SpamAnti.net in January 2010

News of the SPAM world

"Godfather of SPAM": 4 years in jail

Alan Ralsy was one of the most prolific spammers in the world up to his arrest in 2007. But things are getting less sunny for him now. After years of judicial process, the verdict is now out: Alan Ralsky will visit a federal jail for a period of 4 years.

He may have earned a lot of money (specially in 2005) but he will have some hard time trying to take advantage of it.

10 billion SPAM per day: Fined 16 millions US$

Lance Thomas Atkinson, Australian, 26 year-old and accused of organizing one of the biggest SPAM networks has been condemned in Australia, USA and New Zeland (they moved him around a little, didn't they?) for his actions. Obviously high fines...

He controled a 35,000 zombie PC botnet (did you remember to check your PC for Trojan programs with Ad-aware from Lavasoft?) and he used wbe servers in China to send "food complements" and "snake oil" medecine from India.

How to clean up the SPAM wastelands?

For a long time, I managed a black list of domain names guilty of spamming activities. This changed when I considered that the efficiency of the black list had become so low that it was no longer worth fighting the spammers and their lawyers. But my activity and other black lists have an influence which has a much longer impact that could have been initially expected (much longer than the lists life span).

An article from Boing Boing (Internet ghost-towns: the blocked IPs where the bad guys used to live) presents the problem in an interesting way: The places where some big spammer lived are still today "ghost towns" or "waste lands" to be clened that nobody knows how to depollute.

A long time ago, I started to see that somebody buying (quite innocently) the domain name abandonned by a spammer, will soon discover that the name is tarnished by its history and is included in countless local copies of more general black lists like the one from SpamAnti.net. More discreetly, the same happens with IP addresses where spammers where hosted. Address blocks may be free, but their spammer past makes them as impossible to live in as a poluted industrial location. Nearly nothing seems able to create confidence back for it.

History of SPAM with far away echoes...

News of SpamAnti.net

Happy new year!

I wish that 2010 will see your email contain a little less SPAM. And all my best wishes for your happyness.

Buy the encyclopaedia

The encyclopédie du courrier électronique et du SPAM (encyclopaedia of electronic mail and SPAM) is written in French, listed in alphabetic order. It defines words, lists products, technologies, etc. and gives some useful advice. But in French!

This bible of email knowledge (more than 200 pages, 8.26" x 11.69") can now be purchased on line at a very reasonnable price.

You'll get a book perfectly bound and able to serve you as a reference and easy to transport and read.

Some older news archived at SpamAnti.net

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