About two months ago, I started using this program called Sp@mX. Basically, you feed it a set of spam and it munges through it for you and sends emails to the appropriate people complaining about the spam.
This has two effects: Spammers remove you from their lists, so you get less spam, and ISPs shut down spam accounts, which also helps you get less spam.
It took awhile (I’ve reported 4427 spam emails so far), but it cut my spam down from 150/day down to 33/day, and its been steadily dropping.
But its been quite interesting looking at the interaction between myself, ISPs, and the author of the program. I’ve come to the conclusion that ISPs are at least half the problem when it comes to spam. They’re arrogant, whiny, and quite bitchy when it comes to dealing with abuse messages from end users.
First off, realize that Sp@mX is not perfect. Jeff Hendrickson, the author of the program has been reasonably responsive, but he’s not the world’s best programmer. He’s had bugs, and he’s had to learn about spam reporting as he went, so early versions of Sp@mX would sometimes send messages to the wrong ISPs based on forged headers. Since almost all spam have forged headers, that means that with early versions of the program, ISPs could get deluged with messages that had nothing to do with them.
However, that doesn’t excuse their rudeness back to either myself as an end user, or Jeff. Jeff developed a tool for end users to report spam, and it works pretty well from the end users perspective. Jeff now checks before sending an email to a spamming ISP to see if they’ve been blacklisted somewhere, and the reality is that its quite possible for an ISP to show up briefly, yet innocently on a blacklist.
Does Sp@mX work perfectly from the ISPs perspective? No, not every message send from Sp@mX is guaranteed to be a problem for that ISP. But you know what? Suck it up guys! Expecting end users to spend 1 hour per spam to figure out exactly where/when a spam came from so that they can give you a report is just stupid. Instead, tools like Sp@mX are needed. Will those tools have problems? Yes.
After conversing with a number of ISPs on this issue, including a friend of mine, I have come to the conclusion that the true cause of spam is ISP laziness more then anything else. The real reason spam exists is because ISPs have been too lazy to really develop open source tools of their own for dealing with spam at their level, nor have they pushed on the IETF to modify the mail protocols to make header spoofing more difficult. Nor for that matter have they come up with a standardized format for reporting spam that would make writing automated tools simpler.
Cowboy up, guys.
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