Spam Rulz!
p2pnet news | Advertising:- Ninety five percent of all email is advertising junk —- unsolicited incomings.
That’s an unsolicited marketing frightener from Web security vendor Barracuda Networks.
“Barracuda analyzed more than one billion e-mail messages sent to its 50,000 customers, and found that 90 to 95 percent of all e-mail sent in 2007 was spam, up from 85 to 90 percent last year,” says PC Magazine.
The company reports a massive influx of spam messages on Thanksgiving Day, “when spammers tried to cash in on the post holiday shopping frenzy by sending phishing e-mails from popular retailers,” says the story.
“Security vendors now require 24-by-7 defence operations to continuously monitor the internet for new spam trends and distribute new defensive solutions immediately,” PC Pro has the company saying.
We check five separate email accounts throughout the day and we delete most of it —- probably in the region of 800 or 900 spams.
It seems the majority are from online drug peddlers, companies promising to help you make your girlfriend happier than she can possibly believe, and e-mails from people promising to make you rich.
We’ve just checked one of our accounts and it has 113 incomings, every one of which is spam such as “some useful advices for your health” or “Potenzprobleme – ab heute nicht mehr” or “Hard like steel”.
And of course, email spam isn’t all there is.
For a web site owner, incoming spam comments are a constant problem.
p2pnet started running under the Word Press format earlier in the year and, thanks to Akismet, was for the first time able to get a grip on fake comments.
A popular format goes like this:
“Hi there . i was searching for russia and i came across your post and it is definitely the most sensible thing i have seen in a long time, and in my opinion you got something good going here, i have to get my friends to subscribe to your post about [fill in the blank].”
Others are from credit card companies, porn pages from China, mostly, and so on.
It’s hard to see how such obvious crap can be seen as anything other than obvious crap. But presumably people bite, otherwise why would the spammers keep on spamming?
Meanwhile, this is also an opportunity for p2pnet to apologise to anyone whose genuine comment posted was inadvertently deleted during the ongoing daily culling process.
We try to watch for the real deal buried in the comment spam, but sometimes we miss and for that we apologise.
Meanwhile, it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good and the presence of spam keeps a lot companies in business —- and spamming potential users with product information 
Also See:
PC Magazine – Spam Levels Rise to Unprecedented Heights, December 12, 2007
PC Pro – 95% of email sent in 2007 is spam, December 13, 2007
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December 13th, 2007 at 10:42 am
How hard can it be to stop spam? Sue these people out of existence. If the spam comes from another country, threaten sanctions until that country stops those spammers. Make spam unprofitable and it will go away.
The truth is, there’s something about big business that resonates with big government, and the latter will never stop the former because of that sympathy.
December 13th, 2007 at 11:16 am
Yep, Spam rulz because there is profit in it. Fortunately, my email addresses have finally been list washed. I am the author of SpamFryer, Spammerslammer, and Spammer Skewer. I tried bringing together a large number of people in order to remove the profit from spam once and for all. This did not happen because very few people downloaded or used these programs. So, I took a different approach, and this new approach finally worked. I now attack the spammers at their revenue source and work to cut that source off. I now use no filtering on my real email addresses and only receive about 2 to 7 spams a day where I used to receive hundreds.
1. I hid the email addresses on my websites from the email harvesting program but made them visible to human visitors. This stops new spammers from obtaining my real email addresses. Phone and fax numbers should be hidden this way as well.
2. I put fake email addresses and honeypots on my websites that are invisible to human users while being targeted by harvesters. This helps companies that track harvesters and filter spam, since the only email these addresses will ever receive IS SPAM!
3. I find the weakest point for each type of spam, and I work with this information to destroy any good results of the spam run. I informed the spam advertisers why their points of contact were being shut down and why their business relations with reputable companies are being cut off.
***Nigerian SCAM SPAM*** asks the receiver to contact the sender by using an email address advertised within the spam itself. I send the email address advertised in the spam a message that I do not like to receive this type of email and I going to have the email address shut down. I forward the email to the abuse address of the email service that provides the advertised return address. This return email address is usually hosted by a free email service. When an advertised contact is shut down, it makes the entire spam run using this return address moot. Time on the Internet costs money in Nigeria.
***Spam advertising redirect pages*** are usually emails advertising links to pages on usually free sites such as Yahoo Geocities, etc. If the link is clicked, then a redirect script on the advertised web page will redirect the visitor to the real page. This is done because improved filtering systems detect the embedded URLS of websites known to be advertised by spam. I set up scripts that will automatically report redirect pages to the appropriate provider. In addition, I visit some of these webpages so that I can get redirected to their real site. Here, I tell them that plaza1.net and freelink.cx are off limits to spammers, and that they will never make a single dime from my users. I also tell them that about 98% of the email addresses used on this domain are spam traps, and that is the reason their redirect pages keep getting shut down so rapidly.
***Mortgage and credit repair*** spams are also easy to defeat. These spammers usually advertise websites that ask for contact information from the person being spammed. The spammer then sells this information to (usually) reputable Mortgage companies such as Ditech and Country wide. With Voice over IP so popular, I can buy an incoming telephone number for about $12.00 for three months. This telephone number is used to play a message to the caller letting them know that they are calling a lead that was generated by spam and that they are in violation of CAN SPAM. I also input fake leads using telephone numbers such as those belonging to various law enforcement agencies (when appropriate). When mortgage companies receive a number of false leads, they usually stop doing business with the spammer. Again, spammers are notified about what is going on via their website. They are told not to spam any email address on my domain.
***Fake Diploma**** spammers are the next ones to be dealt with. This is done by using Voice Over IP to contact the sender and inform them not to be sending spam to my domains. I had a persistent diploma spammer who kept spamming my domains with fake diploma schemes only advertising a phone number. Using VOIP, I fed off a rapid succession of about 100 calls to the spammers number. I informed the spammer that I legally had permission to keep calling because he had send me the same number of solicitations. For the cost of two dollars, I solved my diploma spam problem. Just check the area code to make sure you are not calling one of those service number out of the Carribean. Otherwise, there is the possibility of your VOIP provider being hit with a huge phone bill.
4. When appropriate, I complain to the provider of the ip that sent me the spam. This is done usually by an automatic script. This can also be done with such services as Spam Cop.
5. One of my anti-harvesting scripts will also send a complaint to the provider of anybody visiting the page informing the ISP of the visitor of the possibility that there is an email harvesting program being used on their network. I have taken great pains to ensure that links on my web pages that point to anti harvesting scripts are not seen by human visitors. whether they are using text or graphic mode browsers.
Websites of companies I use in my war against spammers include (but not limited to) http://www.projecthoneypot.org/ Spam harvesting and email honeypots
http://www.gizmoproject.com/ VOIP provider.
http://www.switchboard.com Telephone directory
http://www.plaza1.net/spammerslammer.cgi Generator of fake information
The only thing spammers respect is money, and when you fix it so that they know whenever they soam you that it will cost them money, the spam will stop.
December 13th, 2007 at 11:28 am
Why is it so hard to believe that most email is spam? Most paper mail is spam! Empty your mailbox. If its like mine there is a bill or two, maybe an ocaisional letter or an ebay response. Everything else……well there is the twice weekly ad from a used car lot, half a dozen “coupon clipper” things, a few pitches from charities, the ad to some guy who li ed here ten years ago “or current resident” and it all goes into the fireplace unread. Its probably 90% by item and certainly by weight. Why would you expect email to be any different? Without this crap I’d never get my fire lit.