About email spammers and fraudsters

[plonkeroo]

I am fed up with fraudulent email (some of which hijack one's own email address) and I do not think the powers-that-be are tackling it the right way. All they do is make life more and more complex for ordinary users whilst doing nothing effective to can the fraudsters.

The whole problem arises from the fact that sending emails is (generally speaking) free whereas if you post a letter you have to buy a postage stamp to put on it.

It costs spammers and fraudsters nothing to send out millions of emails. MAKE IT COST!!

[Belisarius]

I'd prefer they just come up with a new mail protocol and get rid of SMTP. Strikes me as being a little bit cheaper.

[Belisarius]

Protocol, not protocall.

And charging for SMTP traffic would require some sort of centralized system which would mean re-writting all the mail servers out there to conform to it. Plus, this "tax" scheme would only work on American servers, it wouldn't apply to overseas servers, which people could use just as easily as American ones, therefore defeating the purpose.

A new mail protocol would simply require sender-verification. No more spoofing of mail addresses. Also, perhaps a way to send rejected mail back to the user, so as to make mail-bombing and mass spamming a problem for both the culprit and the culprit's mail provider.

And I couldn't become a millionaire of this idea. For wide-spread adoption of a standardized protocol, you'd need to get it turned into an RFC, at which point it's public domain.

[Amaranthine]

If you can, get their fax number and fax them 60 pages of black.

[Belisarius]

You read the slashdot article too, eh?

[sde]

hah nice!

[Rotkiv]

I don't want to pay to send an email.
stop using outlook express. get more than one email address, one for friends and family and trusted places like online stores, and one for business and spammers. It can't go wrong because I have 4 email addresses and have not recieved one spam message. I did reseave some on a hotmail account once, but who cares about hotmail right?
If you have a website, and need to put your email address on it, use this javascript:

  <!--

  var contact = " ME"

  var email = "blah"

  var emailHost = "blah.com"

  document.write("<a href=" + "mail" + "to:" + email + "@" + emailHost+ ">" + contact + "</a>")

  //-->

It will prevent web bots from spammers to pick up your email address.

[Belisarius]

Creating a new mail protocol is still better I think. Makes it so you don't need to go out of your way to avoid spammers.

[Amaranthine]

or you could do something like this with php:

$string = "me@host.com";
$img = imagecreate(400, 60);
$white = imagecolorallocate($img, 255, 255, 255);
$black = imagecolorallocate($img, 0, 0, 0);
imagefill($img, 0, 0, $black);
imagestring($img,1,$xText,$yText,$string,$white);
header("Content-Type: image/jpeg");
imagejpeg($im);

and make it however big you want it with correct x and y.

[plonkeroo]

We should really get down to doing something about Internet parasites, be they spammers, fraudsters, hackers, whatever. And I don't exclude spyware and other intrusionware.

Jeffrey Friedberg of Microsoft says their Windows crash statistics indicate almost HALF of all crashes are due to spyware and adware. Maureen Cushman of Dell said that spyware-related problems are the number one reason that their customers call for technical support.

PS - Why are these pages so wide - I have to keep scrolling side-to-side to be able to read. Stick to 800x600!!

[redhead]

for every [ code] [/ code] tag you make, it will stick a <pre> </pre> tag in, this will create the page as wide as the longest line used inside the tag...

[idx]

Originally posted by plonkeroo
PS - Why are these pages so wide - I have to keep scrolling side-to-side to be able to read. Stick to 800x600!!

Its probably due to the above code sections.

As for spam, I agree that something more needs to be done. Although my recent build of Matt Simerson's mail toaster recipe seems to be working well.

It uses spamassassin, pyzor, clamAV and various other utilities. To date, only a few emails have slipped through, but I know - that's not the point.

One project that looked interesting is TMDA ( http://tmda.net/ )

-r

[cheawick]

I wouldn't know how to do it, but how about doing to them what they do to us. Change their himepages, weblinks, and bombard them with other spammers. Heck, just pitting spammers against spammers should be interesting enough!

[plonkeroo]

Originally posted by cheawick I wouldn't know how to do it, but how about doing to them what they do to us. Change their himepages, weblinks, and bombard them with other spammers. Heck, just pitting spammers against spammers should be interesting enough!

Gosh, just tell me how to do it and let's do it!!!!

[Belisarius]

I still maintain a new standard would be the most sensible.