An honest
politician
is one who
takes your
bribe AND
votes as
you ask.
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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
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What NOT to do
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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 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 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.
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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.
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Fun stuff that doesn't get results, but might be good for a laugh
- Recycling
- If 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.
- A Pre-emptive Anti-Spam Tactic
- Why wait to get spammed, when you
can see them coming in news.admin.net-abuse.misc? 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 ([email protected]) 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 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.
- 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. Some commentary on this law was posted to
usenet a while back.
- 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 postal
inspector as well.
- 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: Mindspring's
policy, Primenet's
AUP, MCI's
spamming policy, and the terms and conditions for my own ISP, 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.
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