Fighting Spam and Winning
For over a year we’ve been black-listing spam hosts. This has been minimally effective - but some changes are in store to increase the effectiveness of our black list. One guy threatened to sue - until we mailed his spam email to his State Attorney General.
We did have two problems, however.
-
We store the spam hosts for the spam and phish we receive in Microsoft Access, then upload the list dynamically to a MySQL database on our host. Later versions of Access (the shipping product for many years) has a bug in it that prevents this from working. Last January we worked with Microsoft engineers to get this working by switching in a dll from an Access version two levels back. Now Microsoft, with one of their “automatic updates” broke this again. We don’t know when or if this will be fixed. So we give you the list now in a static PDF form that we plan to update on weekends at:
http://www.creatingnewworlds.org/stopspam.cfm.
Hackers and Botnets can enjoy this free blacklist of illegal operators for their fun and games! - The online tool we use to identify these hosts from the spam went down, probably from an attack from the bad guys. The tool is back up in a primitive form (http://www.samspade.org), so we can start trying to process our backlog with it.
We will also expand the ranking of our spam listing page. We’ve had great success in the past by using the blogs to create a blog swarm and build high traffic levels on pages. We will try that with this spam page listing now to get its traffic up.
If you don’t like this, sorry. The Bush Administration has been given the charge by Congress to stop and fine these guys. Apparently they aren’t doing it. Too many geldings and wimpys in Congress and the Administration. (You probably get to vote next month - vote a lot of these out.) The hosts have been treating this like a joke. That leaves it up to the users to stop it.
Join us in this war. Create your own black list and circulate it in through the spam blog comments to the hackers and bad guys. This eventually creates another botnet, but targeted at the bad guys. Get serious.