Linux Format forums

[shifty_ben]

Hi all,
as the title to this thread suggests I am soo fed up of getting spam in my inboxes. So Ive decided to set up a site that will effectively name and shame all ISPs that harbour spammers, that is they get reports of spam from the same originating source more than once and do nada about it.
Main thing im wanting to check before I put the work in to set it up is 1) is there already an intiative like this that ive forgotten/dont now about and 2) What are peoples thoughts on it and 3) any legal repurcussions people can think of?
Hopefully if enough people contribute to it then those ISPs that are worst for it may see the fact that people are boycotting all their services as sufficient motivation, but who knows?
Ideally it will be an SQL database with a PHP frontend, maybe joomla, or perhaps ill go the whole hog and try and write it all myself, any other suggestions are very welcome
Spam is like a cancer on the internet, slowly eating up more and more resources, and it is time someone actively tried to stop it rather than just filter it.

[MartyBartfast]

1) is there already an intiative like this that ive forgotten/dont now about...
Yes, there's http://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/networks.lasso and probably many more.

2) What are peoples thoughts on it...
I don't think it'll make the slightest difference, but it may be a usefull & interesting excercise for you.

3) Any legal repurcussions people can think of?
IANAL, but wouldn't think so.

Personally I've found that by routing all my mail through a Gmail account, that filters out %90 of spam. Then using Firefox filters out %90 of anything that gets through. If I was more bothered then I'd install Spamassasin or similar.

[edit]
Having read through my response above it sounded a bit negative, which was not the intention. I agree with your sentiments about SPAM but I just feel that there's no hope of stopping it (at least like this) so the best thing to do is ignore it - which is pretty easty to do these days. I reckon the only way the ISPs will get involved is if the level of SPAM gets to the point where it impacts their network/servers/service, and then they might take more responsibility.

[shifty_ben]

Yea I suppose you've got a pont there. I already use a few filters, and it does usually weed out all the spam, its just a pain cos it still gets downloaded.
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[MartyBartfast]

[Rhakios]

Using pop filters, as you can with KMail, you don't even need to download it, just set the file size to 1KB. 90% of all spam sent to me is deleted on the server (while known non-spam is marked for download), for the rest I get to look at the headers and can choose what gets downloaded or deleted.
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[wyliecoyoteuk]

Spam is a strange thing.
some ppl get huge amounts of it, others don't.
Personally, I use a seperate email account whenever signing up on a web page or mailing list.
e.g. at the moment my signup email is spamdumper2@....
if it ever gets overloaded with spam, it will become spamdumper3.
Blueyonder, my isp gives me 5 mailboxes with 4 aliases each.

Years ago my first email address was hammer@enterprise.net
when it got clogged with spam, I changed it to starship@enterprise.net (call me sad, I don't mind).
these days ,I have several email addresses, and I am careful who gets them, but I get very little spam.
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[Rhakios]

It seems I wasn't careful enough
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[wyliecoyoteuk]

The idea is:
never give an email address to a website or mailing list etc, that you want to keep.
For some of us with public facing emails, it is difficult, buit even my business email gets less than a dozen spam email a week.
I have one customer who gets thousands a day.
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[wyliecoyoteuk]

Just to point out, I have been on the internet nearly 10 years, I have changed my main email address twice.
I receive approx 40-50 emails a day(at home), of which 2 or 3 are spam.
At work, I receive about the same number, but the level of spam is about 50% higher.
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[Rhakios]

[shifty_ben]

I have never given out the email address in question to anyone but friends, yet I still get spam to it, not in any vast quantity but enough to be annoying. I think the main cause of this spam is probably due to chain mail that people insist on sending me.
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[Nigel]

Some people also need to be educated about sending mass mailings to everybody in their address book... how often have you received an email from someone moving jobs which has their entire address book in the "to" field ? If one of the other recipients has Outlook Distress set up to automatically add addresses to their address book & then gets harvested by a spam bot, you're on a spam mail list. If people must send out mass messages like that they ought to send to themselves and then bcc their address book !

Until very recently, I seemed to get almost no spam. Now I seem to be getting 4-5 messages a day. I haven't yet figured out what triggered the increase.
I know that whenever I buy something from ebay I get a rash of phishing messages trying to get me to enter my details into a spoof site (all of which, of course, get forwarded to spoof at ebay dot co dot uk). If I don't use ebay for a couple of weeks they peter out, only to resume when I next buy something. That makes me wonder about how secure ebay is...

[wyliecoyoteuk]

Some spam I receive is addressed strangely, for example hammack_hamett_hammo@...
arrived at hammer@....

I use Blueyonder and 1&1, and Blueyonder's mail servers must have some sort of pattern matching routines, I suppose, as I never get any like that from 1&1 (whose spam filtering is very good)
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[shifty_ben]

No there is one thing worse than people sending to their entire address book, and that is these people who do something online (say a quiz on hunour type) and then use the find out how your friend did box, You get an email from the company saying so an so got this, see how you can do, then even if you don't visit the site the spam just keeps on coming. The risk is not always you giving out your email address to someone you shouldnta its also people you know doing it.
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[nordle]