Ian Hilliard wrote:
> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>
> > Why thus discussion about SPAM all out of the blue? Because hundreds of
> > megabytes of SPAM fill up my account more quickly than I can erase it
> > while benign messages that I send to people get intercepted. The E-mail
> > infrastrcuture has become flakier and less reliable than ever before. It
> > fell victim to Microsoft Windows. It's time to go Open Source. [end rant
> > /]
>
> Some time back, there was some discussion about how to handle spam. The idea
> was to have all spam marked as spam. Not marking spam as spam would be
> illegal. Not long after that the first stories about Windows boxes being
> turned into spam-bots came out.
>
> Microsoft's miserable security has become a tool being used by spammers now,
> but it is not the root problem. The root problem is that some people
> actually respond to the spam. The figure may be one in a Million, but it
> costs nothing to get an army of spambots to send out 100 Million
> spam-mails.
>
> What really needs to happen is for MTA's to filter out spam. This is
> admittedly a very difficult task as many spammers are good at disguising
> their work so that it doesn't get detected as spam. It is however the first
> and most important step. If the spam doesn't get to the fools, the fools
> won't fall for it, the spammers won't make money out of spamming and that
> will be the end of spam.
>
I believe that ultimately this is where it will need to be done. Even
IF (that's a big IF) every owned Windows spam-bot were removed from
existence, there would still be spam. Spammers would get throw-away ISP
accounts, get legitimate web-hosting (with email access) and use a
variety of other ways to send SPAM.
Getting a Windows zombie is currently the cheapest way to send SPAM but
there are several other methods they could always turn to. Then again,
it doesn't look like the Zombie-PC is going away anytime soon.
MTA's should use methods to identify and block spam. When Aunt Milly
starts sending 500,000 emails per day that should be a sign to both the
MTA's and to Milly's ISP that something isn't right.
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