Four Big ISPs File Six Anti-Spam Suits

ackthpt writes "Wired is carrying news that Microsoft, America Online, Earthlink and Yahoo are filing suits against spammers under the CANSPAM act. They will 'follow the money' to find the perpetrators and shut them down. Suits currently filed against John Does will have actual names attached once subpoenas get the names of the actual persons. I wish them all the luck, as I clean about 500 pieces of drek a day from my mailboxes." Other readers point to coverage from the BBC and from the Associated Press (here's the AP story as carried by the Boston Globe).

Good for them

[Space cowboy]

This is really excellent news - according to Spamhaus.org [spamhaus.org], 7 of the top 10 (including the top 2) spammers worldwide are from the USA. Looking at the list of the top 200, I'd say about 80% are from the USA. It needs action within the USA to stop this, and for once I can say I really approve of something AOL, MS and Yahoo are doing [don't know much about Earthlink] - See, I'm not biased at all :-))

Today I received 1681 emails, 137 of which are non-spam. Now I have good anti-spam filters, and I probably only opened about 300 of those, but that's still a major pain where it hurts. String 'em up, I say, bring back lynching - mob justice for spammers!

Simon

Dispose()

[Anonymous Coward]

Use Mailinator [mailinator.com] and avoid the spam in the first place!

Spamdemic map

[prostoalex]

Several years ago this spamdemic map [kruchesamiznaetekogo.com] was quite popular. It's an attempt to have a poster that would allow you to figure out who's behind all those "get out of debt" messages in your inbox. Some of that is still relevant nowadays.

Re:Four Big ISPs File Six Anti-Spam Suits

[Kenja]

"Since when has Microsoft been an ISP?"

Since they started the Microsfot Network? MSN started as an AOL style dial up service back around '93-'96.

Re:Good for them

[silas_moeckel]

I'm getting a similar volume of email with significantly less spam getting through running spamassasin at 4 with no false positives or whitelisting. What spam filter are you using it dosent sound like good spam filters to me.

Re:Good for them

[TwistedSquare]

according to Spamhaus.org, 7 of the top 10 (including the top 2) spammers worldwide are from the USA

Unfortunately from that list 7 of the top 10 spammers alphabetically are from the US, though I don't dispute that the general trend is the majority being from the US

Spam is just getting rediculous!

[AcquaCow]

As one of my responsibilities I admin and camp the spam filter at work. We get a few thousand emails a day into a company of 80.

Much of this spam has had to resort to making their emails unintelligible to try and bypass spam filters.

Others like Aphroditie Marketing have atleast 2 class C licences with full dns for each address that they send email out from. I've had to firewall off entire class C's to block their emails!

C'Mon...who is going to read email with a subject line like:
"Order Meds V@1|um - XA:n:az ; V|@grA & %RND_MED_VIC+0DIN $ .Soma. $ Pnte:r:min LV0J2" anyways?

At some point of obfuscation it has to just become a giant waste of time to try and send the email out.

Re:This should be at least amusing

[PhxBlue]

Its always entertaining to see the anti-lawyer anti-corporate crowd actually agree with something that a lawyer heavy super corporation does.

I'm not anti-lawyer or anti-corporate. I'm just pro-common sense, which means I oppose the actions of "lawyer-heavy super corporations" on a fairly regular basis. However, even "lawyer-heavy super corporations" do the right thing more often than not.

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Why a bigot ? I thought lynching was just when a mob of angry people hanged someone without bothering with all that tedious "due process of law" business ? I seem to remember it that way on the 'sheriff vs outlaws' westerns of my youth...

Just looked it up at dictionary.com and got:

lynch - To execute without due process of law, especially to hang, as by a mob.

lynching - To inflict punishment upon, especially death, without the forms of law, as when a mob captures and hangs a suspected person.

Simon

Re:Hope it works

[another_mr_lizard]

To poison the filters you have in place?

Re:Dispose()

[mrex]

Who modded that up? The guy is spamming slashdot for an unknown, suspicious looking "mail filtering" product, and right there on the side-bar is a Coupon Code for bullet proof/black hat hosters ServerBeach [google.com]!

Better link to AP article

[Patik]

Click here [myway.com].

MyWay.com [myway.com] carries all AP and Reuters articles with no banners, popups, or any kind of registration. Just a couple inobtrusive Google-provided text ads at the bottom. They also have reg-free referal links to NY Times, USA Today, CBS, FOX, and MSNBC stories.

Re:We all get spam but...

[Anonymous Coward]

A detailed study [cdt.org] by the Center for Democracy & Technology concluded "CDT received the most e-mails when an address was placed visibly on a public Web site. Spammers use software harvesting programs such as robots or spiders to record e-mail addresses listed on Web sites, including both personal Web pages and institutional (corporate or non-profit) Web pages." It has very little to do with the mailing lists you're on, and is driven by where your address has been published on the Web.

Re:Excellent News!

[netfall]

I should point out the article I reference with that 7%... Written by Deborah Fallows, Senior Research Fellow at Pew Internet & American Life project. "SPAM: How it is Hurting Email and Degrading Life on the Internet". Available here [pewinternet.org].
Another point is that the 7% statistic may be skewed, because some of the people surveyed didn't consider all mail to be SPAM (ie, they requested the special offers / catalogs / etc by email)

Re:Huh?

[CrankyFool]

AOL is the domain of the clueless user, no doubt, and their marketing is a little annoying, given the plethora of discs they send to everyone, their grandmother, and their dead relatives.

On the other hand, their spam stance has been pretty solid for a while now. Despite the large number of clueless users on AOL, I can't remember the last time I got spam from them, and they've been remarkably good net denizens in this regard -- they were the first large ISP (to the best of my knowledge) to start using SPF, for example.

On the spam front, I think they're definitely whitehats. More than that, they're 800lb gorillas wearing white hats. This is a very, very good thing.

Oh, and Microsoft? Spawn of the devil.

Re:Good for them

[CaptBubba]

Look at the bottom of the page where they keep the stats [spamhaus.org]. All but 2 on the list for Febuary are in the US.

I get spam from the #10 guy, but unfortunatly he's recently sold my address so now I get spam from some guy in Lativa as well. While the volume hasn't gone up, the content has changed from being viagra sales to being ads for beastiality. Plus the new spams seem to be harder to filter, loaded with many false html tags trying to get them through. Only 4 emails a day or so make it past the mail filters my ISP uses, but I still don't want that shit in my indox.

Re:Huh?

[CrankyFool]

Only by that most subjective definition of spam that goes like this: "Spam is what I don't want to get."

The problem with spam is its cost-shifting. Snailmail doesn't have that problem. They're paying to send you stuff. You're not, typically, paying to receive it.

Oh, and have you considered contacting AOL and asking them not to send you any more CDs?

Re:I wonder how effective this will be...

[BradNelson]

Six spammers is probably a drop in the desert, and shutting them down won't cause a noticable impact, but at least it's a start.

From the AP story:
"they filed six lawsuits against hundreds of people who were accused of sending millions of unwanted e-mails"

So it sounds like more than just 6 people.

Re:I wonder how effective this will be...

[jwhyche]

I'm willing to bet it will have more effect than you are giving credit for. Most of the spam on the internet is cause by a realitivity small group of people. Taking down even a few of them might make a noticable impact.

Re:I wonder how effective this will be...

[emilng]

According to the article, it's 6 spammers, not 6% of spammers.