E-mail service here may experience some delays as I undergo a personal trial by spam.
In this case it's a Joe Jobber, most likely a spam gang, that has grabbed both my e-mail address and my server's IP address to illegally sell prescription drugs without prescription.
For the last few days I've been firing off myriad alerts to uce@ftc.gov, the government's address dedicated to fighting fraudulent spam, with no response.
A domain registrar called Yesnic is apparently cooperating with this spam gang. They're the registrar of record on every Joe Job in this bunch. Most of the registrations, on investigation by me, seem to be made-up, but two carry the actual name, and a legal address, fo someone in Columbia, SC. This criminal should be easy to find if someone is interested.
Meanwhile, we learned today that the most popular anti-spam technique, like the so-called CAN SPAM Act that enables spam in the U.S., is in fact becoming a spammer favorite.
I speak here of Sender ID and Sender Policy Framework (SPF, left)), the former of which Microsoft continues to advertise.
CMP's Gregg Keiser writes that of the roughly 1.5 million e-mails found by MX Logic recently which used these "anti-spam" techniques, 84% were in fact spam. MX Logic also says that nearly two-thirds of U.S. spam now comes from individual PCs "hijacked" by spam zombie programs.
If just one spammer were using Sender ID they could easily skew the totals their way, because they're sending out millions-and-millions of e-mails and the rest of us are sending out 10s or 100s. It should be clear Sender ID is not effective, but Microsoft is still going to start flagging those messages not using it in its Hotmail service.
Later this month Cisco and Yahoo will be presenting their DomainKeys plan, which puts a digital signature at the end of e-mails that is checked by SMTP servers against public keys held by sites. How they think they'll keep keys out of the hands of spammers I don't know.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. Thuktun on July 13, 2005 02:13 PM writes...
For the last few days I've been firing off myriad alerts to uce@ftc.gov, the government's address dedicated to fighting fraudulent spam, with no response.
That's been a write-only medium for most users. Not sure if it's still being done, but for quite a while, all submissions were stored in the Fridge. As such, don't expect any useful or timely replies from that address.
CMP's Gregg Keiser writes that of the roughly 1.5 million e-mails found by MX Logic recently which used these "anti-spam" techniques, 84% were in fact spam.
These techniques aren't really anti-spam, they're anti-forgery. They allow a sender to say they are who they say they are, more or less. From the article you linked to:
What's better, though is that the "foreign country" is a domain. If people can more accurately identify rogue domains that allows spammers using these tools, we can boycott email from those domains. Blocklists have been trying to do this for years, but this would presumably make them more accurate and effective. Permalink to Comment2. Shawn on July 13, 2005 09:04 PM writes...
Can Spam Law somehow puts the whole Spam shennanigan into a crazy loop. Too frustrating.
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