ISP Operator Barry Shein Answers Spam Questions 373
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.
Sender pays is a bad idea (Score:2, Insightful)
It'll just kill e-mail. People and corporations wont be so eager to use it when it costs them a dime (or even a cent) per pop.
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.
User Authentification (Score:4, Insightful)
push the responsibility from providers to abusers (Score:2, Insightful)
whitelisting, as many mailing lists use are an effective way to combat spam. i've subscribed to many mailing lists, and haven't seem much spam come through those channels. if whitelisting could be implemented by the ISP's (which I really think it could and barry does a bad job of skirting around the question), are there ways around the whitelisting? it would seem like too much work on the spammers behalf to circumvent that type of a system. have any ISP's tried this type of service?
in short. barry, your idea of "making the bad guy pay for the spam" is a really crowd cheering idea and i'm sure there will be tons of supporters here from the
would you pay an extra 1$ per month for an ISP that alows whitelisting email? if my spam were uncontrolable, i sure as hell would.
"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.
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?
Re:Spam is only a problem for perverts (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Money talks (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 is a bad idea (Score:1, Insightful)
There is always a technical solution.
http://www.cypherspace.org/~adam/hashc
I'm amazed
Getting widespread acceptance is hard of course, but each person who puts it on their system, each e-mail client that has it as an option, increases chances of final solution.
Re:CAPTCHA'a (Score:2, Insightful)
What if both people trying to initially email each other use it?
Does the email get stuck in a loop, or just never get seen as the address was never confirmed?
This one affects a small group of online users: How does a blind person read the obfuscated word? Their normal screenreader/TTS won't handle it...
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.
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.)
Re:Simple Solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Can't mail servers become more intelligent, after all who sends 100 emails a day in one big batch from a hotmail account?
Unfortunately most if not all of the spam you receive marked as coming from hotmail never went within 100 miles of the actual hotmail servers. The distributed nature of the internet makes this virtually impossible.
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.
Re:Simple Solution (Score:2, Insightful)
My mother. That's how long her general address book is, and on occasion she has major news that she puts out to everybody. (When she moves for instance.)
whitelisting via combination methods (Score:3, Insightful)
This means that the vast majority of a typical person's email -- communicating with people they know -- is unaffected at all. Giving their email out to new people is risk-free.
Using the commercial version of this service that I know of -- Spam Arrest [spamarrest.com] -- is $3/mo if you pay for a year. Only about $2.25 if you pay for 2. If I was looking for an ISP that I used for email, I'd expect this to be part of their mail system (albeit perhaps optional).
Re:Simple Solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Like the man said, spammers vs. anti-spam solutions is an arms race - spammers will find a way to work around methods to keep them out. In the case that you have proposed, the work-around is simple: don't deliver all your messages to the same host in close proximity.
A better solution based on a similar concept is Vipul's Razor [sourceforge.net]. This is based on the idea that spammers usually send the same message to thousands of recipients, so if the same message is received by a bunch of different and apparently unrelated accounts, it's probably spam. [and of course, the work-around for this is to vary your message slightly for each recipient]
Another issue is that all of the solutions that are now in use (except possibly the Tarpit solution [martiansoftware.com]) only shield the end user from spam: they don't address the burden placed on the network infrastructure.
So bottom line is, there's lots of little tricks like the one that you have suggested that can be used (separately and combined) to mitigate this problem, but (as you've indicated) they won't solve it.
Re:Sender pays is a bad idea (Score:1, Insightful)
What we need are enforcible laws prohibiting unsolicited commercial messages is ANY of these (mail, email, telephone) mediums. Everything else is just as long-term war.
Re:"Sender pays" should be universal or it won't w (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, this wouldn't save any resources...everyone would have to go download this e-mail from the remote server, possibly slashdotting the poor thing to death on lists with a large readership. This would merely reverse the burden proportion form what it is today...where the list holder would bear the brunt of the bandwidth charges, as opposed to being able to send one e-mail that gets forked to everyone on the list. And only have to deal with responses, not everyone who reads the list downloading every message. Perhaps some kind of free-net style distributed messaging server?
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).
Apologies on the long snip...
This will not work. First of all, this can't stop a spammer that sets up his own "ISP" with it's own mail server that has an AUP of however many messages he wants to send. A potential spammer can always go up the chain to find access at the point where SMTP is not clamped down upon, and plug himself in there. It would be a logistical nightmare of Biblical proportions for every router on the planet to cross-check the credentials on every SMTP packed imaginable, which is what would be necessary in order for your system to truly be spammer-proof, and avoid the "cure is worse than the disease" solution of blacklisting.
Secondly, even if you do somehow clamp down on every bit of SMTP traffic on the planet, if you leave any kind of number of free e-mails possible, the spammers WILL exploit it. They'll sign up as many free e-mail accounts as possible, all hard limited to a certain number of emails/day or recipeients/e-mail, and in no time flat one of them will find a way to script the bejeezus out of them and you'll have made the problem even worse because almost every e-mail source on the planet will have to be blacklisted to avoid the new wave of spam.
it's a laudable idea to try to preserve some free e-mails for the little guy without big pockets, but if you give an inch, the spammers will turn it into a yard. If you're going to make it cost, the only way it will work is to make it cost everyone. Then there's nowhere for them to run.