Get ready for a decrease in your spam

[David]

Starting from now

[theog]

Originally Posted by David

Starting from now

You are joking right?

Please tell me you are joking...

Guess the other 9 "top spammers" are going to lay down arms and simply "go away."

Well, they will go away... to another country that will not turn them over to the USA...

And unlike those online casino bosses, I'm sure the spammers will not accept flights that have connections that fly through the USA...

[Bamb0]

Soloway remained in federal detention pending a hearing Monday.

Good..Right where this idiot belongs!

(Sorry if i sound harsh - i dont like spam AT ALL!)

[Chipper]

Originally Posted by theog

You are joking right?

Please tell me you are joking...

Please tell me you are not...

[David]

Originally Posted by theog

You are joking right?

Please tell me you are joking...

Yes, I am joking (or being sarcastic

This case won't make a bit of difference to the big spam picture. We read about a major spammer being prosecuted every once a year or so. I wonder how many new ones start up?

[hadaso]

There is money in email advertising (botnet based spam) and if it would not go to this spammer, it would go to another one. Businesses still want to advertise at our expense. Criminal prosecution of those actually doing the sending might do a little but not a lot to decrease spam. It would mainly push the advertising money into countries that don't jail spammers. If the advertisers that are hiring botnet services are made to pay for the crime (by serving time) there might be a noticable decrease in spam. Is it different from buying stolen goods? Should the people ordering the service be exempt from responsibility?

Today I sent a complaint to Israel's State Comptroller about botnet based spam I received that advertised the services of the Israel Small and Medium Enterprise Authority. I asked that they investigate if the taxpayer's money was used to hire criminals to perform a crime. I hope it results at least in some kind of guidlines as to what should be checked before a government agancy buys services from spammers. Botnet based spam seems to have become mainstream advertising here with what one would call "legitimate businesses", now including the government. I don't see how this can be stopped unless some responsibility is required from those that pay the spammers/botnet operators/virus creators.

[FMRocks]

Originally Posted by hadaso

There is money in email advertising (botnet based spam) and if it would not go to this spammer, it would go to another one. Businesses still want to advertise at our expense. Criminal prosecution of those actually doing the sending might do a little but not a lot to decrease spam. It would mainly push the advertising money into countries that don't jail spammers.

Bingo. What you have to do is render spam less economical. How you do that is pretty tricky. Litigation and penalties can be part of it, but until users stop buying stuff off of spam messages, it will continue.

[hadaso]

Originally Posted by FMRocks

... but until users stop buying stuff off of spam messages, it will continue.

This will never wrong, because it is based on the assumption that the spam you get is meant for you. It was not. It was meant for a tiny percentage of the recipients who are the ones that will never understand the need to ban spam. Or the ones that will gladly complain about spam and vow to never buy stuff advertised on spam (except when the offer is really good and they meant to buy this thing anyway). The kind of spam I see in my country now is not the kind of spam one is going to boycott if one needs the service, The botnet based spam offering up to $100,000 to small businesses in government backed loans is real money from real government funds and the businesses that need it would not ignore it. The problem is the way they've chosen to find their target ausience: they'll send 5000000 email to every string that contains a "@" that was scraped off the web, or obtained by dictionary attacks carried over several years on all big mail providers, and then they'll be sure that they reach a big chunk of the few thousand potential customers. then a few millions will see it as junk and a few of them will "boycott the offer", but a few thousand will see it as a real offer (which it is) and even those who decided to boycott spam would not be sure if this was really spam or was really part of a limited mailing targeted at them. If you're a small business that can use a government backed loans from a program that promotes small businesses then even if you hate spam and have noting to do with it you'd tend to believe that the particular mailing that fits your needs is really from a small lists of businesses they compiled and not from a huge untargetted mailing. The same with other spam I get' such as the one from "Epsilon Investment House" saying something like "If you have $100,000 or more let us manage your portfolio". Most recipients cannot use the offer anyway. Out of the few that can some would check out the offer and their decision would then be based on financial comparison with other similar offers, where they might not have included this particular vendor in their comparison had they not got the link in their Inbox. Now this financial offer covers the costs if they get one customer out of the several million recipients, so no boycott would stop them. Jailtime would stop them.

[DavidJ]

Everyone: As a matter of fact, I have noticed an enormous decrease in the amount of spam reaching my inbox in the past few weeks, and the reason is obvious: All of my mail goes through the GMail system in one way or another, and GMail, for the moment, has found a way to stop image spam. 'Til the next move by the spammers.

Originally Posted by hadaso

Today I sent a complaint to Israel's State Comptroller about botnet based spam I received that advertised the services of the Israel Small and Medium Enterprise Authority.

Hadaso, I'll be stunned if it does any good. Take a look at http://spamhuntress.com/2005/03/22/i...ata-reporting/ . The company which has intentionally given ICANN false phone numbers is Super-Pharm, which was Israel's sixth biggest retailer, last I heard, and I probably still have the emails to prove that isoc.org.il, the governing body for the domain name system in Israel, knows about it and is playing along with them nicely. How do you spell "money"?

Even if the State Comptroller's office decides to mention the Israeli governmental and quasi-governmental Internet dirt in their annual report, I don't expect it to do any good. There are non-Internet abuses which have been mentioned in the annual report since the days of the dinosaurs, and they haven't stopped. Still, I suppose that you're right that as a matter of principle, one should complain, just to show that we aren't playing along nicely. [By the way, I live in Petach Tikva.]

Thanks.
David.

[King Of Email]

My experience with spam is that it fluctuates over time and between email service ownership, dramatically increasing or decreasing depending on who assumes control over the service. The best example of this is Inbox.net, which began as a very attractive, useful 20MB free email service when most other free email services came in at only 6MB and had no advanced compose HTML options or additional features. Inbox.net went from a spectacular free service to a rot-gut spam nightmare when ownership transferred to an internet "entrepreneur" who promptly used user accounts to pour tidal waves of spam and junk mail into while disabling the basic functions and utilities of the user's mailbox.

Also the record of contacting website owners/administrators about spam problems isn't very encouraging as most that I have either plead helplessness or, I suspect, are complicit in the passage of spam into their own user's accounts. Furthermore, since the source of most of the spam I receive in many accounts originates abroad where little or no meaningful laws or prohibitions against spamming exist and probably couldn't be enforced if they were, spammers can safely route their torrents of trash into user's inboxes from a position of legal immunity. The solution to spam just as the solution to crime isn't to hope and expect the felon will get religion and stop engaging in mass marketing for profit just because it irritates the hell out of users.

The solution lies in monitoring, cataloging, and blacklisting known spammers, their domains, and establishing a workable, intelligent system of spam identification that allows legitimate email through while intercepting junk mail transmission. To date, the best I have ever seen which does not require any prior user configuration or filter tweaking is that which is run by Everyone.net which has evolved over time to reduce unwanted spam as far as my long experience with their email service has shown. Other services, just as prominent, seem not to have been able to accomplish this feat without either allowing in spam or killing off legitimate email. This is why so far, despite the ads and limited commercial emails from Everyone.net, I have so many of their accounts.

[hadaso]

Originally Posted by DavidJ

... and GMail, for the moment, has found a way to stop image spam.

My experience with gmail is that they also categorize some legitimate email as junk (once per every few hundred spam messages).

Originally Posted by DavidJ

... I suppose that you're right that as a matter of principle, one should complain, just to show that we aren't playing along nicely. [By the way, I live in Petach Tikva.]

So it seems you live very close to the spammers... (well... IIRC the first local spammer that sent me spam had whois contact address in Petach Tikva). I hope any kind of report would at least result in some kind of procedures that avoid the hiring of criminals. One of the questions I asked in my complaint is if there are any procedures for checking the kind of technical services government related entities buy or hire, and who is responsible to check these. Anyway, there is very little awareness, so anything can help. I recently got a spam message from a voluntary organization that wants to "fight crime" (headed by a retired police officer) and when I wrote to them about what they do and how they expect me to join an organization that says it wants to fight crime and instead joins the criminals they replied that "tehy purchased the software legally so they may use it (the "software" is a spam sending engine with spambot that scrapes addresses off websites and includes a complimetary list of several hundred thousand addresses). My main point was that they are abusing free public services that are used to hide redirect links to their website and to a "removal service" and they had no idea what I am talking about. So what I see is a need for awareness that this business is full of criminals and there is a need to check the legality of any service before using it. BTW, one of the the free hosting services that was used to hide the spammer's redirect link (tapuz communities) has checked the website they host that displays a "removal form" and redirects the info to the spammer's site and said it's OK with them. Others (such as tinyurl) seem to react on spamcop "spamvertised site" reports and this redirects are eventually removed.