Comments on: I’m tired of spam

By: jack oatmon

jack oatmon — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 23:42:17 +0000

I imagine the internet as an organic system, with all of the so-called programming ‘flaws’ as niches. Your idea about altering protocals to prevent such niche-filling as spamming or viruses sidesteps the fundamental fact that the more sophisticated any system gets, the more anomalies there will be, whether they are planned anomalies (like viruses) or serendipitous(like errors). If you do your little STMP switcheroo, the first people who will fill the unforseen niches will be spammers and hackers by virtue of the fact that commercial programmers only react to problematic programming like spam and viruses.
So what I mean is this:
the more you try to change the internet, the more little flies will be buzzing around your electronic ears. Besides, the open nature of emails and the internet that allow spam to exist is the very reason the internet is special. Take away the spam and you take away all of the ‘electronic civil liberties’ that we enjoy. Like mothers with no baby milk on planes at Heathrow. Catch?

By: jmyles.co.uk

jmyles.co.uk — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 14:51:09 +0000

Spam email sent by me?…

Was reading the blog of Bill Thompson who writes for the BBC amongst other people and noticed his latest post is something which I have recently found myself being effected by(although not on the same scale as Bill)….spam email apparently being &…

By: Stuart

Stuart — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 14:32:29 +0000

I reckon, instead of trying to tackle the spammers, we should impose heavy penalties on anyone found clicking a link found in spam, or actually buying “Miracle H3r8al V1a6ra!”. Kill off the target market, and the spammers will go somewhere else. Maybe…

By: Simon T

Simon T — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 12:45:20 +0000

A life without spam would be like a life without junk mail flying through your letter box each day. Or a life without random text messages from Boz asking what dress I’ll be wearing to the prom (I actually received this text).

Now after the initial realisation that ‘Hey I’m not popular, it’s just spam’ passes I agree that spam gets rather annoying.

Yet, any form of modern communication, whether it be by post, text message, email etc will always produce unwanted communication and I really can’t see how we can entirely rule this out.

I like the SMIP concept though.

Right, where’s that dress for the prom?

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 11:02:24 +0000

I have the same problem although I’m guessing its not on quite the same scale – I get about three or four hundred bounced spam messages every day. I use a catch-all email account on my domain as I like to use a unique email address for each website I sign up for (so I can track where spammers are getting my address from). I don’t actually get much spam myself, maybe 1 or 2 messages a day – however I get about 300 emails a day which are spam which originated elsewhere but was sent with an address ending in my domain. This has then bounced back as undeliverable from the intended recepients email server when they have blocked it or changed their address. This wouldn’t be such a big deal – I have the bandwidth and space to cope with them – but I can’t filter them easily as every email server seems to use a different format for bouncing them. Roll on authentication of senders before accepting an email, and some standards for error codes. There must be hundreds of millions of these sorts of messages bouncing back and forth clogging things up.

By: Owen Carter

Owen Carter — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 11:38:04 +0000

First, I’d like to offer my now and future comiserations.. ‘Future’ because the ‘random@andfinally.com’ addresses will now be settling into peoples mail folders and address books (for newbies who try and respond) etc.. These fake addresses will then be harvested by the spammers, and their buddies in the malware trade, and added to new spam and virus lists.
This happened to me four years ago and I still get spam and viruses sent to those addresses, I’ve passed through the annoyance, anger, and vigilante phases and now just filter them. They still arrive, half a dozen each day..
[Finally, I don’t understand your comment about SPF needing your mail server admins to take action, they do not usually need to do anything. SPF is part of the Domain Name System entry for ‘andfinally.com’, it does not require chanegs to the configuration of the mail server. Unless your DNS provider is also your mail server provider, you should be able to bypass them when setting this up, just talk to your DNS provider. I was able to do it online via the Web interface of my DNS provider, using the ’spf wizard’ on http://www.openspf.org/ .

By: Phil

Phil — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 07:03:43 +0000

I had exactly the same problem a couple of months ago and was just as annoyed as you are that anyone can do this to anyone else and we – the victims – are powerless to do anything.

My ‘fix’ was to alter my domain mail redirection facility to turn off the ‘catch all’ option so that email addresses with anyoldrubbish@mydomain.co.uk would be bounced and only mail sent to valid addresses on the domain would be received.

It reduced the amount of bounced e-mail I was receiving but I agree wholeheartedly that more needs to be done to prevent this abuse.

Keep going Bill. As you mentioned to me before, keep throwing pebbles and maybe the small ripples you are making might actually lead to something being done.

By: Peter

Peter — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 13:29:55 +0000

Although I cannot completely disagree with Richard’s comments on corporate inertia, I don’t think that things are helped by the people tasked with solving the problem.

A few years ago I put together some ideas I had developed while completing an MSc (see http://www.onlinecounsellors.co.uk/esmtp/esmtp.htm). These ideas include the use of headers and the subsequent retrieval of the email (if the server address is real) and how these changes could work alongside the current SMTP environment. My motivation was to reduce the amount of Spam I receive rather than any monetary gain.

I then went looking for someone to run these ideas past and was directed to the Anti-Spam Research Group (ASRG), part of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) (see http://asrg.sp.am/). Unfortunately, in the 4 or 5 months I subscribed to their mailing list, it seemed to consist primarily of a lot of angry and touchy people who were far more interested in un-constructively criticising each other than they were in cooperating in order to come up with a workable solution.

It seemed to me that any spammer worried about his future would probably also subscribe to the mailing list, if only to reassure themselves that there was no real threat to their business model likely to arrive any time soon.

By: Richard

Richard — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 07:14:20 +0000

There are some probably wonderful simple ways of securing email – ranging from a more secure protocol to digital signatures. The reason these don’t take off is corporate greed.

Companies want to use any new feature to their competitive advantage. In this world of software patents and “Intellectual Property” this means that any new feature can be used to ensure that only your mail system, or the mail systems of people that pay your license fees, are allowed on the Internet. That rules out open source and makes competition expensive.

Microsoft control the mailer that a lot of people use. They have the power to block a competing technology by making their mailer incompatible with it or making it hard to use. PGP suffered this. Their behaviour suggests that they wish they had the power to force a technology onto other users, forcing them to go out and buy Windows. Fortunately they don’t.

We need a solution that is developed in a truly collaborative method that is free for anyone to implement and is not used. Email and the Internet themselves are so successful because they were developed in such a way. Only a truly open solution can solve this problem.

By: Kevin Millican

Kevin Millican — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 22:59:30 +0000

I had similar problems some time ago – my hosting company contacted to say their server was being hit by 2GB of mail per hour.

Eventually it became so bad, I had to abandon the domain name because our reputation (and this was a church website) was so tarnished.

I can say confidentally that things do get much better when you implement SPF/SenderID – most ISPs do check the records on incoming email even if they don’t set it up for their own users.

One other thing – if you move the domain name to http://www.123-reg.co.uk, it’s easy to setup your own TXT records for SPF