Ever wonder where spam came from?

[JadziaDax]

Spam's Big Bang!
The volume of junk e-mail has exploded this year. Can the Internet be saved?
By CHRIS TAYLOR
Tuesday, Jun. 10, 2003
(printed in the June 16, 2003, issue of Time Magazine)

LINK

Cable-TV descramblers! FDA-approved diet pills! Viagra without a prescription! Instant access to XXX movies! Dramatically enhanced orgasms! If you have ever received e-mails advertising products and services like these — some quite within the law, some clearly outside it — chances are they came from a guy like Howard Carmack, professional spammer.

Using three computers and working out of his mother's home in Buffalo, N.Y., Carmack sent an impressive 857,500,000 unsolicited e-mails in one year, something that is perfectly legal in New York State. But Carmack crossed the line, according to EarthLink, his Internet service provider, when he set up 343 accounts using stolen credit-card numbers to send these e-mails.

EarthLink took notice and began a year-long cat-and-mouse game to discover Carmack's true identity. "My name's not on anything," he boasted at one point, according to investigators, when they reached him on his uncle's cell phone. "You'll never catch me." Fingered by his upstairs neighbor and a former employer, Carmack went to ground. A private detective was hired to stake out his mother's house. Carmack was finally caught running from his car to the front door and was served with a complaint. Now out on bail, he has been found liable in a $16.4 million civil lawsuit by EarthLink. Charges of criminal fraud filed by state attorney general Eliot Spitzer are still pending. "There are many more like Carmack," Spitzer warns. "This sends a message that we are pursuing them." Spitzer, a man who knows how to put himself in the spotlight, was the avenging angel of Wall Street last year. Now he is on a cybercrusade against spam.

And no wonder. In the space of a year, according to research firm IDC, the number of uninvited entries into U.S. In boxes has shot up 85%, to a total of 4.9 trillion. Driven by cheap technology and the promise of easy profit, spammers have gone from pests to an invasive species of parasite that threatens to clog the inner workings of the Internet. For the first time last month, according to MessageLabs, more than half the emails received by U.S. businesses were unsolicited. The time we spend deleting or defeating spam costs an estimated $8.9 billion a year in lost productivity. Sensing an enemy as unpopular as al-Qaeda, lawmakers are pondering a plethora of solutions — some of which, spam watchers say, could end up doing more harm than good.

Why do spammers flood the Internet with ads nobody wants to read? Because some people do read them, and a tiny fraction actually respond — which in the world of direct marketing is like money in the e-bank. Take former spammer Scott Hirsch of Boca Raton, Fla., who sold his e-mail marketing business last year for $135 million and retired at the age of 37. Florida is home to more spammers than any other state, and Hirsch — who started his first bulk e-mail list way back in 1996--likes to take credit for helping make Boca Raton "the spam capital of the world." Hirsch filled his mailing lists with the e-mail addresses of people who had "opted in" by checking (or forgetting to deselect) one of those ubiquitous boxes on website order forms. "When people want to receive [e-mail]," he explains, "you get a much higher return."

But for an increasing number of Hirsch's imitators, spamming is a numbers game that rewards excess. "The more times they deliver the message, the more money they make," says Charles Curran, general counsel for America Online, which last week filed lawsuits against more than 100 spammers. "They all want to get as close to infinity as possible." This is getting easier all the time, as high-speed Internet access gets cheaper and computer processor power continues to double every 16 months. Meanwhile, the software tools for spamming continue to improve. Web crawlers harvest e-mail addresses en masse from chat rooms and newsgroups. Dictionary-attack programs string together words or names in multiple languages, random numbers, an "@" and the names of common mail servers. Presto: millions of likely e-mail addresses.

Spoofing — the practice of faking the return address of a spam, so you won't be able to trace who sent it, or the subject line, so you will open it — just complicates things further. Today, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), 66% of spam are spoofs of one sort or another. Brian Westby, a porn-website owner based in St. Louis, Mo., was a classic spoofer: the subjects for his Xrated spam included "Good evening," "What's going on?" and "Please resend the email." Westby's spam deluged a bank in Santa Barbara, Calif., and an Internet service provider in Coatesville, Pa., some of whose clients angrily canceled their service. The FTC finally got a federal judge in Chicago to shut down Westby's operation. A trial is pending.

Spoofed or otherwise, the spam that makes it to your In box is just the tip of the iceberg. At the four major e-mail providers — MSN (including Hotmail), Yahoo, EarthLink and AOL (which, like this magazine, is owned by AOL Time Warner)--between 40% and 70% of all incoming mail is killed upon arrival at their mail servers. But this has spawned a kind of spam arms race: the more mail is blocked, the more spammers send, in hopes that some will get through. As a result, the performance of the mail servers is starting to suffer. Two months ago, 8% of MSN mail was spam. Today it's 50%. "The rate of spam," warns MSN business manager Kevin Doerr, "is threatening the viability of e-mail as a communications medium."

This has to be my favorite line:
"...spammers have gone from pests to an invasive species of parasite..."

I thought getting junk mail in my mailbox was bad. I have one e-mail account that I never use. No one has it, and I don't give it out. The other day, I found over 100 pieces of spam e-mail just sitting there. It has gotten out of control.

Filtering the messages doesn't completely do the trick. A lot of these unwanted e-mails still get through. Other than "delete", there has to be anoher solution. There has to be a way to get them to stop.

[phredgreen]

yeah. cut the cord and go live in a shack somewhere in montana. when you have something to say to someone, send it in a brown package tied with string. they'll get the message real good.

seriosuly though, i've pretty much cut off my email usage because of the continual crap i'm wading through. it's frustrating sometimes.

[YourNeverThere]

oh man, i hate that guy, and anyone like him. Also i think that when a service provider sells service to someone or when someone signs up for a email address they should be explained what unsolicied email is and not to open it, then mabye the popularlity would go down do to no one reading them,

[krwlz]

If no one read them (impossible but lets assume) by what the article said, they would actually send more...

[The_Dude]

he was the bastard that started this

[MSD]

857,000,000? Yeah, to each person in the country. What? Not everyone has an email address? Oh, I got the ones intended for them.

[Cynthetiq]

i saw this guy on TV not to long ago... it was while he was in court... now I know who to not step on the brakes for when I'm driving in Manhattan.

[4thTimeLucky]

Maybe my maths is squiffy, but Carmack sent about 1 trillion emailes in a year.
Then the article says 4.7 trillion spam emails are received total in the US each year.

So that means that if Carmack used just US addresses he responsible for 1/4 to 1/5 of all the spam emails!?

[gov135]

Originally posted by 4thTimeLucky
Maybe my maths is squiffy, but Carmack sent about 1 trillion emailes in a year.
Then the article says 4.7 trillion spam emails are received total in the US each year.

So that means that if Carmack used just US addresses he responsible for 1/4 to 1/5 of all the spam emails!?

Good point here. Your math looks fine to me.

Perhaps he sent out nearly a trillion, but its a worldwide thing. There are nearly 5 trillion in just the US, the article says. That may account for the difference. There are alot of inboxs out there with users outside the US, and some of the worst spammers live outside the US as well.

[4thTimeLucky]

I thought that might be the case (or he has just been bragging to impress his mom).

I also thought that it might have been laziness on the part of the article writers ("Hey, Fred, can you think of a really big number" "Yeah, 857,500,000" "Thanks, that'll do nicely"). I don't trust anyone after Jason Blair

Regardless, being repsonsible for about 1/4 the volume of US spam is quite an achievement for a guy who still lives with his mom.

[Schwan]

It's a scary thing, and it's impossible to stop this. The moment that proper legislation will be passed in the US, these people will move to other countries that wll allow them to continue doing this... just like countries that live off low taxes.

The only way to do something about it is to change the way people think about spam. It's thesame as trolling on newsgroups and message boards - I't pointless if no one responds, but then someone always does. As long as there will be a buyer...

[Tom Thumb]

Is there anyone anywhere besides the spammers themselves that support them? I doubt it.

I don't think it's impossible to stop. They stopped spam faxes pretty well, they should be able to do the same for email.

[rockzilla]

Not sure if this is the same guy, but you can find his, or another Spam King's home address on the web and sign him up for all kinds of junk real mail. I'd be all over it if it weren't for the massive waste of paper.

[spectre]

My mail filter rules: If the email comes from someone on a list that I've set up, it goes into one set of folders (friends, family). If it's from someone not on the list, it goes into a folder marked "crap" that I browse occasionally to see if any real ones were lost in. If not, they get deleted. I don't even bother reading the emails in that folder if they aren't from someone that I know.

[Schwan]

Originally posted by spectre
My mail filter rules: If the email comes from someone on a list that I've set up, it goes into one set of folders (friends, family). If it's from someone not on the list, it goes into a folder marked "crap" that I browse occasionally to see if any real ones were lost in. If not, they get deleted. I don't even bother reading the emails in that folder if they aren't from someone that I know.

It works if you know the people you should expect the emails from. Most of the time I don't know this - that's the problem of most of the people who use the Web for business or run sites. Unless it's obvious spam, I have to check each new e-mail in my inbox.

[ARTelevision]

yes agreed it's the downfall of usability on the Net.

thinking of a solution: email security certs - available from Verisign.
Only those with whom you trade your private key get access to your email.

it takes some getting used to - I use it at work for secure comms with my programners - but it could come to that for all of us.

even simpler, deny access to all except a select access list.

[MacGnG]

spam started way before personal computers... short story: guy programing the first email type thing on old ass computers sent out a message which was sent to ever user on the system... start of spam

[GakFace]

hehe, i was thinking of the edible version...

Couldn't Chain Letters be the preview to Spam? They were always those annoying things you'd get from friends that you wanted to throw away anyways. so those slowed down only to get emailed by everyone to make your dick grow 2 inches.... ugh. We need a service... like.. to hire Bones to punch every spammer for a small fee. That'd work.

[Eviltree]

I hate spammers. Get a life and a real career you parasites.

[Gortexfogg]

Those internet spammers make telemarketers look like saints. Just think if someone called around the US 857,000,000 times...we'd have legislation trying to stop it in no time. Maybe we should some how redirect all of our spam to our representatives and senators, sparking them to lay down some ground rules to somehow turn the tide of spam.

[GakFace]

hahahahaa.... if we all did that, they'd yell at us for shutting down their email (as it would overload)... Hmm If we could somehow gather people to do that for just ONE day, I bet things would have an effect somewhere

[eyeseepeedude]

spam spam spam spam SPAMITY SPAM!!

[Roark]

Don't worry, in Japan it's invaded their cell phones big time. Won't be long now before text message spam becomes the same thing here.