Email spam history and email spammers

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Meaning of Spam
Spam starts with episode 25 of Monty Python's Flying Circus,
and a group of Vikings sing the word Spam over and over...

Email spam

The 'correct' term for email spam is Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE), though you'll see the term Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE) used more often.

Spam is popular amongst the scammers, the multi-level marketing crowd and the porn pushers because it costs them so little to send. This is because they send it by stealing the resources of others.

Shunning. At any one time the majority of spam comes from a few sites. By shunning them, refusing all articles from them the amount of spam drops.

Hunt the perpetrators down. Complain to their upstream provider. Repeatedly get them shut down. Get the servers, web pages and email addresses of the advertisers yanked. Report the illegal schemes to the local police.

There are three main flavours of email spam

1. Spam sent by an ordinary customer of an ISP, sent via his ISPs mailserver, usually with minimal forging of the headers. This tends to be sent by newbie spammers. If they're slapped down by their ISP they may decide spamming is bad, or they may just get more sophisticated.

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2. Spam sent using spamware - programs specifically designed to send huge amounts of email (up to 100,000 emails an hour) over an ordinary dialup internet connection. This software is designed to steal service from an innocent third party by relaying email through their server. It's also designed to forge the email headers to deflect complaints away from the perpetrator, either towards the third-party or towards yet another innocent bystander. The load this puts on the third-party server can bring an ISP down for days.

3. 'Professional' spamhauses. These are company’s setup purely to commit theft and fraud. They have permanent internet connections, or sometimes have their servers in the premises of other crooked service providers. They don't usually spam to advertise themselves, instead they find clueless businessmen and charge them $1000 or so to send their advert to hundreds of thousands of people's mailboxes.

What can be done?
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Filter them out or bounce them back. If you receive email via a unix system you may be able to run procmail filters. If not you can use the spam filter capabilities of your mail reader, or one of the many third party filtering tools, freeware from www.mailwasher.net--that allows you to filter, bounced, blacklist and delete spam emails from your ISPs mail server without having to download it into your email client.

Hunt the perpetrators down. Complain to their upstream provider. Repeatedly get them shut down. Get the servers, web pages and email addresses of the advertisers yanked. Invoice them for your time or sue them in a small claims court when they don't pay up. Report the illegal schemes to the local police.

Tracing the perpetrators using spamware, or the spamhauses requires some familiarity with email headers--see bottom of page on Sam Spade freeware spam tracing tools.

The Spam Sketch
The cast:

Man - Eric Idle

Wife - Graham Chapman

Waitress - Terry Jones

The sketch:
Scene: A cafe. One table is occupied by a group of Vikings with horned helmets on. A man and his wife enter.

Man	You sit here, dear.
Wife	All right.
Man	(to Waitress) Morning!
Waitress	Morning!
Man	Well, what've you got?
Waitress	Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam; spam bacon sausage and spam; spam egg spam spam bacon and spam; spam sausage spam spam bacon spam tomato and spam;
Vikings	(starting to chant) Spam spam spam spam...
Waitress	...spam spam spam egg and spam; spam spam spam spam spam spam baked beans spam spam spam...
Vikings	(singing) Spam! Lovely spam! Lovely spam!
Waitress	...or Lobster Thermidor au Crevettes with a mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on top and spam.
Wife	Have you got anything without spam?
Waitress	Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Wife	I don't want ANY spam!
Man	Why can't she have egg bacon spam and sausage?
Wife	THAT'S got spam in it!
Man	Hasn't got as much spam in it as spam egg sausage and spam, has it?
Vikings	Spam spam spam spam (crescendo through next few lines)
Wife	Could you do the egg bacon spam and sausage without the spam then?
Waitress	Urgghh!
Wife	What do you mean 'Urgghh'? I don't like spam!
Vikings	Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!
Waitress	Shut up!
Vikings	Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!
Waitress	Shut up! (Vikings stop) Bloody Vikings! You can't have egg bacon spam and sausage without the spam.
Wife	(shrieks) I don't like spam!
Man	Sshh, dear, don't cause a fuss. I'll have your spam. I love it. I'm having spam spam spam spam spam spam spam beaked beans spam spam spam and spam!
Vikings	(singing) Spam spam spam spam. Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!
Waitress	Shut up!! Baked beans are off.
Man	Well could I have her spam instead of the baked beans then?
Waitress	You mean spam spam spam spam spam spam... (but it is too late and the Vikings drown her words)
Vikings	(singing elaborately) Spam, spam, spam, spam. Lovely spam! Wonderful spaaam! Lovely spam! Wonderful spam. Spa-a-a-a-a-a-a-am! Spa-a-a-a-a-a-a-am! Spa-a-a-a-a-a-a-am! Spa-a-a-a-a-a-a-am! Lovely spam! (Lovely spam!) Lovely spam! (Lovely spam!) Lovely spaaam! Spam, spam, spam, spaaaaam!

The information on this page is derived from: Internet Protocol Addressing Help Topics - www.samspade.org a spam tracking freeware.

Some of the tools provided by Sam Spade

Dig tool, requests all the DNS records for a host or domain

Finger tool, asks a server about one of it's users

Traceroute tool, finds the route packets take between you
and the selected address

PING tool, sends a series of packets to the current address to see if it's alive and how long it takes packets to make the round trip

Whois tool, for contacting network registries to find out contact information for the current domain or IP address.

nslookup a DNS whois tool that perform forward and reverse DNS queries for the current address (this will usually give you the IP address of a hostname and the hostname of an IP address)

IP Block is a multiple server lookup tool to find owner of the block of domain or IP address.

SMTP Relay Verify (checking) tool, to find out whether a SMTP server is insecure--therefore allowing anyone to relay email through it. (Spammers relay email through third party mail server which obfuscasates message headers and harder to find the originator)