Tips for fighting spammers?

[Syneryder]

Does anyone have any tips for fighting the spammers (and not just filtering their spam)? I mean, the sort of thing that could get their connections disconnected or their ISPs blocked?

I'm getting mighty annoyed by all the emails from DigitalPublishingTools and HiMailer... HiMailer especially, since its a spam tool that promotes itself and has a nasty habit of sending me 10 messages or more all at once. I would dearly love to get these people blasted off the internet (*ahem* by legal means of course).

I use SpamCop (http://spamcop.net/) on nearly every spam I get, I'm aware of the excellent UXN Spam Combat (http://combat.uxn.com/) site and will try their Spam Complaints Primer... but I wondered if anyone had any more tips? Or is that about all you can do, and just hope that ChinaNet, Diyixian or WorldCom will help you? (Not likely...)

[kitchin]

NY Times ran an editorial against spam yesterday. Today it has an op-ed suggesting a whitelist method, requiring the sender to look at a graphic and type in the code. Searching for these editorials, I came across a story about Yahoo Shops getting put on anti-spam lists by Spamhaus, MAPS and Spews.org (what reputation those services have, I don't know). They claim Yahoo has been slow to respond to a backlog of complaints. And worse. I don't know how much of it is breast-beating by the anti-spam services, which have a good growing business themselves.

Spam is getting in everyone's way. My idea is to start sending more bounces, with a note asking the sender to email me, at a different address, for instructions if the mail is legit. But when I bounce legit mail, say because it is too big, my senders usually do not read the bounce message. They just say their mail to me got returned. So my plan is to write my own bounce sender, that uses more a more friendly format. I want it to look like advice, not a returned message, but still be a bounce. The important thing about a bounce is that it cannot be replied to.

About that editorial: it seems the spammers are lobbying Congress, but corporate lobbying can be overcome if enough people complain. A few years ago, laws that banks wanted against the expansion of credit unions were defeated this way.

These links are probably only good for a week or so.
Political editorial:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/13/opinion/13FRI2.html
Technical op-ed:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/14/opinion/14ETZI.html
Yahoo Shops as spam-friendly:
http://www.nytimes.com/cnet/CNET_2100-1017-957781.html

[sheila]

If you are serious about fighting spam, I would recommend the SPAM-L mailing list to you. If you asked your questions on that list, I'm sure you would get quite a bit of advice.

http://www.claws-and-paws.com/spam-l/

Also, there is some useful info in the SPAM FAQ:
http://spamfaq.net/

Spam FAQ is the FAQ for the newsgroup NANAE (i.e. news.admin.net-abuse.email ), and you can get quite an education reading that newsgroup, too. However, the volume of articles posted to that newsgroup is insane (there is no way I can believe that anyone reads it all) and a lot of kooks post in the group, too, giving it a high noise-to-signal ratio. So, your time might be better spent in some other endeavour than reading NANAE.

SPEWS, SpamHaus and MAPS are the most reputable or influential lists among all of the block lists. FWIW. SPEWS is very hard to get on to. An ISP has to have been permitting spammers without taking action against them for quite some time before the operators of the SPEWS list will list the site. They do start out by only listing a small number of IP addresses, but if the ISP still takes no action, they will list larger and larger blocks of their IP addresses. So, eventually, if the ISP takes no action against the spammers, most of their customers will end up being blocked.

[Syneryder]

Thanks for that Sheila, I'll be sure to check out those links. I don't see myself becoming a spam warrior, but when a particular spam annoys me like the two I mentioned, I'll definitely do what I can to help out.

It seems the spammers are lobbying Congress, but corporate lobbying can be overcome if enough people complain. A few years ago, laws that banks wanted against the expansion of credit unions were defeated this way.

I'm sure you could lobby and still appeal to their corporate views too - we just need someone to calculate the millions/billions of dollars spent each year on lost productivity and lost sales due to dealing with spam. I know of one multi-million dollar e-commerce company that regularly loses important email because of spam issues.

Kitchin: excuse my ignorance, but what's an "op-ed"?

[kitchin]

I think you're right about the costs of spam.

Op-eds are on the page opposite the editorial page. They are essays which may or may not agree with the opinions on the editorial page. Both pages are for opinion pieces, while the rest of the paper is more objective. The staff of the editorial pages is completely separate from the news staff. Both are answerable to the owners. I was surprised to learn how large the editorial page staff is. A big paper has about a dozen writers just for the unsigned editorial page editorials.
:QTrtfm:

[zmax]

Spam is getting in everyone's way. My idea is to start sending more bounces, with a note asking the sender to email me, at a different address, for instructions if the mail is legit.
My custom filter bounces all emails rather than blackhole because if it is legit I want them to know I didnt get it and to find another way to resend to me! But I dont use a custom message. If you have a message like that about emailing I would use a spam decoy email address. I have one at yahoo that I only use for posting on usenet :) and when an email is required but it might get spammed.

David

[gtc]

Another step is to try and keep your real email addresses out of the spam lists. I use Sneakemail (http://www.sneakemail.com/) for this purpose.

Sneakemail generates random, throwaway aliases with filering rules so you can see where spam is coming from and block it or filter it.

I did a little blog entry (http://www.cheshirelaw.com/archives/000015.html) on this.