Stripsearch / End of spam predicted

[Tom Anderson]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Chris Fortune" <cfortune at telus.net>
> Good financial argument, but there's one assumption that's wrong, it 
> doesn't matter if nobody buys spammer's products, that's not
> what finances the largest spam businesses.  Here's the con job:  Spammer 
> Inc. advertises various bulk mail advertising packages to
> wannabe mail order tycoons.  Sucker takes the bait and pays a reasonable 
> low fee to Spammer Inc.  Spammer Inc sends out a few
> million emails, using a bot network, stolen resources, yada yada, whatever 
> is their superior weapon, it doesn't matter anyway.  Even
> if they do have good penetration, nobody in their right mind is going to 
> read that spam or buy any junk, and even if they do,
> there's not much profit in that.  Instead, Spammer Inc will arrange to 
> purchase a few items from the sucker, then present the sucker
> with a revenues cheque and a carefully doctored accounting report, and 
> sweeten him up for the Big Con:  an exclusive, members only,
> several thousand dollar investment in the Platinum Bulk Mail Package.   Of 
> course sucker loses his shirt and Spammer Inc has
> plausible deniability.  If they think they can take sucker for another 
> bigger ride, they buy some more of his junk and do it all
> over again.  These are the guys who are sending out gazillions of emails, 
> and are willing to research how to penetrate filters.
> It's not about product sales at all, it's about fraud.

It will be only so long before the ineffectiveness of spam is common 
knowledge.  Your scenario I doubt is the most prevalent, and even if it is, 
it won't last long.  Moreover, I'm betting that "bot networks" will be far 
harder to establish and maintain in the near future.  If Microsoft doesn't 
beef up security through service packs or Longhorn, it won't be long before 
ISPs start throttling down, filtering, or blocking users sending large 
amounts of email.  Legitimate methods of sending email will be too 
expensive, and illegitimate methods are in a losing battle.  80% of spam is 
generated by just 200 known spam operations 
(http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/index.lasso).  Most of these are directly 
marketing products (viagra, HGH, timeshares, porn, address lists, debt 
consolidation, printer ink, etc), or trying to pump up stocks, not conning 
fellow would-be spammers.  Knocking out just a few of these by making it 
unprofitable and extremely difficult to spam will cut down on the total spam 
problem significantly.

In a New York Times article, they describe the plight of uberspammer Alan 
Ralsky: "It was taking more mail to get the same response. (His target is to 
earn $500 in profit for every 1 million e-mails sent. His commission is 
often 40 percent of the price of each product sold.) And the cost of his 
carefully arranged international network is going up, even more so now." 
[http://web.archive.org/web/20031231030023/http://www.iht.com/articles/123183.html]

> bogofilter mailing list seems to have removed it?  The href's were in this 
> format http://paypal.com/?s8s980s8 , and the query
> strings were all different.  Only the last one was marked as SCAM-ADDRESS.

I really need the exact text to determine if there was a bug or not, and 
why.  You can send it to me directly.

Tom