6 posts tagged “uce”

As you can see, I might be a bit busy with emails.

I wish this was retouched, but it isn’t. Thanks to your friendly neighbourhood spammers, I have 35,200 emails.
   The price of being popular.

I returned tonight from the opening of Temperance to find over 800 spam bounces—3 Mbyte worth—waiting.
   Both Lucire and the Medinge Group email addresses were forged in ‘From’ headers in spams emanating from dozens of sources. It was a spot of bad luck to get bounces to two organizations that our company administers.
   Many were marketing a site at a dot com domain, ppaulcreative (I refuse to link this to give this bastard traffic) and the majority were the result of open proxies.
   Open proxies, in 2008!
   ISPs need to get their act together, for starters, and prosecutors need stronger cross-border laws to go after these bastards for the cost to us.
   And since somewhere between 0 and 0·1 per cent of spams have the sender’s email address, it is simply silly to bounce these back to the return path or the ‘From’ address, particularly if the ISP’s firewall is clever enough to determine the message was spam. I say these ISPs are as much at fault as many of the spammers in creating unnecessary worldwide traffic.
   Meanwhile, among the people leaving doors open were two New Zealand ISPs. Many were American (Verizon, AOL, SBC, etc.) but the overwhelming number came from Poland and Russia. Red China was up there, too, and it was disappointing this time to note that Singapore and Israel had open proxies that were exploited by the spammers.
   Naturally, many were filed with SpamCop and others joined our blacklist. But I suspect tomorrow morning will not be fun, because 200 bounces per hour totals 1,600 over the time I will be asleep.

Shame on the following companies today:

Panda Security, for spamming the Medinge Group. While there is always a possibility that forged headers led to our address being subscribed, there was never any confirmation from us, plus I’ve since used all their unsubscribe methods in their spams, and have even written to the company using its feedback form. This is sad for a company that supposedly is looking after home computer security.

Tech2.com: never subscribed, yet the target of spamming for a year at least. We have Tech2.com’s IP addresses manually entered into our server, which means we get a tiny header notification in our trash—signalling that they are still coming. Again, a company that should know better.

   Have other Voxers ever been surprised at who spams, given what their corporate missions are?

I hate days that start like this. Last night, about 20-odd spammers decided to collude and put in one of our addresses—not one of our firm, but one which I get cced on—in the ‘From’ header in their email. Where do the bounces go? Right here.
   I’ve received roughly 2,300 bounces in the last 24 hours.
   My spam filters are pretty good but it’s the sheer time that one needs to download. The morning one was the above—945 messages to download, with roughly 850 of them bounces overnight.
   We had probably reported all of the spammers to SpamCop automatically, and our filtering software probably filed a second report, so it is annoying that so many ISPs left open proxies and unprotected servers for spammers to exploit.
   Many of these were with respectable American firms (e.g. Verizon), plus the usual suspects in Thailand, Red China, Poland, Italy, Hungary and South Korea.
   I’m annoyed at the bounces but I cannot see a second way out. I hate it when I get no bounce from an invalid address or if my email has been delayed. But surely ISPs can recognize offending IP address from blacklists and conclude, ‘Right, this is spam, it is selling Viagra, and we won’t bounce it because there’s a blacklist match.’
   We filed our SpamCop reports when the count was around 400 so I am disappointed that so many ISPs left either their server proxies open or failed to check with their blacklists. Even we have a blacklist that we use here on the work server. As a result, another 1,900 bounces came in during the next 22 hours. Seven megabytes’ worth of traffic.
   The spammers’ techniques themselves are fairly clever: by colluding on spamming (and there was no consistency to what was sent—it included porn, fake watches, Viagra and fake handbags) they try to ensure that if you shut down one, there are still another 20 operating.
   But it gets annoying with the sheer quantity of bounces. I believe this is the third such incident in as many weeks, so I’m waiting for these idiots to move to another domain! They probably have no idea that the latest domain is even connected to us.
   Hey, spammers, instead of creating even more negative karma for yourselves, why don’t you stick in some non-existent addresses into the ‘From’ header? You are assholes already but did you have to go even lower down on the food chain?
   And with all that there were two people, perhaps out of 10,000 spam bounces over the last three weeks, that wrote to us to complain. That’s not too bad. We simply explain to them, as they seem unaware of the nature of spam, that spammers forge ‘From’ fields in email.
   Roughly 40 spam bounces since I began typing this post.

One thousand, eight hundred spams today. I hope that record will not be broken for a while.
   Thank you to those spammers in the United States (Comcast, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves—plenty came through you, so it’s ironical you block so many other ISPs and accuse them of spamming), Turkey, Poland, Red China, Hungary, Mexico and Chile for wasting my goddamn time today.
   To the ISPs and hosts with open relays: come on, get with the programme.
   But with our reporting software, we added a heck of a lot of IP addresses to blacklists today without my lifting a finger.

[Cross-posted] There have been a lot of domestic businesses emailing me of late out of fear that, if they sent me more bulk emails, they would violate the new anti-spam legislation that comes into force in New Zealand tomorrow.
   This has been good in the case of NZ Post, to whom I never gave permission to spam me. It has also allowed me to get off another list that I sent a remove request to some time ago that was not honoured.
   But the majority are from businesses that need to communicate with me as a member of the press. Why they need to verify that I wish to continue on their mailing lists seems a waste of time.
   Of course journalists need to continue receiving press releases, and the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Bill, in its final draft form, provides an exception for them.
   The interpretation part of any legislation is always interesting as you an infer some of Parliament’s intent there. ‘Consented to receiving’ means, inter alia:

consent that can reasonably be inferred from—
   (A) the conduct and the business and other relationships of the persons concerned; and
   (B) any other circumstances specified in the regulations;

It goes on to provide other interpretations of consent, e.g. when an email address has been ‘conspicuously published by a person in a business or official capacity; and’ there is nothing to suggest that the person does not want to be spammed; and:

   (C) the message sent to that address is relevant to the business, role, functions, or duties of the person in a business or official capacity; but
(b) does not include the circumstances specified in the regulations from which consent cannot be inferred[.]

   For those businesses (like ours) that have mailing lists that only includes people that have specifically and expressly requested to be on it, then this Act presents no problems. The only ones where we have compiled addresses are press mailings, covered by the definition of consent.
   It shows that by respecting laws over a decade before they are drafted, we are sitting pretty.
   In fact, I am not sure how this law might apply to us, with the only problem being false addresses that are fed in to our request forms. It does mean that we need to keep more records, which is a burden on honest businesses.
   We, and the many emailing us, may actually have a final out, with the following not qualifying as unsolicited commercial email (UCE):

provides notification of factual information about a subscription, membership, account, loan, or similar relationship involving the ongoing purchase or use by the recipient of goods or services offered by the person who authorised the sending of the message, or the recipient’s ongoing subscription, membership, account, loan, or similar relationship;

which largely covers notices that we send out.
   I wanted an anti-spam law here in New Zealand because I was getting unsolicited junk email from the ACT Party over the course of maybe one year. But when one considers the bigger picture, the majority of spam in New Zealand is not from New Zealanders. The majority is from American, Russian and eastern European countries, often routing through Far East servers. And this act does nothing to prevent them.
   In that frustration, I foresee a rush to judgement by regular people now panicked by all these extra-cautious requests from companies. What if they had signed up to a list and forgot about it? Does this Act now arm them, making them into amateur Perry Masons who believe that they have one up on legitimate, honest companies? Honest people will be pursued.
   In such a case, is it fair to shift the onus of proof on to the sender, when the sender might not have kept records prior to the Act coming in to force of the original subscribe request?
   I believe honest companies can discharge the onus of proof by providing evidence of how their emailing lists are compiled. In our case, we send an initial email, outlining that someone had signed up with that address. We ask the recipient to notify us immediately in case of fraud. Since 2006, we send out two emails to confirm the fact (one acknowledgement, one confirmation) with clear removal and feedback links.
   Sorry, Kiwis, tomorrow will not be a spam-free day. We will receive as many spams about penis enlargements, drugs and porn as we did today. The same SOBs will email us about wins in lotteries we never entered, or ask if we can transfer funds for some ousted African dictator. It targets the wrong people, but then, Parliament cannot exactly enact laws that go outside our borders—and that is where spam mostly comes from.

Disclaimer: don’t rely just on me. Seek legal advice.