Robert Soloway, crowned the "spam king" by federal prosecutors for having sent millions of unwanted e-mails around the globe, pleaded guilty Friday to felony mail fraud, fraud in connection with electronic mail and failing to file a tax return in 2005, the year he made at least $300,000 through his junk e-mail business.
[...]
"The fact of the matter is, he's broke," said Troberman, pointing out that Soloway is named in a default judgment of more than $10 million in Oklahoma and owes another judgment to Microsoft.

A divided Virginia Supreme Court affirmed the nation's first felony conviction for illegal spamming on Friday, ruling that Virginia's anti-spamming law does not violate free-speech rights.
 
Jeremy Jaynes of Raleigh, N.C., considered among the world's top 10 spammers in 2003, was convicted of massive distribution of junk e-mail and sentenced to nine years in prison.
 
Almost all 50 states have anti-spamming laws. In the 4-3 ruling, the court rejected Jaynes' claim that the state law violates both the First Amendment and the interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Michigan spam king Alan Ralsky , his son-in-law and nine others have been indicted in Detroit on charges of violating federal anti-spam laws, the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced today.
 
The 41-count indictment said Ralsky, his son-in-law, Scott Bradley, 46, of West Bloomfield, and others used unsolicited e-mail to pump up the price of largely worthless stock in Chinese companies and sold the stock reaping huge profits and leaving Internet subscribers who purchased it holding the bag.
 
The operation also used illegal methods to maximize the amount of spam that could be sent while evading spam-blocking devices and tricked recipients into opening and acting on advertisements, prosecutors said. This included using false headers in email messages, using proxy computers to repay span, using falsely registered domain names to send spam and misrepresenting the advertising content of email messages, prosecutors said.
 
Ralsky’s crew also tried to send spam using illegal botnets, a network of robot computes infected with malicious software that instructed the infected computers to send spam, the indictment said.
 
The most serious charges against Ralsky and the others, mail and wire fraud, carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. The indictment also charged the group with violating federal spamming laws, money laundering and conspiracy.

And a line farther down in the article which I feel is rather an understatement:

News of the indictment brought cheers from anti-spammers.

I laughed out loud a couple times watching this. Could be because I'm a geek. Or maybe it's because I use Gmail. Or maybe because I hate spam. Or all three!

Got this today in my spamtrap:

when to stop blogging

I think the spambastards are on to me... They're trying to SILENCE me! That's it! Well, if anything happens to this blog, I have a packet of information that's going to be sent to a certain individual and then the truth will be known! So don't you try anything, Random J. Spammer! I'm on to you!

I keep getting phishing emails claiming that I've received an ecard. Mind you, they never tell me who its from, or rather, they do, but it's always ridiculous. So far I've "received an ecard" from:

a schoolmate
a family member
a friend
a co-worker
a neighbor

and a few others that I can't recall. Today, though, I got this:

You've received an ecard from a Worshipper!

My inner goddess must be showing....

Okay. The spammer has gone to a distributed attack. From the looks of the IP addresses involved, he/they have a bunch of zombie machines, that is, computers infected with trojans that run the script.

This pisses me off because there are apparently so many COMPLETE MORONS out there who manage to get this crap on their computer to begin with. Hello, ever hear of, oh, I don't know, VIRUS PROTECTION? How about maybe not clicking on everything any random person sends you, think that could help?!

Okay, that vent over, now to the f#%king bastard who keeps doing this: YOU'RE AN IDIOT, MATE! Crashing my server with your poorly written bot will NOT cause your website to have better rankings in the search engines!!!

For now, we've disabled comments, because we've completely removed mt-comments.cgi and we're setting up various means of preventing the spam attacks. They're hitting the script from the outside, that is, they're totally by-passing any pages or blogs, and just going directly. Now that there IS NO SCRIPT there, they can't call it.

We're also doing several other things, including rebuilding the kernal so that traffic has a better connection throttle and we'll be looking at upgrading Movable Type (I haven't done it in too long, I admit it) and a few other tricks we've found.

This kind of comment spamming is, apparently, all too common. On a really big server, it just slows it down. On a small server like ours, it kills it completely.

So, well, no comments for an indefinite period. If you want to talk to me, feel free to email, though.

A British company has been ordered to pay damages for sending spam.
 
Gordon Dick took Transcom to Edinburgh's Sheriff Court for sending an unwanted advertising email, which he claimed was a breach of anti-spam laws.
 
He was awarded £750 in damages plus legal costs of £616.66 through a "decree in absence" after Transcom did not appear in court.

Okay. Yes, our server's been off and on for a few days. It's the same problem as we had before, probably the same idiot comment spammer, running a script that effectively creates a SYN flood, which is a kind of Denial of Service Attack.

This time we've recompiled the kernal and added a few things to throttle traffic and shut down inappropriate multiple responses, plus we've set the firewall up with an extensive block of IPs (I mean a really BIG block, too). The IP block will keep him out for a while, but as this happened a month ago, I'd reckon it won't be long before he's back on yet another ISP and we'll have to block that, as well (we may end up blocking most of Russia, and for that I do apologise, but I doubt there's a great deal on our servers of particular interest to most Russians, anyway, so I don't think they're missing much).

You can see some more of this idiot's work in this guestbook, which has been autospammed just about to death. Fortunately for them, it didn't kill their server (it kills ours for a couple of technical hypergeeky reasons I won't go into).

So that's the deal. Wish us luck that with the new throttling and IP blocks and other precautions, we'll be able to keep this f#$%ing b@st@rd away from our server. I can tell you I'm sending the worst vibes I can manage!

The message Andrew sent to users on the server:

G'day caffeine-users.

As you may be aware, our favourite server has been on and off for a couple
of days.

What you may not be aware of is it's thanks to a spammer trying to spam
the comments on one of our blogs. They launched so many scripts that it
repeatedly ate up RAM until the operating system could no longer function,
causing a crash.

We're not sure which blog it was they were trying, but whatever it was,
we know that they didn't actually succeed in adding any comments. Even
so, if you maintain a Movable Type blog, and you have comment moderation
turned on, now may be a good time to check pending comments. If you find
a bunch of stuff in Russian, please let me know.

We have taken steps to ensure that this particular attack vector will not
occur again. And, of course, lindor's replacement is in the process of
being built. It's a more powerful machine, which will degrade more
gracefully if someone tries to hammer it.

Apologies for the downtime, and thanks for your patience.

Cheers,
Andrew Bromage

---

I have long said that spammers are the absolute scum of the earth, haven't I? Well, this is the sort of crap these pathetic losers do!

The Tale of a Spam (a feel-good story).

When you're an over-the-counter stock not traded on the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq, there's a presumption among many that your business isn't on the up and up.
 
That perception is doubly difficult to overcome when you're one of the dozens of penny stocks being touted in spam messages that regularly get blasted across the globe.

Spammers seem to be having little luck pushing up prices of thinly traded stocks.
 
The idea of so-called "pump and dump" scams is to buy stock at low prices and then try to drum up excitement in order to inflate the price.
 
Penny stock promotions have tripled in the last few months, according to estimates. One internet security firm says stock-related spam already accounts for 15 per cent of all junk email, compared to less than one per cent two years ago.

(I've always wondered who is stupid enough to buy stocks recommended to them by random anonymous spammers...)

BT has launched an automated system to identify professional spammers and 'botnet'-infected customers on the BT broadband network.
 
Professional spammers will face account termination, and unwitting spammers and virus transmitters will receive help cleansing their computers of the programs that turn their PCs into "zombies," though there will be a fee for that service. BT has also not made it clear if it will help customers prevent their computer from becoming reinfected.

Just got spam through one of the mailforms I hadn't fixed yet (on a different domain). Fixed it immediately. And you know what? Every time I put a CAPTCHA on a mailform, I just feel like raising up my middle finger to the sky and shouting "F**K YOU, YOU SPAMMING BASTARDS!"

Only without the asterisks.

A Virginia appeals court has upheld the first felony conviction under a state anti-spam law. In the process, the court also suggested that spam recipients might be able to sue spammers for money damages.

Fraudsters who deal in stolen credit card data have devised a means to extract money from sponsors of junk mail campaigns.

I'm going to have to put a CAPCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) on my mailforms. I keep getting automated spam for all kinds of complete crap. I've started banning IP addresses (because my mailform tells me the precise IP address the mail came from, making it easy to do), but I can't keep doing that indefinitely.

It's ticking me off, it really is.

And it's not even that my mail isn't filtered, because it certainly is. It's that when I see the header from a mailform I instantly recognize it and, previously, I was able to know what it was about AND that it wasn't spam. Now I can tell it's spam (because they're idiots and make it obvious even before I've opened the message), but it's caught in my spam trap or something and I have to retrieve it. These idiot moron sleaze bastards are robbing me of my most precious commodity, time. They're also stealing something I can't really afford to lose, and that's patience (I've got precious little of that and I need it, dammit).

So, I hereby put a curse on anyone and everyone who sends spam through any of my mailforms. May the annoyance and irritation that you willfully inflict on others return to you threefold. So be it.

Spam king and online drugstore operator Christopher William Smith, aka Rizler, 26, who is awaiting trial at the Sherburne County Jail, Elk River, Minn., used his phone privileges to arrange a hit on a witness and the witness's family.

A small ISP in the town of Clinton, Iowa, has just won one of the largest payouts ever extracted from a spammer.

Ralsky has long been identified as one of the world's largest spammers by anti-spam organization Spamhaus. The group describes him as a convicted felon who uses virus-infected PCs to send spam, and claims that he has hacked mail servers in the past to spread his spam.

I keep getting emails advertising a particular php type site (that is, they have scripts and other php-related materials on the site). And when I say I keep getting them, I mean sometimes to the tune of several a day, but at least once a week.

When I first started getting them I checked the email to see what it was about, but I don't recognize the site and I certainly never asked to be spammed with email telling me to visit it.

The thing that ticks me off the most is that every email from these idiots insists that it's not spam. Is it unsolicited? Is it commercial? Is it in my spamtrap? Well, hey, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck....

They say, in the body of the message, that they obtained my email address "from legitimate sources" whatever the hell that's supposed to mean. Not that I joined an opt-in list, not that I signed up for their site, nothing of that sort, but that they got it from "legitimate sources".

Well, I won't say what site it is because there's no way I'm going to give them any traffic, but they really need to stop sending me this crap if they want me to stop reporting it for what it is: SPAM.

There is yet ANOTHER new exploit out there that the idiot spammers have figured out to use.

This is pretty obscure and fairly recent. For nine years (since Andrew first wrote that script for me in 1996) that mailform and things based on it (such as the graphic set registration which isn't online any more and the other download registration one) was very secure. Leave it to the spammers to figure out how to screw with people's servers to spew forth their garbage....

It is mostly unlikely that people have worked out how to hack that script, BUT it's possible, so if you're using it or any variation of it, please go to Alicorna and get the new one and install that one instead.

He hasn't (yet) updated the Graphics Download script, but I'll let you know when he does. It's not online at the moment, but I'll put it online when it's updated so people can get it easily.

For now, if you're using the mailform go here and download the updated version just to be on the safe side.

No registration required, just download and off you go.

I swear, spammers really are the absolute scum of the earth.

Russia’s most (in)famous spammer, Vardan Kushnir, 35, was dead in his apartment in downtown Moscow on Monday, July 25. Someone repeatedly smashed his head with a heavy object, authorities say, and then ransacked his entire apartment.

(Let this be a lesson to you: "Spam kills!" or, as my amusing husband put it, "For God's sake, don't spam!")

And another article that might be of interest:

Certain anti-spam parties have made threats in the past against some of the world's more notorious spammers.
[...]
Russian Internet service providers frequently closed down his sites when users complained about the spamming practices.
[...]
Among those complaints came death threats; it is speculated that while many were from angered users, some may have come from the sort of loosely-organized anti-spam gangs described in the 2004 book Spam Kings.

We've been working on getting Spamassassin working on our server. So far, we're still busy seeding the database, and as a result, I've got a couple of my addresses going to my shell account on the server (so I can save the mail and easily add it to the database, although we now have another means of doing that and I'll probably redirect it back to spamcop.net now).

So anyway, I went just now to find that there was an email waiting for me. Since I use a text-only reader on the server (well, DUH, what else are you going to use in that situation), any HTML or attached images or other junk isn't visible.

Here's the message I just got as it appeared in my mail reader (the address they sent it to has been obscured; the address it's from is obviously fake):

Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 01:13:29 -0600
From: Eldon Koch
To: obscured@domain.xyz
Subject: Phamacy Online
Parts/Attachments:
1.1 Shown 2 lines Text
1.2 OK ~41 lines Text
2 2.6 KB Image
----------------------------------------

Get a capable html e-mailer

[ Part 2, Image/JPEG 3.5KB. ]
[ Cannot display this part. Press "V" then "S" to save in a file. ]

---

Don't you love that? I should get a capable HTML e-mailer so that I can read their f*%#ing UNSOLICITED CRAP?!

Normally, I don't pay any attention to spam, don't even open it, but this time I did because of the spamtrap filter thingy, and I'm sorry I bothered. From here on, that address is going to be redirected to spamcop and filtered there and every message that comes in will be REPORTED.

And NO, I will NOT use an HTML capable mail program just to read SPAM.

Spam title:

Can you afford to ignore SmallCaps?

well, i dunno, can i?

It's pretty rare that I actually find spam funny, but just now in my spam filter I saw this:

Makes you great in bed. Now all you have to do is get laid.

A Perth company suspected of bombarding computers across the country with tens of millions of spam emails has been raided by officers from the Australian Communications Authority (ACA).
 
ACA inspectors seized the contents of computer hard drives and other material at the firm - which has not been named - as part of the investigation under the federal anti-spam legislation.

He was once considered among the top 10 spammers in the world, using the Internet to peddle pornography and sham products and services like the "FedEx refunding processor," prosecutors say. Convicted in the nation's first felony case against illegal spamming, Jeremy Jaynes, 30, on Friday was sentenced to nine years in prison for bombarding Internet users with the junk e-mails.

All we need is a website that allows some interaction.
[...]
It could be argued that a website owner is actually inviting content to their site when they allow comments.

(Personal note, this is a good part of why I don't have comments enabled here or anywhere else. You're welcome to email me, though.)

Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines! (Too funny, go have a look, I swear I was actually having to wipe my eyes I was laughing so much!)

A man who claims he has been receiving unsolicited emails from a US company for two years is now being sued by them, for branding them spammers and reporting their actions to ISPs.

Texas sued one of the world's largest "spam" e-mail operations on Thursday, seeking millions of dollars from two men it says are responsible for sending illegal messages on the Internet, the state's attorney general said.

The Federal Trade Commission has charged a network of corporations and individuals with using spam to sell access to online pornography. The FTC alleges that the defendants, acting as a single business enterprise, barraged consumers with e-mails containing sexually-explicit content without the required warning label.

Under an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, a man known as the "Spam King" will stop infecting computers with advertising programs until a federal lawsuit against him is resolved.
 
Sanford Wallace and his companies, SmartBot.net Inc. of Richboro, Pa., and Seismic Entertainment Productions Inc. of Rochester, are required by the agreement to send online ads only to people who visit their Web sites.
 
The government says Wallace used spyware to infiltrate computers, overwhelming them with ads and other programs. Then, he tried to sell programs he claimed would fix the problems. The government said the remedies do not work.

Just thought I'd pass on this link, in case anyone might be interested: spamfaq.net.

Just got this spam caught in my spamtrap:

Get supper Sized bonni!

I keep getting spam messages with this title:

Are You Lonely or Horney?

Uhhhh, are these my only options?

Just got this spam:

D'oh!

Just got this spam title (unedited; hope you're not too offended by the profanity):

Just got this in my spam trap:

(NOT A SPAM) TURN $6 INTO $600000 IN 15 WEEKS

But it's not spam....

A Los Angeles man who used other people's wi-fi networks to send thousands of unsolicited adult-themed e-mails from his car pleaded guilty to a single felony Monday, in what prosecutors say is the first criminal conviction under the federal CAN-SPAM Act.

DEAR SIR/MADAM,

THIS IS A PERSONAL EMAIL T0 YOU ONLY. I AM THE SON OF SPAM SPADE, THE
FORMER LOAN OFFICER OF NIGERIA, WHO WAS KILLED BY A RUSSIAN LADY WHO WANTS TO MEET YOU. HIS MORTGAGE RATES WERE SUPERB, BUT HIS PENIS WAS TOO SHORT, SO HE ORDERED 60,000,000 VIAGRA PILLS AND BEFORE HE COULD TAKE THEM HE WAS ASSASINATED BY 5 MILLION EMAIL ADDRESSES AT NO COST TO YOU. NOW I HAVE THESE 60 MILLION VIAGRA PILLS AND SEEK YOUR HELP IN TRANSFERING THEM TO YOUR ACCOUNT.

I AM USING THIS MEDIUM T0 REACH YOU. HOWEVER I HAVE NO OTHER CHOICE AND THIS IS STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL, YOUR CO-OPERATION IS NECESSARY. YOUR RESUME WAS SELECTED AS BEING HIGHLY QUALIFIED, BUT THIS IS NOT SPAM! THIS IS FREEDOM FROM DEBT - CUT YOUR MORTGAGE IN HALF WITH OUR AMAZING REMOTE-CONTROL PASTA POT. THIS OFFER IS FREE. YOU HAVE NO OBLIGATION TO DELETE IT AT ANY TIME.

Y0UR PILLS ARE BEING HELD IN AN INEXPENSIVE DIGITAL CABLE DESCRAMBLER BOX GUARDED BY TEENY TITS CARRYING EXPLOSIVE LOADS. THE LOWEST RATES ARE LOCKED IN, ALONG WITH YOUR FREE GIFT. THESE PILLS MUST BE TRANSFERED TO YOUR ACCOUNT USING A HAND-HELD ORGANIZER WHICH MAY BE OBTAINED FROM A FREE GOVERNMENT-AUCTION WEB SITE. BY VIEWING PHOTOS OF SINGLES IN YOUR AREA, INCLUDING HORNY WIVES, YOU CAN LOOK YOUNGER, LOSE WEIGHT, AND INCREASE YOUR STAMINA WHILE DRIVING PRE-QUALIFIED CUSTOMERS TO YOUR MULTILEVEL PROGRAM AND MAKE OVER $4000 PER MONTH GUARANTEED. THESE PILLS WILL NOT ONLY MAKE YOU LOOK 3" LONGER, THEY WILL GET RID OF YOUR FLEAS AND TICKS FOR GOOD! SIMPLY COPY ANY DVD TO YOUR FREE INTERNET DOMAIN AND BEGIN YOUR ANTI-AGING PROGRAM TODAY.

THE PLAN IS SIMPLE. Y0U WILL USE NORTON SYSTEMWORKS (A $300 VALUE FOR ONLY $38.95) TO PURCHASE 37 MILLION SHARES OF TONER CORP STOCK. THEN YOU WILL MEET ME AT THE WORLD'S SMALLEST DIGITAL CAMERA WITH $30,000 IN CORAL CALCIUM. WARNING: DO NOT TAKE ANY HUMAN GROWTH HORMONE OR YOU WILL NOT QUALIFY FOR YOUR FREE GIFT. ONCE YOU RECONNECT WITH YOUR HIGH-SCHOOL FRIENDS, YOUR FREE CREDIT REPORT WILL BE SENT. WITH THIS REPORT, YOU CAN BUILD YOUR OWN ONLINE CASINO. ONCE INSIDE THE CASINO, YOU WILL SUBSCRIBE TO KARA'S FREE FAN CLUB, WHERE YOU WILL BE ENTERED IN A DRAWING TO PROTECT YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM. DO NOT FAIL TO DO THIS, OR I WILL REDUCE THE SIZE OF YOUR PENIS BY THREE INCHES! KARA'S WEB SITE WILL POP UP 6,000 PAGES, ALL OF WHICH YOU WILL HAVE TO CLOSE BY CLICKING THEM. FOR EACH ONE YOU CLICK, TWO MORE WILL APPEAR. AFTER YOU COMPLETE YOUR ONLINE DEGREE (IN 8 MONTHS OR LESS), I WILL SEND YOU A HOT AMATEUR MP3 THAT WILL CONSOLIDATE YOUR DEBT USING ONLINE AUCTIONS. NOT EVEN CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, OR OPRAH WILL KNOW OUR SECRET!

N0W Y0U WILL BE READY TO RECEIVE THE PILLS. YOU WILL USE THE AUCTION SITE TO FIRE YOUR BOSS AND CLAIM YOUR PORTABLE DVD PLAYER FROM THE SECRET ANTI-WRINKLE AGENT. NEXT, BOOST YOUR CELLULAR RECEPTION AND DRIVE OUR TEENY LOLITAS WILD WITH HUMAN PHEROMONES MADE FROM PRE-OWNED INKJET CARTRIDGES. YOU WILL TRADE THE PHEROMONES FOR A SINGLE GEORGE FOREMAN GRILL FILLED WITH A FREE THIRTY-DAY SUPPLY, WHICH WILL ENLARGE YOUR PACKAGE EVEN FURTHER. THE HERBAL INGREDIENTS IN THIS PACKAGE WILL INCREASE YOUR REVENUE PROJECTIONS BY 3" AND CLEAN THE INNER WALLS OF YOUR INTESTINES. REMEMBER, THIS IS NOT A SLEEP REMEDY, THIS AMAZING PRODUCT TARGETS THE BACTERIA THAT ACTUALLY CAUSE SNORING!

0UR PSYCHICS ARE STANDING BY TO TAKE YOUR ORDER. GIVE THEM YOUR CREDIT CARD NUMBER AND WAIT FOR THE BEEP. YOU WILL BE GIVEN THE ULTIMATE SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHROUGH AND A FREE CREDIT CHECK. DEPOSIT THIS CHECK IN A PRE-APPROVED ACCOUNT, AND YOU WILL TAKE HOME 40% OF THE PILLS.

THIS IS A VERY SIMPLE TRANSACTION. THE RESULTS ARE GUARANTEED. THIS IS A COMPLETELY SECURE INVESTMENT. I HOPE YOU WILL HELP ME AND MY FAMILY AS WE ARE IN DESPERATE NEED. PLEASE REPLY ASAP.

SINCERELY,
S0N OF SPAM

P.S., IF YOU WANT TO BE REMOVED FROM THIS MAILING LIST, SIMPLY GO TO
www.UNSUBSCRIBE.COM.

---

Note: There's an entry on this one at Snopes, the Urban Legends Site. And their comment that it scores 31.1 on SpamAssassin is funny, but I once had a spam that scored 45, believe it or not (I didn't look to see why it scored so high, but I did take note of the score at the time).

Simple fact is that, Spam works. If you send out 10 million emails and only 0.05% (1 in 2000) people respond that's 5000 responses! That's 5000 people buying your useless bottle of penis enlargement pills at $10-50 a pop.
 
Yes, people are THAT unbelievably stupid.
 
However, it's not all doom and gloom. Recent innovations in spam filtering software has made the average spammers life more difficult. Long-time spammer, Bernard Balan, 51, who operates a bulk mail site from Emsdale, Ontario called one-stop-financial.com, says he's gone through "unbelievable hardships" to keep the spam flowing.

Microsoft Corp. filed nine new lawsuits against spammers who send unsolicited e-mail, including an e-mail marketing Web hosting company, the world's largest software maker said on Thursday.

Microsoft seem to have taken on the job of educating people about spam. To that effect, they've put up a page about spam and what to do about it. Most of the advice is fine, except for this little ignorant gem:

Forward spam to the spammer's Internet Service Provider (ISP). If you get unwanted mail, the sender's address will show the ISP name after the "at" (@) sign. If it came from MSN.com, forward the entire e-mail with headers, to mailto:mailto:abuse@hotmail.com.

Uhm, yeah, do you suppose ANYONE at Microsoft has ever actually gotten any spam or do they live in a spam-proof bubble or something?

I couldn't let it go unchallenged. I sent them a message via their feedback form. Here's what I wrote (slightly edited to remove unnecessary redundancy):

Under "Step 2" you suggest to "Forward spam to the spammer's Internet Service Provider (ISP)" but then you tell people that "the sender's address will show the ISP name after the "at" (@) sign"

This is absolutely ridiculous advice. NO spammer is going to put their actual address or ISP in the "from" field. They usually use fake addresses, and of course if you try to reply you just get a bounce message and also generate needless network traffic.

Spammers also sometimes put in the "from" field a random address from their list. Reporting spam of that sort may be sending false reports to the ISP of a totally innocent party who just happens to be on the spammer's list.

Please, remove this piece of bad and useless advice as soon as possible. I'm really surprised to see something this wrong on Microsoft's site. It's about the same as telling people to prevent spam by tying a string around their big toe: Useless, unless it actually does harm!

Although spamming has existed on the Internet since as early as 1978, the first major spamming incidents didn't take place until the early 1990s. Spamming began becoming a major problem at the same time that the Internet began its exponential mainstream expansion in 1993 (also known as Eternal September). (Hmmm, that's right when I was getting on the net, actually...)

In the calculus of Internet crime, two of the most sought-after commodities are zombie PCs and valid e-mail addresses.
 
One indication of the going rate for zombie PCs comes from a June 11 posting on SpecialHam.com, an electronic forum for spammers. The asking price for use of a network of 20,000 zombie PCs: $2,000 to $3,000. Such networks typically are used to broadcast spam and phishing scams and to spread e-mail viruses designed mainly to create yet more zombies.

glorify Bonni

Normally, I think spammers are full of crap, but in this case, I think they have a point...

Spam subject:

Like an afterburner for your penis.

Okay, how did this spammer find out that I have a thing for weddings?

Bonni fetishist 826 brides

Spam subject:

Remove all your computer traces lobotomy

Uhm, I think I would have to have actually had a lobotomy to fall for that...

*ahem*

crankshaft my circulant commercial column bodied infirm lodge bodleian temple sandpiper flush jubilate childbear motivate removal carburetor set churchgoer dadaist junk senate basel claudio canopy bandpass dinnertime outrageous netherlands conqueror bound peridotite brendan carven kidnapped

Yeah, I'm really going to fall for that and open it...

I've always believed that spammers are scum. This pretty much confirms it:

Organised criminals based in Russia are fuelling the rise in the amount of spam sent over the Internet, according to a leading opponent of junk mail.
 
Steve Linford, director of The Spamhaus Project, warned on Tuesday that these gangs are supplying US-based spammers with details of compromised PCs that can be used to send out their unsolicited commercial messages, and creating viruses that will create more of these open proxies.
 
"There is a new level of criminality in the spamming world," Linford told the Openwave Messaging Anti-Abuse conference in London. "Russian gangs are creating viruses and proxies and selling them onto US spammers."

A man who sent 850 million junk e-mails through accounts he opened with stolen identities was sentenced to up to seven years in prison Thursday.

Atlanta-based Internet service provider Earthlink Inc. said it hoped the sentence and an earlier $16.4 million civil judgment against Howard Carmack will deter other spammers.

The spam was entitiled, "Stop these annoyying messages here". Naturally, it was in my spam filter (and NOT in my inbox).

But I was so intrigued I had a look at the contents:

Hi Candy,

If you received this email then whatever s.p.a.m filter your using is not working properly.

If your one of those people that are sick and tired of sifting through your in.box looking for the "good" emails
then we have the product for you. Your time is valuable, so having your inbox flooded with junk messages is not
only annoying, but also costly.

The answer to all your problems is here...

[url deleted because there's NO WAY I'm giving them a free link!]

First of all, I'm not Candy (although if you are what you eat, I might feasably be chcoolate, but I'm more likely to be Diet Coke).

Secondly, my spam filter was working perfectly, thanks.

Thirdly, although generally speaking I think spammers are the absolute scum of the internet, at least this one (or whomever came up with this spam campaign) was somewhat clever and a little bit funny.

It's better than asking me if my penis is big enough, anyway.

Just got this spam message in my spam can:
learn how to dialate! wichita

Uhm.... Does Wicheta actually need dialation? If so, why?

I've noticed an anomoly on our server. Andrew hasn't seen it firsthand because it always seems to take place late at night, and normally I'm the only one using the server that time of day.

Huge amounts of system resources were being gobbled up, to the point of visibly slowing down a lot of stuff (like, say, the web server). I kept reporting it, but I couldn't pin it down (I'm more or less competent in a Unix system in a limited way, but really, the workings of the mail server and a lot of other processes are beyond me). I did get some basic information on what was going on, though, and it seems that there were mail spools backed up in the system. Several spools of "outgoing" mail, several of them over a hundred megabytes in size. YOUCH!

Well, Andrew investigated today (with the information I gathered last night) and it seems it was due to -- don't look shocked now -- spam. No, we weren't being used as a spam relay or anything (which was what I feared), but it seems that our system receives around 300 spam messages a day that are addressed to addresses that the spammers just "guess" at. You know, webmaster, dns, info, contact, etc., and then a lot of common names and so on. Three HUNDRED of these a day, every day (now tell me that spam isn't a problem, how much bandwidth is that wasting?).

So the thing that was happening was all these non-deliverable messages were being collected and our server was trying to figure out where to send the bounce message. Since 99.9999% of spam has forged headers, obviously the poor mail program couldn't work it out. So it was just going a little loopy, and gobbling up system resources while doing it. Nice, huh?

Andrew's reconfigured the system now so that it just plain rejects mail for non-existent users, which means it's the problem of the mail system that sent the mail out. Since that system is the one spewing out the spam (presumably; there's only so far a spammer can go to forge the headers), they're the ones who ought to be dealing with it, anyway.

Of course, this means that people who send mail to our system but use a poorly formatted address (typo or whatever) will get a bounce message that isn't very helpful, but unfortunately, that's just the way things are and have to be.

Spammers are the absolute scum of the earth. They use up everyone else's time and resources, they abuse other people's servers and exploit open services and ports, they deliberately do stuff to bypass spam filters (Hello! If I have a spam filter it means that I DON'T WANT SPAM!), and they're basically just disgusting and sleazy as hell. As far as I can see, no matter what other redeeming quality a spammer might have, their deliberate abuse of the system earns them a LOT of bad karma. I hope they're all reincarnated as slugs or some other creature that crawls on its belly and eats decomposing organic matter.

In a case that threatens the complete demise of the Internet, spammers won round one early this week but SpamCop came back to take round two.

---

And on a related note, this quote is from Spamcop's own discussion boards:

Let's buy an email list from some spammers and make this a opt-out class action suit. Anybody who doesn't want to sue Snotty can just email us and be removed from the list.

Just had this in my spam trap:

codiene will ease pain

Really? It WILL?! Who knew?!

Found this spam title rather amusing:

only you can defy bar

And so I do! Bar, consider yourself defied!

Just got this stuck in my spam filter:

GET YOUR UNIVERSITY DIPLOMA.. chose piece feature parley beebread architect carborundum adhere mckinley curdle preferring dick faraday forgiven paradigm crosswalk accommodate stayed persian elizabeth caspian bottommost dakar infelicity donate astarte meant administer tiny women cloud

Uhm, yeah. I'm convinced. I'll do business with these people RIGHT AWAY!

Oh, well, At least it's more interesting than another spam I got, which was entitled:

Message subject

President Bush and Democratic front-runner John Kerry are engaged in a high-tech political showdown that combines the targeting power of direct mail with the glossy appearance of a television commercial.
 
The format is a Web video message e-mailed to millions of the Democratic and Republican rank-and-file.
 
“It’s animated direct mail,” said Michael Cornfield, research director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University. “It’s meant to mobilize supporters, raise money and create buzz.”

In other words, it's an unsolicited, bulk-emailed message with a link inside. Yeah. That's just what the average voter needs to make up their mind. SPAM.

Okay, first of all, it seems that the full internet service has FINALLY been resolved. We are now on a much faster connection, both incoming and outgoing. Whew.

No word on what the service provider actually intends to do about it, as far as the billing.

And now, it appears, upon detailed inspection, that the goal of the hacking attempt was our mail server. Spammers (or scammers) deliberately hacked into our machine (and did it very poorly, I should add) and managed to crash it because they were trying to send a HUGE amount of mail. We're still repairing the damage to the mail server.

This, by the way, is known as "server rape" and if you could see the damage done, you'd see why.

Now try to tell me that spam is "harmless" and that all you have to do is "hit delete". Spammers are absolutely the scum of the internet, in my opinion. Evil, scheming bastards, that's about the size of it.

Microsoft wants to shut him down. New York's attorney general wants to see him in court. But Scott Richter keeps thinking big.

Got this caught in my spam filter:

I NEED YOUR ASSISTANT!!!

Yeah, me, too! Whenever you see her, will you send her in here? Sheesh!

"Daphnia blue-crested fish cattle, darkorange fountain moss, beaverwood educating, eyeblinking advancing, dulltuned amazons...."
 
This is not a failed attempt at free-form prose. It's a snippet of a spam message intended to promote a sexual stimulant, a deliberate crack at sneaking past and spoiling some of the most popular antispam filters.

Got this subject line in my spam filter:

i don't understand darupcmxfu oeabb

What a coincidence! I don't understand darupcmxfu oeabb either! I guess I'll have to immediately read that completely and do business with the company/person who sent it!

Not.

Tomorrow morning tens of thousands of Victorians will return to work after their summer holiday and will spend a large portion of their day deleting the unsolicited emails - or spam - clogging their inboxes...

I've had my spamcop address for a couple of years. I've just noticed that 10,000 messages have gotten caught in my spam filter in that time. Mind you, some of them were legitimate emails (because I use a very high level of filtering just out of preference; if I set it lower, I'd get far fewer false positives, but more spam would hit my inbox). I'd say that maybe 5%-10% of the mail that gets stuck in my spam filter is legitimate mail. The rest really is spam, pure and simple.

So, let's say that 90% of the recorded items in my spam filter have been spam, that's 9,000 spam messages caught, reported, and deleted.

Now tell me my paid account isn't worth the US$45 a year for two accounts (Andrew's and mine).

Subject lines found in my spam can today (no, I didn't read ANY of the messages or open them in any way; I just skim the titles):

FORGET Viagra

Good idea.

Discount enlar-gem`ent p.i-ll_s

Which discount will these pill enlarge?

Billroberts Completely safe and doctor endorsed

Is he, now?

Because of You........ ragntph c blbqt

Hey, don't go blaming ragntph c blbqt on me. I had nothing to do with it!

Caught in my spam filter:

Stop emails like this one

Uh, dude, I just did. But thanks for thinking of me, eh?

Call it spam rage: A Silicon Valley computer programmer has been arrested for threatening to torture and kill employees of the company he blames for bombarding his computer with Web ads promising to enlarge his penis.

E-mail security hardware maker IronPort Systems Inc. will announce next week that it is buying anti-spam company SpamCop for an undisclosed sum, according to information obtained by the IDG News Service.

Just got this "suggested site" for the web design resource index I maintain on the Alicorna domain:

We are an established & trusted name in the travel industry specializing in vacation
packages, cruises, Condos and hotels in US, vacation packages, all inclusive resorts, golf resorts, ski vacations etc. Visit us to avail heavy discounts

Obviously, I'm not including the URL. Also obviously, I'm not adding it to the list.

Yes, I blocked their IP address. Bloody morons.

Earlier this week I got a spam inviting me to buy the domain elizabyte.com for $89.95. I reported it as spam and deleted it from my filter.

Today I got ANOTHER one. I was curious, so I went to my domain registrar and checked, and it was available to register (it hasn't been for some years, but I guess the owner let it expire). So I registered it. Two years, fifteen bucks.

The actual spam (with URLs edited to protect the guilty):

Are you perhaps interested in buying ELIZABYTE.COM ?

I'm selling the domain through [scam-operation] for $89.95.

If you are interested signup here:
http://www.[scam-operation].com/transfer/e/?ELIZABYTE.COM

Well, no need for that, you moron. But thanks for letting me know it was available, eh?

(For those who might be interested, I've got it set up to forward to elizabyte.net at the moment; I may eventually use it for something else, but I did want to have it, so there you go.)

Just got this in my spam filter:

Powerful Anti Spam Filter

From the title of a spam that got caught in my filter which, while I didn't open it to find out, was almost certainly for some sort of penis enlargement scam:

I b:ec*a;me tw.ic*e t`he m^an I use t"o b.e

... and lost my ability to type. Or maybe he's typing with his newly enlarged member? Hmmmm....

Emails spruiking celebrity porn or get-rich-quick schemes would be outlawed under new measures to ease the number of junk messages popping up in Australian inboxes.
 
But new laws introduced to parliament today are unlikely to have much of an impact on the bulk of unsolicited commercial emails, or spam, which originate overseas.

---

I'm in agreement that it's not going to have much impact, but I like the idea of it, anyway. Unfortunately, the Australian Parliament has a history of passing laws about the internet that can't possibly be enforced, mostly because the average member of Parliament is about as technically savvy as my cat and they won't listen to the real technical experts.

Still, it's an interesting read, if nothing else.

Got this stuck in my spam filter today:

The powerful, effective and intelligent anti-spam tool.

Hmmm. Well, you're in my filter and I've just reported you to the originating system. Hey! It works!

I used to always have a Hotmail account to be my "trashcatcher" account. I'd use that for things like downloads and such that require a working address but where I don't trust the site enough to give my proper one (yes, it's filtered, but I'd still rather not be bothered by more spam than necessary).

Anyway, that account expired, so I went and made a new one, with a different login name. I've had this account for less than 24 hours. It's ALREADY got spam in it. Several pieces.

My only thought is that the address was previously used by someone else, but it's a really unusual word for the login name, so that seems dubious. I wonder, does Hotmail just hand out your email address instantly? Their privacy policy indicates that they don't, but when you get spam in an account you've had for less than a DAY, you really, REALLY have to wonder what the hell is going on...

I expect that most people have gotten those spam messages which, instead of having a subject line, have an odd or unusual word to get your attention. The first time it happened to me I figured it was spam, but checked anyway to be sure. I don't fall for it any more, of course, because no one I know or anyone I woulddo business with sends me emails with a single, obscure word in the subject line.

Anyway, that being said, today in the spam filter was a piece of mail with a very interesting word for the subject line. I was so intrigued I looked it up in my handy American Heritage Dictionary (which I have installed on the hard drive, because I'd lose a real book dictionary if I had it in this mess that might have a desk under it).

Today's word is: catabolic, found in the dictionary by its noun form, ca·tab·o·lism. It means, The metabolic breakdown of complex molecules into simpler ones, often resulting in a release of energy.

So there you go. Spam is good for something, anyway. Or at least, this one was. And I still didn't open it to see the contents and I still reported it to the originating network, so there you go.

Awwww. Those poor, maligned spammers. People hate them, call them names (like, oh, "sleazy bastards"), sue them, it's just all so distressing. Good thing spammers can join a support group to help them when life is just so, so unfair. After all, what kind of mean, thoughtless person doesn't want their penis enlarged and their mortgage reduced? People are just SO mean...

I got an email in my spam filter that had the title, "The Magic of Artistic Paper-Cuts". I figured it was spam (it was), but I was intrigued, so I had a peek inside. Amid the JavaScript, image links, and other crap (which is just gibberish since my mail reader and my spam filtering system are both 100% plain text), I found this jewel of a paragraph:

We are one of the biggest arts providers based in China. We can supply you with high-quality, artistic, and customized paper-cuts. Our paper-cuts are developed for all kinds of use in both daily life and business. We will also meet any design challenge!

I think they don't quite understand what "paper cut" means in English...

Still, now I have this image of a new type of body modification, delicate scarification via papercuts...