Carl’s SEO & Web Design Blog

Our spam load has increased dramatically during the last few weeks in spite of spam filters on our host and system. We trap the IPs and domains of spam hosts and load them to a database. This is our black list, and is available and uncopyrighted at http://www.creatingnewworlds.org/stopspam.cfm.

Note: This page is temporarily down. We upgraded our Windows 2000 from sp3 to sp4 and lost the driver that updates the MySQL database in the process. We hope to have this page back soon. The local Access file is still being updated during this time.

The government is doing very little. We just mailed our end-of-year copy of this to the FTC, President Bush, and one of my senators, Senator Ron Wyden. We’re giving them a few suggestions. Here is Senator Wyden’s copy of the letter. Then we’ll tell you what you can do:

Re: Failure of CAN-SPAM Act

Please find enclosed a listing of the spam reaching my system that is illegal or fraud. The FTC is supposed to be finding these and stopping this using the CAN-SPAM act, but it is obvious that the CAN-SPAM act is a total failure. In fact, looking at this indicates that their recent 100+ page report on the FTC “success” with the CAN-SPAM is spin, not facts.

As the government has failed to stop the spams, we are putting the domain name and domain name of spam that reaches us online in a public database and encourage hackers to destroy the IPs and domains. The IP, then, becomes dead for whoever uses it next. That is the only alternative we have at the moment. The page, located at http://www.creatingnewworlds.org/stopspam.cfm, has a very good PageRank of 4 on Google. We blog the page. When we get a gripe or someone threatening to sue, we send their illegal email to their state attorney general (when they are US based) and that stops them. We’ve had no foreign complaints. As other people do this (which we encourage), there is an erosion of available IPs. Spam has to be stopped at its source.

In my world, if I had employees at the FTC with this level of failure I would fire them. Failure to do this puts the responsibility of the failure directly at the commission of the FTC and on the President, to which the commission reports.

Here are some suggestions I would encourage you very strongly to make:

1. Raise the current fine level to finance what needs to be done. Germany charges $65,000 a spam. (This probably requires an act of Congress). Without the proper resources and if doing nothing, you are sending a message that the government (Administration and Congress) is owned by the DMA. Is that the message you and the President want to send?

2. Enforce the fine. They break the law, they pay the fine. No nice talk.

3. Return a portion of the fine (10% split between whoever reports the IP) to the people reporting the spam to finance their processing.
4. Hold accountability at the FTC. Fire when people aren’t doing their job..

I will be blogging what the FTC, the President and Congress does. This letter is in a blog posted at http://www.netadventures.biz/wordpress.

What You Can Do
Here are some suggestions on what you can do.

• Build you own black list of the sites that the spam email points it. We put some email addresses in our database for sources of the spam. For example, if the spam tells you to go to http://www.thisdomain.com, then put that domain and its IP in the database.

• If you want to include the host systems IPs and domains of where the email spam is coming from, we have a $15 dollar paper that shows you how to read those email headers. Certain lines in the header can’t be forged. The paper tells you where and are and how to use them. Order from our store.

• Fire your listing off to the FTC, the President, and your senators and representatives. Remember some of them are up for election next fall. Don’t try to blackmail them with your vote. they are already running scared - or should be. Don’t be a one-issue voter next fall, but hold your senator and representtives accountable.

• If someone complains about being on the list and they are in the U.S., send the information to the state Attorney General where they reside. Keep your spam email so you can send that to the Attorney General. We never get complaints from foreign hosts.

• Know the CAN-SPAM Act so you can tell when they violate it. Use the Federal Trade Commission’s web site to find that.

• Hack the spam hosts if you like. They are already illegal.

Have fun. If you want to use our ColdFusion program on stopspam.cfm, go for it. Look at the source code and copy and paste into a page on your site. Change the database pointers to your own web site. Change fields as necessary. We just put the IPs and domains in a local Access database and then upload it periodically to the MySql database on the host. Very simple. Check with your host on how to do this. Change hosts to our host if they can’t