I'm not quite sure what to think about the situation, because Ken is right
about offshore spammers, but my mailbox is telling me something
different. He's right that overseas spammers could care less about
anything that Congress does. However, many overseas spammers actually have
funders here in the U.S. The thing that has surprised me is that the
current law seems to have already made a difference in the pornographic spam.
Before you misconstrue my thoughts on the new law, I'll quickly add that I
think is it ill conceived, ill advised, and totally ineffectual. As you'll
see, my pornographic spam has slowed, but the total amount of spam has
increased.
I've made a hobby of keeping an eye on my spam. I find it interesting to
follow the burst of messages on certain topics over time, how the spammers
respond to growth of filers, and how the spam has responded to the current
legislation.
I'm on a mailing list of early adopters and Internet pioneers, many of whom
have email accounts that have been active since the early 90's. The nature
of our work is such that we probably get between 50-300 valid emails a day
(I'm on the lower end of that spectrum, thank goodness) but since our
addresses have been around for so long, we also get 200-1000 pieces of spam
a day.
When the latest law was being debated, there was general consensus on the
list that rather than slow down spam, the new legislation would actually
cause it to increase. (I won't go into detail about the reasons for the
sake of brevity.) That prediction has so far turned out to be
true. However, after January 1, when the law went into effect, I noticed
not only an increase in spam, but a significant change in the nature of
spam. Here's what I've observed in my personal garbage heap.
1) Significant increase in Viagra and simialar ads
2) Significant increase in duplicates. ie, the same message five times from
five different spoofed senders, but all with the same time stamp.
3) Significant decrease in the amount of pornographic spam.
4) SIGNIFICANT increase in 1-4 line spam that has 100-300 random words
included below the single line
Numbers three and four had me scratching my head for a while. While I have
no proof, here is what I think is going on.
Pornographic spam used to make up about 15% of my trash. Now it is down to
a tickle of less than 1%. Even though much of it did come from overseas, I
believe the businesses that were funding the sites can be traced back to
this country. While past penalties under state laws were not a concern to
these folks, the new law is. (Again, discussing the reasons would make this
message too long.) If the overseas messages could be traced back to a U.S.
source, they could and would be prosecuted.
The random words had me wondering for a while, but I'm pretty sure these
are designed to not sabotage spam filters that analyze the content of
email. If you aren't familiar with this kind of message, it might have a
message such as this, with the last words being a link to a web site:
Our US Licensed Doctors will
Prescribes Your Medication For Free
Medications Shipped Overnight To Your Do.
show me more
(Then below the "show me more" link, you would see 100-300 words similar to
those below.)
leaf appanage pretension cerebral platinum efflorescent goldfish e's beater
derriere nosebleed antenna posit manic polyphemus bam ambulatory shattuck
bathroom inclination martini malton ineffable cal rite anastomosis abstain
< next 200 words snipped>
Again, I have no proof here, but I believe that if you have a filter that
allows you to mark messages as spam, marking a significant number of these
messages will result in more and more legitimate messages being marked as
spam. Eventually, every message you receive would end up going into the
spam bucket.
Any way you look at it, spam is not a problem that will go a way soon. It
is also not a problem that legislation will be able to deal with
effectively. Now if you believe Bill Gates, he will be our
savior. According to him, Microsoft is working on the solution and within
two year's, spam will be a thing of the past.
Good luck, Bill. If you succeed, I just might be a Microsoft fan again.
Art
At 03:00 AM 1/31/2004, you wrote:
><<Pornographic spam e-mail will have to be clearly labeled by mid-June to
>allow Internet users to easily filter it out, the Federal Trade Commission
>announced Wednesday.>>
>
>I would not bet that will make any difference. The folks who send that
>junk disguise it for a reason. Many of them are offshore anyway and
>impervious to U.S. law. They are not likely to make it easy to filter
>out. As it is they do all they can to get it past the spam and p*rn
>filters. Sooner or later, there has to be some *real* fix for the problem,
>or the Internet will become unusable.
>
>Ken
******************************************************************
Art Wolinsky - OEO 3DWriting, Inc
awolinsky@3dwriting.com
http://www.3dwriting.com
Technology Director - Online Internet Institute
http://oii.org
(609) 698-8223
******************************************************************
I am perfectly capable of learning from my mistakes.
I will surely learn a great deal today.
******************************************************************
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