Conference back40::soapbox

From: [email protected] (BonesG8)
Newsgroups: news.admin.net-abuse.misc
Subject: Major Anti-Spam Court Decision
Date: 4 Feb 1997 05:24:00 GMT
Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com
Lines: 30

Judge Graham of the Southern District of Ohio today issued a preliminary
injunction barring Cyber Promotions from sending unsolicited e-mail
messages to CompuServe subscribers on the ground that such messages
constitute a trespass upon CompuServe's proprietary computer equipment.  

The 32 page opinion is precedent setting.  AOL had previously obtained an
order allowing it to block Cyber Promo's mailings.  The order obtained by
CompuServe prohibits Cyber Promo from sending messages to CompuServe in
the first place.  More importantly, the Court's order is easily adaptable
to spam sent by any party to any ISP.  Conceivably, even an individual
could sue a spammer for trespass!

The Court flatly rejected Cyber Promo's arguments: 1) by opening itself up
to receive Internet mail, CompuServe was obligated to carry any messages
sent to it and 2) the first amendment obligated CompuServe to carry Cyber
Promo's mailings. 

A few points influenced the court:

1.  Compuserve had specifically notified Cyber Promotions that it was not
authorized to use Compuserve's equipment to carry Cyber Promo's mailings. 

2.  Compuserve had attempted to block Cyber Promo's mailings and Cyber
Promo had evaded the filter;

3.  Compuserve established it had been lost subscribers and subscriber
goodwill as a result of Cyber Promotions' mailings.

Cheers for Compuserve.   A copy of the decision should be available in
this group tomorrow.   

As you know, I just returned from a 12 day business trip.

There were 75 messages from the internet in my unread mail.

*Fifty* of them were spam.

Grrrrrrrr.

/john

    I know what you mean John. I've tried everything I can think of to shut
    the spammers out. I've reported them to their ISP, have an e-mail
    address killfile, reported to my ISP and returned the spam to the
    sender. None of this has helped. We have three different e-mail
    addresses at home and every night there are at least 10-15 spam messages 
    on each. The problem is these spammers change the from address and even 
    disguise the ISP name. 
    
    If anybody has any suggestions how to stop this I would love to know. 

I am learning procmail for use on my internet ISP where I get my daily spam.
This is a Unix mail filter. The trick is to filter out (delete) all messages
from known spam sites as well as look for evidence where the spam really comes
from (don't believe the From: line) and filter on that.  I'll supply more info
once I learn. 

Spambots collect addresses from anything posted to Usenet groups, so either
fake the From: address or expect to get spammed if you post to them. Allegedly
they'll pick up email addresses from anywhere in the message.  Don't ever
respond to the "To remove yourself from our mail list send mail to..." since
they use these as VALID email addresses (more valuable! They can sell this list
for more money!!) 

They also mine web pages for mailto: tags (AltaVista's evil twin) 

    Who knows how to alter your "from:" line when posting to newsgroups?
    
    I get too much spam, and a lot of people are adding a false character
    (or several) in their return addresses along with instructions for
    how to really send mail in order to foil the spambots. 
    
    I'm using mxrn on an osf alpha ws that's also running DECathena. 

	Spam is horrible..... it seems to have made the transition from food to
email and keep everything intact.

    I'm beta testing the Exchange/Outlook plug-in to read AOL mail.
    
    It's gonna be cool:  The first real chance I get to try the Outlook
    Rules Wizard.  AOL is the only place I ever get spammed, and it
    constitutes about 95% of my AOL mail.

    Yeah, I like that feature with Outlook.  I use it exclusively.

    >I'm beta testing the Exchange/Outlook plug-in to read AOL mail.
    
    Where can I get this?

    There's a link on Microsoft's web page under the Outlook product.  They
    direct you to some guy at AOL to email, and if he likes you, he puts
    you on the Beta test list.
    
    Presumably, it'll be released for Windows-95 soon.  Unfortunately, I
    can't induce it to work under NT 4.0.

The latest multiple spam attack is coming from something called
"videosluts.com".

The mail claims that the pictures are live, and that they will do
whatever you tell them.

/john

       <<< Note 786.118 by COVERT::COVERT "John R. Covert" >>>
  >>  The mail claims that the pictures are live, and that they will do
  >>  whatever you tell them.
                                       
Even repent their shameless activites?

"Paint my house."

    >The mail claims that the pictures are live, and that they will do
    >whatever you tell them.
    
    So John, how was it??   :)

    expensive.

    High bawd rate?

	A A A R R R G G G H H H ! ! !

savetrees.com!

S E V E N T E E N   copies of the latest crap spam.

In just the last hour and a half.

/john

_NINETEEN_ more of the identical messages arrived from savetrees during the
night, for a total of forty-one!

/john

    Could your reports of the spam be considered spam?

I have a method that eliminates about 80% of email spam for those who use an
ISP with a Unix shell account with access to procmail (a mail filter/management
utility)

Set up a mail filter that junks or bounces everything that does NOT have your
email address somewhere in the To: or Cc: field.  About 80% of spam uses a
bogus To: field (I've even seen NO To: field!), it uses the Bcc: field which
does not show up.

Danger Will Robinson! If you subscribe to any listserv maillists you must have
another filter rule preceding this to allow stuff from the maillist through.

I'll bring in the appropiate procmail "recipes" tomorrow (it's quite arcane
so I don't remember the syntax offhand)

For John and other VMS users: If you have Deliver installed on the system it
can do pretty much the same thing.