.
The most popular version suggests that is was inspired by the
Monty Python skit in which virtually every item on some restaurant's menu
includes spam in some form or other. The waiter's recitation of the menu
becomes unintelligible except for '...and spam, spam with..., spam salad,
...with spam, spam mixed with..." and so on. It really picks up when the
Vikings start chanting "spam-spam spam, spam, spam-spam spam, spam...." ad
nauseum. This is what the net would be like if this stuff was allowed to
continue unchecked. If that's not a horrifying thought, maybe you should
see the skit in question.
My personal belief is that geeks (who make up much of the 'net
community (myself included), much of Monty Python's audience, and probably
most of Monty Python's cast) just tend to use the word spam when more
appropriate words don't come to mind readily. For no particularly good
reason, it really stuck this time.
-NW
Due to popular demand, I've expanded the first couple of paragraphs to
better explain what spam is and why it's such a pain in the ass.
Personally, I'm getting two to five unsolicited email messages every week. This is up from approximately zero unsolicited messages per week a few years ago when I first started using the Internet and Usenet. It's a trend that has been steadily increa
sing, especially for the last year or two. It's a trend that really really worries me. It's a trend that is, worst of all, wasting my time!
-NW
I an working on a Usenet news server designed to filter spam from
a news feed and quietly drop it. Announcements in due course (next
few months) but if anyone wants to help with other platforms and
live feed debugging please
mail me.
Wow! Thanks for the help. I'll certainly become an anti-spam activist
and use your information to good effect.
I don't get it! What is SPAM?
Pardon my ignorance but what does "SPAM"ming mean?
"SICK PEOPLE AGAINST MAIL"???
For the Spammers that have a web page I visit it with a macro every time that
I leave my system idle while connected for more then 5 min. This way at least
I'm sucking down their site and causing their site to slow down so those that
are interest get bored waiting for an over taxed server to show them just what
They get for "ONLY $9.99 A MONTH!!!!" and leave with out buying.
The only reason they have the site is to make money. No Money, No Site, No Spam.
Very nice -- I like the idea of dialing the 800 number in the ad. One
might wish to be sure to mention (if there's a message taker or, even
better, a human at the other end) that you saw their ad in (insert
newsgroup here) -- and no, you're not interested in buying anything,
you just wanted to see what they had.
Unfortunately, every time you call the 800 number, chances are you're
also adding your own phone number to a database that will result in
your receiving "junk phone calls" on a variety of useless subjects.
Solution? Make the calls from a pay phone, ideally one that doesn't
accept incoming calls.
Isn't spam remarkably like the countless hours of television (including but not limited to advertisements) that most of us watched in our childhoods? And to think, whoever controls the information going to the youth of the nation controls the future
of the nation. Greedy, stupid corporations played a central role in molding us and shaping our opinions, attitudes, and perspectives. Something to think about, perhaps...
<a href="http://www.metareality.com/~nathan/visit.cgi/html.Spam"
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