SpamAnti.net
in June 2002

A major event for SPAM-fighters like us.

The European Parliament just voted to ban all SPAM. The European Directive - to be fully applicable in about a year - will make illegal all commercial e-mail sent without a prior agreement of the receiver ("opt-in").

This will not stop SPAM, but it will give weapons to spank European spammers. And this is a very good step in the direction of SPAM management.

I recommend this toolset (both the Internet online version and the Windows version) for SPAM hunters. You have everything ready to do serious chasing.

Because of tough and very technical "criminal charges for denial of service relating to the Lotus Domino issue", Ian Gulliver, administrator of ORBZ (Open Relay Blocking Zone) decided to stop it black list activity. He invites evrybody to consider SpamCop or ORDB.

Fortunately, this has a limited impact since there are quite a number of other black lists.

This may be the worst blow against spammers. After the anti-SPAM decision of the European Council on dec 6, 2001, it's time for a vote at the EuroParliament. We may have a fully anti-SPAM legislation in a few weeks.

The latest development from companies willing to SPAM you is coming from Truste trying to define a "signature" that will tell you "this is a SPAM you can trust". Honestly, do we want a stamp on it? Most spammers will still be hijacking open relays and push junk (possibly faking the Truste signature). Stamped or not, I don't want all these SPAMs in my mailbox.

In December, DoubleClick started to inform its customers of the coming end of “Intelligent Targetting” that they used to build a “profile” of the Internet user based upon the web site she visited. The removal seems to be a consequence of outrageous pricing (3 to 4 times more than normal banners) rather than of the consumer pressure - though it was significant.

Today (July 11th), the Citizens' Rights and Freedoms, Justice and Home Affairs Committee has adopted a proposal that will make opt-out a valid option for e-marketers. It essentially means that SPAM will be considered legal as far as there is the option of one-by-one request of removal (and we know that this does not work to reduce the SPAM overload).

This proposal still has to be voted at the Parliament, but it is expected that it will not be modified there, leaving wide-open doors to spammers in Europe. Real bad day!

Update (oct-23): They missed the point completely and voted yesterday an amendment that legalizes opt-out. It remains to be seen if tis can be stopped, but spammers already rejoice.

Update (dec-07): The European Council finally came to an agreement on SPAM and other subjects of similar interest (cookies, etc.). And the good news is that SPAM is going to be banned. To send commercial offers to an Internet user a company will need to get his/her approval first. This will become compulsory as soon as it is voted by the European Parliament. But, this means that Europe will finally have the laws that we where lobbying for.

This time, they intend to extend SPAM to your mobile phone. The most hateful extension of SPAM in years: mobilespam.com. When they start, it will be the end of m-commerce, though.

Additionally, I learned that NTT DoCoMo is putting $217 million to compensate i-mode users for the deluge of SPAM they already receive using their e-mail-enabled phones. It's starting!

MobileSpam failed and closed.

ORBS (Open Relay Behaviour Modification System) is a system helping ISP to filter SPAM by reporting those system open to mail relaying that is used by a lot of spammers to hide their activities. It may be temporary, though.

Update: it appears that Alan Brown (owner of ORBS) stopped operation and is selling ORBS and the ISP behind it (Nw Zealand's Manawatu). We don't knwo if ORBS will be re-appearing soon. No more news for now.

Latest news: Already three successors have started to operate to date. I can't tell which ones are good and will survice and which ones will die soon:

• ORBL (OK)
• ORBZ (closed)
• ORDB (OK)

(Source: The Register)

The US Congress is currently considering HR718 to reduce SPAM. It includes: obligation to include a valid return address (useless with the help of drop boxes at yahoo and such), opt-out (you can ask not to receive this spam anymore - useless as such. We need opt-in), inclusion of originator identification (good), enforcement of this policy by ISPs and individual users (from 500$ to 50000$).

I fear this won't lead us nowhere, since it is opt-out and it only means that you won't receive the SPAMs twice (if you take time to correctly answer to the zillion SPAMs received).

Sigh!

What is the cost of SPAM?

10 billion euros (or more than 9 billion US dollars) per year according to a recent report from the European Commission. It could finally be announcing a formal ban of SPAM.

CIAC is presenting its new web page about hoaxes. Very interesting.

Pitr, one of the heroes of the satiric web site User Friendly fights SPAM today in his own hackish way. Go and have a look!

In a fine combination of the powers of Internet JUNKBUSTER and Pow!, WebWasher removes ads from the web pages you browse. Additionally, it's free and easy to configure. Go get it!

And you can use them as proxy servers to share your (possibly fast) Internet connection between several PCs.

First, you need to be able to clean your own site:

• Anti-Relay: How Can I Fix the Problem?

Then, before fighting back, you need to find where SPAM comes from:

• Figuring out fake E-Mail & Posts
• Sam Spade - tools to help find the origin of a mail
• Network-Tools.com: Traceroute, Lookup, Ping, HTTP Headers, E- mail relay Check, and WHOIS Tools
• SPAMcop: has software which does parsing of spam headers, and there are newsgroups as well.

The following web sites host services that postmasters can use to automatically detect open mail relays and filter out mail coming from them.

• Internet JUNKBUSTER against web advertisements

Further information for that purpose can be found at Anti-Relay: Stop Third-Party Mail Relay.

Here it is! Spam.Anti has its own domain name. You can find us more easily at:

www.SpamAnti.net

Very important: If you want to send me SPAM at this address, inclusion in the black list is automatic (no questions asked).

400 per month. This is my current SPAM rate. It leads to an archive that just went over 5000 domains. Definitely not good!

Companies will spend 7.3 billion dollars in e-mail advertisement in 2005 (164 millions in 1999), according to Jupiter Communications. In four years from now, the average American will receive 1600 advertising e-mail (in a total of 5600), against a mere 40 in 1999.

It was a long time since the last legal threats. This time it's the French impotrevenu.com who obtained removal from the black list of domains thanks to its direct promise of lawyers' action.

UUnet (first world ISP) has fallen victim of a major SPAM act. Apparently, English users (at least) have been left with no e-mail during several days.

I may be happy of that since UUnet has been known for years as being extremely laxist with SPAM. They may be paying the price today to learn how to change their policy.

Almost 10% of the 393 billion email messages sent in the US in 1999 were SPAM (according to eMarketer).

You may have noticed the appearance of the search engine field on my web site. Thanks to Atomz.com that provides a free customizable search service, You can now search my web site (both SPAM.Anti! and my personal pages. Tell me if you want to see some improvements, or if you have ideas of how I can improve my service here.

I have identified two rather good books about SPAM-fighting that you may want to buy from Amazon.com.

Removing the Spam, Electronic Mail Processing and Filtering : Email Processing and Filtering (The Networking Basics Series) by Geoff Mulligan.

Stopping Spam by Alan Schwartz, Simson Garfinkel, Debby Russell (Editor).