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It used to be that our unsolicited distractions in life principally consisted of junk mail, telemarketers, and Jehovah's Witnesses.

At least you could throw away the junk mail, hang up on the callers, and either answer your front door naked, or allow your dogs to discuss your eternal salvation with the JW's, while chasing them (the JW's) across your front yard.

Today, however, through the magic and infinite reach of the Internet, you can now reach out and annoy THOUSANDS of people with the click of a button.

Not a day goes by that I don't receive at least a half-dozen email offers for everything from thinning my thighs to growing hair, to the perenniel fave, MAKE MONEY FAST!!!

I used to actually read all of my in-bound email; now, if the subject line looks at all suspect, it will likely end up in a holding cell with others of its sort awaiting digital termination with extreme prejudice.

The personalized-spamming is just an offshoot of the now-famous spams indiginous to UseNet - the global collection of roughly 20,000 digital bulletin boards, largely occupied by people with a modem, a passion, and way too much time on their hands.

Often hiding behing the veil of anonymity, this new breed of cowardly, evil people now bravely shoot out thousands - sometimes hundreds of thousands - of unsolicited, unwanted offers to unwilling recipients by cross-posting messages to thousands of newsgroups.

Just a few short years ago, in the dark ages of the 'net, when someone posted an inappropriate message on a newsgroup such as comp.databases.pick, somebody (meaning Garrett Hildebrand) would quickly spring into action, informing this digigoth (the digital age's answer to the Visigoths) that his/her/it's messages were not welcome here and that continued postings would result in serious damage to the senders in-basket in the form of tons of flame-mail responses. Or worse. You see, Garrett is both a very-skilled 'net-guy, plus, a former US Marine.

This used to work. But Garrett already has a full-time+ job, and can't single-handedly defend UseNet.

So the mantle of defense passes on to us as individuals. You can take action by responding directly to these bozos - sometimes, as they often use anonymous remailers - demanding that your email address be removed from their list. A more effective remedy is to advise the "postmaster" of the sender's offenses at the Internet Service Provider (ISP) where the registered sender's domain resides.

A more elegant and passive remedy, at least in terms of our email, may be the use of "bozo filters". Many email client programs now allow you to define sets of rules for accepting inbound email messages. You can eliminate mail from specific senders (like any domains ending in ".gov"), or even summarily refuse messages that contain certain key phrases, like "MAKE MONEY" or "IRS AUDIT".

Conveniently and conversely, there are a lot of new intelligent "agent" programs - nicknamed "bots" - now appearing that allow you to set a criteria for what you want to see, then turn these little guys loose on the 'net to go fetch it for you and bring it home.

Excuse me, my dogs and I have to answer the doorbell.

Jon Sisk
www.jes.com

Original article for Computing News & Review, Octomber 1996

Copyright © 1996 Jonathan E. Sisk.

 

Web Supplemental

After I wrote this, I passed it by Garrett, who good- naturedly added a bunch more to it, which follows intact:

Gee, Jon, you might have told me _where_ to find the article. However, knowing you to be a rational sort of guy, I figured it might be some simple algorithmic variation on one of the other articles I have looked at for you, so I came up with http://www.jes.com/articles/nr_9610.html (this being October) and, voila, there it was.

The article looks good, but I'd want to add something important to this bit:

So the mantle of defense passes on to us as individuals. You can take action by responding directly to these bozos - sometimes, as they often use anonymous remailers - demanding that your email address be removed from their list. A more effective remedy is to advise the "postmaster" of the sender's offenses at the Internet Service Provider (ISP) where the registered sender's domain resides.

Generally, most "From: " and "Reply-to: " fields in spam-type email are fake. That is to say, spoofed. A quick way to check this out is to turn on the full-headers option of whatever email tool is in use. There will be a list of handlers of the email, with the most recent at the top of the list of "From" lines. By working backward through the list, one can see if the true origin domain actually matches the apparent, or alleged one.

My advice: always forward the entire email to abuse@domainname and request the user be stopped from issueing spam. If the email bounces, try it again to postmaster@domainname. The abuse address is preferable, because if the domain has such an address, these guys usually just terminate the account of the spammer. I have single-handedly wiped out at least thirty accounts over the last six months this way. Spamming is not appropriate behavior on the Internet.

--------------------------

Here is an example. I got email which apparently was from homebiz@flock.mwci.net was actually delivered from the domain interramp.com. No amount of replying to either the homebiz address or the postmaster at mwci.net would fix a thing. It took looking at the email headers to figure out that interramp was involved (BTW, they were recently acquired by Mindspring, so interramp abuse mail should go to abuse@mindspring.com).

Garrett

Garrett Continues

Garrett sent us an example of another incident involving a spammer which jammed the reply-to with more junk mail.

Here is one ace down. Check out the URL enclosed in the Mindspring response for interesting reading.

--gdh

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 15:45:55 -0400 (EDT)
From: Robbie Honerkamp 
To: Garrett Hildebrand 
Subject: Re: spam mail complaint

The user has been cancelled.

MindSpring does not approve of misuse of Internet
resources, including email or news spamming, and
considers such abuse a serious matter.

The MindSpring Appropriate Usage Policy can
be found at http://www.mindspring.com/aboutms/policy.html

Robbie Honerkamp
MindSpring Postmaster



On Mon, 1 Jul 1996, Garrett Hildebrand wrote:

Postmaster,

I received the following, unsolicited email. I replied to the
originator via the "Reply-To" mechanism, stating that I do not
appreciate getting junk mail like this. Unfortunately, the
creator of this email has set the "Reply-To" to auto-answer with
yet more junk mail. I have no recourse for stating my unhappiness
with this other than emailing you as one place to start (because
of the "From" line, LinkNet ) and the
registered ISP for mhclimited.com, Indirect. Please ask this
person to stop spamming the Internet with junk mail.

Thank you,

Garrett Hildebrand

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 30 Jun 1996 18:24:26 -0600
From: LinkNet 
Reply-To: proact@mhclimited.com
To: activate@mhclimited.com
Subject: **Thought For The Week**

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faster than the fastest Lion or it will be killed...Every morning a 
Lion wakes up.  It knows it must outrun the slowest Gazelle or it 
will starve to death.

It doesn't matter whether you're a Lion or a Gazelle...when the sun 
comes up,  you'd better be running."

See the web site at:

http://www.mhclimited.com/proact.htm

or send e-mail for an automatic message for details on ProAct:

proact@mhclimited.com

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