A New Type Of Realtime Blocklist: The SURBL 219
Glamdrlng writes "The SURBL, or "Spam URI Realtime Blocklist", represents a nexus of RBL's and content filtering that may bring us one step closer to a spam magic bullet. While traditional RBL's perform a DNS lookup on the connecting mail server, SURBL's take this a step further by parsing the text of the email looking for URI's and doing a lookup on those web servers. They also prevent "joe jobs" by maintaining a whitelist of legitimate web servers whose domain names may show up in spam messages, e.g. EBay, Paypal, Microsoft, etc. The only requirement to implement the SURBL is a plugin on your MTA such as spamassassin that can parse the body of each email. While there is no MTA that directly supports SURBL's without a plugin, the author hints at one being in development."
Is this really a GOOD idea? (Score:5, Interesting)
possibilities for abuse. While the While-List would protect against
this it will protect the BIG players on the market - it can still
wreak havoc on small/medium enterprises - e.g. a competitor of a
(pretty much) 'niche' firm could get a spam out advertising the
COMPETITOR in order to get HIM blocked...
Or - the other way around - a company gets itself a whitelisting
(via a "fake" joe-job on itself) and then continues spamming...
Please stick to PASSIVE measures! They can't be abused...
It's a great idea (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It's a great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Boy - that list will be f***ed up pretty soon...
Re:Is this really a GOOD idea? (Score:5, Insightful)
The advent of bayesian spamming brought spams that included whole paragraphs of random words - just so that your list would get more and more bloated...
How long do you think it will take spammers to add dozens of valid - but in the context of the spam nonsensical - URLs just to fill up the black-list and make it useless?
Re:Is this really a GOOD idea? (Score:2)
It doesn't appear to have impacted baynesian scanners too adversely, however. I've been using a Baynesian scanner for ... I guess about a year now, and it's still working great (and the token list is big, but not unmanagable).
Re:Is this really a GOOD idea? (Score:3, Informative)
Marking the odd legitimate mail as *not* spam should clue the filter in to those sites, and you only have to do this once per legitimate site.
Re:Is this really a GOOD idea? (Score:5, Interesting)
And if you use the auto-whitelist feature, then it won't increase the false-positive count, except for people who receive a lot of emails with lots of random links from lots of different people.
Plus, the spam detection software may very well be capable of distinguishing between the decoys and the real spam-links by analyzing the context of the URI. At least that will be a lot easier than analyzing the grammar in an email and detecting the nonsensical paragraphs and the nonsensical/typo-ed words in spam.
Sure, it's not the final battle, but it looks like a very promising improvement in the fight against spam.
Re:Is this really a GOOD idea? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is this really a GOOD idea? (Score:4, Interesting)
- that:
- adj (Not this one, that one)
- dem. pron. (Look at that )
- rel. pron. (birds that sing)
- can:
- noun (a can of whoopass)
- verb (The boss is gonna can your ass)
- modal (I can swim)
- one
- adj ( one fine morning)
- pron (the one that got away)
- part
- noun ( part of speech)
- verb ( part the Red Sea)
- adj ( part man, part machine)
- used:
- verb (I used a hammer on the kitten)
- adj (a used car)
- ten
- adj ( ten fingers)
- pron ( ten in a row)
- row
- noun (ten in a row )
- verb ( row your boat)
- pretty
- adj (a pretty girl)
- adv (a pretty good giveaway)
OK, that was a little snarky. Anyhoo, spammers can just extend the stream-of-random-words technique and create "sentences" that are syntactically kosher but semantically empty: Colorless green dreams sleep furiously. Hell, they don't even need to create sentences -- they can just pinch real, human-generated text from any old web site.Re:Is this really a GOOD idea? (Score:2)
Pretty soon, the rich will employ servants to read their email, thus countering the whole offshoring thing.
See now, it's all about finding that thread of silver in the crapheap...
Re:Is this really a GOOD idea? (Score:2)
Similarly, if a spammer inserts a whole bunch of random URLs in the message, then the real URL will be diluted. (provided that the real URL is not standing out in any way, or if it does, the filter can identify it)
Re:Is this really a GOOD idea? (Score:5, Interesting)
snip snip from their page
And no, I am not posting an URL. If you want to get to the page, google for "Dobly" (yes, that is the actual spelling) and go to the first page.
Re:Is this really a GOOD idea? (Score:2)
Re:Is this really a GOOD idea? (Score:3, Informative)
However, I had to abandon my DSPAM testing after a few weeks. The filter was *way* to slow to learn and in the process generated an incredible amount of false positives. With about 400 spams learned I still got around 29 false positives. And filtering accuracy according to its own built-in stats was less than 60%...
Considereing that I get about 2500+
Re:Is this really a GOOD idea? (Score:4, Interesting)
The SURBL is not blocking URLs but IPs where spamvertised URLs are hosted at. I've been doing this for about half a year, too - it's really effective in filtering spam as most spammers choose "bulletproof" ISPs whose netblocks are listed on SPEWS and SBL for that reason. Take Chinanet, for example - an email which is including a link hosted at Chinanet is almost always spam.
I'd recommend not a single SURBL list but several ones, ranging from an in-progress DNSBL to a SPEWS-/SBL-like blacklist with the latter fed manually.
If SURBL gains acceptance, spammers could choose bulletproof ISPs and have most of their spam emails filtered due to SURBL listings, or choose white-hat ISPs and don't get filtered but kicked.
Re:Is this really a GOOD idea? (Score:3, Informative)
Absolutely, but that does not mean that a very restricted blacklist might not have a place.
One of the frustrating things about the spam world is that every good idea gets grabbed by zealots who start to make a bigger nuisance of themselves than the spammers.
It would be really good to have some mechanism that could used to protect people against phishing frauds. If some web site is pretending to be citybank or p
Time to dig out this old post. (Score:5, Funny)
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
(x) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Re:Time to dig out this old post. (Score:5, Funny)
( ) Was funny.
( ) Was informative.
( ) Was interesting.
( ) Was informative and funny.
( ) Was interestingly informative.
(x) Was funny in an informative sort of way.
( ) Was rehash.
( ) Is itself spam.
( ) Is overrated.
( ) Gave me gas.
Re:Time to dig out this old post. (Score:5, Insightful)
- (x) Users of email will not put up with it
We'll see.- (x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
One of the few constants is that there will be way for money to get from the target back to the original spammer or seller. (well, it's possible something more complex is going on and that's not the real goal of spam, but at the least, it's something that's remained constant for years, which is notable in the world of spam). So "following the money" is really based on an acceptance of the above criticism, and a realization that the arms race can never get around the money stream.Filters may be lead to arms races, but does anyone NOT use them right now? There are few alternatives, namely things like making email non-anonymous / PKI, enacting large legal penalties along with huge international support, rejecting email from anyone you don't know, ....
- (x) Whitelists suck
Actually, it's a blacklist. Blacklists may suck, but it's possible they suck less than spam, and the proliferation of RBLs [rbls.org] kind of implies that.Sure, there might be a way to stop spam once and for all and then blacklists would be hated, but the very presence of a antispam-rejection-template implies that there won't be a magic bullet for a long time to come.
- (x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
The only way it CAN'T work is if money isn't the real goal of spammers, or if they make it hard enough to "follow the money" that other methods are easier/nicer.Re:Time to dig out this old post. (Score:4, Interesting)
(x) The whitelist feature can be abused
As anyone who's spent any amount of time reading Slashdot comments should know, there are open redirect URLs on a number of sites that would be whitelisted under this proposal. On Slashdot, they were used to hide references to goatse. In spam, they can be used to whitelist spam URLs.
Re:Time to dig out this old post. (Score:3, Interesting)
Take for example the spammer who wants to get his spam through to me. He peppers his document with HREFs to Yahoo!, Hotmail, CNN.com, NASA.gov and a dozen or so other sites that are likely in the whitelist.
Now I look at it and he manages to squeek by the initial origin lookup (e.g. he would have passed through traditional RBLs) and body check finds that *most* of the entires in the body are good sites, and only one of them
Re:Time to dig out this old post. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Time to dig out this old post. (Score:2)
Indeed, that's why I thought it was pure blacklist. I don't care how many white URLs there are if any are to known spammer/virus sites!
The whitelist will always be limited (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The whitelist will always be limited (Score:2)
This is a non-solution, really.
We adjust the frequency of the shields, (Score:5, Funny)
I don't see this as the be-all, end-all for spam, but I do find it a very interesting and potentially very effective arrow for my spam-killer quiver.
Re:We adjust the frequency of the shields, (Score:3, Informative)
Either do I. In fact, the first thing that comes to mind is that the domains that start actually showing up in email will become random. This introduces a bit of additional cost to the spammer, but if that's the only way to survive, they'll do it.
They could also use IPs, but this would become even more of a pain for them since it's harder to get IPs. If you start doing blocking for the random domain names by resolving the IP, and banning based on that, you'
Re:We adjust the frequency of the shields, (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:We adjust the frequency of the shields, (Score:3, Interesting)
You don't need to hack into them. I know that Yahoo has an open redirect URL -- it was used to disguise a link to goatse a while back -- and I suspect that most other major web sites have similar URLs.
And the target of the next spate of virus will be? (Score:2)
SURBL? (Score:5, Funny)
Show me one self-respecting spammer who's going to quake in their boots at the threat of being hit with a "SURBL".
("Oh no.. please.. not the SURBL. Don't SURBL me.. Its too much... no.. No.. NOOOOOO!)
Why not just call it a "NERF" and be done with it?
I propose we come up with Spam deterrents with names like "Knuckle Duster", "Jagged Bottle", "Bloodied Crowbar" and "Bubba the Love Truncheon".
Re:SURBL? (Score:4, Funny)
Personally, I like BASTARD:
Bad Ass Spam Threat And Reduction Deterrant
A plugin? (Score:4, Interesting)
Anything which requires extra software on the MTA or client side is not a simple requirement as it cannotn be implemented universally. This is doomed to fail.
Re:A plugin? (Score:4, Funny)
> it cannot be implemented universally
Bollocks. Send it to random users as an encrypted zip file with the key in an attached jpeg and a title like "returned mail" from a user called "hg477d762@hotmail.com", and enough people will install it to make it effective.
Never underestimate the stupidity of end users.
Re:A plugin? (Score:3, Insightful)
ANY technical solution is going to require extra work on the client side, so rejecting this outright is kind of rediculous unless you're advocating a purely legal, market-based, or vigilante solution.
Spam is getting to be such a problem that techies are setting up things like SpamAssassin for themselves and friends, and major ISPs are using RBLs. So this isn't really a problem.
Re:A plugin? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you want bloat and dysfunction like this, look at Exchange or Notes or Gropewise. It's a GUI, it's a calendar, it's a database, it's an MTA! well, it doesn't scale and it tastes like floorwax.
This is why sendmail developed the MILTER interface. Firewall-1 had a proprietary scanning interface (e
Re:A plugin? (Score:2)
Pretty much every MTA has this.
Except MS Exchange, but, well... enough said.
Re:A plugin? (Score:2)
Whitelist maintenance? (Score:5, Interesting)
From the article:
Though the article's author feels that "most SC users probably make an effort to uncheck legitimate domains to prevent false reporting," I have read reports that some mail server admins claim that SpamCop's users are rather likely to mistakenly report ham as spam [emailaddresses.com]. So the domain whitelist [freeapp.net] becomes important, but what practices have the SURBL administrators put in place to prevent corruption with respect to sites reported to whitelist at surbl dot org?
Present problem. (Score:3, Insightful)
But, I have to ask, why aren't existing RBLs like Spamhaus effective. They should be far more effective than the ~40% that I am experiencing.
Re:Present problem. (Score:2)
>and passed onto Spamassassin before it can be
>dropped or tagged whereas, the other RBLs allow you
>to drop the connection before the message is transfered.
if the RBL in question is based on parsing the text of the message, then I'm pretty sure you have to let the message be transfered anyway... So, not really a problem in this case.
Re:Present problem. (Score:2)
The answer is simple - many spammers are now querying the RBLs themselves and using the results to pick which proxies to send their spam through.
If you run an RBL, I think that with some analysis you could determine when a spammer is querying your RBL by their traffic pattern - for instance, if a given source is consistently the first to query for a given IP addres
Re:Present problem. (Score:2)
Re:Present problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but that's not because it's a SpamAssassin plugin vs an MTA plugin. That's because the SMTP protocol doesn't allow for what you describe.
Let's say I'm an MTA. When you connect to me, the first thing you do is introduce yourself, then tell me the envelope sender and envelope recipient of the message you're about to send, then give me the full message including headers and body. My options for blocking the message are:
Existing RBLs work at step 2. Filtering based on message content can't happen until step 7. You could build it into the MTA, but MTAs are complex enough as it is; using something else (SpamAssassin, Procmail, whatever) is a better idea.
Then what happens when .... (Score:5, Interesting)
Works for me (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Works for me (Score:2)
Very funny, but so true! I thought about wildcarding .biz but was afraid I'd catch something legit. So far, so bad, so I think I'll do the same now, with a whitelist should I ever find something legit.
Viva procmail!
DOSes and things outside of ones control (Score:5, Interesting)
I know I have gotten spam reports from places like spam cop because people have included the URL of my website in their spam. My site had nothing to do with the spam other than the spammer was using an article on the site to back up his point of view.
This type of system could very easily be abused to blackhole many mailing lists.
Spam is unavoidable (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Spam is unavoidable (Score:5, Insightful)
This is because the solutions of the day focus on content instead of anonymity.
I've said it before, I'll probably say it again, get rid of unauthenticated email and the spam problem becomes a thousand times easier to fight. SPF and various RMX solutions exist in design today. If people want the spam problem to go away, that can be done today. Unfortunately people would rather piss and moan and call for legislation or perfect solutions than deal with these good ones today.
In the case of spam the perfect is the enemy of the good enough. We should stop spam today.
sendmail internal RBL (Score:5, Informative)
We've been able to effectively stop about 50% of the spam using these lists and save resources and bandwidth. What's left is to start RBL'ing the domestic DUL IP space (Comcast, SWBell, Bellsouth, etc.) on a class B-level until the ISPs start cracking down on their rogue users.
Re:Too much work!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
One problem we're seeing now is that some of the RBLs like Spamcop, automatically expire a blacklisted entry after X days. The spammers take advantage of this by playing around in huge Asian-Pacific blocks of IP space that give them plenty of addresses from
Re:Too much work!!! (Score:2, Interesting)
Assuming you setup and honor a whitelist form, maybe. I regularly setup legitimate businesses on DSL connections from BellSouth. These are busiiness accounts with static IPs but, certain organizations like RoadRun
Re:Too much work!!! (Score:2)
Re:Too much work!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd love to have one; I wouldn't necessarily *blacklist* APNIC, but I would definitely rate-limit the entire APNIC to 28.8kbps into my network. I'm not sure it would "end" anything, but it would slow down spammers and/or cause them to give up on us.
so-called "remove me" links (Score:4, Interesting)
My proposed solution to spam (Score:3, Interesting)
My suggestion is to present the user with those images containing a word (like the one used by Yahoo! etc during registration) everytime the user needs to send a mail (before clicking Send). This is a reasonably difficult Turing-type tests which could weed out a majority of automated scripts/spambots.
An immediate problem with this scheme that I see is that for the words to be sufficiently random and crack-proof, they would have to be served in real-time to the mail program, and could need tweaks in current mail programs. A static list coded into the program might be too easy to break. This isn't too impractical, since an Internet connection is assumed during most email transactions.
Another problem, ofcourse is that it will not work with text-based mailers like PINE, but as long as it weeds out all the spam sent from all the freebie mail accounts we could see an improvement.
Comments/Suggestions?
Uh... No. (Score:3, Insightful)
What about corporate use? Many legitimate emails go to a dozen recipients almost like a mailinglist. Think of the lost productivity with th
Limited implementation (Score:2)
Re:Limited implementation (Score:2)
These days, most spam isn't sent by freebie accounts, either. Most spam is sent from computers that have been hijacked using the latest batch of e-mail viruses.
"Everytime the user needs to send a mail" (Score:3, Insightful)
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
Also, accessibility, custom SMTP clients, yadda yadda yadda... but you've already realized your mistake so I'll stop now.
Re:My proposed solution to spam (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Spam isn't primarily coming from legitimate SMTP relays like Yahoo or Hotmail
2. Ultimately to make such a system work, the mail would end up having to be flagged as "approved" by completing the process you suggest, which basically turns the scheme into a trusted-computing system (aka "whitelist"), and if you're going to go that route, you might as well call a spade a spade.
And since we're calling spades a spades, the way to do it is to require all SMTP servers to have
Re:My proposed solution to spam (Score:5, Interesting)
At least 80% of our incoming spam, brute-force attacks, and other SMTP violations are coming from behind legitimate hosts like AOL, Verizon, Blueyonder, RoadRunner, and so on. Not forged IPs that pretend to be those hosts, but actual IPs that return to those MXs.
Look at today's list of brute-force attacks so far [gnu-designs.com].. (as of Mon Apr 12 17:55:53 EDT 2004)
Every single one of these lists gets collected and reported, per day, per provider, and to date, not a single one of them has done anything to stop the abuse. In fact, it keeps increasing every day. The more we block, the faster they come at us.
Re:My proposed solution to spam (Score:2)
You just hit the problem on the head. Those aren't Hosts, they are companies or providers. A host is a single machine or "hostname"(multi-homed hosts and multi-ip load balancing notwithstanding). mail.example.com is a host. Most of your spam is pr
Re:My proposed solution to spam (Score:2, Informative)
Re:My proposed solution to spam (Score:2)
[...]
as long as it weeds out all the spam sent from all the freebie mail accounts we could see an improvement
That wouldn't help one bit. Spammers may forge a freemailer's address, but in reality they use either open relays which are run by admins way too lazy to implement ANY contermeasures against spam or (as it's more and more common) they're using worms to infe
Re:My proposed solution to spam (Score:3, Funny)
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been sh
Re:My proposed solution to spam (Score:2)
B) It's already been broken, by offering free porn to those who break the code
C) It's stupid.
D) What about spammers that run their own mail servers? Which is to say, nearly all spammers.
E) It's stupid.
F) It will break every mailing list in existence, or mailing lists will be set up by spammers.
G) It's stupid.
Did I mention, it's stupid?
Check out my Anonymous E-mail (Score:3, Interesting)
Instead of a picture I just present a riddle or other question.
A human can search Google for the answer in order to be able to send their anonymous message. A program would need to be written and trained to be able to do that specifically for my web-site. I'm confident only someone with an academic interest in such a challenge would do it. And so far it hasn't been abused.
I use the same type of challenge but render the text to an image and add
Yet Another Stupid Spam Idea (YASSI) (Score:4, Informative)
This boneheaded scheme falls into the same category as all content-based filtering systems: It doesn't address the most henous crime on the part of spammers, which is the consumption of bandwidth and network resources. And like other client-side/content-based filtering systems, the system will work about 12 minutes before the spammers figure out a way around it and then your system doesn't work. And of course, you'll have to constantly update it in order to make in effective, which means you have yet another piece of software that requires routine updating, slows down the mail service, your computer and everything in between. And after all that, you'll still get spam.
The main reason spam is prevalent is because SPAMMERS STEAL BANDWIDTH WITHOUT PAYING FOR IT. When you force them to operate from a single location, then they have to act ethically and then they have to pay premium money to spam, and then they go out of business because it's only economical when they steal resources.
You don't have content-based filtering on other primary methods of communication. It's a federal crime to go through mail; (at least before Patriot) you needed a court order to tap phones. E-mail should be an equally sacred communication medium that shouldn't be subject to "strip searches" before it hits your inbox. And this whole boneheaded scheme will NEVER stop spam in the first place, so let's stop pursuing these efforts.
RBLs are most effective right now. The worm invasion is evidence of that, as spammers are finding less IP space to operate from so they're engaging in more aggressive tactics to take over peoples' machines, which, hopefully sooner-or-later, will land these sleazebags in jail.
Re:Yet Another Stupid Spam Idea (YASSI) (Score:3, Insightful)
Ummmm, the hell? It's perfectly legal to go through mail. My own mail, naturally. And it's legal to tell someone else (say, a secretary) to go through your and filter it. Ditto phone calls
Re:Yet Another Stupid Spam Idea (YASSI) (Score:2)
So the RBL's keep them running from IP to IP, or serving spam off of compromised machines (Gotta love the spamhaus XBL). Personally, I view this as a progression of RBL's: make it so that, no
Re:Yet Another Stupid Spam Idea (YASSI) (Score:2)
A few years ago I would've expressed my best wishes hoping that you die a wretched death from a na
No system that uses the content of an email... (Score:4, Informative)
There is already a cure for spam - give everyone unlimited email addresses, give out different addresses to different recipients, and delete any email that receives spam (along with possibly sending an email of complaint to whoever you originally have that particular address to). The whole thing could easily be built into mail clients and supported by mail providers. It works fine for me. It costs me $35 to buy my own domain and a one off payment of about $30 to zoneedit [zoneedit.com] to set up the mail forwarding. It works so well, and has worked for the least 3 or 4 years, that I almost suspect that there is some kind of conspiracy to overlook this method in order to promote other dubious methods.
Re:No system that uses the content of an email... (Score:4, Insightful)
If people have to get passwords from you before they can contact you, then... what do you do if you're an open source author... or if an ex from college wants to hook up again and googles you, and finds your website, but STILL can't contact you... or you want to sign up for match.com so that random women can email you.
Re:No system that uses the content of an email... (Score:2)
Re:No system that uses the content of an email... (Score:2)
It does put some burden on the sender as well though. These are the options I see:
Re:No system that uses the content of an email... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No system that uses the content of an email... (Score:2)
I'm also lucky in another way. My surname is almost unique. 95% of searches on my surname find me, 5% find my brother. I'm easy to google. I've always thought that people's names should be unique :-)
Re:No system that uses the content of an email... (Score:3, Interesting)
Currently, spammers can create new spam relays only so fast.
Currently, spammers want to receive money via credit card over the internet.
Currently, it's hard enough to effectively spam that there aren't tens of thousands who are actively doing it, so blacklisting certain credit card vendor IDs could work.
Currently, spammers want to make it harder to "follow the money" so they use crazy javascript stuff
Re:No system that uses the content of an email... (Score:3, Interesting)
Use a registrar like directNIC [directnic.com] that has $15 domains and free email forwarding.
But note that you don't have to have your own domain to use that method. MTAs like qmail offer extension addresses (user-*@example.com). Also check out spamgourmet [spamgourmet.com] for a more advanced approach.
Re:No system that uses the content of an email... (Score:2)
Re:No system that uses the content of an email... (Score:2)
Unfortunately (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Unfortunately (Score:2)
My "requires total cooperation at once" suggestion (Score:2)
Counter-attacks are bad-- read this summary (Score:5, Informative)
check this summary of spam methods.
http://netextend.com/junkmail [netextend.com]
Overview
Solutions
Conclusion
Read the full report at
http://netextend.com/junkmail [netextend.com]
joe jobs (Score:2, Insightful)
Not sure you're getting it (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not sure you're getting it (Score:2)
Care to tell us what the setup is?
Re:Not sure you're getting it (Score:2, Informative)
In your main.cf file include this at the bottom
body_checks = regexp:/etc/postfix/spammerbodies
Learn more here about main.cf and other cool spam protections here:
http://www.afp548.com/Articles/mail/spam2.html [afp548.com] including a really great RBL configuration.
Create a spammerbodies file and include this line
# various encoded URL formats. if they're trying to disguise the URL then they're up to no good
I don't get it. (Score:2)
Re:I don't get it. (Score:2)
That's right. It's not intended to be the first line of defense. It's intended to help spot spam that gets through your IP-based blacklists.
And for that purpose, it looks very promising.
Re:I don't get it. (Score:2)
Good, but not particularly new, idea (Score:2)
First, there is no spam magic bullet. There never will be.
This is very similar to what SpamPal [spampal.org] along with the URLBody [noctua.org.uk] plugin does. (Client-side, Windows-only, also not a magic bullet.) The only difference being that this checks URLs against existing DNSBLs, and this is a new DNSBL specifically for this purpose.
Already in use by MT-Blacklist (Score:5, Informative)
This isn't new (Score:4, Informative)
The process is mostly automated but when it comes to blacklisting a domain, it's manual. You cannot automate it fully because legitimate domains make it into spams. yahoo, msn and w3c.org are the most common. Even without it being intentional on the spammers part. The automated part rips through e-mail logs pulling out who it's to, from and the subject and then all the urls. I can then clear out any entries that are going to account that aren't mine. And from there I go through and make sure the ones that do get added are actually spam domains.
A computer can't really tell the difference between a spam domain and a legitimate domain. Humans can.
Spam domains are blatently labeled like "medsforyou.com" contain random letters and numbers or have the spams images linked in the root. 8000hosting.com/ad.jpg is a big giant clue that this is a spam domain. I've seen links with 6 or 7 subdomains tacked on. I manually remove all the subdomain garbage and block the main one.
The link ripper not only yanks out the root domain (and any subdomains) but also the exact URL of what it was pointing to.
The main problem with anti-spam tools is that they rely on computers to find patterns. Spammers are not computers. They're idiots but not computers. And you can't get around the fact you need humans to be effective without causing colateral damage. Spammers do not always use computer identifiable patterns.
The other "problem" with this method is that it only says 50% of the bandwidth cost at max since the server has to recieve the message for parsing. So it's only good for people offering e-mail services like myself who can't risk being over zealous in fighting spam which could result in losing other people's e-mail.
ISPs are forced for the sake of bandwidth to use IP blacklisting while this sort of method would work as a secondary filter.
Again, there is no silver bullet. You cannot just rely on one form of spam protection if your goal is irradication. This method is just the least error prone when done properly. IP blacklisting can be like nuking a small villiage to kill a fly. This is a highly focused and reasonably sized flyswatter that may occasionally flak off some paint if swung too hard.
And never underestimate the number of domains spammers own. I get a dozen or so new domains to filter out ever few days. I may get spam but at least it's costing them real money to get it to me.
Ben
Could be good, could be bad. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a little sensitive to this since a spammer is actually Jo-jobbing one of my domains (not autopr0n), and I get hundreds of "user unknown" messages every day, along with a handful of messages telling me "my" email was blocked. It's really irritating.
But, if it's done right, it could work out pretty well. In fact, this would actually be effective against a lot of the current Spam out there, and kill Spam with off-site images.
Anyway, let me throw one countermeasure out there. Suppose spammers start including commonly mailed URLs (such as those on hotornot, yahoo, etc) in their spams in order to decrease the usefulness of these things. If this thing gets popular, expect to see a lot of Spam include a lot of random URLs the way they now include lots of random words. You'll also start to see things like "Javascript decryption" and other techniques to prevent machines from figuring out which, exactly, URL it is that is being advertised, rather then random noise.
Re:Won't catch JavaScript-constructed URL's (Score:3, Insightful)
And the rest of us will just block all e-mail that contains scripts. Yeah, I can't wait for that to happen...
Mod parent up (Score:2)
Exactly what I was going to say. Outlook probably renders many things into a URL which are not technically URLs. Who's to say a content filter can catch them all? If the content filter parses Javascript, then spammers will send in emails which run infinite loops and bog down the mail server. But even without, I'll bet there are quite a few Outlook bugs/features which render quite questionable URLs as links.