Interesting Anti-Spam technique

[Peaches]

http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/0503/07spam.html

1) How much of a PITA will these be for companies that send mass emails via opt in lists? :unsure:
2) How long will it be before the spammers outsmart it?

[gonzo]

Sounds like a white list to me from the press release.
You can install this on any server these days...

[Loun]

I have already run into that a couple times from my mainstream site. I have an optin email list using mojo mailer. When people sign up for hte list they get an email for confirmation (that email wont go through to people using that) I will have to manually go and type a word in to get them on my list... Secondly when people email me asking for advice and where to get free information on things, I type up an email and reply to them and then get that crap where I have to go to a website look for and type in a word... all to help them where i get nothing out of it. Makes me less likely to want to assist them.

It sucks that it has gotten to this point with spam but what can ya do.

[RawAlex]

yeah, but here is the problem:

People opt in to a valid email list, say about quilting. That list is automated. There is no way for a person who WANTS to get this mail to recieve it, because the automated system will not process the "challenge".

Conversely, I could see spammers hiring a bunch of people to process bounces and get authorized, which would defeat the system. Just route all the challenge requests to some low cost providing nation, and have people paid a couple of cents per "fixed" email.

The spam will go on, the valid double opt-in lists will get blown off.

dum-dums.

Alex

[Anthony]

This is a system I've been giving my friends for awhile, http://www.mailfrontier.com

The challenge response is the best way right now to stop it. But, like Alex already mentioned, it's easily broken by having a live person(s) there to answer it.

[sharky]

good idea, but it will never work in the long run.

[JR]

my opinion is that there are some really profound missunderstandings about spam. i have no recent experience, but a couple years ago, i helped someone set up a massive STMP relay network through ISP's where i had connections. i learned a few things really quickly

1) its not so simple. the average schmuck cannot send any kind of volume that matters. it requires a lot of investment, a cooperative ISP (which almost dont exist today), good custom software, decent lists and knowledge of a whole host of tricks to beat filters which change constantly as well.

2) the bulk of spam is coming from a small group of people. my guess is that it is really small. probably at least 50% of all spam comes from no more than 50 people.

3) its becomming less and less profitable daily. its becomming less and less easy to keep relays online. its becomming less and less possible to find cooperative ISPs... and more difficult to create ISP's for this main purpose.

you cant just set up dial up accounts and run a mail program on a windows 98 machine and send mail on a anonymous 56K connection like several years ago and make money.

4) the problem with spam in my opinion right now is that small group of people that stay ahead of the curve. those few people are sending more and more and more.

I think those people will always be ahead of the technology curve and be able to beat any filters. But they are running out of cooperative ISP's, anti spammers continue to find better and better ways to flood their ISP's with 1000's of complaints per day causing them to block the IP's of the relays and as more and more people get agressive about setting up their own filters - as well as AOL, yahoo, hotmail etc etc... get better at making it more difficult to get through their filters, it will just get to a point in my opinion that it will cease to be profitable.

maybe i am wrong. but that is my impression. i think its like everything else in that the gold rush is over, now the top dogs are tring to hang on... and its getting less profitable daily.

i also unsubscribe to almost mail i get. it reduced the total spam i get to about 10% of what it was. alexs previous suggestion in the AOL thread which is a rip off of spamcop.net urban legend on their messageboards that people use your address in some way when you unsubscribe is pretty silly. the people sending the bulk of spam are trying very hard to use clean lists and to keep them clean. its the difference between staying online a few more days or getting shut down. remove lists are getting to be more valuable than e-mail lists and are traded and sold.

[gonzo]

Originally posted by JR@May 7 2003, 11:45 AM
my opinion is that there are some really profound missunderstandings about spam. i have no recent experience, but a couple years ago, i helped someone set up a massive STMP relay network through ISP's where i had connections. i learned a few things really quickly

1) its not so simple. the average schmuck cannot send any kind of volume that matters. it requires a lot of investment, a cooperative ISP (which almost dont exist today), good custom software, decent lists and knowledge of a whole host of tricks to beat filters which change constantly as well.

2) the bulk of spam is coming from a small group of people. my guess is that it is really small. probably at least 50% of all spam comes from no more than 50 people.

3) its becomming less and less profitable daily. its becomming less and less easy to keep relays online. its becomming less and less possible to find cooperative ISPs... and more difficult to create ISP's for this main purpose.

you cant just set up dial up accounts and run a mail program on a windows 98 machine and send mail on a anonymous 56K connection like several years ago and make money.

4) the problem with spam in my opinion right now is that small group of people that stay ahead of the curve. those few people are sending more and more and more.

I think those people will always be ahead of the technology curve and be able to beat any filters. But they are running out of cooperative ISP's, anti spammers continue to find better and better ways to flood their ISP's with 1000's of complaints per day causing them to block the IP's of the relays and as more and more people get agressive about setting up their own filters - as well as AOL, yahoo, hotmail etc etc... get better at making it more difficult to get through their filters, it will just get to a point in my opinion that it will cease to be profitable.

maybe i am wrong. but that is my impression. i think its like everything else in that the gold rush is over, now the top dogs are tring to hang on... and its getting less profitable daily.

i also unsubscribe to almost mail i get. it reduced the total spam i get to about 10% of what it was. alexs previous suggestion in the AOL thread which is a rip off of spamcop.net urban legend on their messageboards that people use your address in some way when you unsubscribe is pretty silly. the people sending the bulk of spam are trying very hard to use clean lists and to keep them clean. its the difference between staying online a few more days or getting shut down. remove lists are getting to be more valuable than e-mail lists and are traded and sold.
Wanna buy some remove lists?

[Nickatilynx]

hehehehehe

Most filters do not work anyway if the mail is unique ;-))))

This game is about giving away the old secrets not the new ones.

Colin,remember the engines? ;)

Find out what they want and give it to them....for .00001 of a sec ;-)))



************************************************

JR wrote :


2) the bulk of spam is coming from a small group of people. my guess is that it is really small. probably at least 50% of all spam comes from no more than 50 people.

true! :)

3) its becomming less and less profitable daily. its becomming less and less easy to keep relays online. its becomming less and less possible to find cooperative ISPs... and more difficult to create ISP's for this main purpose.

Absolutely!

""i also unsubscribe to almost mail i get.""

Then you have become a prime mail three mths from now ;-)))





Last edited by Nickatilynx at May 7 2003, 03:53 PM

[Almighty Colin]

Originally posted by Nickatilynx@May 7 2003, 03:45 PM
This game is about giving away the old secrets not the new ones.

Colin,remember the engines? ;)


http://www.linkification.com/linked/Circle.gif

[cj]

Originally posted by JR@May 7 2003, 02:45 PM
my opinion is that there are some really profound missunderstandings about spam. i have no recent experience, but a couple years ago, i helped someone set up a massive STMP relay network through ISP's where i had connections. i learned a few things really quickly

1) its not so simple. the average schmuck cannot send any kind of volume that matters. it requires a lot of investment, a cooperative ISP (which almost dont exist today), good custom software, decent lists and knowledge of a whole host of tricks to beat filters which change constantly as well.

2) the bulk of spam is coming from a small group of people. my guess is that it is really small. probably at least 50% of all spam comes from no more than 50 people.

3) its becomming less and less profitable daily. its becomming less and less easy to keep relays online. its becomming less and less possible to find cooperative ISPs... and more difficult to create ISP's for this main purpose.

you cant just set up dial up accounts and run a mail program on a windows 98 machine and send mail on a anonymous 56K connection like several years ago and make money.

4) the problem with spam in my opinion right now is that small group of people that stay ahead of the curve. those few people are sending more and more and more.

I think those people will always be ahead of the technology curve and be able to beat any filters. But they are running out of cooperative ISP's, anti spammers continue to find better and better ways to flood their ISP's with 1000's of complaints per day causing them to block the IP's of the relays and as more and more people get agressive about setting up their own filters - as well as AOL, yahoo, hotmail etc etc... get better at making it more difficult to get through their filters, it will just get to a point in my opinion that it will cease to be profitable.

maybe i am wrong. but that is my impression. i think its like everything else in that the gold rush is over, now the top dogs are tring to hang on... and its getting less profitable daily.

i also unsubscribe to almost mail i get. it reduced the total spam i get to about 10% of what it was. alexs previous suggestion in the AOL thread which is a rip off of spamcop.net urban legend on their messageboards that people use your address in some way when you unsubscribe is pretty silly. the people sending the bulk of spam are trying very hard to use clean lists and to keep them clean. its the difference between staying online a few more days or getting shut down. remove lists are getting to be more valuable than e-mail lists and are traded and sold.
JR, nice post, but i think you are in la la land ...


1) It may not be so simple, but the average schmuck CAN do it. that's the problem. any retard with a computer and some software can send a few million emails. not necessarily 'properly', but what's your definition of properly? as long as it gets in their inbox, that's all most spammers care about.

2) possibly

3) less profitable is only a concern for those who were around when it was more profitable. read gfy recently? profitable for those kids is a few hundred bucks drinking money a week - no concern of how things are done or who gets hurt or how many laws are broken. i've watched the standard of those who send mail drop dramatically over the years. it used to only be the big companies or the ones with serious setups. now every retard who wants to make some lazy cash sends spam.

yes you can just setup on dialups like several years ago and make money. you should try finding a prepaid here in the area i live in ... always sold out or low on stock

4) The problem with spam is that it has NO enforced rules. In 99 Paul Vixie managed, with just a few simple rules, to entirely shut down most of the big spam operations. His rules however blatantly stomped all over the 5th amendment so he was eventually silenced and spam has gotten worse ever since. Threaten an ISP with a fine and they will NOT accept spam, but ISP'S WILL continue to take porn spam customers, if they think they can make money from them. There will always be a new isp owner who wants to give spam a go ... this is a big world, if no one in the usa wants to do it, someone else will ...

the goldrush is over, but that's the same for every area of the industry ... the industry isnt as profitable any more and yet we have more glitz and glamour and fancy parties and big dick contests than ever before.

alexs previous suggestion in the AOL thread which is a rip off of spamcop.net urban legend on their messageboards that people use your address in some way when you unsubscribe is pretty silly.

I know you said this just to have a dig at alex, but it was a pretty naive comment ... many unsubscribe links are actually disguised as confirmation links ... spam webmasters will mail anything if they don't have a current list - including mailing their remove lists if they still have a sale in them.

Lisa & I went to a dinner early last year of about 30 webmasters .... every single one of them a spammer (if we realized before hand we wouldn't have attended). We had an interesting encounter with the classic spam retard - a total loser in life who had achieved nothing prior to his career in spam, who now thought he was a genius because he had figured out how to send more emails a minute and make an extra few bucks a day. (What he described to me had already been done years before) He asked us what we did and we said 'we manage affiliate programs' ... he laughed and said sarcastically 'shit that must be good for 10 tgp sales a day' ... he turned and snickered with his friends ... i couldn't believe someone could not only be so stupid, but could be so cocky while they were being stupid. he kept making comments like 'spam makes more money than anything else in this industry' ...

after half an hour of this, lisa and I just got up and left, knowing full well we could go home and check our stats and they would be bigger numbers than that entire room of losers - so focused on numbers like 'ten million emails' that they forget that those 10 million emails are also people who surf and can end up at a porn site in a number of other ways.

there will ALWAYS be spammers - and most of them are the lowest form of life. they will always think they are more clever than the rest of the industry while they are really nothing more than the shit on the bar floor at the end of the night.

If spam was restricted to a few big companies like cen, nick, scott etc it would be like the old days - but instead, we have 'spawn of spammers', each step down the family tree loses a little intelligence & has a lot less concern for the non-existant, never inforced rules.


ok morning rant over

:biglaugh:

[RawAlex]

CJ, well put.

I have an interesting technique now for spam with remove links... I have a handy list of people that I think need more mail, and I just run them all through the remove link.

I have tested it. In some cases, a single remove can lead to 100+ emails in the next 48 hours on a virgin mail account.

It's a great way to make friends. :-)

Alex

[Phoenix66]

I don't get the problem, honestly. I think that all needed to stop spam is to block everywhere e-mails that come from origins that do not match return address. May be I'm not familiar enough with transport protocols, but this doesn't seem to be hard to maintain.

[Hooper]

I get a lot of spam, in my filtered spam box. It's not that hard to differentiate spam from regular email imho.. i get a hundred or so spams a day (thanks nick ;-) and 99.9% of them get filtered into my spam box. i still read my spam box, but i read it on my time.

I think that may be the biggest misconception. People like to shop. People like to spend money, and people most certainly like to spend money on naked people.

Idiots are causing the biggest problems. Professional spammers dont want complainers. They want to remove them.

Give me 30 days and i'll make it better for everbody.. already have $35k where my mouth is and counting. I think you'll all be very suprised.

[slavdogg]

notice how no one really gave much fuck about spam until mainstream sammers went crazy

same goes for pop ups/unders it wasnt a problem when it was only on adult sites until yahoos and most mainstream sites started throwing them around

[JR]

JR, nice post, but i think you are in la la land ...

1) It may not be so simple, but the average schmuck CAN do it. that's the problem. any retard with a computer and some software can send a few million emails. not necessarily 'properly', but what's your definition of properly? as long as it gets in their inbox, that's all most spammers care about.

what i mean by "properly" is that it takes serious volume to make money. by "properly" i was talking about the people who send most of the spam on the web. its not a question of "reaching the inbox". its a question of millions reaching the inboxs' everyday. thats no easy task... and that is increasingly beyond the reach of the average schmuck to do.

AOL is the most profitable address on the planet and they are getting ready to try to put people in prison. if you remove AOL from the spamming equation, that in itself reduces the profitability of spam quite a bit.

i did not say anything to be fact, just my opinion based on my limited experience. but i am usually in lala land. :P

there are two types of spammers basically as far as i have seen:

1) the schmucks. (apparently all using dial up accounts in Brisbane) :)

2) the professional spammers. i think these people are responsible for what is by far the largest part of spam. probably more than 90%. its the ability of these people to do what they do that will determine how much spam you get in the future.

in the professional spammers in my opinion, there is again two categories that i have noticed. the "i dont give a fuck" crowd that just tries to do whatever volume they can before they shut down... especially when it comes at someone elses expense (someone elses hosting and relays) and even go so far as to mail remove lists just to get a couple extra signups.

... and the people that have a real investment in what they are doing and are trying to stay online as long as they can before their ISP cant take the heat or they run out of IP's. The bulk of e-mail comes from the serious crowd. not from "any schmuck" and it will never come from GFY types.

Brisbane dial up providers also block and filter dial up accounts when they start sending too much e-mail... most do everywhere. I know people who were in Brisbane doing exactly that. they went elsewhere for that reason. it depends i guess on what type of volume you are talking about. what you can do with a dial up account and a desktop program is increasingly limited. there are severe limitations as to what "any shmuck" can do and that bar is being raised daily.

(note: Nick is an "exceptional schmuck"). :wnw:

I agree with you that the bigger problem is the lack of laws and controls. but things are also evolving in the direction where that is changing as well. several states have came down pretty hard on spammers. Washington has in the past, California has, and now AOL's home state is definately going to try to make some examples of people. Paul Vixie caused a lot of damage to people who were not offenders and did not have the law on his side.

I think its all going to continue to change and evolve in a direction where it will become increasingly difficult to make money at all with spamming. that pattern cannot be denied today. its happening.

i think we are going to see a peak in spam soon and probably a decline.

maybe Hooper has already solved the problem. :)

[Trev]

All this fuss over tinned meat... jeese :P

[cj]

AOL is the most profitable address on the planet and they are getting ready to try to put people in prison. if you remove AOL from the spamming equation, that in itself reduces the profitability of spam quite a bit.

The motivation behind AOL disapproving of spam is because they aren't profiting from it as much as spammers are. AOL & Microsoft together in their new 'fight against spam' is nothing but a ploy to build systems which allow their approved spam through & spammers eventually cracking the system and getting their mail through. New regulations only change the dynamic of how the business of bulk email works, it doesn't end it of reduce its effectiveness.


there are two types of spammers basically as far as i have seen:

1) the schmucks. (apparently all using dial up accounts in Brisbane) :)

2) the professional spammers. i think these people are responsible for what is by far the largest part of spam. probably more than 90%. its the ability of these people to do what they do that will determine how much spam you get in the future.

I disagree ... I believe that the professional spammers don't need to send as much email to get results. I know that one of the most valuable things to professional spammers is a good remove list - one that will contain every possible person that could get them shut down. Professional spammers run scripts over their lists to clean them up and remove duplicates and obvious problem addresses like dot gov and nasa and fbi addresses ... and so on ... Why send 10 million if 7 million are duplicates and nasa addresses?

The schmucks don't think of this ... they see a list of 10 million emails for sale for 2.95 at ebay and off they go ... 10 million emails make it to the internet but only to 3 million are unique people.

THAT is why spam is a problem in my opinion. Sending 10 million emails IS something almost any adult webmasters could do, but knowing the difference between a golden 3 million email addresses and a shitty 7 million. Leave spamming to the professionals and i think the problem would DECREASE by 90%.

[RawAlex]

I would add that there is always the "jerk of the month" out there, willing to spam you endlessly to get your attention. I am sure many of you have filters for "temple kiff" and "katamadu" and such... The spam is gone - but for a couple of months, they were hot and heavy.

There are no end of affiliate programs and pyramid style reseller schemes that cry out to be spammed. Amateur spammers buy a 10 million name list, "stealth" software, and rent a flameproof landing page, and away they go. It can take ages to actually track down which isp they are really coming from. For as long as their DSL or cable modem runs, they are spammers. These people tend to run 24/7 until they flame out.

I am certain the are thousands of new spammers out there each month. Add to that the pros, the Ralskys and such, and you have a broad tapastry of wasted resources, repeated messages, and pissed of public. Spam isn't effecient anymore because so many people do it. Even the newbies are learning to filter, and their ISPs are starting to help.

One too many trips to the well leaves the well dry.

Alex

[Rolo]

RawAlex - I agree... spamming will continue no matter which laws are in place. If it gets to risky doing it from the US, then russian spammers will take over (or another nation)... Its always worth it for someone, thats why I belive that we will all end up with anti spam software - just like most of us have anti virus software in place.

How the software will work - I think a combo of filter, free access lists, paid e-mail access lists will work wonders :-)

If I had the money that some of these big corps are putting into fighting spam, then I´m sure I could get rid of 99.99997% of all the unwanted spam.... who will fund me? :D

[Nickatilynx]

allow their approved spam through & spammers eventually cracking the system and getting their mail through.

zip-it! ;)

[Trev]

It's funny how I never realy looked at the spam before just sat hitting delete untill this morning.


72 promoting online meds (Forest was this you lol)
36 promoting e-presentation garbage
17 offering DVD burning sofware
3 pushing porn

hmmmm.... seams mainstream are the new axis of evil :grrr: