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Spam
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Spam
History of spamming | Stopping e-mail abuse | e-Mail spam | e-Mail fraud | Messaging spam | Mobile phone spam | Newsgroup spam | Spit (VoIP spam) | Honeypot | Spamware | Pills porn and poker | Joe job | Spam Prevention Early Warning System
Spamming is commonly defined as the sending of unsolicited bulk
e-mail - that is, email that was not asked for (unsolicited) by
multiple recipients (bulk). A further common definiton of spam restricts
it to unsolicited commercial e-mail, a definiton that does not
consider non-commercial solicitations such as political or religious
pitches, even if unsolicited, as spam.
In the popular eye, the most common form of spam is that delivered in e-mail
as a form of commercial
advertising. However, over the short history of electronic media, people
have spammed for many purposes other than the commercial, and in many media
other than e-mail. Spammers have developed a variety of spamming techniques,
which vary by media:
e-mail
spam,
instant messaging spam,
Usenet newsgroup spam,
Web search
engine spam,
spam
in blogs, and
mobile phone messaging spam.
A KMail folder
full of spam e-mail messages collected over a few days.
Spamming is economically viable because advertisers have effectively no
operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists. Because the
barrier to entry is so low, the volume of unsolicited mail has produced other
costs which are borne by the public (in terms of lost productivity and fraud)
and by Internet service providers, which must add extra capacity to cope with the
deluge. Spamming is widely reviled, and has been the subject of legislation in a
number of jurisdictions.
Solutions to the spam problem
All manner of attempts have been made to curb unsolicited mass electronic
communications. For more information, see
Stopping e-mail abuse. There are many solution categories in this constantly
evolving field. Source-based blocking solutions prevent receipt of spam, while
content filtering solutions identify spam after it’s been received. There are
avoidance strategies, including disposable identities. Automated cancellation of
netnews spam is ongoing. Contractual measures such as Internet Service
Providers' acceptable-use policies are also employed.
Anti-spam laws such as the
CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 have also been introduced to regulate or increase the
legal penalties for spamming. Various vigilante and retaliatory tactics are also
employed. Newer strategies include various cost-based and
e-mail authentication and sender reputation solutions. The best means
however is to be vigilant as to whom you give your email address. Constant
distribution of your email address is bound to result in spam in some way. The
best frame of mind is to decide whether the website can be trusted with your
email address.
Spamming in different media
E-mail spam
- Main article:
E-mail spam
E-mail spam is by far the most common form of spamming on the internet. It
involves sending identical or nearly identical unsolicited messages to a large
number of recipients. Unlike legitimate commercial e-mail, spam is generally
sent without the explicit permission of the recipients, and frequently contains
various tricks to bypass e-mail filters. Modern computers generally come with
some ability to send spam. The only necessary added ingredient is the list of
addresses to target.
Spammers obtain e-mail addresses by a number of means: harvesting
addresses from Usenet postings, DNS listings, or Web pages; guessing common names at known domains (known as
a
dictionary attack); and "e-pending" or searching for e-mail
addresses corresponding to specific persons, such as residents in an area. Many
spammers utilize programs called
web spiders
to find e-mail addresses on web pages, although it is possible to fool the web
spider by substituting the "@" symbol with another symbol, for example "#",
while posting an e-mail address.
Many e-mail spammers go to great lengths to conceal the origin of their
messages. They might do this by
spoofing e-mail addresses (similar to
Internet protocol spoofing). In this technique, the spammer modifies the
e-mail message so it looks like it is coming from another e-mail address.
However, many spammers also make it easy for recipients to identify their
messages as spam by placing an ad phrase in the From field—very few
people have names like "GetMyCigs" or "Giving away playstation3s"!
Among the tricks used by spammers to try to circumvent the filters is to
intentionally misspell common spam filter trigger words. For example, "viagra"
might become "vaigra", or other symbols may be inserted into the word as in "v/i/a/g./r/a".
The human mind can handle a surprising degree of corruption, but sometimes this
tactic can backfire, rendering a message illegible.
ISPs have begun to use the misspellings themselves as a filtering test.
The most dedicated spammers—often those making a great deal of money or
engaged in illegal activities, such as the
pornography, casinos and
Nigerian scammers—are often one step ahead of the ISPs. Reporting them to
your ISP may help block less sophisticated spammers in the future.
So-called "spambots" are a major producer of e-mail spam. The worst spammers
create e-mail viruses that will render an unprotected PC a "zombie computer";
the zombie will inform a central unit of its existence, and the central unit
will command the "zombie" to send a low volume of spam. This allows spammers to
send high volumes of e-mail without being caught by their ISPs or being tracked
down by antispammers; a low volume of spam is instead sent from many locations
simultaneously. Many consumer-level ISPs (Earthlink, for example) stop spambots
by blocking the SMTP port (port 25), although there are some users who make legitimate use of it.
Messaging spam
- Main article:
Messaging spam
Messaging spam, sometimes termed spim (a
portmanteau of spam and IM, short for instant messenger), makes use of instant
messaging systems, such as AOL Instant Messenger or ICQ. Many IM systems offer a
directory of users, including demographic information such as age and sex.
Advertisers can gather this information, sign on to the system, and send
unsolicited messages. To send instant messages to millions of users on most IM
services merely requires scriptable software and the recipients' IM usernames.
Spammers have similarly targeted Internet Relay Chat channels, using IRC bots that
join channels and bombard them with advertising messages. Because most IM
protocols are proprietary, it is easier to enact unilateral changes to make
spamming more difficult.
A similar sort of spam can be sent with the
Messenger Service in Microsoft Windows. The Messenger Service is an SMB facility intended to allow servers to send pop-up alerts to a Windows
workstation. When Windows systems are connected to the Internet with this
service running and without an adequate firewall, it can be used to send spam.
The Messenger Service can, however, be easily disabled.
[1]
Messenger service spam, in particular, has lent itself to spammer use in a
particularly circular scheme. In many cases, messenger spammers send messages to
vulnerable Windows machines consisting of text like "Annoyed by these
messages? Visit this site." The link leads to a Web site where, for a fee,
users are told how to disable the Windows messenger service. Though the
messenger service is easily disabled for free by the user, this scam works
because it creates a perceived need and then offers an immediate solution.
Oftentimes, the only "annoying messages" the user is receiving through Messenger
are advertisements to disable Messenger itself.
Newsgroup spam and Forum spam
- Main article:
Newsgroup spam
Newsgroup spam predates e-mail spam, and targets
Usenet newsgroups. Old Usenet convention defines spamming as excessive multiple
posting, that is, the repeated posting of a message (or substantially similar
messages). Since posting to newsgroups is nearly as easy as sending e-mails,
newsgroups are a popular target of spammers. The Breidbart Index was developed to provide an objective measure of the "spamminess"
of a multi-posted or cross-posted message on Usenet.
Spamming an
internet forum in general, is when a user posts something which is off-topic or
doesn’t have anything to do with the current subject. Also, a post that doesn’t
contribute to the thread
whatsoever is also considered spam in some cases. A third form of Forum Spamming
is where a person repeatedly posts about a certain subject in a manner that is
unwanted by (and possibly annoying to) the general population of the forum.
Lastly there is also the case where a person posts messages solely for the
purpose of increasing his or her ranking on the forum. In a broader sense,
advertising on forums where it is not wanted is known as spamming and is
generally seen as an annoyance.
Mobile phone spam
- Main article:
Mobile phone spam
Mobile phone spam is directed at the
text messaging service of a mobile phone. This can be especially irritating to consumers not only for the
inconvenience but also because they sometimes have to pay to receive the text
message.
Internet telephony spam
It has been predicted that
voice
over IP (VoIP) communications will be vulnerable to being spammed by
prerecorded messages. Although there have been few reported incidents, some
companies have already tried to sell defenses against it.
[2]
Online game messaging spam
Many online games allow players to contact each other via player-to-player
messaging, or chatrooms or public discussion areas.
What qualifies as spam varies from game to game, but usually this term is
applied to all forms of flooding the game with messages; in case of
MUDs, the problem is
usually the same as with other chat services (see
Messaging spam).
Many games have strict rules on what kind of communication is acceptable in
the games. Frequently, the terms of service don't allow promotion of external
websites except on very strict terms (for example, URLs may be allowed on player
profiles, but not anywhere else), and promotion of websites in-game is usually
very much frowned on in any case.
Spam targeting search engines (Spamdexing)
- Main article:
Spamdexing
Spamdexing (a
portmanteau of spamming and indexing) refers to the practice
on the
World Wide Web of deliberately modifying HTML pages to increase the chance of
them being placed high on search engine relevancy lists. People who do this are
called search engine spammers. In layman's terms, spamdexing is using unethical
means known as "black hat seo techniques" to unfairly increase the rank of sites
in search engines. When a website is optimized to be indexable by a search
engine, without trying to deceive its web crawler, this is called
search engine optimization. To be sure, there is much gray area between
white-hat search engine optimization and black-hat spamdexing.
Blog, wiki, guestbook, and referrer spam
- Main article:
Spam in blogs
Google's
PageRank system uses the number of links to a page as an index of its
"importance". Ordinarily, very few pages will link to a spammer's commercial
site, because it is of no interest to anyone else, and hence it will have a very
low PageRank score. To counter this effect, spammers attempt to create links to
their sites on other people's pages.
The most common targets for this kind of spam are
weblogs, the
spamming then being known as
blog spam,
or "blam" for short. In 2003, this type of spam took advantage of the open
nature of comments in the blogging software Movable
Type by repeatedly placing comments to various blog posts that provided
nothing more than a link to the spammer's commercial web site.
[3]
Similar attacks are often performed against wikis and guestbooks, both of
which accept user contributions; something that consistantly impresses and
confounds critics of Wikipedia is its remarkable lack of spam, in spite of having nearly one million articles
and over two million pages.
On January 18, 2005, Google proposed
a rel="nofollow" attribute that could be placed on a link; doing so
instructs most major search engines to ignore the link, rendering it useless to
spammers. Software is then rewritten to add this attribute to any link embedded
in a comment. As of April 2005, nofollow has seen expanding usage, but is not
yet universal.
[4]
As well as comment forms, editable pages and guestbooks, some sites publish a
list of the most common referrers to
their site in order to show how readers have found it. These lists have also
been exploited by spammers with so-called
referer
spam, in which the spammer makes repeated web site requests using a fake
referer URL pointing
to a spam-advertised site. That URL will later appear as a link on the site,
boosting the PageRank of its target.
Commercial uses
The most common purpose for spamming is
advertising. Goods commonly advertised in spam include
pornography, unlicensed computer software, medical products such as Viagra,
credit card accounts, and fad products. In part because of the bad reputation
(and dubious legal status) which spamming carries, it is chiefly used to carry
offers of an ill-reputed or legally questionable nature. Many of the products
advertised in spam are fraudulent in nature, such as quack medications and
get-rich-quick schemes. Spam is frequently used to advertise scams, such as
diploma mills,
advance fee fraud,
pyramid schemes, stock pump-and-dump schemes, and
phishing.
It is also often used to advertise
pornography without regard to the age of the recipient, or the legality of
such material in the recipient's location.
One of the most common ad spams is the computer software program GAIN. Also
known as Gator or Claria or Dashbar, this insidious program hides itself within
the active programs running on your computer and will collect information on
internet habits. Based on the websites you visit, it will then send you
"relevant" advertising at random intervals. Unfortunately, this program is often
attached and automatically installed with popular "free" software, such as many P2P filesharing
clients. Even removing GAIN from your computer can sometimes prove difficult, as
it leaves traces of itself even after uninstallation or removal by third party
spyware programs.
Spam has different levels of acceptability in different countries. For
example, in Russia spamming is commonly used by many mainstream legitimate
businesses, such as travel agencies, printing shops, training centers, real
estate agencies, seminar and conference organizers, and even self-employed
electricians and garbage collection companies. In fact, the most prominent
Russian spammer was American English Center, a language school in Moscow. That
spamming sparked a powerful antispam movement by enraging the Deputy Minister of
Communications Andrey Korotkov and provoking a wave of counterattacks on the
spammer through non-Internet channels, including a massive telephone DDOS (Distributed
Denial of Service) attack.
Comparison to postal "junk" mail
There are a number of differences between spam and junk mail:
- Unlike junk
postal mail, the costs of spam paid for by the recipient's mail site
commonly approach or even exceed those of the sender, in terms of bandwidth,
CPU processing time, and storage space. Spammers frequently use free dial-up
accounts, so their costs may be quite minimal indeed. Because of this
offloading of costs onto the recipient, many consider spamming to be
criminal conversion or
theft.
- Junk mail can be said to subsidize the delivery of mail customers want
to receive. For example, the
United States Postal Service allows bulk mail senders to pay a lower rate
than for first-class mail, because they are required to sort their mailings
and apply bar codes, which makes their mail much cheaper to process. While some ISPs receive
large fees from spammers, most do not—and most pay the costs of carrying or
filtering unwanted spam.
- Another distinction is that the costs of sending junk mail provide
incentives to be somewhat selective about recipients, whereas the spammer
has much lower costs, and therefore much less incentive.
- Finally, bulk mail is by and large used by businesses that are traceable
and can be held responsible for what they send. Spammers frequently operate
on a fly-by-night basis, using the so-called "anarchy" of the Internet as a
cover
Noncommercial spam
E-mail and other forms of spamming have been used for purposes other than
advertisements. Many early Usenet spams were religious or political in nature.
Serdar Argic, for instance, spammed Usenet with historical revisionist screeds.
A number of evangelists have spammed Usenet and e-mail media with preaching messages. A
growing number of criminals are also using spam to perpetrate various sorts of
fraud[5],
and in some cases have used it to lure people to locations where they have been
kidnapped, held for ransom and even murdered
[6].
DoS spam
Spamming has also been used as a
denial of service ("DoS") tactic, particularly on Usenet. By overwhelming the
readers of a newsgroup with an inordinate number of nonsense messages,
legitimate messages can be lost and computing resources are consumed. Since
these messages are usually forged (that is, sent falsely under regular posters'
names) this tactic has come to be known as sporgery (from spam + forgery). This
tactic has for instance been used by partisans of the Church of Scientology
against the alt.religion.scientology newsgroup (see Scientology vs. the
Internet) and by spammers against news.admin.net-abuse.email, a forum for mail
administrators to discuss spam problems. Applied to e-mail, this is termed
mailbombing. The Usenet Meow Wars (circa 1996) were DoS attacks on various
newsgroups aimed at specific posters, thus disrupting the newsgroups where they
were active. The DoS attacks launched by Hipcrime, which continue today, are
more specifically crafted as DoS attacks on entire newsgroups. The alt.sex newsgroups were rendered virtually uninhabitable by commercial porn
site spammers, partially for advertising purposes and partially to destroy a
perceived free competitor. (This spawned the creation of the moderated,
unspammable
soc.sexuality newsgroups.)
In a handful of cases, forged e-mail spam has been used as a tool of
harassment. The spammer collects a list of addresses as usual, then sends a spam
to them signed with the name of the person he wishes to harass. Some recipients,
angry that they received spam and seeing an obvious "source", will respond
angrily or pursue various sorts of revenge against the apparent spammer, the
forgery victim. A widely known victim of this sort of harassment was Joe's
CyberPost, which has lent its name to the offense: it is known as a joe job.
Such joe jobs have been most often used against antispammers: in more recent
examples, Steve Linford of Spamhaus Project and Timothy Walton, a California
attorney, have been targeted. Sometimes victims (such as ROKSO-listed spammers)
are subscribed to lists that don't practice verified opt-in, such as magazine
subscriptions and e-mail newsletters, a practise known as subscriptionbombing.
Spammers have also abused resources set up for purposes of anonymous speech
online, such as
anonymous remailers. As a result, many of these resources have been shut
down, denying their utility to legitimate users.
E-mail
worms or viruses may be spammed to set up an initial pool of infected machines,
which then resend the virus to other machines in a spam-like manner. The
infected machines can often be used as remote-controlled zombie computers, for
more conventional spamming or DDoS attacks. Sometimes trojans are spammed to
phish for
bank account details, or to set up a pool of zombies without using a virus.
History
- Main article:
History of spamming
The term spam is derived from the
Monty
Python
SPAM sketch, set in a cafe where everything on the menu includes
SPAM luncheon meat.
As the server recites the SPAM-filled menu, presently a chorus of
Viking patrons drowns out all normal conversation with a song, repeating "SPAM,
SPAM, SPAM, SPAM" and singing "lovely SPAM, wonderful SPAM" over and over again,
stopping all conversation, hence SPAMming the dialogue. The excessive amount of
SPAM in the sketch comes from British rationing in World War II. SPAM was one of the few foods that was not restricted and widely
available, so by the time of the sketch, the British were fed up with the
luncheon meat. Another similarity is that everything on the menu comes with
SPAM, therefore representing that you can't order something without receiving
something you don't want, much like one can't be active on the Internet and
never have spam sent to your e-mail address(es).
Although the
first known instance of unsolicited commercial e-mail occurred in
1978 (unsolicited electronic messaging had already taken place over other media,
with the first recorded instance being via telegram on September 13, 1904), the
term "spam" for this practice had not yet been applied. In the 1980s the term
was adopted to describe certain abusive users who frequented BBSs and MUDs,
who would repeat "SPAM" a huge number of times to scroll other users' text off
the screen. In the early Chat rooms in services like PeopleLink and the early
days of AOL, they actually flooded the screen with sizeable quotes from the
Monty Python routine. This was generally used as a tactic by insiders of a
particular group who wanted to drive newcomers out of the room so the usual
conversation could continue. This act, previously termed flooding or
trashing, came to be called spamming as well.
[7] By analogy, the term was soon applied to any large amount of text
broadcast by one user, or sometimes by many users.
It later came to be used on
Usenet to mean excessive multiple posting—the repeated posting of the same
message. The first evident usage of this sense was by Joel Furr in the aftermath
of the ARMM incident of March 31, 1993,
in which a piece of experimental software released dozens of recursive messages
onto the news.admin.policy newsgroup. Soon, this use had also become
established—to spam Usenet was to flood newsgroups with junk messages.
Commercial spamming started in force on
March 5, 1994, when a pair of lawyers, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, began
using bulk Usenet posting to advertise immigration law services. The incident
was commonly termed the "Green Card spam", after the subject line of the postings. The two went on to
widely promote spamming of both Usenet and e-mail as a new means of
advertisement—over the objections of Internet users they labeled "anti-commerce
radicals." Within a few years, the focus of spamming (and antispam efforts)
moved chiefly to e-mail, where it remains today.
[8]
There are three popular
fake etymologies of the word "spam". The first, promulgated by Canter &
Siegel themselves, is that "spamming" is what happens when one dumps a can of
SPAM luncheon meat
into a fan blade. The second is the
backronym
"shit posing as mail." The third is similar, using "stupid
pointless annoying messages."
Hormel Foods Corporation, the makers of SPAM® luncheon meat, do not object
to the Internet use of the term "spamming." However, they do ask that the
capitalized word "SPAM" be reserved to refer to their product and trademark.
[9] By and large, this request is obeyed in forums which discuss spam—to the
extent that to write "SPAM" for "spam" brands the writer as a
newbie.
However, Hormel has begun to press the trademark issue—first, when a firm
registered the trademark "SpamArrest" in 2003, Hormel sued to invalidate the
mark,
[10], and more recently two failed attempts to revoke the mark "spambuster".[11],
[12]
Alternate meanings
The term "spamming" is also used in the older sense of something repetitious
and disruptive by players of various
video games, most often first-person shooters or fighting games. For shooters,
it refers to "area denial" tactics—repeatedly firing rockets or other explosive
shells into an area—or to any tactic whereby a large volume of ammunition is
expended in the hope of either scoring chance hits, covering teammates' advance
with suppressive fire, or clearing or defending an area from an enemy presence.
In fighting games, spamming most often refers to overuse of particularly
powerful moves, especially if they are easy to execute.
Whether such tactics are viewed as cheating or abusive varies from game to
game, community to community. Analogous to
camping, the tactical advantage gained by those thus engaged is the crux of the
issue. If every player defensively "spams", and no one makes the offensive push,
there will be no opportunities for players to come into conflict, and thus there
will be no game. Games like Capture the Flag help to break this deadlock by providing incentive to
invade enemy territory, however risky.
Conversely, the same term may be used to describe those who flood the in-game
chat with
needlessly profuse and/or frequent messaging, similar to
messaging spam mentioned above. Although perceptions vary within the gaming
community, in most arenas excessive messaging is unwelcome. On the other hand,
in the
role-playing games MUD, MUSH, and MUCK, players
happily continue using the word in this original sense, with no implication of
abuse. When a player returns to the terminal after a brief break to find his or
her screen wonderfully filled with pages of random chat, it's still called
"spam".
[13]
SPAM could also be taken to mean a set of humorous
English backronyms, including: Short/Stupid/Silly Particularly/Pointless Annoying
Messages, Self-Promotional Advertising Material, Self Propelled Automatic Mail,
Send Post All Members, Sending Persistently Annoying Mail, and Shit Posing As
Mail.
Costs of spam
The California legislature found that spam cost United States organizations
alone more than $10 billion in 2004, including lost productivity and the
additional equipment, software, and manpower needed to combat the problem.
Spam's direct effects include the consumption of computer and network
resources, and the cost in human time and attention of dismissing unwanted
messages. In addition, spam has costs stemming from the kinds of spam
messages sent, from the ways spammers send them, and from the
arms race
between spammers and those who try to stop or control spam. In addition, there
are the opportunity cost of those who forgo the use of spam-afflicted systems.
There are the direct costs, as well as the indirect costs borne by the victims -
both those related to the spamming itself, and to other crimes that usually
accompany it, such as financial theft,
identity theft, data and intellectual property theft, virus and other
malware infection, child pornography, fraud, and deceptive marketing.
The methods of spammers are likewise costly. Because spamming contravenes the
vast majority of ISPs' acceptable-use policies, most spammers have for many
years gone to some trouble to conceal the origins of their spam. E-mail, Usenet,
and instant-message spam are often sent through insecure
proxy servers belonging to unwilling third parties. Spammers frequently use
false names, addresses, phone numbers, and other contact information to set up
"disposable" accounts at various Internet service providers. In some cases, they
have used falsified or stolen credit card numbers to pay for these accounts. This allows them to quickly move
from one account to the next as each one is discovered and shut down by the host
ISPs.
The costs of spam also include the collateral costs of the struggle between
spammers and the administrators and users of the media threatened by spamming.
See
[14].
Many users are bothered by spam because it impinges upon the amount of time
they spend reading their e-mail. Many also find the content of spam frequently
offensive, in that pornography is one of the most frequently advertised
products. Spammers send their spam largely indiscriminately, so pornographic ads
may show up in a work place e-mail inbox—or a child's, the latter of which is
illegal in many jurisdictions. Recently, there has been a noticeable increase in
spam advertising websites that contain child pornography.
Some spammers argue that most of these costs could potentially be alleviated
by having spammers reimburse ISPs and individuals for their material. There are
two problems with this logic: first, the rate of reimbursement they could
credibly budget is not nearly high enough to pay the direct costs; and second,
the human cost (lost mail, lost time, and lost opportunities) is basically
unrecoverable.
E-mail spam exemplifies a
tragedy of the commons: spammers use resources (both physical and human),
without bearing the entire cost of those resources. In fact, spammers commonly
do not bear the cost at all. This raises the costs for everyone. In some ways
spam is even a potential threat to the entire e-mail system, as operated in the
past.
Since e-mail is so cheap to send, a tiny number of spammers can saturate the
Internet with junk mail. Although only a tiny percentage of their targets are
motivated to purchase their products (or fall victim to their scams), the low
cost sometimes provides a sufficient conversion rate to keep spamming alive.
Furthermore, even though spam appears not to be economically viable as a way for
a reputable company to do business, it suffices for professional spammers to
convince a tiny proportion of gullible advertisers that it is viable for those
spammers to stay in business. Finally, new spammers go into business every day,
and the low costs allow a single spammer to do a lot of harm before finally
realizing that the business is not profitable.
Some companies and groups "rank" spammers; spammers who make the news are
sometimes referred to by these rankings (Spamhaus'
"TOP 10 spam service ISPs",
The 10 Worst ROKSO Spammers ). The necessary secretiveness of the operations
makes uncertainty about how they actually determine "how bad" a spammer is
unavoidable. Also, spammers may target different networks to different extents,
depending on how successful they are at attacking the target. Thus considerable
resources are employed to actually measure the amount of spam generated by a
single person or group. For example, victims that use common antispam hardware,
software or services provide opportunities for such tracking. Nevertheless, such
rankings should be taken with a grain of salt.
To better understand the cost of spam to an organization,
MX Logic Email Defense has posted a
cost of spam calculator on their website.
Continuously updated
statistics from postini track the ebb and flow of e-mail abuse without
ranking spammers.
Political issues
Spamming remains a hot discussion topic. In fact, many online users have even
suggested (though they were presumably joking) that cruel forms of
capital punishment would be appropriate for spammers. In 2004, the seized
Porsche of an indicted spammer was advertised on the internet; this revealed the
extent of the financial rewards available to those who are willing to commit
duplicitous acts online. However, some of the possible means used to stop
spamming may lead to other side effects, such as increased government control
over the Net, loss of privacy, barriers to free expression, and even the
commercialization of e-mail.
One of the chief values favored by many long-time Internet users and experts,
as well as by many members of the public, is the free exchange of ideas. Many
have valued the relative
anarchy of the Internet, and bridle at the idea of restrictions placed upon
it. A common refrain from spam-fighters is that spamming itself abridges the
historical freedom of the Internet, by attempting to force users to carry the
costs of material which they would not choose.
An ongoing concern expressed by parties such as the
Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU has to do with so-called "stealth
blocking", a term for ISPs employing aggressive spam blocking without their
users' knowledge. These groups' concern is that ISPs or technicians seeking to
reduce spam-related costs may select tools which (either through error or
design) also block non-spam e-mail from sites seen as "spam-friendly". SPEWS is a common target of these criticisms. Few object to the existence of
these tools; it is their use in filtering the mail of users who are not informed
of their use which draws fire.
Some see spam-blocking tools as a threat to free expression—and laws against
spamming as an untoward precedent for regulation or taxation of e-mail and the
Internet at large. Even though it is possible in some jurisdictions to treat
some spam as unlawful merely by applying existing laws against trespass and
conversion, some laws specifically targeting spam have been proposed. In 2004,
United States passed the Can Spam Act of 2003 which provided ISPs with tools to
combat spam. This act allowed Yahoo! to successfully sue Eric Head, reportedly one of the biggest spammers in the
world, who settled the lawsuit for several thousand U.S. dollars in June 2004.
But the law is criticized by many for not being effective enough. Indeed, the
law was supported by some spammers and organizations which support spamming, and
opposed by many in the antispam community. Examples of effective anti-abuse laws
that respect free speech rights include those in the U.S. against unsolicited
faxes and phone calls, and those in Australia and a few U.S. states against
spam.
Court cases
Attorney
Laurence Canter was disbarred by the Supreme Court of Tennessee in 1997 for
sending prodigious amounts of spam advertising his immigration law practice.
Robert Soloway lost a case in a federal court against the operator of a small
Oklahoma-based Internet service provider who accused him of spamming. In another
case against Soloway, U.S. Judge Ralph G. Thompson granted a motion by plaintiff
Robert Braver for a default judgment and permanent injunction against him. The
judgment includes a statutory damages award of $10,075,000 under Oklahoma law.
In the first successful case of its kind, Mr. Nigel Roberts from the
Channel Islands won £270 against Media Logistics UK who sent junk e-mails to his personal account.
[15]
Newsgroups
-
news.admin.net-abuse.email
- others in news.admin.net-abuse.* hierarchy
-
alt.spam
See also
Background
External links
Anti-spam organizations
Anti-spam articles and publications
-
Spam In Developing Countries - part of the
OECD Antispam Toolkit
-
AOL Postmaster Pages - What to do if
AOL blocks you
-
Outblaze Antispam Pages - Articles on spam filtering by the postmaster
staff at
Outblaze
-
SpamKings Blog by Brian McWilliams
-
SpamHelp Anti-Spam Articles
-
Anti Spam Whitepapers and Software
-
Anti-Spam Topics
-
Antiphishing Crusade Daily News of phishing spam collected from around
the net.
-
Article by Andy Coote in SC Magazine June 2004
-
California lawyer who sues spammers
-
E-mail Address Harvesting: How Spammers Reap What You Sow by the
Federal Trade Commission
-
Email Battles Daily news about spam, security, privacy, spyware,
phishing and viruses from the front lines of the e-mail wars.
-
Getting Rid of Spam (summary)
-
Library of E-mail Spam Reports and Articles
-
Spam FAQs
-
Spamfo.co.uk News on junk e-mail, scams, fraud, legal aspects and
reviews of software and services.
-
SpamNews.co.uk Delivering your daily slice of fresh Spam. All the spam news,
all the time
-
Suggestions on how to choose an e-mail address and how to disclose it with
care
-
The rules of spam, according to net.admin.net-abuse.email
-
The War Against Spam — a collection of reading material on the
subject
-
Unsolicited Commercial E-mail Research Six Month Report by the
Center for Democracy & Technology
-
UPI article about the economic effects of spam
-
White paper from e-mail client developers
-
Yahoo Domain Keys: Another Ineffective Spam Solution —
shumans.com article, Dec 6, 2003
-
Spam Techniques Research — do.homeunix.org paper and wiki, Jul 7, 2005
-
A tool that deals with referer spam
-
How to deny access to spam bots
-
Why I Hate Spam by
Bill
Gates,
The Wall Street Journal, June 23, 2003.
-
Artist turns mortgage loan and Viagra spam into art Vyuz.com
Humor
-
Spamusement A collection of humorously drawn cartoons inspired by actual
spam subject lines.
-
The Incredible Spam Museum A search engine like site that collects and
publish spam e-mails.
-
Spamradio Turns spam e-mail into online music streams.
-
Spam Eulogy A guy that lives in a world of spam.
-
WhamBamSpam Website that wants you to spam it's forums, essentially free
advertising, and spam discussions.
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