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ISP Operator Barry Shein Answers Spam Questions
1) Back to the 90s
by gylz
If you had known back in the early 90s that spam was going to be the problem it is now, what steps would you have taken then to protect yourself and others from it?
For instance, what changes would you have advocated in the mail protocols and what standard procedures would you have told other ISPs to use to prevent spammers from getting a foothold in the first place?
Barry:
When The World began selling the first commercial dial-up internet accounts in 1989 one question we were frequently asked by the privileged few who had internet access was: How are you going to control them? To be honest, we never had a good answer other than developing what everyone thought was a pretty good AUP (Acceptable Use Policy) and promising to enforce it as best we could.
But even as the net developed, in the early-mid 90s, there were similar problems with system cracking and break-ins. Back then there were more open holes to just walk right through, get a privileged shell, or just cause mayhem. To a great extent spam can be viewed as a form of system compromise and similar to malicious cracking in many ways.
One of my pleas back then to other ISPs was to make some sincere effort to know to whom you were giving accounts. Many of the ISPs with big funding and marketing departments to match would just give out new accounts to anyone with a drink coaster and worry about it later, oftentimes much later only when the bill wasn't paid.
I think practices like these gave rise to the sense of anarchy and lawlessness on the net that came from the easy abuse of anonymity which persists today. At The World we were careful about not enabling new accounts until we were pretty sure we had valid information. Many ISPs did not do this and tracing problems back to an account on their service would lead to a dead end; the info they had on the account would turn out to be obviously fraudulent.
Also, and this isn't a regret but more of an observation, some early internet advocates wanted only end-to-end services which basically meant that every single computer on the net should be a mostly autonomous client and server. Dial-up made this impractical; you couldn't really run a web site or even a decent mail server over a part-time connection. But I think some of that ambivalence over goals contributed to inaction on issues which might have helped with problems we see today.
2) Acting Locally, Effecting Globally
by merlin_jim
Many posts talk about proposed changes to society, government, and technology to lessen the spam problem. However, an ISP has more insight into the problem than many others, and I thought I'd ask a question to tap that insight:
Given today's society, technology and infrastructure, what can an individual do that would be effective in reducing not only the personal strain of spam, but also lessen an ISP's burden.
What kind of strategies have you seen work. For instance, in particularly bad instances I'm prone to send an e-mail to spam@isp.net, abuse@isp.net, or admin@isp.net, but usually never even get a response. Is there a better thing to do? Are there things that are absolutely the wrong thing to do (such as replying to a spam)?
In short, what would you like to see users do in response to spam today?
Barry:
Pressure your legislators to enforce the laws already on the books! Hijacking others' systems, identity falsification, and fraud are already illegal. These aren't legitimate business people who send all this bulk mail, they're crooks.
Even if a spammer can sneak around the laws making it clear that the activity is illegal, this prevents a spammer from getting investors, incorporating, taking out bank loans, obtaining legal indemnification against liability, buying business insurance, registering with their state or owning intellectual property (e.g., trademarks), etc.
Something else everyone can do is install spam filters. And help others install spam filters. Ultimately, I believe it's an arms race between the filters and the spammers so other forces need to be put into play.
But my reasoning is that utilizing filters now will make the internet experience more pleasant and productive for many which is a good thing. Their wide-spread use will also serve as a wake-up call to those companies who are deluding themselves into thinking they're "white-hat" spammers so ought to be exempt. The filters throw their stuff away also.
The so-called legitimate advertisers need to get to the table with the ISPs and figure this thing out and stop thinking the status quo serves them.
At this point my thinking is that there isn't much difference, from the point of view of an ISP, between companies whose spam you don't hate and those whose spam you do hate.
When it's paper mail you have to put a stamp on a letter whether the intended recipient asked for the mail piece or not. I think we need to move in the same direction on the net with all bulk e-mailers. They need to start paying for the infrastructure they're exploiting.
The current situation is that people tend to define "spam" as e-mail which promotes products which they don't want others to think they want. We need to get beyond that because you're paying for any e-mail you receive, even if only indirectly.
3) why not whitelist?
by Aviancer
Why hasn't any large ISP or enterprise seriously considered whitelisting mail? The traditional blacklist idea -- when I see spammers I'll no longer accept their mail -- is so easily overcome that many spammers don't even wait one generation to change addresses. Instead, bounce all mail you don't recognize, with a note to the sender on how to inform the system that you are a real user. Nearly all spammers loose their incoming account immedately, so this seems the natural choice. There's some more detail on this method at the TMDA project.
Barry:
The easy answer is that the target moves too fast. How could we begin to keep up a whitelist at the ISP level on behalf of thousands or even millions of customers?
And how exactly do you propose to "inform the system that you are a real user"? Right there is the crux of the matter. What you're suggesting is one of those techniques which works pretty well for individuals but is unmanageable at the ISP level.
Something from the TMDA site I do agree with is:
We just have slightly different approaches to making spam prohibitively expensive. Let a thousand flowers bloom!Spam will not cease until it becomes prohibitively expensive for spammers to operate.
4) Is there a reasonable solution?
by PincheGab
Given that junk mail in the regular mail is more acceptable (and I will mention that my wife (specially) does like to know when there's a sale on), and given that e-mail is the next big thing, what do you see as an acceptable solution/accord to spam?
I certainly am tired of deleting the penis enlargement and Nigerian bank deposit e-mails, but where is the balance and how do we attain it, if ever?
Barry:
I believe the only approach which will work is a "sender pays" model for bulk e-mail advertising. Such a model corrects the current situation on several levels:
a) Sender pays can provide an economy to enforce its own rules.
Most proposals I've seen to deal with spam are workable on paper but fail in this regard. If, when considering yet another spam proposal, you ask yourself who will pay for this or that solution, how will it be enforced (e.g., if it requires lawsuits who will pay the lawyers?) generally no answer comes to mind.
However, if we create a (bulk) sender pays model through some sort of trade association then that organization would have a revenue stream which can be tapped to enforce its revenue model, and a monied interest in defending that revenue model.
b) Sender pays creates a conduit of control between the sender and the ISPs.
Right now spammers can use an ISP's facilities to firehose any spam they want, to anyone and everyone they like, at almost zero cost. For example, kids' accounts are flooded with explicit pornographic come-ons. There's no ability to control that sort of thing.
What business allows its facilities to be used to offend its customers?
In a sender pays model one could also refuse to be paid and, hence, refuse the advertising. Spammers are trying to send their spam to the ISP's customers. I think the ISP has both a right and an interest in controlling that so as not to drive customers away. It's not reasonable that an ISP such as myself has no control over what sort of advertising is placed in my customers' mailboxes yet is left responsible for the quality of that experience.
c) Sender pays clarifies the legal situation without a need for new legislation.
Sending, and not paying, would become simple theft of service, wire fraud, etc.
5) ISP Tools
by feenberg
Do ISPs have the tools they need to prevent outgoing SPAM from their own customers? I look at Sendmail and don't see anything that would allow you to throttle mail volume, check outbound messages for SPAM, restrict new customers etc. There isn't even anything built in that would warn you about a customer sending a million messages. It would seem that a few tools like that would be a big help to an ISP too small to develop its own.
Barry:
I think the best tool is knowing who your customer is and having a clear and effective policy if a customer spams such as clean-up costs which should also include intangibles such as public relations costs.
But you're correct, better tools at that level might help if ISPs were inclined to use them. Many ISPs do use tools such as you describe, others obviously don't care.
6) RBL's
by sabri
One of the few measures that can be taken against spam is the use of blacklists (for instance via DNS). There are a lot of pro's and con's for the use of DNSBL's. How do you feel about these? Should DNSBL's be governmentally regulated? Do you use any DNSBL? Should an ISP enforce certain RBL's (let say, of open relay's) on its customers?
Barry:
I've always resisted using these blacklist services at the ISP level. There are several reasons why but the most important is control.
If the blacklist suddenly began blocking some site, such as a major university or corporation because it was the source of spam the night before, that might cause a big problem with our customers. Even if it could be worked around it'd be just another out of control detail which might send one into fire-fighting mode suddenly.
Another problem I've had with blacklists is that some have become rogue and gone power-mad, blacklisting addresses for reasons completely unrelated to their stated purpose such as personal politics.
Also, the blacklists I've looked into were volunteer efforts which meant the people involved often felt they could paper over any mistake or oversight or staff unresponsiveness with the excuse that they were unpaid volunteers so what do you expect? You can't have your ISP be dependent on organizations with that attitude. And what if I don't like a blacklist's policies or implementation of their policies? If I'm not paying them I can't vote with my wallet.
I suspect that anyone attempting to run a blacklist in a professional, paid manner would go broke; the service isn't worth what it'd have to charge to stay in business. The legal costs alone can be daunting. With legal issues even if you're right it can be expensive getting there. And customers of any service don't want to pay for your legal bills as the major cost of such a service. So we're back to problems with the economic models.
I don't think government regulation would help with blacklists, per se, except in very general ways (they can run the courts for the lawsuits!) The only analogy I can think of are credit bureaus but most of the government regulation in that area is to protect consumers. I don't think we want the government stepping in to protect spammers!
Finally, yes, just about all ISPs blacklist (block) offending sites. Doing it in-house gives them the control they need. It's not great to have to take this on but it's the only choice right now. Unfortunately it's becoming a major burden, and the results are not altogether predictable.
7) What would be the minimum actual cost?
by jamie
What would be your actual dollar cost of spam, if you didn't spend much time and effort fighting it?
Let me explain...
I sometimes hear that spam has significant costs in bandwidth and storage but I don't believe it. As far as I can tell, SMTP traffic is at most 2-5% of net traffic. And a quick calculation shows that an ISP's costs for storing its users' spam are fractions of pennies on the dollar. (*)
You've likened spam to a DDoS attack on your mail servers. Stories about being flooded with traffic sound impressive but computers are so fast now, it's hard to put anecdotes into context. So I'm looking for dollar amounts. For a customers paying b dollars per unit time, an ISP like yours has to spend c dollars per unit time on servers that can handle those customers' incoming SMTP traffic. If this is significant, I'm looking for c over a times b :)
Obviously admins to run the servers are an important cost. But for purposes of this question, suppose you wanted to do the bare minimum. Say you set up the SMTP servers to use just a few of the less-intrusive DNSBL lists, like sbl.spamhaus, relays.ordb, or list.dsbl, and then ignored them as much as possible.
The next most common argument I hear is that customers will abandon ISPs that don't fight spam. But every ISP has the same problem, so this is really a competitive advantage issue except for the small percentage of users who are actually driven off the internet by spam.
Then there's outgoing spam but I don't imagine that's too hard to recognize and stop quickly.
Let me know what I'm missing...
(*) Thumbnail calculations of spam storage follow. Let's say J. Average ISP Customer gets 20 spams a day at 10K each, and deletes them only every 30 days. That's an average of 20*10K*15 = 3 MB of storage. If the ISP replaces hard drives every two years on average and its total storage costs are ten times the actual medium costs (for labor, backup, redundancy, downtime), then at today's hard drive prices, that spam storage will cost the ISP 0.003 * 10 / 2 dollars, or about a penny and a half. Over that same year, J. Customer pays the ISP $100+.
Barry:
Your figures for the percentage of bandwidth which is spam are far too low. Others have put the numbers much higher. NewsFactor cites studies putting the figure somewhere between 17 and 38%. See http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/19803.html.
As to computers getting faster, that's not a primary issue in my mind. But addressing even that point, how rapidly should I have to amortize and replace my equipment just to accommodate spammers?
And what about the intangibles? They're becoming the major factor in all this. E-mail is the "killer app" on the net. Yet spam is fouling that e-mail experience.
People reading Slashdot might be sufficiently committed to e-mail that they'll wade through all the spam and tweak spam filters even if it takes hours per day and a clothes pin on their collective noses. But what about the many millions of people who aren't so committed to this technology?
As an ISP I can tell you they're giving up on the internet, to them the cost/benefit is just not worthwhile. That's not a good trend.
Another cost is that spam is undermining the standardization of protocols on the net, and thus introducing a pervasive chaos. Every ISP and many other sites are scrambling around implementing mostly different "solutions" to the spam problem. Some of these in-house solutions might be ok, others can be pretty bad.
One result is that e-mail is becoming less reliable as a communications tool. Your mail might get through, it might be kicked out or filtered as spam, you might be able to figure out why and get the message through on a slightly changed subsequent attempt, or maybe not.
Who needs this kind of craziness? How can this situation possibly be productive?
How productive is it to have millions of people installing and customizing spam filters? Or having really bright people writing spam filtering programs? And where is this all going?
In my opinion, if unchecked, I think the current trend is very destructive to the entire idea of a public network.
P.S. I realize in another answer I recommend installing spam filters, but I see that only as a temporary measure.
8) Collateral Damage
by aridhol
One of the greatest problems with spam-prevention techniques has to do with collateral damage. Can you see any solution to spam that either prevents or minimizes the damage to innocent bystanders, such as other users of a spammer's ISP?
Barry:
Yes, the solution I favor is going to a sender pays model aimed at bulk e-mailers.
Other approaches, in particular technical solutions, are prone to causing collateral damage. Inevitably as the arms race heats up, and spam filters have to take bigger and bigger risks to have any effect, collateral damage will become more common.
And it's already worse than you might imagine. Spam and similar are causing severe operational problems on the net and undermining standards as ISPs and others invent new ways to avoid the spew.
As one concrete example, right this minute there's a network provider who was just assigned most of the 69.0.0.0/8 IP address space. Unfortunately, this was formerly a spam and DOS (denial-of-service) cesspool so many sites out there just block the whole 69.* address space.
So the new owners are making appeals to firewall managers asking them to please remove their blocks in the 69.* space on the NANOG (North American Network Operators Group) list.
But NANOG is not a particularly big or influential mailing list. At best it's only aimed at North America while the blocking exists world-wide. But how do you communicate with so many sites and undo the problem? In a nutshell, you can't. I suspect their customers who get space in 69.* are going to find themselves blocked by many sites for many years to come.
See what a mess spam is causing? It's like asking how much can such a little tiny termite eat? And then the house falls down.
9) Spam Lawsuits
by ca1v1n
Do you think new laws that allow ISPs and end-users to collect damages from spammers on a per-message basis can be effective tools to reduce spam?
Barry:
Although it should be part of the picture I think this sort of litigation would be ineffective as a primary attack on the problem.
What we need to do first is stop the insanity!
To do that I say introduce sensible economics into e-mail advertising. You may find network TV commercials annoying, but imagine if just anyone could break into a station's signal at any time and insert advertising! That's what we have right now, and it's crazy.
If we were subjected to a few, well-paid and placed ads it might be annoying to some but others might even find it beneficial like the person in the previous message whose wife likes to know about the good sales. Or we could just pay a premium and not see another ad, analogous to premium cable TV. Or find ways to block them via our personal mail clients, analogous to what people do with PVRs. It'd just be a matter of economics and marketing and taste.
But right now it's complete anarchy, only the introduction of a viable economic model can tame the situation.
Also, I'm not optimistic about any legalistic approach so long as there's no scalable revenue stream associated with e-mail or its abuse.
Currently the general consensus on the net is that we don't even want sales taxes on e-commerce, which might be a reasonable point of view, but then we're going to ask that billions should be spent on courts and enforcement of new spam laws? Where is that money supposed to come from? Cut the fire dept? The schools? Not-growing corn subsidies? Without additional revenue something has to give.
Given a sender pays model money could be earmarked for private enforcement, such as investigation and litigation. And the case could be more realistically made as to the exact economic cost of spam. If an ISP was supposed to get paid for ads going through their system then anyone evading that is simply guilty of good old fashioned theft of service, no new laws needed. And legislators, who presumably would be getting their usual business tax cut of such revenue, could begin to see the logic in returning some tax money to defend these revenue streams.
There would still be challenges to be worked out internationally but it wouldn't be the first time a revenue model had to work on a global scale. Obviously international telephony and postal mail works well enough to combat fraud. But only with some sort of concomitant revenue stream attached to the activity could you possibly begin to tackle the problem, domestically or internationally.
10) Kill 'em all
by Lord_Slepnir
If you could meet a spammer, what would you say? What would you do? What caliber would you use? Would you want someone to do it for you? Is $10,000 a head too much?
Barry:
I would tell the spammer in no uncertain terms that spammers' days are numbered, just like junk faxers and other scam artists who exploited a brief window of vulnerability.
Situations like this don't last long.
Of course, then the spammer would laugh in my face because that's what sociopaths like to do when confronted. But, as the expression goes, we'll see who laughs last.
One thing is clear, however, spammers will not listen to reason. So any change in their behavior will have to be the result of force.
The dark side of the force... (Score:5, Funny)
One thing is clear, however, spammers will not listen to reason. So any change in their behavior will have to be the result of force.
Can I be the one who applies force? Pretty please?
(Just joking, as I only dream of applying force to the skull of the spammer after one spam too many...) =)
Re:The dark side of the force... (Score:5, Funny)
But then again, I have always been partial to ironic punishments;-)
Parent
Re:The dark side of the force... (Score:3, Funny)
What about them? (Score:4, Funny)
Well, how can you refuse their great deals!?! They must think we're crazy.
Simple Solution (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Simple Solution (Score:5, Interesting)
If a hotmail server for example looked at the age of an email address/account when deciding to accept an email then it might prevent some spam. If an email account is minutes or hours old and the user attempts to send 1000 emails from it then you know you're dealing with a spammer. Also if you check for replies to that message you also can validate if the mail was potentially a valid one.
I personally receive very little spam since installing Popfile, in the the true tradition of networking and the internet it's free. Works hundreds of times better than any commercial tool I have used. Best thing is it's cross platform too, if you can run perl on an OS you can run popfile.
Parent
Re:Simple Solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Now obviously this won't work for individual cases. You need to monitor a large avergae traffic flow, and you need to monitor a single sender generating traffic for multiple recipients. But the implementation of this should be very easy on the cpu usage of an average server (but if you wanted to increase the reliability, you could also include the option to check the content of the incoming messages... a single source sending the same message to multiple users presents a much more likely candidate for spam filtering, but is also much more cpu-intensive).
Can anyone comment on a technique such as this? Has it been tried before? It seems this would eliminate false-hits and stop a large number of mass-mailings.
Parent
throttle an smtp server (Score:5, Interesting)
ISP's offering dialup services generally know the CLID and maybe the name & address of a caller.. but its too much hassle to do anything about bulk mailers that use the service. If I go and sign up with a free isp I can send a huge volume of spam before I get banned and there is a very low chance of any comeback.
What tools are available for SMTP gateways (such as sendmail, exim etc) that let you trottle mail based on the sending address / user (maybe tied into radius)? So i can allow normall users to send thier 20 messages per connection by automatically make it unattractive to people sending 1000's. If each subsequent message from a user has a longer and longer transmission time (insert some arbitary delays etc) then they won't relay through the isp server.
Any ideas? I was talking to a friend recently that works at a small isp and he has the exact problem above. They give out "free" accounts (earning off the call revenue) and spammers clog up the smtp server with really vast volumes of junk in the mail queues... after all - most addresses on spam lists are duds.
Re:throttle an smtp server (Score:4, Informative)
Mail coming in from outside your address space must be destined for your address space to be acceptible. Only relay messages originating within your address space. This functionality is now built into Sendmail, but I remember when it wasn't and had to add it myself.
It is possible, despite the quote re: Sendmail, to track X messages sent per IP over Y time, and begin issuing errors to the sender if the volume is higher than proscribed. You can even allow for email lists, if they're know to you, to be exempt. This is not easy to implement in Sendmail (the rules took a long while to hash out) but now that you can link external programs into sendmail's processing of messages, a child could do it.
The real issue, however, for ISPs is dealing with inbound SPAM. For that, there are no easy fixes. Much of it is no longer domestic in origin. With processors getting faster, it may be possible to implement a Bayesian filter [slashdot.org] at the ISP level, saving each individual user from the trouble. You could plant bogus addresses as spam traps in the path of spammers then assume that mail to those addresses are bad and assume messages to real accounts are good and then let the bayesian filter take over. You could also provide a mechanism to feed other messages into the bad portion of the filter (e.g., spam that slips through).
For users that are concerned about the possibility of false positives (much higher with balcklists, BTW) give them the option to opt in or out at will (defaulting to in, I'd think.)
Parent
thinking about sender pays (Score:3, Interesting)
Another solution may be to have a ten cent "deposit" every time you send an email. If it's legit, you get it back. If the end user rejects it, you lose your ten cents.
The problem with the first approach is that it wouldn't work unless every ISP did it. It would make more sense to charge at the incoming mail server.
ISP's don't care... (Score:4, Insightful)
But you're correct, better tools at that level might help if ISPs were inclined to use them. Many ISPs do use tools such as you describe, others obviously don't care.
I would guess that the majority of these ISP's do care. The problem is that spamming issues are such a low priority for them when they are just trying to keep their heads above water (financially speaking).
Another issue is that the ISP's will almost always be perceived as not caring, because there is no way they can possibly respond to every single person that claims to be spammed from such and such ISP.
Sure (Score:3, Insightful)
No new unenforcable laws or new bloated government agencies required.
Money talks (Score:5, Insightful)
If no-one ever responded to SPAM, it would die out pretty rapidly.
If it's still with us it means one of two things:-
1) It pays to send SPAM.
2) There is an endless supply of spammers who have yet to realise that it doesn't pay.
Re:Money talks (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Money talks (Score:3, Insightful)
Meanwhile, the con artists at the top don't have to deal with the carnage and destruction at the bottom, while skimming the cream at the top. That's the essence of business planning in a nutshell.
Re:Money talks (Score:5, Informative)
At the time I was going through a major anti-spam kick, where I would thorougly investigate each piece of spam, contact the appropriate ISPs (often by phone), etc (I've since given up on this effort since most ISPs simply didn't care).
Anyways, this one particular piece of SPAM had an order form built right in to the email, which submitted the details (unencrypted of course) to a CGI on the spammers "server" (connected via some throw-away dial-up account).
As part of my "investigation", I just happened to cut and paste the URL of the CGI into my browser, but took off the filename (that is, I went to their cgi-bin directory). I couldn't believe it, but the cgi-bin directory was open to the world, including the flat files which were storing the user's names, email addresses, home addresses, and credit card information, etc.
I refreshed the files once in a while over the next several hours, and just watched the list of orders build and build and build. I'd say in one evening this guy made several hundred dollars in profit. Multiply that by the number of days in the year, subtract the amount that they spent to send the email (nothing or almost nothing) and you've got your answer. Spammers make money. In some cases, lots and lots of money.
Parent
Re:Money talks (Score:5, Informative)
Do you have any facts or specific experience to back this up, or are you talking out of your ass?
I used to work with the abuse department of a broadband ISP. The majority of the spam complaints we received were due to our customers who were running SMTP servers and didn't realize they were configured as open relays. Spammers would scan blocks of IPs on our network, find somebody with port 25 open, see if it's an open relay, and if so, start sending spam. Over the next 24-72 hours we would receive complaints, mostly from SpamCop [spamcop.net]. We'd identify the customer and send them an e-mail notifying them of the problem. 24 hours later we'd suspend their service. Then the customer would call into Tech Support confused about why they can't get online, and we'd have to explain what was going on. Most of the time they had no idea. Some of these customers don't know what an SMTP server is, let alone an open relay - yet somehow they've got one set up. Others know, but just forgot to fix it.
Of course, open SMTP servers is not the only problem - open proxy servers work too, usually to connect to an open relay somewhere else so the spammer's real IP doesn't show up in the headers.
I do agree that most spammers don't use their ISP's mail server, although several do. Some ISPs such as Earthlink firewall port 25 so you can't send mail except through their servers (unless you exploit an open proxy; see above) - this helps Earthlink to greatly reduce the amount of spam coming out of their network, since customers with open relays are not a problem for them.
So if we could please move on, the problem is that spammers are doing the same thing as many people on slashdot, they are running their own mail server off their cheap (often free thanks to parents, and yes I am asserting that much spam is from teenagers) broadband connections
Spamming directly from your own broadband connection is retarded; that's why most spammers don't do it. Our policy was to suspend your service until you agree to quit spamming, then suspend it again until you agree to quit spamming again, then cancel your account and charge you a $250 early-termination fee for breaking your one-year contract. We've already got your credit card number, and it's in the service agreement.
I think this is something that needs to happen more often: ISPs need to start making it really expensive for spammers to operate, by charging them large fines when they do. Don't just cancel their account, but make them pay.
The biggest problem with this is, there are so many incompetent people with hacked/infected machines that it's often impossible to tell the difference between an innocent victim whose system was compromised and a die-hard spammer who's lying through his teeth. The latter you want to get rid of ASAP; the former may pay you a lot of money over the next several years (and refer all his friends) if you can help get this little issue resolved.
Parent
User Authentification (Score:4, Insightful)
"Sender pays" should be universal or it won't work (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless everyone must pay for every e-mail sent, the letter of the law will be exploited to the spammers continued benefit. I don't necessarily advocate moving to a pay system, but if you're going to make anyone pay, you damned well better make everyone pay.
Re:"Sender pays" should be universal or it won't w (Score:4, Insightful)
It probably is a everyone pays system - although I suspect that ISPs will then say "x messages per y time period included!" - and either eat the cost or raise their rates to compensate.
The real problem will be the same as it is for any microbilling setup - the overhead is a killer. It all looks well and good to stop the spammer that's hitting you with 100,000 emails, but when you realize that you also have to deal with the 10,000 accounts that are sending 10 emails each, the overhead eats you for lunch. Maybe he's proposed a solution for this - if so, then there's a whole lot of VC's that would like to talk to him.
Parent
Re:"Sender pays" should be universal or it won't w (Score:3, Insightful)
You can maybe peg some of these costs into a subscription scheme -- most people have to be subscribing somewhere to get access to email -- but that breaks down in a lot of ways. People using business email accounts aren't exactly paying now, but businesses are unlikely to [a] charge their own users for email throughput (are they?) or [b] restrict users from emailing to certain addresses (would they?). People using free webmail accounts aren't going to be interested in paying, but the companies providing the service if they had to handle a surcharge for each mail one of their users produced. There are obviously wrinkles in the subscription model, but the problems aren't quite as bad as they are for broader applications of that idea (subscribing to sites like Salon, for example). Still, the problems are there, and possibly a major impediment.
So you're back to micropayments, a familiar issue to a lot of people at this point. Can they work? Can they make any money? Is the point, in this context, even to make money, or do we just want to prevent other people from being able to make money this way -- and if that's the case, this isn't exactly fair, is it? We'd be punishing everyone for the actions of a small group, because no one has managed to come up with a more imaginitive solution, perhaps with good reason, but hopefully with great reluctance as well.
Re:"Sender pays" should be universal or it won't w (Score:4, Interesting)
But this objection is unnecessary: the truth is that mailing lists are no longer necessary!
Why does anybody have to send emails to 100 or 200 people? This is the stuff of horrific waste!
Instead, let's get the purveyors of email programs the ability to IMPORT messages into the mail queues. Simply connect to a server and download the latest stuff. Do it once a day, once an hour, or whatever. People with PDAs do this (think "AvantGo" and "Mazingo" and a few other services that hot-sync news from the web to a PDA for offline perusal). People with POP and IMAP accounts do this as well (connecting to a server on some regular basis to get email). It's not a big change from the current email GUI model.
For instance, let's assume there's a "Slashdot Mailing List" that basically feeds all the stories that appear on Slashdot. Your mailer can connect via some "well known protocol" (ftp, http) to the server that provides the mailing list. The mailer then imports the messages into its message queue, augmenting the messages it has received via IMAP and POP3.
How would this work? The mailer sends the last received message id, and the server sends all messages on the list that appeared after that id. This could be either by generating a transaction on the fly from a database, or just concatenating all messages id's from the one that was last received. Add compression (which email doesn't provide) and you have now provided a benefit--less bandwidth required compared to bulk email.
And the mailer KNOWS that it's not receiving SPAM, since the user has actually OPTED IN by definition by giving the email program the name of the mailing list that the user is interested in.
(Some mailing lists do a lot of this processing already, by incorporating messages in a digest format that is emailed or posted to the web, so we're not asking for too much additional functionality from them.)
Now, an ISP can intercept ALL DATA going across port 25, and examine the envelope. If there is more than a few recipients ("few" determined by the ISP's AUP), the ISP can generate a bounce ("Too many recipients") and drop the mail, or even save the mail, and in the bounce, give a URL that points the user to a "Click Through" agreement to pay the surcharge for sending email to multiple users.
For Spammers that try to circumvent this by sending one message per recipient, the ISP, which now has the equivalent of a "taxi meter" on port 25, can detect this as well, simply by aggregating the number of emails that a single address is sending out (simple database application).
Spammers that use open relays will get hit by the same problem, again assuming that the open relay's ISP has filtered port 25.
This should cut down spam.
The person whose wife wants to know about sales, simply OPTS IN to a server that will feed her the latest prices from the local grocery or the mall down the road. Advertisers are happy (they know how many people are downloading their bulk stuff), and the recipient is happy. If the mailing list isn't what the wife wanted, tell the email program to no longer download the stuff.
The only problem I see with such a solution is the possible invasion of privacy that could happen if it wasn't just the envelope of the message that is inspected (think: Carnivore). I'd leave this up to the implementing parties to come up with safeguards against this.
Any opinions?
Parent
Problem with sender pays (Score:4, Interesting)
Is how sender is defined. Is any mail of a commerical nature the definition? Would an email from my stockbroker (ie one I hire) suggesting that I sell MSFT qualify? If it's limited strictly to bulk, where is "bulk" defined.
Yes, certain varieties of spam may be eradicated, but the spammers will simply move on to other varieties that aren't covered.
Spammers are getting even smarter. (Score:4, Informative)
If you are stupid enough to buy software from a spammer, beware it might contain a virus to turn your computer into an open relay, so be smart and install Linux.
Education would definately help... (Score:5, Insightful)
Every day thousands of people sign into various sites, drop their email addresses here and there, never thinking of the consequence of where thats going to go, and not seeing the connection to the increased levels of spam. I have one spam account that I use for any site I think is going to sell/lease/rent/whatever my email and I watch it to see when increases begin. I don't ever give out a regular account, because I KNOW I'm going to get spam.
If we could educate the 'regular' masses of internet users that send emails to their family and friends, and surf for news, we'd be ahead already. If we could show them that by giving away your email address you ARE going to get spam, they might stop. The example that works for me is 'do you stop and give out your address to every single store you walk into? to the guys trying to 'give away' free newspapers?' If people learn to control their email address as they do the rest of their personal/private information, there will be less targets for spam.
My 'theory' works in practice. I get about 5 spams a day on my main account, which I use for various mailing lists, websites etc. I selectively give out my 'good' account, and what crap I do get Cloudmark [cloudmark.com] gets rid of for me.
So if we could educate our friends/family not to just give up their email address to every site that wants it, every program they install, every popup that comes up, they'd get a lot less immediately.
one problem (Score:5, Insightful)
From the horse's mouth himself when asked "If the ISPs were to band together to control spam, why shouldn't they just block it entirely?" - his answer: "it's too hard to identify."
Its no secret that spam is hard to identify. If it were easy to identify, we wouldn't even have this duscussion. BUT, if you can't identify it well enough to filter effectively, HOW THE FUCK DO YOU EXPECT TO REGULATE IT?? You think the spammers are going to roll over and suddenly agree to play by the rules, especially since you're going to ask them to start paying $$? I don't think so!!
Go ahead with your system and try to regulate the spammers. In order to do that, you'll have to license each bulk emailer and probably force them to comply with the system by putting a unique identifier in their spam so it can be properly "regulated". Go head... do it! That way, we can grab to licensee list and filter by that... in essence, you'll probably be making spam easier to identify and kill. Where's the economy in that?
setup a trap open relay?? (Score:4, Interesting)
Sender pays (Score:3, Interesting)
Then, for someone to spam 50,000 people, they'll want to find away to get 50,000 e-mails sent to them, probably from other spammers, and spammer will be fighting spammer in the arena of the web, while us "innocent bystandards" will be making money. More likely, spam will just stop and everyone will send about as many emails as they receive.
need more details on how this would work (Score:3, Insightful)
Overall interesting, I just would like more info on the details...or if the details can't answer those questions, start thinking now.
Sender pays won't work (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sender pays won't work (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree.
If you give me the choice between "SMTP without spam", and "SMTP-Barry, with only the spam that someone has paid my ISP to send me", I'm all for it.
That is, I'll continue to use SMTP, and block all SMTP-Barry traffic because I'm not interested in anything Barry's clients have to say, no matter how much they paid my ISP to get past the filter.
Unfortunately, if you give a spammer a choice between "SMTP where it costs $19.99 per disposable account to spam a million people and get $100 in responses" and "STMP-Barry, where it costs me $100K to spam a million people"...
So don't give us the choice? Drop SMTP altogether for SMTP-Barry? Great. Now instead of getting 10 spams a day for Viagra, I get 10 spams a day for DaimlerChrysler. How am I better off?
(No, I'm not making that up about Chrysler - got a fucking turdlet for Chrysler products from Eddy Marin's "optin-subscription" spamhaus just a few days ago. Looks like Eddy's working his way up - he's also scammed Gonzaga University into working with him. Way to check references on your fucking marketing partners, Chrysler.)
Parent
Sender pays: ISPs charge for net email traffic (Score:5, Insightful)
is for reputable ISPs to start charging for
net email traffic. Thus if a peering ISP is
sending you more email than you are sending them,
you charge them for the service of transporting
their mail to your users.
ISPs that provide service to spammers will then
be paying for their outgoing email, and will have
every reason to charge the spammers for the
extra traffic.
ISPs on the receiving end of excess traffic
will either have a new revenue stream, or will
have a legitimate reason to blacklist an ISP:
they haven't paid for the service they are
getting.
Daniel
No need to byzantine systems (Score:4, Insightful)
We need to sign backbone providers up for a blackhole systems. Then blackhole open relays and spam-friendly ISPs.
If an ISP's client's email doesn't reach 5% of the net, the client's going to blame the target systems. If that client can't email anyone who isn't on his ISP, he's going to blame his ISP. This is why we need a large percentage of backbone providers signed up. We need to make it look like a serious problem, not a normal glitch.
ISPs would probably want to have an account type of people who send more than 100 messages per day, or more than ten copies (non-CCs) of a single message. People with these accounts can be more closely monitored and if someone with a regular account sends out a few hundred spam before being caught, it's not that big of a deal.
We've shown that companies won't disconnect a paying customer until everyone else complains. We need a way to make complaints heard, and an above-reproach spam-listing service to direct the complaints. The service needs to be run by a wide sampling of people and all spam submitted needs to be publicly visible. Anything less opens it up to charges of discrimination. Also, having a strictly documented procedure helps if they're sued by a spammer for defamation.
It needs to be established that while you paid for the pipe for the ability to send data, I am free to choose if I want to listen to you. It's not censorship if everyone decides to ignore you.
How is e-mail different then snail mail? (Score:3, Interesting)
Recently I moved to a town where there is no home mail delivery. I had to get a PO box. After a few weeks, I found that I was getting more direct mail then mail addressed to me. I asked the post office not to deliver this mail, but they refused saying that those companies paid to have mail delivered to me and therefore they couldn't stop delivery of junk mail. The only way I could get them to stop was to write each junk mailer and request them to stop sending me unsolicited mail.
Well, I don't think I am going to send each one a letter so I just put up with it. How is this any different than spam?
Re:How is e-mail different then snail mail? (Score:3, Insightful)
Quote: Money. It costs $$ to send snail mail. That money goes to the USPO, who use it to beef-up staffing and pay for the resources needed to deliver said mail. On the other hand, a spammer can send 10 or a million emails a day for the same flat rate. But ISPs don't receive any $$ for the extra resources needed to deliver said mail.
Power-mad RBLS = SPEWS (Score:5, Insightful)
Check out the answers to requests to SPEWS for delisting in news.admin.net-abuse.email. They tend to be along the lines of:
"What? You actually purchased a netblock from that evil, scum-sucking ISP who hosted a website that pointed to another website that somehow gathered email addresses that found their way into some spammers list?" We don't think they'll stop having something to do with spam so forget about them ever being de-listed!!! Serves you right you moronic spam supporting fool for not checking first!! MUWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!"
I think he's describing SPEWS quite well.
ISP Control? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that's kind of a slippery slope. When the ISP begins deciding what email you get and don't get, where do you draw the line. I would certainly want a system like this to be opt-in so that I can deal with all the email I get (good and bad) and not have that decision made for me by someone else.
Spammer pays... (Score:5, Interesting)
And then some ISP's would simply put it on a flat rate. Or advertise "Send free emails!", and charge an extra dollar on the base price.
The recipient? hmmm.....there would end up being some kind of reciprocal agreement between spammers. "I pay you, you pay me."
The poor user whose box gets cracked and becomes the sender of a million emails is in for a fight getting his money back or account reinstated.
And then of course the valid bulk email senders would wither and die.
Who pays, and who gets 'paid'?
Sorry, but there are far too many loopholes and traps for paid email to actually work.
No Way! (Score:3, Insightful)
Banning spam is an impossible task, and instead a mechanism must be developed to control bulk commercial e-mail and make the senders pay for the infrastructure costs of distribution, according to an Internet service provider president.
"It could be a legitimate business," said Barry Shein
This I object to a lot. There's no way I want to support any initiative that puts more spam in my mail box. The national "don't call" list is a step in the right direction towards re-gaining control over our telephones. Now we should support the same thing for email.
Don't give up the fight!
Here's my suggestions:
1. Make it illegal to use an email list for spam unless you are the primary seller to a customer. Let's put all these knot-heads who do nothing but collect email address and re-sell them out of business. Amazon.com can hold on to my email because I purchase stuff from them, but not anyone I don't have a business relationship with.
2. Primary sellers may sell one-time use email addresses. One time use. Period. Holding onto that email falls under 1. and will land your butt in jail.
3. The primary seller MUST maintain a "don't email" service. Failure to do this accurately is a big no-no. Addresses on the "don't email" list can't be sold or even used internally for advertising.
Now that will take care of all the domestic spam. To finish the job, we should:
4. Require that the mail relay is responsible for anything transmitted. Yup, run an open relay and you could go to prison. Sucks to be you. Maybe you should put some reasonable controls on that open relay, like only accepting email from IPs from a country with reasonable SPAM law. China is obviously right out ^_^.
That's it. We could do it. "Don't email" lists won't work because foreign coutnries won't respect them. But close those relays and the problem becomes local. Some well meaning yet technically challenged IT people go to prison? Good. The technically challenged have no business operating a computer anyway.
Think how much better the world would be if no one was getting bilked by 419. If everyone could use the internet with fear of unwanted porn or receiving literally hundreds of scams each month. Hey, we might even see some growth in the industry! More use of websites, legitmate use of email advertising, and the jobs that follow, it all flows from taking control of the internet from people that are basically common criminals.
Mr. Shein's plan does one thing and one thing only, and that's put money in his pocket, while the rest of us can go hang.
Preach on! (Score:5, Interesting)
Those of you who run one or more domains from which spam NEVER generates, and who's had some asshole wacko submit said domain(s) to a RTBL, raise your hand.
If you think RTBLs are great, wait until you get on one of them. It's almost Orwellian. Amazingly simple to be in one, incredibly difficult to get out.
Granted, some RTBLs are run responsibly. But a few are nothing more than power trips for the operators - people who've become essentially hysterical about spam and are quite glad to condemn anyone with minimum proof. An IP address in a forged header, fer fuck's sake.
Police, prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner, all rolled up in a wonderful little bundle of joy.
People who buy into spam (Score:4, Interesting)
Spam and mail percentages (Score:4, Interesting)
Hi Barry,
Thanks for doing this interview :)
I'm not really satisfied with your answer to my question about dollar cost of spam, but that's OK, you don't have to satisfy me :)
I did want to clear one thing up. I had written:
And you responded:
I totally accept that spam is about 17-38% of SMTP traffic, that sounds roughly correct to me.
My point there was that SMTP traffic is a very small fraction of total net traffic.
I haven't found any recent statistics on this -- partly because I don't think anyone publishes these numbers anymore, and partly because it's a real pain to try to find with Google. (Do a search on "SMTP NNTP HTTP bandwidth backbone" and you turn up a zillion ISPs bragging about all the protocols they support and how many backbones they're connected to.)
Here's one example of the crappy data out there, a six-year-old report from a link near a backbone showing that SMTP traffic totaled 2.2% of all network traffic:
http://www.nlanr.net/NA/Learn/popular.html [nlanr.net]
Here's another survey of a backbone, this one five years old, showing SMTP traffic as 3.3% of all network traffic:
http://traffic.caida.org/Reading/Papers/Inet98/ [caida.org]
My point was just that if we're trying to assign a dollar figure to what spam costs an ISP, we might as well ignore connectivity charges, because SMTP itself uses so little bandwidth.
As for what all the other costs add up to... I still don't know.
from the dept. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Sender pays is a bad idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Get to know your spammer. Field trips are more entertaining than sitting on the couch watching television.
Parent
Re:Sender pays is a bad idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Reciever has the "right" to bill sender for unsolicited email - a processing fee as seen in many a sig.
If the sender can't be found, then they have the right to bill the ISP. Which will get the lax ones off their ass and implement some actual policies and the spam house ones eliminated.
International law in the way? No problem! The "Right to bill sender for processing fee" law has diplomatic status, and it clearly states that mobs, minimum of 10 people, have the right to use all means necessary to extract the fine either as money, property, or pain.
Where anonymity fails, application of brutal force, stalking, and humilation by an organized group of angry citizens doesn't.
Fight spammers with fire! Burn them to the ground.
Parent
Sender pays is dead in the water (Score:4, Insightful)
The only alternative would be for large groups of ISP's to band to together to impose uniform fees, making the system the de facto standard. Um, can anyone spell antitrust?? The idea doesn't clear the laugh test.
I think sender pays maybe would work in principle, but is entirely impractical. As a practical matter, it will just piss off a public that HATES being nickle-and-dimed to death. Notice the unpopularity of metered ISP access? Americans in particular like flat rate, whether it be email, telephones, or whatever.
These are just a few problems off the top of my head, I'm sure I can think of more. But *please* don't ask me for the real solution.
Laws don't stop crime, but do make it hurt. And who among us wouldn't mind seeing a few spammers do some time? Even if they get to us because we fail to protect ourselves, what they're doing is wrong (fraud etc.) and should be punished. Let's not blame the victim.
Parent
Re:Spam is only a problem for perverts (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Get over it! How, exactly? (Score:3)
I don't hate spam because of personal inconvenience. I hate it because of the fact that it uses up massive resources on the net, and wastes a lot of people's time for no good reason. Remember, these were questions to someone at an ISP, where spam costs them time and money.
Actually, if I ever do have to check my email via webmail, it does bother me. On my normal account, I don't get that much spam, but on my webmail account? Holy crap. 99% of it is spam. I don't give it out to anyone either, I use it when I need to provide an email for purchasing things online. Yet, I get tons of spam on it. I only check it once a week for that reason alone.
Spam is hated for the same reason telemarketers are hated. I don't mind that people complain about them, because if nobody complains, then nothing will be done to stop them.
Re:Get over it! (Score:3)
Also, I don't know about you, but my time is worth money. Every time I have to delete spam that escapes my filters, that's time that I could have been productive. Deleting a hundred spam e-mails is annoying and time consuming. It takes more time than just hitting the delete key. Some e-mail programs have a really sucky user interface, and in a corporate environment, you don't get to choose which e-mail program you use. Sucks to be you, in that circumstance.
Yeah, yeah, I know... YHBT... but I'm bored and feel like posting.
Re:Ahhh, diddums... (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously.
ARIN probably came back and told them "This is the only
This is why large ISPs and hosting companies (with multiple
Parent