From: dlv@bwalk.dm.com (Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM)
Date: Sun, 17 Aug 1997 15:49:56 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Picketing With Packets
In-Reply-To: <19970816232134.20321.qmail@zipcon.net>
Message-ID: <55JkBe2w165w@bwalk.dm.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Mike Duvos <enoch@zipcon.net> writes:

> dlv@bwalk.dm.com (Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM) writes:
>
>  > In all fairness, in addition to Stanford Wallace, there are
>  > several other spammers sending out junk e-mail. If you
>  > completely eliminate Stanford and his company, you will
>  > STILL get junk e-mail.
>
> If Mr. Spamford were terminated with extreme prejudice, my junk
> email would be reduced to managable levels.

Perhaps because others like him would be scared... Most of the shit
I get is from other spammers.

>  > Perhaps this will spark another round of a cypherpunk
>  > discussion of technical solutions to junk e-mail...
>
> I'm tempted to go some sort of postage route myself, but I
> occasionally get mail from newbies who have never written me
> before, and who occasionally have something interesting to say.

How about this: have a program
keep a list of the message-ids of all the articles you send to
Usenet or via e-mail for a week. if someone sends you an
e-mail with "In-Reply-to" message-id on the list, consider
reading it. Otherwise if it's from a stranger, e-mail back
explaining your filtering policy, and remember the message-id,
so this time they can respond.

>  > I placed myself on a zillion "remove" lists.  Now I no
>  > longer get any junk e-mail of interest (which I did on rare
>  > occasions), but still get at least once a day an MMF and/or
>  > an ad for a sex site.
>
>  > I'll tell you what I did, if anyone cares to spend a little
>  > time emulating what I did.
>
>  > Visit these two sites and jump through the loops:
>
> It is not *I* who should do the hoop-jumping in order to keep my
> mailbox free of garbage.

Here's a little crypto project:

When you go to the iemmc.org site and enter your userid in a form,
it e-mails back to you a number.  You're supposed to retrive
your e-mail, then go to another iemmc.org site and again type
in your address and the number, and then you'll be removed from
their junk mail list... yeah, right.

Another dirty trick on iemmc.org's part is that if you're junking
all e-mail from them, you can't get their number and can't complete
their removal process (not that it helps much).

Observation 1: it's much easier to get ON their junk mail list
then to get OFF of it.

Observation 2: if you enter the same userid several times, you
get several different numbers in the mail; all of them work
(not just the latest)

Observation 3: a number that works with one address won't work
with another address.

It looks like the magic number has some random part and a checksum
of the e-mail address you're trying to remove.

It would embarrass them if we had a way of generating the numbers
than their cgi script accepts. (Alternatively, maybe someone can
pull out the source to their cg script...) Then people would be
able to get themselves on the "remove" list much easier.

> Additionally, a lot of mail is of the "This is the only mailing
> you will receive from us" variety.  Getting 50 a day of those can
> be royally annoying as well.
>
> I am tempted to launch a few thousand packets in the direction of
> any IP which sends me unwanted material trying to sell me
> something.  If everyone did this, spamming machines would be
> buried in a packet snowstorm within a few minutes of starting
> operations.

Or they'll develop new techniques to combat such DOS attacks
that'll benefit us all. :-)

---

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps