Frustration with spam hits new high

[Dasher]

I believe the law is impotent to stop these bandwidth suckers, and direct action is necessary.

 

I suggest an organization, the Society for the Prevention of Automated Mailers, S.P.A.M.

 

Volunteers sign up to an international registry. When enough volunteers (around fifty, I'd think) in any given area are available, the group targets the worst spammers (tracking the address of these freaks is relatively simple for the major remailers, they can be traced back to their ISP site locations.)

 

The group, all fifty or so, visits the site, walking in unannounced (it's a business, so open to the public.) At this point one of several things can occur:

 

1: All members are carrying electromagnets or powerful alnico or other magnet, which they brush against any and all servers.

 

2: The members physically remove the server drives, plus any backup tapes or drives they can find. Pay the company fair market for the drives, but remove them.

 

3: Drive nails through the drives (a commercial nailgun should do the trick.)

 

The key is a LARGE group of people need to showup at the same time: just begin entering the offices until the area is overflowing with bodies, and they can't see/understand what is happening until too late-a physical denial-of-service attack.

 

Of course, this is considered illegal, so eventually, the group is busted - this is desirable, as it gives the group a platform. Now, on record in court, the spokespersons for anti-spam regulation have a national platform. The group members plead temporary insanity, having been driven crazy by so many ads for penis enlargers, cialis, mortgages and prescriptions...

 

Although I recognize there needs to be some refinement of the basic ideas, hopefully a safer, perhaps even legal, way to erase the data, I am quite serious - the only way to stop spammers is to destroy their data. When it is not possible to maintain a database of SPAM addresses longer than a week, they WILL get the message.

 

Yes, I may be legally insane for suggesting this. I don't care. I sell my music on the web, and not in a mainstream market-I don't do rock or pop, and refuse to deal with the greed of the current crop of indie lables that sell your product and give you 10% of the contracted rate. So I spend an hour a day wading through the crap, trying to find new business contacts. Typically there is one, every 500 emails or so (it used to be one in 20, with the bulk as digests of forums I subscribe to.)

 

Yes I have anti-spam software installed, and use it. It doesn't help. I still have to cull the crap for contacts not on my approved list. I do not give these vermin the right to invade my space and steal my time, and am willing to do anything short of physical violence to stop them.

 

I'll get off my soapbox now.

 

Dasher

[tld]

Originally posted by Base:

I still don't get how spammers make any money?!?

I heard an interesting analysis of this on the radio a while back. It's estimated that about 50 in every million spams gets a response, but the fact is they'd still be making money if it were only 1 on a million. It's very cheap to send millions and millions of spams once your set up to do it. Almost the entire cost is shouldered by everyone but the spammers.

 

My email is all over my web site, yet after 7 years I still never get more than about 20 spams a day. I don't filter any of them, and I report all of them using spamcop.net. That helps in getting them shut down and at least makes the bastards keep getting new providers.

 

Another important factor is having an email address that's not with a major isp, as spammers randomly try email addresses on all the major isps. My brothers company get an earthlink account and intensionally made the user name a totally bugus combination of alphanumerics. They never gave the address to anyone, and never used the email address at all. They decided to check it a few months later and it had been spammed into the stone age.

 

Damn...when I first got on the internet in 1994 email seemed so cool...now it seems like a necessary evil. It's a shame.

 

I really do recommend reporting spam with spamcop though. Spammers obviously hate it, as they've DDOSed spamcop.net many many times.

 

Tom

[Jim Novak]

The thing I want to know is - is there a worm responsible for some of the more arcane spam?

 

I'm getting what appears to be spam that is trying it's hardest to get past filtering by inserting non-linear words into the subject header, and the same in the body. It's so comical in fact, I've made a separate inbox to save some of it because the titles are so hilarious in a zen-koan way.

 

I can't see anyone profiting from it, even if they sucker a few here and there. The Chinese/Korean spam is so nebulous that even if I wanted to buy 500 15" CRT's @ 10$ apiece I wouldn't be able to figure out where to go from the spam in the first place ... I'm getting spam that is basically "nothing": no attachments, no web addresses, sometimes "try Viagra", but that's all. Really surreal things that appear to be the result of some sort of scripting worm gone mad.

 

Regardless, Popfile makes it manageable. Earthlink's filters take out about 200 emails a day for me, and then Popfile does another 200 or so. If it wasn't for that, email would be completely useless for me. I suspect it already is for a lot of the less technically savvy people trying to deal with it.

[jcskid]

i second Mailwasher,

 

as someone in biz open to the public you cant imagine the amount of spam.

 

even with scripts on our contact pages, so email is not revealed, all it takes is a email worm that hits someone with our email in his(her) mail program. and boom its on email lists in weeks.

 

while i still get 100+ a day everyday, mailwasher is bouncing god only knows how many i dont see.

and each day more email addys get added to mailwasher.

 

its a cool program, while it is shareware this is one program i paid the guy for.

 

scott

[Gulliver]

I am a pervert. I like to delete my spam.