Why fighting SPAM is pointless, and why you need the final solution.

[mole]

Yup, I'm a spamfighter. And I report those suckers all the time. What I have noticed :-

1. Spam gets reported to very fishy addresses. Those that you won't walk down the alley at night.

2. Spammers get smarter and more crafty in making reporting difficult, with codes that encrytp or plant your email all over the body.

3. You never know what's the next trick that spammers will play, since they have no morals and will stab you in the back at the slightest provocation.

The problem is not going to get better, its going to get worse. Because technology is getting better.

I read once that the only way to combat spam is to fight technology with technology.

Spamfilters don't work. They only mask the problem.

Reporting doesn't work. It only opens you to joe-jobbers with the sole aim of counter fighting anti-spammers.

So, the next solution is human verified send mail. The email system has become vilified by spammers, to the point that anonymous email will become a no no.

I have decided to activate my http://www.spamarrest.com . If someone wants to contact me, they better be there to verify they are human beings before anything gets through. With a model like spamarrest, you get ZERO spam mail.

Spam mail will kill email-commerce in the coming years. The internet is no longer free, its going to be a place where security guards are abundant to allow or deny access to this once privilige called email.

The spammers don't care. Why should they? Each man for himself, lie, cheat, kill, or pillage. Sad, isn't it?

 

[Kid Kool]

i don't have a problem with spam. i just delete it.

 

[DomainPairs]

I actually bought the name spambounce.com to bounce spam on to the the sponsoring site. 25 million mail items arriving might discourage sponsorship, and they couldn't filter it because they would filter out the genuine replies.

I've got so many projects on at the moment that I won't be able to do anything with it, so I'll probably end up selling the name.

 

[DrWho]

Here's a funny thing... When I give out my email as "[email protected]" (valid email) I never receive SPAM!

Your product has merit! Good luck!!!

 

[bidawinner]

Originally posted by mole
Yup, I'm a spamfighter. And I report those suckers all the time. What I have noticed :-

1. Spam gets reported to very fishy addresses. Those that you won't walk down the alley at night.

2. Spammers get smarter and more crafty in making reporting difficult, with codes that encrytp or plant your email all over the body.

3. You never know what's the next trick that spammers will play, since they have no morals and will stab you in the back at the slightest provocation.

The problem is not going to get better, its going to get worse. Because technology is getting better.

I read once that the only way to combat spam is to fight technology with technology.

Spamfilters don't work. They only mask the problem.

Reporting doesn't work. It only opens you to joe-jobbers with the sole aim of counter fighting anti-spammers.

So, the next solution is human verified send mail. The email system has become vilified by spammers, to the point that anonymous email will become a no no.

I have decided to activate my http://www.spamarrest.com . If someone wants to contact me, they better be there to verify they are human beings before anything gets through. With a model like spamarrest, you get ZERO spam mail.

Spam mail will kill email-commerce in the coming years. The internet is no longer free, its going to be a place where security guards are abundant to allow or deny access to this once privilige called email.

The spammers don't care. Why should they? Each man for himself, lie, cheat, kill, or pillage. Sad, isn't it?

Sorry mole but thats lame..I did the demo..every person that would want to send me an email gets the email they sent to me sent back so they can click a link and type in a code etc...

Thats fine for friends and immediate relatives but not for doing business...

I understand the frustration..but thats not the solution..but it MAY be a solution ...

I admire the effort...

 

[Gail]

Well - I hate spam, but I am in the "use the delete key" group. We wouldn't have spam if it didn't work. If people would just stop opening it and buying from it...it would die an ignoble death.

So instead of villifying the spammers, save your vitriol for the morons who actually make it profitable for the spammers to continue.

Actually, I use MailWasher -a free utility program. You can preview your email before it is downloaded from the server and "bounce" the spam back. Automated mailing programs will often delete your address as "bad" so you get removed from their database.

Hey, let's start an anti-moron website -

You might be a moron if...

...you actually believe you can make $60,000 a week in your spare time selling penis pills.

 

[sheepster]

Pick one of your domains, wildcard it, when you sign up for something like somenewservice.com use the mail addy [email protected]. Use a custom addy for each site you sign up to. You'll know which ones sell your addy to spam by the address they used to send it to. Then, if you get spam at that addy bounce it back to several of the addresses at the domain that sold your email address...

 

[uncle]

hmm... isn't this post spam?

 

[com]

A lot of spam artists use scripts that run through websites and pick up all emails (strings with only one '@' and at least one '.'). For this reason, i always setup one email (same color letters as the background, small print, on one of the pages of the site, which is doing one thing and one thing only, forwarding to [email protected].

Edit: I think i have the solution: http://www.dnforum.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=18365

 

[mole]

http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/groupware/story/0,10801,77704,00.html

 

[NamePopper.com]

SPAMBLOCKERS.ORG - I'm just waiting for an opportunity to put it to work!

Of course - I would sell it for a reasonable amount too - if somebody contacts me.

 

[uncle]

www.samspade.org

:laugh:

 

[mole]

Spammers are evolving their spamming technology like a radioactive virus. They are devising new ways to verify your email is live.

In the old days, it was the "Remove me" trick.

Then it was the web bugs planted in HTML email that trigger off a verification just because you have your preview pane on, irregardless of whether you actually "opened" the mail or not.

Today, your email is embedded all over the body of the spam so that even reporting the spam could help verify your email. Most email spam today originates from very suspicious downstream providers in South America, Europe and Asia. You can't trust the "ISP" or "web host" you report to anymore.

I'm back to Mailwasher.net now. PROPERLY CONFIGURED with real-time filters from the world's best blacklist resources eg bl.spamcop.net (I use 9 blacklists at one go), it just sieves out the spam into its viewer and hides all your legitimate email so that you can scan faster down the spam list.

All you need to do is to press one button (Process Mail) and all spam in your viewed list gets blacklisted, deleted, and bounced. And the bouncing feature has been souped up so that errors are minimised.

Mailwasher can be trained very fast to identify legitimate mail.

Best thing now is, spammers can no longer verify my email.

 

[mole]

SpamCop Blacklist bl.spamcop.net
SPEWS level 1 spews.relays.osirusoft.com
Osirusoft open relay inputs inputs.relays.osirusoft.com
ORDB open relays relays.ordb.org
Spamhaus Blacklist spamhaus.relays.osirusoft.com
South Korea (the country) korea.services.net
Osirusoft Open Proxies socks.relays.osirusoft.com
monkeys.com open proxies proxies.relays.monkeys.com
China (the country) cn.rbl.cluecentral.net
Nigeria nigeria.blackholes.us
Argentina argentina.blackholes.us
Brazil brazil.blackholes.us

Here are the blacklist resources you can add to your Mailwasher.

:razz:

 

[mole]

Tips:

Under your Friends list, make sure to uncheck "display email from friends"

Under Options, make sure you check "Check the origin of the mail ..."

Under Account -- Bouncing email ... check "use remote with local fallback" That seems to work best.

 

[Mr Webname]

Another Mailwasher convert

 

[Fearless]

I use Mailwasher. I think it causes my screen to go haywire from time to time though. I Didn't have the problem before I installed Mailwasher. Then again it could be this Java crap causing me problems.

 

[mole]

Told you to stop using your Intel 386 Monochrome screen system, greg

 

[insomnia]

Doesn't this post classify as Spam? Afterall, he is advertising his product in the lounge

 

[com]

mole, i have another idea, are you open? drop me an email and i will tell you all about it.