OT - Suggestions for dealing with spam

[Baron Grazic]

I was recently at a Secure Technology Conferance and they were quoting stats from a Gartner survey that says that by 2004 50% of all email received will be spam.
According to their studies 58.4% of spam orginates from the US, with China coming second with only 5.6% and Great Britian 5.2%.
This gives the indication that the US needs to start the anti-spamming initiatives and ensure they follow thru...
If we want spam stopped completely, it is the big ISPs that should start the process, since they have the technology, information and might behind them to combat it.
Having a company or Govt body doing IP scans and contacting the companies out there that have mistakenly activated 'Mail Routing' would also help in a small way. If the spammers are unable to bounch emails from unsuspecting company routers then tracing their source will be so much easier.
Just my rant for the day...

[Instar]

Recently on slashdot I read about several anti-Spam blacklist servers have been dedicated denial of service (DDoS) to death. I wonder who was behind it... www.spamhaus.org I think has a lot of really good resources on it. Myself, I have one clean account and one throwaway that Ive been using for a while now. I get over 100 junk mail a day or so. Its nice to think that I am popular or something.

[Instar]

Originally posted by DavidG:

quote:

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Originally posted by Loser:

When I say feasible, I don't mean possible. Sure it's possible, but you'd have a hard time arguing that money needs to be spent there when it could be put to more useful ends.

Heheh. yea I knew what you meant. Guess I was just feeling argumentative because these spammers piss me off so much.

I wonder if anyone knows how hard it really is to find out the origin of spam? I know it's impossible for average joes like me but for someone with the right technical knowlegde...

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Actually you can usually find the legit sender of the spam (as they fake the "From" email address very easily. www.spamhaus.org usually has good guide to it I think.

[Baron Grazic]

Sorry Instar, I couldn't locate anywhere on that site, how to trace the orginal source.

For those people reading this that have Outlook or Outlook Express and are interested, you can quickly look at the history of any email by :-
Outlook - 'Right click, Options, Internet Headers'
Express - 'Right click, Properties, Details'

Reading it can be a little bit more tricky, but reading the Received: lines, will give you an indication of where the email came from, and you should be able to find the IP address.

If you have an email from PBW, you should be able to use this method to determine that the email came from PBW and not the hosts email account.