Talk:Spamming

New comments at the bottom please

Chain email spam

I don't know enough to write this myself, but...
a) is there a name for the emails that say "if you send this to 11 people a video will pop up on your screen"? b) is this spam as such, or does it have another name?

A) Wouldn't that just be a form of chain mail? B) It might not qualify as spam under its definition as unsolicited commercial email (since they're typically not commercia); but it might qualify under the broader historical context (think Monty Python: "spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, and more spam" and usenet postings drowning out all discourse).

UCE

What is UCE? -- Zoe

UCE == Unsolicited Commercial Email; UBE == Unsolicited Bulk Email. Spam is often defined by antispammers as "UCE or UBE". That is to say, if you get mail you didn't ask for and it is either commercial (advertising something), or bulk (duplicate messages have been sent to a large number of other people), or both, then it is spam.

"Antispammers" or "spamfighters" are people (usually mail system administrators, but sometimes just concerned users) who try to stop spam. They do this by teaching people why spam is bad (and ineffective); by advocating laws and suits against it; by encouraging ISPs to kick off spammers; and by implementing technical means to reduce spam, such as filters and DNSBLs.

You can learn a lot about spam, spammers, antispammers, and so forth from the Spam FAQs at http://www.spamfaq.net/ and on the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email. --FOo

Topics to Cover

This is a moderately complicated topic technically, and can get very complicated (and flamy) socially. Some things that it might be useful to cover in the future, within the purview of email spamming along, include:

Spamfighting history
Spammer businesses ("spam gangs")
"Mainsleaze" (so-called)
Different views on what constitutes spam
Confirmed opt-in
Mailing list vendors ("millions CDs")
Spam blocking techniques (blacklists, DNSBLs)
Spam filtering techniques (content filtering, Razor, DCC, naive-Bayesian filtering, SpamAssassin)
The question of whether spam filtering is effective (see [1] for one discussion of its limitations)

Within the purview of Usenet spamming, it might do to have more on the subject of sporgery (touching perhaps on Hipcrime) as well as the Cancelmoose and NoCeM systems. --FOo

I decided not to add "chickenboner" as a see also. BF

NPOV the Article

This article takes a strong stand against spam. Believe me, I sympathize, but we need to rework it so that it presents the issues from a neutral point of view -- Stephen Gilbert 16:05 Jan 10, 2003 (UTC)

Ok. First find someone who either likes receiving spam or admits to sending it. -- Tarquin 17:10 Jan 10, 2003 (UTC)

I agree that this article is strongly POV, even though I'm a spam fighter. However, I have the suspicion that if we were to announce to the spammers "Hey, spammers, here's an article on spam; please edit it to include your point of view"... Well, they'd probably vandalize it so much that we'd have to make the article protected.

We could try to figure out what spammers think by reading public interviews with spammers, but the interviews I've seen haven't had any defenses of spamming; spammers simply seem to not care about any criticisms leveled against them. There is a mailing list for spammers, but it's closed and the only let actually spammers in. Probably someone should find a direct-marketing web forum , ask some questions, and then paraphrase the answers.

I do know that some spammers have accused spam fighters of being vigilantes, and of being in the pay of "big business" in order to squelch an advertizing method that can be used by "the little guys". Maybe we should include that? -- Khym Chanur 04:34, Oct 29, 2003 (UTC)

If anyone wants to do some detective-work on the spammer's POV, here's a list of spammer web forums. -- Khym Chanur 11:32, Nov 4, 2003 (UTC)

I'd say one step towards NPOV would be to address these points:

1. Since contact information is frequently false or misleading, why do people advertise with spam?

Anecdotal evidence I've seen points to the conclusion that the money in spam is not made by the person or company who is advertised (let's call him the customer), but by the spammer. A customer will either pay so much for each contact made because of a spam run, which works out to a profit for the spammer of a few thousand dollars for a run (before the cost of the account, & appreciation for the hardware, & labor); or the customer pays a flat fee for the run. In either case, the spammer has no interest in "cleaning" her/his list of addresses; the time saved by reducing the total number of addressees is considered less than the time spent cleaning the list of inactive accounts & people who are not interested.

2. Arguments for spam (they actually do exist!):

The trade association for Direct Sales (I forget their name) has fiercely defended the "right" to spam people. Apparently, they believe that eventually spamming will become at least as acceptable as telemarketing, & so want to keep that option open.
From what I've read, spamming is considered acceptible sales behavior in some Asian countries, such as China, Hong Kong, & Korea. They cannot understand the American & European reaction, & basically ignore the protests. As a result not a few ISPs or end users block all email from many Asian countries, & only allow through specific email addresses of people they have a relationship with.

I'd add this material to the main article, but I'm writing this all from memory, & don't have any references available. -- llywrch 20:03, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Actually, it's a myth that spamming is "acceptable sales behavior" in Korea at least. For instance, South Korea passed a law a couple of years ago mandating that all email advertising put a filterable string in the Subject line (the equivalent of the "ADV:" mandated by some U.S. state laws), so that recipient sites could reject advertising. Here are some links on the spam issue in Korea: [2] [3] [4] (last one is in Korean)--FOo 14:13, 23 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Philosophical questions or Advocacy?

67.194.67.71 added a large section entitled "Philosophical questions" which, while insightful in some ways, is phrased as a piece of advocacy. (See this diff.) I have incorporated some of the concerns expressed into the page in a more neutral form. I invite additions to the "political" section by those who can more clearly express these concerns.

As for the question of the page being too strong of a stand against spam -- in my experience there are precious few arguments for spamming. Spammers usually claim not to be doing anything wrong, but they don't exactly claim to be doing anything right. Email spamming is not after all a sustainable practice; unchecked, it renders email unusable, thereby destroying the very resource it is parasitical upon. --FOo

Expanded

Expanded the links and added some structure for others to build on. Or me, later. Will probably evolve into some sort of practical tools page eventually but this is as good a place to start as any. JamesDay

Rare Spam & Opt-in

Has anyone *ever* received a spam message like the one added to the page by User:24.159.246.142? I haven't, and I think the statement "most spam blockers can't stop this" is also wrong. If there are no objections, I'll rollback his edits. -- Schnee 22:32, 18 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I've never received a spam like that, but it would not surprise me. It is inaccurate, however, to day that "spam blockers can't stop this." In fact, while obfuscation techniques work to get around censorware programs that look for "dirty words", they actually make it easier for smarter filters to catch the spam: instead of looking for the words, a smarter filter looks for the obfuscation techniques! For instance, here's a regular expression from my site's spam filters:

/\S[A-Za-z]<!--.*-->[A-Za-z]\S/

This catches the use of HTML comments in the middle of a word, which is a common spammer technique to obfuscate "dirty words". --FOo 01:04, 19 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I removed this for being non-npov: The fact that spam is usually contains very boorish language evidently written by persons lacking the mental capacity to grasp the concept of politeness or spelling or grammatical sentences also contributes to the low esteem in which spammers are held.

and this as I don't think it's true: (By and large, senders of email advertisements each assert that what they do is not spamming.) Often the rationale for such assertions is a dishonest statement that the recipient has "opted in", i.e., solicited bulk mailings from the sender. Angela

It is a fact that many spam messages contain the claim that the recipient "opted in". It is also a fact that, as a mail system administrator, I have frequently had users inform me that these claims, with regards to specific spam they have received, are quite false. (One of my users was recently very distraught over a spammer's claim that he opted-in to receive spam advertising child pornography.) I believe if you search archives of known spam -- such as the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.sightings, which is a public spam archive -- you will see many examples of blanket "opt-in" claims which are regarded as false by the mail recipients. --FOo 05:35, 6 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Also, many spams contain "opt-out" or "remove" links that supposedly let the user opt-out of future spams. These links are often used to just verify that the email address the spam was sent to is valid and, in fact, guarentees that the email address user will get more spam in the future! Even if a spammer actually has a valid opt-out link (is there such a spammer that would do such a thing?), they know that most users know that such links are just used to confirm email addresses and not remove them and know that most experienced users will just ignore them anyway!

Hmm, I haven't read the entire article lately, but if the information above isn't in the article, it should be added. :-)

BTW, I have received spam like the one 24.159.246.142 added, but it is an uncommon one. —Frecklefoot 15:15, 6 Nov 2003 (UTC)

SPAM vs. spamming

Isn't it more appropriate for SPAM to redirect to this article referring to unwarranted mail first? There are many out there (esp. outside US), who have no idea that there is actually a product called SPAM, but any internet user knows what Spamming is. I feel there can be a disambiguation on top of the spamming page that can take care of the product (and the other meanings). Spamming is more well-researched than SPAM anyway.

It is not that I dont see the reason why it is organised as it is now (considering that all-caps SPAM should refer to the product and all), but I still feel it is better, if the article and the disambiguation is organised the other way around. (At least to me, until about a little while ago, the word spam had only one invidious meaning) chance 13:33, Dec 3, 2003 (UTC)

Moved to Spam (e-mail). A gerund is not a good name for a page title. Vacuum 23:27, Jan 21, 2004 (UTC)

On that note, why is there that noarticle-link to Email spam in the 'Types of Spam' section? Isn't that what this page itself is about? Also, the front page featured article stil links to 'spamming'. -- Fennec 23:05, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Much of the content of this page is about non-email spam, or spamming in general. So, unless content is moved around (i.e. out of this article), then "spam (e-mail)" is not an appropriate title for this article. --Minesweeper 08:48, 31 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Someone just added "This kind of spam is very easy to switch off: just click on Start, Run and enter "cmd.exe"." Does this have to be done on every boot, or does windows "memorise" this. If it has to be done every time, then it doesn't qualify as "easy". - snoyes 18:31, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)