Eugene weekly., July 31, 2003, Page 14, Image 14

worth of legal judgments against them, which
they’ll probably never pay, and they’re still
blasting away millions of spams a day. For
some of them spamming is almost a socio-
pathic outlet. It’s very hard to prove where a
spam came from, and they’ll get e-mail ad-
dresses any way they can. The list,” he said
ironically, “would be a prize.”
• Making E-mail Expensive. One reason spam
propagates is because it’s so inexpensive to
send it. “It costs about $200,” said
Cambridge, Mass., programmer Paul
Graham in Technology Review, “to send one
million messages.” It’s an effort, Graham
said, that typically yields about 100 re-
sponses. If those responses equal an average
of $2 each, the spammer breaks even.
One theory is that if all e-mails cost 10
cents apiece (e-mail without purchased e-
stamps would be blocked), raising a spam-
mer’s cost to $1,000 per million messages,
spamming would become economically un-
feasible.
The Local Fight
While System Administrators for the UO
and EFN (www.efn.org) don’t know of much
spam originating from Eugene or
Springfield, they do know that a lot of spam
comes into the area, and they do their best to
stop it.
“In terms of e-mail system management,”
said VanDevender, “the greatest amount of
our energy is spent blocking spam.” Both
EFN and the UO manage fairly aggressive
spam filtering systems, using various black
lists and filters. Together, these lists can stop
a great deal of spam from entering your
inbox.
MAPS RBL (Mail Abuse Prevention
System Realtime Blackhole List), Spam
Assassin, Spamhaus Black List (SBL) and
the Blitz Open Proxy Monitor (BOPM) are
all among EFN’s defensive weaponry.
Switch from AOL or Hotmail and get an ac-
count with EFN and their programs will be
doing some filtering work for you. Not only
that, but you’ll be keeping your money local.
MAPS RBL, SBL and BOPM all keep
track of known spam locations, and so EFN is
able to shuttle all e-mail from those locations
into a separate folder for users, marking each
e-mail for a high probability of being spam.
Spam Assassin takes another interesting ap-
proach to defining what is and what isn’t
spam before it gets to you.
The folks at Spam Assassin have decided
that there’s certain criteria that all spam will
“often” have in common, and for each criteria
an incoming e-mail meets, the e-mail is as-
signed points. If the point total exceeds a cer-
tain value, it’s labeled spam and either re-
turned or sent to a junk folder. For example, it
seems that most spam is written in a language
called HTML; if the message is 50 percent to
60 percent HTML, it’s assigned .2 points. If
the font size of the e-mail is large, the mes-
sage is assigned .1 points. If the subject head-
ing uses the words “ANAL GRANNIES,”
the e-mail is obliterated, and so on.
If spam makes it past one of EFN’s filters,
it still has to get through the others. Very
rarely a legitimate e-mail will be filtered out,
and at that point a user will ask EFN to adjust
filtering on a particular account to avoid fu-
ture errors. Users such as yourself can wield a
heavy hand in the melee, by following simple
suggestions and using simple tricks. Master
them, and you’ll be, like me, a step closer to
mastering spam. Until then, do your best to
put up with it, and choose your replies care-
ew
fully.
Mainsleazers: For money they’ll
do an e-mail marketing campaign for
your company. They’ll send spam out
for you, your company gets a black
eye and the mainsleazer moves on to
another unsuspecting client. Bad
mojo.
E-MAIL WORMS: Spammer
viruses that can install unauthorized
proxie software onto a host system.
Then millions of emails can be sent
through the system. Your system.
SPIDERS: Web crawling programs
that search the net for unguarded
proxies. Didn’t I see one of these in
The Matrix?
DICTIONARY ATTACKS:
Spammers use software opening a
connection to a victim’s mail server.
They automatically submit millions of
random addresses and record which
addresses succeed. These are then
added automatically to the spam-
mer’s list, and can be resold to spam-
mers worldwide.
CHICKEN-BONERS: People spam-
ming from some inexpensive loca-
tion, such as a trailer park.
SPOOFING: Showing a fake route or
return address in order to conceal
where an e-mail originated.
PHISHING: Spamming and scam-
ming to get account and credit card
numbers. Don’t give ‘em out!
419 SCAMS: Spam e-mails named
for the Nigerian legal code suppos-
edly making them illegal (even
though the government is suspected
to be involved) “introducing” you to a
wealthy foreigner who’s having trou-
ble getting money out of his or her
country. The individual needs your
account information and promises a
huge cut if they can smuggle money
into your account. Give ‘em your data
and it’s your money that gets the
chop.
RATWEAR: Software designed to
exploit open proxies.
14 JULY 31, 2003