Spamming


  
  1. The Origin of SPAM
  2. What to do when you see a SPAM or got SPAMed

The Origin of SPAM

"Well there's egg and bacon; egg, sausage and bacon; egg and spam; bacon and spam; egg, bacon, sausage and spam; spam, bacon, sausage and spam; spam, egg, spam, spam, bacon and spam; spam, spam, spam, egg and spam; spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam and spam; or lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a mornay sauce garnished with truffle pate', brandy and a fried egg on top of spam."
- Monty Python's Flying Circus


  
It's possible, even easy, to get a list of every Usenet newsgroup and publicly accessible LISTSERV list. With very little thought, you can convert the list into a program that will mail the same message to every single one of these groups.

Doing this is called spamming, after the Monty Python sketch quoted above.

  
During the past years, there have been three such mailings that have "succeeded": One poster said that the end of the world was nigh; another advertised the services of their law firm in the so-called "Green Card Lottery" message; and a third, labeled "MAKE.MONEY.FAST" was the Usenet equivalent of the old chain letter.

Of the three, the one that got the most attention was the Green Card Lottery spam(1). According to the Washington Post, the law firm in question considered the Internet to be "an ideal, low-cost and perfectly legitimate way to target people likely to be potential clients."

Many people felt differently, though. They felt that, first, the Internet is the wrong place to conduct commercial business. Many of the charters of the Usenet newsgroups and LISTSERVS specifically prohibit offers to do business. The few that do accept offers restrict the buyers and sellers to individuals, not businesses. The net has had a long tradition of non-commercialism, ever since its founding days as ARPAnet.

Second, the net isn't free. One popular newsreader, "trn", displays the following message before it lets you post:

     This program posts news articles to thousands of machines
     throughout the entire civilized world.  Your message will cost
     the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send
     everywhere.  Please be sure you know what you are doing.

     Are you absolutely sure you want to do this?  y/n
Since the spammers are alleged to have posted to over 6,000 groups, they surely spent quite a bit of somebody's money.

Finally, people who gather together to discuss a topic get annoyed when someone discusses something outside the group's charter. They often complain to the newsgroup itself, thereby increasing the traffic even further.

Note that spams generally aren't crossposted. That means that every news host will receive, process, and make available to its readers a separate copy of the spam for every newsgroup. Of course, "courteous" spammers who use crossposting can make things even worse. In one recent spam, not only was the spam sent to all sorts of unrelated newsgroups, but so were the angry replies! (The people replying were guilty of not reading their "To:" and "Cc:" lines before they posted).
What to do when you see a SPAM or got SPAMmed
  
"People who take issue with control of population do not understand that if it is not done in a graceful way, nature will do it in a brutal fashion"
- H. Kendall

  1. NEVER reply to the group. The spammer won't read it. He's interested in talking, not listening, and he isn't a list member or a regular reader. Your angry posting will only annoy the other members of the group, and won't affect the spammer in the slightest.

  2. If you have a lot of time on your hands, you may read the responses of members who ignored my first bit of advice. On comp.os.vxworks, for example, one (moderately clueless) member posted (in response to the end of the world spam) "This isn't a religious newsgroup!" An old-timer responded "I think that very much depends on the topic. ;)."

  3. If you have even more time on your hands, reply to the poster at his own mailbox. But you may not get satisfaction. Quite often spammers hit and run, and by the time you get back to yell at them, they've closed out their accounts (or if their site administrator is on her toes, they'll have had their accounts closed by the administrator).

  4. If you're even angrier at the spammer, you can write to the administrator of his site. If the spammer is clown@circus.com, his administrator is postmaster@circus.com.

  5. This is net abuse that can get you removed by your site administrator, you may want to mailbomb the offender. That consists of sending him lots and lots of email until his site or his account crashes. And, yes, it is perfectly possible to make a machine crash, taking down all its users, by sending too much mail to a person on that machine. The same thing can happen to gateways processing the mail.

    Yes, you have it within your power to spam the world, or to mailbomb (mostly innocent) people. You also have it within your power to buy a gun and start shooting at people. That doesn't mean you have to do it.