On Sat, 4 Jun 2005, Alan DeKok wrote:
In your case (and in many cases of email forgery), the mail is
forged in order to generate hate mail and otherwise annoy you.
How do you know the mind of the spammers? Are you in contact with them?
How do economists figure out the purposes and principles of business?
Observation and analysis. It doesn't take rocket science to figure it
out.
http://www.av8.net/SpamTypes.txt
Your spam isn't type 1. It isn't type 2. Wait, Type 3 seems to fit pretty
well.
Type 1 Commercial spammers have anonymous .be or .nu domains, which
prevent return mailbombing. Or they use their own domain. They don't need
to forge your address in the "From:" field. They want you to buy their
product. They comply with CAN-SPAM and don't forge addresses.
Type 2 Fraudsters want people to respond so they can conduct the fraud.
They don't need to forge your address, that would hurt the fraud. They
send out messages, hoping for response. The from address is real. It may
be stolen, but its real, until, perhaps it is turned off in response.
Type 3 abusers are trying to conduct some type of annoyance or extortion
or infection. They want you to get hate mail, they want to annoy you. Or
they want to infect people you know with viruses. They want people to
think the mail came from you or at least from your domain. That is the
point. They can't comply with CAN-SPAM, as they aren't real businesses.
This distinguishes pure abusers from commercial bulk emailers, which is
what the DMA set out to do with CAN-SPAM. And CAN-SPAM has been
very successful at demonstrating that.
--Dean
[and yes, I'm aware that many anti-spammers think that CAN-SPAM has been a
dismal failure. And it has certainly been a blow to their claims and their
world view. But its been a success for the DMA. The anti-spammers were
wrong when they rejected the IEMCC proposal in 1997. Probably, it is
anti-spammers that are generating much of the type 3 abuse---anti-spammers
were generating the open relay abuse, and that was very similar in
characteristic to the current type 3 abuse.]
--
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