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Spamming
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The Origin of SPAM
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What to do when you see a SPAM or got SPAMed
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"Well there's egg and bacon; egg, sausage and bacon; egg and
spam; bacon and spam; egg, bacon, sausage and spam; spam, bacon,
sausage and spam; spam, egg, spam, spam, bacon and spam; spam,
spam, spam, egg and spam; spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam,
baked beans, spam, spam, spam and spam; or lobster thermidor
aux crevettes with a mornay sauce garnished with truffle pate',
brandy and a fried egg on top of spam."
- Monty Python's Flying Circus
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It's possible, even easy, to get a list of every Usenet newsgroup and
publicly accessible LISTSERV list. With very little thought, you can
convert the list into a program that will mail the same message to
every single one of these groups.
Doing this is called spamming,
after the Monty Python sketch quoted
above.
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During the past years, there have been three such mailings that have
"succeeded": One poster said that the end of the world was nigh;
another advertised the services of their law firm in the so-called
"Green Card Lottery" message; and a third, labeled "MAKE.MONEY.FAST"
was the Usenet equivalent of the old chain letter.
Of the three, the one that got the most attention was the Green Card
Lottery spam(1).
According to the Washington Post, the law firm
in question considered the Internet to be "an ideal, low-cost and
perfectly legitimate way to target people likely to be potential
clients."
Many people felt differently, though. They felt that, first, the
Internet is the wrong place to conduct commercial business. Many of
the charters of the Usenet newsgroups and LISTSERVS specifically
prohibit offers to do business. The few that do accept offers
restrict the buyers and sellers to individuals, not businesses. The
net has had a long tradition of non-commercialism, ever since its
founding days as ARPAnet.
Second, the net isn't free. One popular newsreader, "trn", displays the
following message before it lets you post:
This program posts news articles to thousands of machines
throughout the entire civilized world. Your message will cost
the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send
everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing.
Are you absolutely sure you want to do this? y/n
Since the spammers are alleged to have posted to over 6,000 groups,
they surely spent quite a bit of somebody's money.
Finally, people who gather together to discuss a topic get annoyed when
someone discusses something outside the group's charter. They often
complain to the newsgroup itself, thereby increasing the traffic
even further.
Note that spams generally aren't crossposted. That means that every
news host will receive, process, and make available to its readers a
separate copy of the spam for every newsgroup. Of course, "courteous"
spammers who use crossposting can make things even worse. In one
recent spam, not only was the spam sent to all sorts of unrelated
newsgroups, but so were the angry replies! (The people replying were
guilty of not reading their "To:" and "Cc:" lines before they posted).
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What to do when you see a SPAM or got SPAMmed
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"People who take issue with control of population do not understand that if it is not done in a graceful way, nature will do it in a brutal fashion"
- H. Kendall
- NEVER reply to the group. The spammer won't read it. He's
interested in talking, not listening, and he isn't a list member or a
regular reader. Your angry posting will only annoy the other members
of the group, and won't affect the spammer in the slightest.
- If you have a lot of time on your hands, you may read the
responses of members who ignored my first bit of advice. On
comp.os.vxworks, for example, one (moderately clueless) member posted
(in response to the end of the world spam) "This isn't a religious
newsgroup!" An old-timer responded "I think that very much depends on
the topic. ;)."
- If you have even more time on your hands, reply to the poster
at his own mailbox. But you may not get satisfaction. Quite often
spammers hit and run, and by the time you get back to yell at them,
they've closed out their accounts (or if their site administrator is
on her toes, they'll have had their accounts closed by the administrator).
- If you're even angrier at the spammer, you can write to the
administrator of his site. If the spammer is clown@circus.com, his
administrator is postmaster@circus.com.
- This is net abuse that can get you removed by your site
administrator, you may want to mailbomb the offender. That consists of
sending him lots and lots of email until his site or his account
crashes. And, yes, it is perfectly possible to make a machine crash,
taking down all its users, by sending too much mail to a person on that
machine. The same thing can happen to gateways processing the mail.
Yes, you have it within your power to spam the world, or to
mailbomb (mostly innocent) people. You also have it within your power
to buy a gun and start shooting at people. That doesn't mean you have
to do it.
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