SpamArchive.org is a community resource that provides a database of known spam to be used for testing, developing, and benchmarking anti-spam tools.

The goal of this project is to provide a large repository of spam that can be used by researchers and tool developers. In the past, there were a few small personal spam archives that were used. There was no large set of spam that could be used to test new anti-spam algorithms.

Thus, developers could not sufficiently test their techniques across a range of messages. Also, the lack of a “standard” sample of spam made it difficult to effectively benchmark anti-spam tools.

The problem of unsolicited e-mail has been increasing for years, but help has arrived. In this article, David discusses and compares several broad approaches to the automatic elimination of unwanted e-mail while introducing and testing some popular tools that follow these approaches.

The problem of unsolicited e-mail has been increasing for years, but help has arrived. In this article, David discusses and compares several broad approaches to the automatic elimination of unwanted e-mail while introducing and testing some popular tools that follow these approaches.

Unethical e-mail senders bear little or no cost for mass distribution of messages, yet normal e-mail users are forced to spend time and effort purging fraudulent and otherwise unwanted mail from their mailboxes. In this article, I describe ways that computer code can help eliminate unsolicited commercial e-mail, viruses,
trojans, and worms, as well as frauds perpetrated electronically and other undesired and troublesome e-mail. In some sense, the final and best solution for eliminating spam will probably take place on a legal level. In the meantime, however, you can do some things from a code perspective that can serve as an interim solution to the problem, until (if ever) the laws begin to evolve at the same rate as public frustration. Read the rest of this entry »

Spam. We’re reading about it everywhere now and we’re not talking potted meat. It’s the kind that clogs up your email box every day trying to sell you everything including the moon.
Well I have a special treat for you. An interview with the “spam king”.
Of course, that’s not his real name. He’s afraid to divulge that for obvious reasons. This person started using spam as a marketing method in the late 90’s sending out 100’s of thousands of emails a day and he kindly offered to tell us about how he does his dirty deeds.

Wade ? Thanks for joining us today. What got you into the spam marketing industry?

SK ? Money, pure and simple. Of course more people willing to spend money on the Internet really got things going. It wasn’t until about 2 years ago that mass email blasting got effective although I’ve been spamming for years.

Wade ? How many people do you send email too?

SK ? Oh, I’ve cut back a bit but anywhere between 300,000 to 800,000 a day. I’m a small time operator. The big time guys are sending out 10 times that number every day. Read the rest of this entry »

Posting an email address in a public place is not an invitation for companies to send unsolicited advertisements. Hosting a public Web forum or Usenet server does not give companies permission or the moral right to advertise on it. And soliciting comments from the public on a weblog entry or other Web page does not mean that companies or individuals are invited to use it for their advertising purposes.

Usenet news succumbed to spam long ago. Email was next. Now spammers have turned their attention to weblogs and comment forms. In order to increase search engine rankings you are posting advertisements to our Web pages. What you failed to understand is that bloggers are smarter, better connected, and more technologically savvy than the average email user. We control the medium that you are now attempting to exploit. You’ve picked a fight with us and it’s a fight you cannot win.

We have complained amongst ourselves, tried technological solutions, and tried to understand the nature of comment spam. And we are done. We now intend to fight back. Read the rest of this entry »

Anti-Comment Spam Tactics

What can you do to stop blog spamming? Below I have posted some methods that I have collected in the www. The layout is the following: first the description and second the links to the installation and documentation (always at the author´s website ? no copyright problems right?). I have tried to organize them starting from the easiest, GOOD LUCK!

1.Comment Spam Quick Fix from Burningbird’s. Easy method to start stoping spam in your blog. You add a hidden field to all of your comment forms and then MT look for that information when it processes the comment form. This simple process will eliminate most of bots spam comments (the most dangerous).

You only need to modify the following MT templates:
Individual data entry
Comment Listing Template
Comment Preview Template
Comment Error Page

2.Comment Queue Script/MT Hack from ScriptyGoddess. This script put all comments into a pending status until you approve or disapprove them. This solution may cause your blog a lost of interaction but you can target comments suspicious of spam. Some people will find this difficult because you must modify your MT installation and also you must watch your comments. Read the rest of this entry »

As you may know there is a lot of discussion going on out there regarding blog comment spam. In my opinion comment spam can be defined as a comment posted to a blog wich is not related with the content of your post. It will include a link in the comments field or in the name of the author to a commercial website. The problem is becoming serious as spammers are developing bots that can make dozens of post in an hour. We must stop this now or we´ll be the third spam generation victims after mail boxes and guestbooks.

Blog comment spam can´t be comprared yet with his big brother “email” but there is enough presence to be considered as a danger. MT doesn´t help too much cleaning your articles from spamming post so if you don´t want to spend an hour each day doing blog cleaning I recommend you to take action right now. They use bots to kill your blog but you don´t have a cleaning bot, remewmber this!. We must hit asap before this becomes a major problem. Some blacklists are ready to use and other methods are a good starting point. I have collected here some methods and solutions that blog owner are developing. I´ll add a brief description of each method and a link to the author´s website where you ca find more info. I don´t want to infright copyrighted material so you must get the original content from the authore´s website. Read the rest of this entry »

Advertising

Some companies engaged in legal business, advertise their products or services using spam. They can carry out its own newsletter, but more often ordered her to those companies (or individuals) who specialize in this. The attractiveness of such advertising is its relatively low cost and (presumably) a large scope of potential customers. Such unsolicited advertising may have the opposite effect, causing rejection of the recipients, and may even become synonymous with intrusive advertising, as happened with ham SPAM.

In connection with the sharp rejection of the spam recipients, and the tightening of legislation antispamovogo share of legal goods and services in the total volume of spam is decreasing.

It is believed that, with proper organization of promotional mailings, they can actually increase sales, not delivered to the recipient of special concern. The principal terms of mutual benefit to the recipient and the organizer of distribution are:

combining the roles of organizer and dispatches e-mail service provider;
improving the quality of the target audience of each specific distribution of advertising messages;
warning customers of the provider that he would send out promotional messages;
providing convenient means to block unwanted messages.

It should be noted, however, that the advertising message distributed to users with their consent, by definition, are not spam. Read the rest of this entry »

Spam folder in the mail client Mail:

E-mail

The largest flow of spam is distributed via electronic mail (e-mail). Currently, the proportion of viruses and spam in general traffic, e-mail is on an estimated 70 to 95 percent . As spam is most frequent advertising unpopular products: rolex, viagra, etc. .

Spammers collect e-mail addresses by using a special robot, or manually (rarely), using a web page, conference Usenet, mailing lists, electronic bulletin boards, guest books, chat rooms … This robot software is able to collect thousands of addresses per hour and create one database for further distribution by them as spam. Some companies only deal with the collection of addresses, a database and then sell. Some companies sell spammers e-mail addresses of their customers, they have ordered goods or services via e-mail. There is another way to get a long list of e-mail addresses: the addresses are generated by first randomly on specified patterns (from thousands to a million), and then just checked the special program-validator on their validity (existence). Read the rest of this entry »

Communication over the network with advertisements (advertised address removed)

Sometimes spam distribution network via the built-in Microsoft Windows SMB-service Messenger. These messages appear as pop-ups (unless a third-party software, manufacturing them in other ways). In this case, to turn off their admission may be, for example, to stop the Messenger service using net stop messenger [12]. In versions of Windows NT, beginning with Windows XP SP2, this service has already stopped by default, so this method of distribution are less likely to occur.

SMS-messages

Spam can be spread not only through the Internet. Advertising messages sent to mobile phones via SMS-messages, especially the unpleasant fact that they are difficult to defend.

Collect email addresses

Spammers find out the email addresses of users in different ways. Some of them are:
Address mailbox user posted on the public site ? mostly in the guest book, forum, personal card, etc., where it can find a special program (harvester), Scanning indexing sites such as search engine robots.
If the address of the mailbox is not unique word, for example, common name, it may be chosen for the dictionary. Do spammers have special dictionaries that include common words, names of people, place names and some of the most popular combination of network slang. Combining this dictionary and a list of domain names (open public), a spammer gets a list of addresses for mailing.
If you are a person with whom the owner of this correspondence box was infected with a Trojan program, all the addresses from its address book can get to a spammer.
The database of customers a company could be stolen or even sold by the company spammers. Read the rest of this entry »

Ideology

It is clear that spam brings economic benefits to its customers. This means that users, despite the dislike of spam, does enjoy the services advertised through spam. Until the impact of spam exceeds the cost of overcoming protection, spam will not disappear. Thus, the surest way to fight a denial of service advertised through spam. There are proposals on the use of public condemnation, until the end of communication, against those who buy spam advertised goods and services.

Other methods are aimed at inhibiting the spammers access to users.

Preventive measures to protect

The surest way to fight spam ? do not let spammers get e-mail address. This is a difficult task, but some precautions can be taken.
Do not publish your email address on public websites.
If for some reason the email account to publish, it can be coded like ?u_s_e_r_ (a) _d_o_m_a_i_n_._n_e_t?. Spammers use special programs to scan websites and collect email addresses, so even a masking addresses can help. It should be remembered, however, that in the simplest cases ?encoded? will be able to recognize and address of the program. In addition, it is an inconvenience not only for spammers, but also for ordinary users. Read the rest of this entry »