Truer Words - A Journal

More Sophisticated Spam

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 30 May 2006 13:24:58 GMT

You know the spam houses have merged their databases with those used by the junk 'snail mail' services when the spam you receive is totally personalized and customized for the receiver.

Date: 5/30/06 2:47 AM
Received: 5/30/06 2:47 AM -0400
From: rblackburn@mortgagesprocessing.com (Robert Blackburn)
To: <my email address> (Seth Dillingham)

Dear Seth,

Our office is attempting to follow up with you in regards to your MYSTIC Home.

Your home is located in the 06355 streamline refinance zone and qualifies for a payment reduction of $48780 (which is a 38% savings per month) over the next 24 months.

Our Service is Free of Charge to the homeowner and we require No Checks of any kind with Zero Upfront Fees.

Please call our office at 1-866-570-0858 we are standing by to serve you.

Sincerely,

Debra Masson
mortgagesprocessing.com MYSTIC Office
6303 Owensmouth Ave
10th Floor ME-15
Woodland Hills, CA 91367
d.masson@mortgagesprocessing.com
1-866-570-0858

This message is confidential to Seth Dillingham regarding 76 DOGWOOD LN Property on May 18, 2006. And was brought to you by mortgagesprocessing.com if you received this by error or feel that you should not have received this communication please contact abuse@mortgagesprocessing.com

Internet communications cannot be guaranteed to be timely, secure, error or virus-free. The sender does not accept liability for any errors or omissions.

This piece of spam contains my office phone number, my home address, and my zip code! This is much more sophisticated than the spam of the old days.

On the other hand, they clearly don't know everything about us. We've been renting the same house for almost eight years.

Still, I can see how this extra information could easily persuade people to think the message was legitimate. If I owned this house, the biggest clue would be gone and all that would be left would be the fact that I received a dozen copies of the same message. ;-)

Non-Automated Spam? Manual Spammers?

seth@macrobyte.net — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 02:46:34 GMT

I don't get it. Spammers have been signing up on my site (and others), and then posting 'unsolicited commercial messages'. This has now happened five times here on [tw], and I've seen it happen on other sites, too.

No, I'm not stupid. I know spammers do that all the time. The problem is that they've been doing it *manually*.

What profit or advantage could there possibly be in non-automated spam!? Is this just about search rank?

The logs make it clear that it's being done manually. If you follow the logs, you can him/her making mistakes, going back and trying over again. In the end, s/he posted an incomplete message and had to do it a second time.

What's the deal? Has anyone else seen this sort of thing?

Other than unpaid, unfed, slave labor -- literally -- I can't imagine the cost of any human labor being low enough to generate any chance of profit.

Perhaps it's just about page rank?

Maybe I'll just chalk it up to stupidity. (But somehow that just doesn't feel right.)

Spammers are Evil

seth@macrobyte.net — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 13:57:12 GMT

Levi pointed to an Interview with an Internet Vampire, also known as a Link Spammer.

Reading the interview, I have to admit that I agree with a lot of what he says. He's able to take advantage of weblogs because they simply aren't designed, in any way, to stop him. Most of them hardly do anything to even slow him down. We (the software developers on the other end of the system) spend most of our time making the software more feature-rich and easier to use, and expend very little effort on preventative measures. Lots of reactionary measures, very little prevention.

The interviewer misunderstood one of "Sam's" comments. He said:

Will the initiative by Google, Yahoo and MSN, to honour "don't follow" links defeat Sam and his ilk? "I don't think it'll have much effect in the short, medium or long term. The search engines caused the problem" - we didn't quite follow this bit of logic, but Sam continued - "and they're doing this to placate the community. It won't work because most blogs and forms are set up with the best intentions, but when people find hard graft has to go into it they're left to rot. To use this, they'll all have to be updated. The majority won't be. And there'll just be trackback spamming."

By this Sam means spammers setting up their own blogs, and referencing posts on zillions of blogs, which will then incestuously point back to the spammer, whose profile is thus raised.

Not a big deal, but I'm pretty sure Sam was literally referring to "trackback spamming." Trackback is supported by most weblog software these days. Most sites just accept trackback pings without doing any verification whatsoever. You send a ping claiming that you've linked to them from an online casino or pillz site, and they'll just include your link on the page, automatically.

How easy is it to write a script that sends trackback pings? I wrote one in ten minutes, to help me test Conversant's trackbacks as they were being developed. Another five minutes and I could have been crawling the output from sites like weblogs.com, and sending pings to every site I found. There's really nothing to it.

(Note that my script stopped working with my Conversant sites once I put in the test to make sure that the incoming ping was legit. However, if a spammer really wants to hit Conversant sites, he'll find a way around this problem. I have more tricks up my sleeve, though.)

My First "Sender Policy Framework" DNS Record

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 12 Oct 2004 10:29:42 GMT

This morning, I set up my first Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record for one of the domains hosted by Macrobyte.

SPF is a new type of DNS record which is designed to prevent (or at least limit) email spoofing. Basically, Server B is receiving an email from Server A. Server A says the mail is from yourname@yourdomain.com. Server B checks the DNS for yourdomain.com to see if Server A is allowed to send email for yourdomain.com. If it is, great. If not, it's considered a spoof (what happens from there is probably up to the administrator of Server B.)

The SPF wizard makes it easier than it would have been otherwise, but it's still a huge pain in the butt. It's made especially difficult by the fact that all of the domains we host have mail sent through the clients' home ISP's. The names of those ISP's � or anyone other domain through which a client might send a legitimate email that appears to come from the domain we host (got that?) � must all go into the SPF record. In other words, if I host your domain foo.com, and you occasionally send mail from yourname@yourdomain.com through your ISP's mail server (which Earthlink, for example, actually requires), then I have to list that ISP in the SPF record.

If Macrobyte's DNS servers are going to include SPF records for all of the domains they host, then we have two choices: talk to every single client and work out a list of domains through which they might send email for the domain we host, or we can create a form for them to fill out so they can basically do it themselves.

With the latter route, of course, we then need to contact most of the clients who use it to correct the mistakes they'll inevitably make. This isn't their fault, though... most people understand literally NOTHING about the domain name system. I can't even imagine how I could explain what I need from them in a general way which will "click" with the average joe, nevermind allow them to fill out a web form with the information I need.

In the end, I'm probably going to start with the most technically adept clients, and work from there. One client at a time. Perhaps it will become easier as I gain experience, and I'll find the right way to ask the right questions.

SpamAssassin 3 Looks Great!

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 28 Jul 2004 15:51:23 GMT

Since Macrobyte's new server needs to be configured from scratch anyway, I decided to check the status of SpamAssassin 3. If it was ready, I'd start out with that rather than 2.63. Unfortunately, it's not due out until next month.

Still, it looks great! Check out the release notes for SpamAssassin 3.0.0-pre2, which is expected to be the last pre-release version. It looks like they've improved nearly everything, and they've rolled in most of the custom rulesets that we're all using anyway.

Lots of performance improvements, too.

Oh, and I see they've built in support for SPF, the Sender Policy Framework. I've been trying to ignore SPF since I first heard about it, as supporting it will require a lot of changes to DNS, the mail servers, and probably other areas. Now that some of the big guys (like Hotmail) are supporting or planning to support it, I'm starting to think it's not going away. Yippee.

Underwhelmed with Spam, but Impressed with Spammers

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 06 May 2004 08:27:03 GMT

Since installing SpamAssassin, I've been obsessively writing (and tweaking) custom rules, adjusting scores, and training the bayesian classifier.

Before it was installed I would get at least 100 UCE/UBE messages every night, and at least that many again throughout the day. SpamSieve did (and does) a nearly-perfect job of catching it all, but I really hated having to download that much useless mail in the first place. Also, Macrobyte's mail server hosts over 100 email accounts, and nearly all of them were getting some amount of spam: some a lot more than my account, some a lot less.

Last night, only five made it past SpamAssassin and into my mailbox. SpamSieve caught every one of them.

I have to admit, though, that I'm really impressed with the spammers' determination. There are some publicly available, custom rulesets for SA, that target certain types of spam. It wasn't long before the spammers started writing their messages to get around those rules. So, the rules were updated. The spammers clearly study the rules, because a little while later they started getting through again.

If you hadn't noticed, there are three tricks they've been using lately, quite effectively. First, they obfuscate words by putting punctuation be'tw_e!en the letters, or replacing letters with similar-looking characters: tests for specific words will fail, so they have to be rewritten to ignore punctuation and treat \\/ (two slashes) the same as 'v', ! the same as I, etc. Second, they've been filling the spam with random words (in html email they color those words the same as the background, so the reader doesn't see it but spamassassin does), or, even worse, lots of famous quotes. This confuses the bayesian classifier, which will see a few spam words but lots of generic words or "good" words. Third, some of them use almost no text at all, and instead just include an image with their message.

Weasels.

The filter-writers can work around these things, but it's not easy, and every additional test requires a few more CPU cycles. It's worth it, in the end, because fewer messages being delivered means the spammers make less money. Eventually, they'll stop trying.

That's the idea, anyway.

Custom SpamAssassin Rules

seth@macrobyte.net — Fri, 09 Apr 2004 09:22:36 GMT

Customizability is one of the nicer aspects of SpamAssassin. You can override the default scores for any test with just two words in a config file, and you can add your own set of tests almost as easily. Most tests consist of just three lines: one to define the test in perl, one to describe the test in English for the report added to the headers, and one to provide a score.

SpamAssassin is in the process of becoming an official Apache top-level project (which is excellent news, IMO). They're not there yet, but the Apache Foundation is hosting a wiki with lots of SpamAssassin goodies, including a small list of useful, custom rulesets (tests).

I've installed the first custom ruleset listed on that page, called antidrug.cf, which is intended to block pill-related spam but not legitimate medical email. It's well written, and highlights the way I think most spam filters should be done. These rulesets give low scores to messages that mention just one category of "pill" (like pain, sexual dysfunction, or diet medication), but higher scores when more types are mentioned. So, an email from your doctor that talks about five different types of pain meds won't be marked as spam, but spam that mentions pain medications, male performance enhancers, sleeping pills, anti-anxiety medication, and diet pills all in the same message will be incinerated on the spot. ;-).

It also gives higher scores to messages which use obfuscation when naming the medications, like two slashes \/ for the letter 'V' or the @ for the letter 'a'. (Actually, ti's a lot more thorough than that, but you get the idea.)

What's great about this sort of server-side, perl-based spam filter is that the rulesets are professionally maintained and so carefully considered. Virtually nobody takes the time to write these sorts of filters in their mail clients, as it's too much work for any one person to do well.

This is Fun

seth@macrobyte.net — Fri, 09 Apr 2004 14:04:35 GMT

Managing and tuning SpamAssassin on Macrobyte's server is turning out to be a lot of fun! I'm glad Brian talked me into this.

(I'm such a geek.)

SpamAssassin is Running

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 18:25:46 GMT

Back in December I mentioned that Macrobyte was going to start running SpamAssassin on our mail server, in an attempt to cut down on the amount of spam it handles. Until a couple weeks ago, about 3/4 of all incoming messages were spam. That's ridiculous.

Brian A. set it up on the server months ago, and then a couple weeks ago I finally made time to configure and activate it. Since then, incoming spam has been cut in half, approximately. Server performance is about the same as it was before: the additional overhead of checking each incoming message for 'spamness' is balanced by there being less mail for the users to download from their mailboxes.

Last week a client in Georgia had me install SpamAssassin on their MacOS X Server box. This was a little challenging, as I don't run OS X Server and didn't have any experience with its mail server, Postfix. However, Apple themselves came to my rescue thanks to their long page of instructions for setting up SpamAssassin on MacOS X Server.

Still, there are some things to watch out for on that page:

The most difficult part of it, for me, was that they provided a procmail recipe to allow each user to have his/her own recipe also... but they don't mention that if you don't put a personal recipe file in every user's home directory, procmail will throw errors. (I don't know what the default setup looks like, but my client's OS X Server system doesn't have home directories for every mail account!)

My solution? Leave out the line beginning with "INCLUDERC"
The procmail recipe they listed uses a lock file when delivering mail to /dev/null.
```
    :0:
    * ^X-Spam-Level: \*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*
    /dev/null
    #trash all messages with a very high spam score
```
The second colon there on the first line, after the 0, is what tells it to use a lock file. That means only one thread at a time can send spam to the bit bucket, and on a high-throughput server this can turn into a serious performance problem. It doesn't make any sense, either: there's no danger of any sort of collision if it's just testing the message and sending it to /dev/null, so just leave out the second colon.

This client is already seeing a big difference with the amount of spam the users have to deal with, but now he's trying to get me to lower the cutoff point (the score at which a message is sent to /dev/null instead of just marked as [SPAM]) all the way down to the same score at which a message is first tagged. That would mean that any message SA thinks is spam will simply disappear, including false positives.

Instead, I'm talking them into some special addresses to train SA's bayesian filter (which is just one part of SA's scoring system), and I'll compromise by lowering the cutoff by a few points. A better trained bayesian filter combined with a lower cutoff point should result in a lot less spam.

Habeas Follow Up: I Spoke With Habeas, Inc.

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 13:11:34 GMT

The Habeas idea seemed so good, it really bugs me that so much "Habeas spam" has been coming through lately with the Habeas headers. Three days of it now, with no sign of letting up.

Concerned that Habeas, Inc., might no longer be viable, I called and left a message on their voice mail. They called back about an hour later: yes, they are still there, and yes, they are quite aware of all the spam going out with the Habeas headers included.

After a rather confusing few minutes, I finally figured out that they were assuming the spam filtering software (like SpamSieve) were using the Habeas BlackList service. That service provides a technical block to habeas "infringers," to go along with the legal block: whenever a message with the Habeas headers is filtered by SpamSieve, it would check the Habeas black list (DNS) to make sure the sender is allowed to use the Habeas headers (which spammers never are).

Unfortunately, that would slow down the filtering process an awful lot. Also, without going through all the crazy lookups performed by a service like SpamCop, I'm not sure how SpamSieve (or the Habeas Blacklist) can be sure they're checking/blocking the right ip addresses.

Perhaps Michael would be so kind as to comment on this...?

Habeas Spam

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 13 Jan 2004 09:28:02 GMT

Yesterday I received a bunch of spam with Habeas headers. Those are special headers added to email that are supposed to gurantee that the message is NOT spam. The group that came up with the idea owns the trademark on those headers, and anybody who uses them without permission is suppsoed to be spanked by the courts until they can't sit down for at least a month.

SpamSieve, my spam filter of choice, has a preference setting to honor or ignore Habeas headers. I chose to honor them, hoping that they'd actually work. This tells SpamSieve that if the message has the special headers then it shouldn't bother checking to see if the mail is spam.

Unfortunately, the only mail with Habeas headers that I've ever received (that I know of) has been spam. Yesterday I got at least a dozen such messages, and yes some of them have been reported.

I hope the courts have an extra long paddle for these guys.

(Michael Tsai, SpamSieve's author, has a story about the Habeas problem, too.)

Less Spam Recently?

seth@macrobyte.net — Sun, 04 Jan 2004 14:35:38 GMT

I've been receiving a lot less spam in the last couple weeks. I know Brian has, too. Anybody else?

Perhaps spam is heaviest during the christmas shopping season? Is something else happening to cut it back?

Filtering Spam

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 18 Sep 2003 09:49:22 GMT

I recently upgraded to SpamSieve 2.0 (and then 2.0.1, yesterday). The new version includes a lot of features that beat the latest tricks used by spammers to sneak through these Bayesian filters. To take advantage of them, Michael (Tsai, the programmer behind SpamSieve) recommends that you reset your corpus and start over from scratch.

Obviously, this means retraining SpamSieve. That's easy enough, because I get a ton of email, and about half of it is spam. It doesn't take long to retrain when you're feeding it three or four hundred spam messages per day.

This has introduced an unfortunate side effect, though: until it's fully retrained, I have to be more diligent about scanning the spam mailbox in Mailsmith to watch for false positives. I've been finding at least one every day. Right now I have 234 messages in that box, and I have to look at every one of them to make sure it's an email from a client or some family member I forgot to put in my whitelist (address book).

I hate spam, and spammers. They're worse than the virus writers.

No Tricks, No 'Preventive Measures', Just... No Spam

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 07 Aug 2003 16:32:44 GMT

NPR had a story this afternoon about the challenge-response method of spam prevention, which I have always disliked almost as much as the DNS Black Lists.

Anyway, it got me day dreaming about an internet with no spam. Not because of regulations, or spam-detection software, or filters. Just... no spam. Nobody sends it. It's never even been heard of. Everything else is the same, but there's no spam.

Only in my dreams, I know, but doesn't it sound wonderful?! I'd check my email in the morning and have only 40-50 messages, instead of 200. In a given day I'd only receive 100 - 150, instead of 500 - 600. What a dream.

National "Do Not Call" Registry, and Spam

seth@macrobyte.net — Fri, 27 Jun 2003 18:42:07 GMT

The FTC has finally opened the National Do Not Call Registry. Register your phone number(s) on this list, and by October most telemarketers will be unable to legally call you.

NPR reported that Dubya said the list was growing by more than 100 numbers per second, at its peak today.

This doesn't just send a message to the telemarketers about invading our lives... it will effectively put most of them out of business, if enough people register. Good riddance.

There's little doubt that the (eventual) success of the the DNC Registry will be used to support similar legislation regarding email SPAM. Unfortunately, while I'd support any reasonable measure to reduce or eliminate the amount of spam (specifically UCE, or Unsolicited Commercial Email) I receive, I don't think a "Do Not Email" registry is the right approach. Two reasons: too much spam arrives from overseas and so enforcement would be virtually impossible, and I prefer the chaotic, unregulated internet to one with Big Brother watching over everything.

The solution to the spam problem, I believe, has not yet been found. There may not even be a good, general solution. MTA-level and MUA-level filters are not good enough: they reduce the spam I actually have to deal with personally, but they do nothing about the incredible amount of bandwidth (and money) it wastes on the inter-networks.

Spam on the Increase

seth@macrobyte.net — Sun, 27 Apr 2003 19:29:54 GMT

Spam seems to be on the increase. This weekend (Fri - Sat) I averaged more than 150 UCE messages per day. That's ridiculous.

SpamSieve caught most of it, but the spammers are learning. Perhaps 5% of this weekend's spam was not recognized, which is really bad compared to the usual 1.5% inaccuracy rate.

AOL Mail Problems

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 12 Dec 2002 11:54:42 GMT

David Carter-Tod is reporting that they're having trouble receiving email from AOL users at the school where he works, due to a configuration issue in their DNS.

Sounds familiar. We've been having that problem lately, too, off and on. Something must have changed at AOL a few weeks ago.

SpamSieve 1.2.1

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 19 Nov 2002 18:15:45 GMT

Michael Tsai has released SpamSieve 1.2.1.

The best thing about this upgrade is that it now supports Eudora and Claris Emailer 2.0v3! There aren't a lot of people still using Emailer, but there are lots of Eudora users who have been tempted to use Apple's horrendous Mail.app just for its spam filtering capabilities. Now, as long as they're willing to part with $20, they can use Eudora and have the same type of bayesian spam filters.

Brent Switched to Mail.app for Bayesian Filters

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 23 Oct 2002 16:47:31 GMT

Brent Simmons mentioned today that he switched to Mail.app from Eudora, because of the bayesian filters in Mail.app.

As I mentioned last week, I'm using SpamSieve with Mailsmith to get basically the same filtering algorithms, without having to switch to a mail client I like a lot less. I'm still training it, but only a couple unwanted messages are slipping through per day.

SpamSieve doesn't support Eudora yet, but the interface between the mail client and SpamSieve is entirely AppleScript-based. According to this support page, the only problem is a bug in Eudora 5.1.1. If it's fixed in the next version, support for Eudora will be included.

SpamSieve: Bayesian Filter for Spam in Mailsmith

seth@macrobyte.net — Sat, 12 Oct 2002 19:52:28 GMT

This morning I installed the trial version of SpamSieve, a spam detection utility for use with Mailsmith, Entourage, and PowerMail.

SpamSieve uses bayesian filters to learn what you think is, and is not, spam. After it's been trained thoroughly enough (meaning, it's seen at least a few thousand messages of both types), a bayesian filtering system should have near perfect accuracy in detecting spam.

It was easy to set up, and so far it doesn't appear to be slowing down the filtering in any noticeable fashion. (Actually, the installation instructions include a trick for accelerating the process of downloading and filtering mail, and it definitely made a difference.)

I've fed it a few thousand messages from my existing mailboxes, but it'll be quite awhile before I've received enough spam to really consider it "trained." For the last few days, I've only been receiving ten to fifteen pieces of junk mail per day. That's way down from what it was just a week ago. (Brian Andresen says the same is true for him.)

A Plan for Spam: Bayesian Filters

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 20 Aug 2002 21:08:42 GMT

Brian Andresen sent me a link to Paul Graham's Plan for Spam. It's a long article, but I found it utterly fascinating and inspiring.

Paul's plan could be put to use by hackers (for hackers) very quickly, and when the kinks are worked out it could be built into email clients for regular users.

The best part is that it's nearly perfect at catching spam (meaning: catches 99.5% of SPAM, and produces zero false positives), and if used widely enough it would effectively put an end to all spam.

My favorite quote from this article (just because of the extreme nature of his comments):

False positives are innocent emails that get mistakenly identified as spams. In the spam filtering business, false positives are your biggest worry. For most users, missing legitimate email is an order of magnitude worse than receiving spams, so a filter that yields false positives is like an acne cure that carries a risk of death to the patient.

This article got me all fired up about writing a geek-level Bayesian Spam Filter in either UserTalk or Java, for MacOS X. It would be a truly-useful tool, and would perhaps help pave the way towards tools like this being incorporated into mail clients.

Unfortunately, I still have to try to make a living, and I'm behind schedule on too many client projects to seriously consider something like this. It's too bad... I'd really like to do it, and if I wrote it in UserTalk then I could use the Attribute Search Engine for the message indexing side of the problem.

Oh well. I'll save this for another day, when I'm not behind schedule and don't have a long honey-do list (or at least when I can pretend that I don't).

Dave's Spam

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 30 Apr 2002 11:15:19 GMT

Dave Winer mentioned this morning that he received

"250 emails this morning. Only four contained content. The rest were spam and viruses."

I'd like to know how much of that email came through the Yahoo Groups that he's a member of. I'm really sick of YG! I've joined a bunch of lists hosted there in the last couple of years, but now they seem to be my single largest source of spam (either spam sent directly to the list, or spam sent to the address I used to subscribe only to that list).

Bare Bones (Finally) Releases Mailsmith 1.5

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 25 Mar 2002 15:51:54 GMT

Bare Bones Software, Inc., has released Mailsmith 1.5.

Look, the truth is that email clients suck. All of them, they all suck. Some less than others, of course. So it's ironic that my absolute favorite email client is from a company whose motto is "Software that doesn't suck."

I'm one of the (rather proud) beta testers for Mailsmith.

The list of improvements from the previous version (1.1.6) to this new version is extremely long. My favorites include the following:

The same text engine as is used in BBEdit 6.5, including GREP-based searching across one or many mailboxes
Nearly identical text-suite support (scripting) as in BBEdit 6.5
Built-in PGP support (not available on X because PGP isn't on X yet)
One-click SpamCop reporting
Display HTML email as plain text

In my opinion, Mailsmith sucks the least of all of the email clients I've used. I even like 1.5 better than the long-dead Claris Emailer... and that's really saying something.

(To anybody who tried Mailsmith when it was first released: it's lost all of the stability problems that plagued it back then. Mailsmith hasn't crashed on me, except when using a couple of the betas, in at least a year.)

Congratulations on a job well done to Rich, Jim, Christian, John, and everybody else at BareBones.

ORBZ: Good Riddance, Now Who's Next?

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 20 Mar 2002 15:47:46 GMT

Greg scooped me, again. This time it's on the report at the Register that ORBZ has shut down.

Oh, that's such great news. I really hated that "service"... I'm not even a spammer, but their approach to fighting spam sucked as much as it is possible to suck. I'd rather receive 500 spam messages per day than have a single valid email blocked by their foolishness.

Think about it. Would you want all postal mail from Lancaster, PA, blocked from reaching your town, simply because that's where a huge amount of junk-mail catalogs are printed and mailed?

I think not.

I can't stand spam, and I'm an active user of SpamCop, but those black-hole lists are worse.

Unfortunately, they're sprouting like weeds.

Spammer's Black List

seth@macrobyte.net — Sat, 26 Jan 2002 17:59:53 GMT

I wonder if there's any such thing as a "Spammer's Black List", a list of people that the Spamsters don't send spam to.

I wonder how many messages I have to report to SpamCop, and how many spammers' accounts I have to eliminate at the host, before they put me on that list.

(So far, I'm well into the hundreds.)