Category: Net: Spam

This game reminds me so much of real life. In SpamWars you control a gun and have got to stop the spam from reaching the keyboard by shooting at it. You’ve also got to try and aim at Sid the Spammer to try and kill him and stop him sending the stuff – as the levels progress he starts sending you viruii/viruses as well: not fun.

On seconds thoughts, it is a fun game – I scored 3,860 on my first go and 10,430 on my second. Once you get a machine gun or flame-thrower (yep, you can get “gun upgrades”) you can easily kill Sid straight away before he sends you any spam and get bonus points.

Well, it’s now been a month since I commenced reporting a selection of my spam to Spamcop (see the results of my first week reporting).

My spam levels have been quivering between only about a dozen a day (usually at weekends) to the deluge I got yesterday of around 800 🙁 I tend to report each “unique” message to Spamcop (selected on the criteria of “To:” address and “Subject:” being different from the spam I have in my mailbox at that time – some spammers send around 20 mails to the same address with the same subject: only one of those gets reported).

Ok, a month and a day ago (yep, I should have done this entry yesterday) I purchased 25Mb of “Spamcop reporting” (paying for membership just adds a few fancy things such as ‘past reports’ and ‘amount of spam reported’ – it also removes a few ads and the “parse” time delay). I now have just 10.3Mb left. Yep – in a month, I’ve reported just under 15Mb of spam. My “average usage rate” is 5.53bytes per second or 14.3Mb per month or a massive 174.4Mb per year (that’s an increase of 50.5Mb per year since 3 weeks ago).

At the moment, I seem to be reporting more like 10% of my spam to Spamcop – therefore I receive around 55.3bytes of spam EVERY SECOND: that’s 4.5Mb a day. A month, that’s 136Mb. So – therefore, I receive in the region of 1.63Gb of spam a year.

The good news is that after the well known spammer Alan Ralksy was featured on a Slashdot article (referring to a freep interview) several Slashdot visitors decided to “turn the tables” on him. They’ve signed him up with practically every form of “snail mail” to his home address of 6747 Minnow Pond Drive, West Bloomfield, Michigan, MI 48322, USA. Of course, the other Slashdotters were happy to hear this 🙂

Ralsky was actually sued by the Verizon company and is barred from sending their customers spam late in October… Ralsky doesn’t, however, seem too happy about people taking photographs of his house – Rich Clark has received some threatening phone calls within 24 hours of taking some quite nice photographs.

Oh – and AOL also won a spam case against the spammer outfit CN Productions and owner Jay Nelson.

Are the tables turning against the spammers after so long? I hope so…

Damn! I’ve just been hit by another “hit-and-run” spammer. They sent around 900 spam emails to me in little under an hour (I was busy doing other things so I didn’t notice the start of the run). Drat! Only 76 got reported to SpamCop though.

What really got annoyed was the fact that they had sent 20 identical messages to the same email address each time. And they had an average size of 20.7Kb each. Richy nashes teeth

So, for your “amusement” and interest, I have “captured” one of the spams and “disassembled” it for you.

Well, it’s now been a week since I started using SpamCop in a ‘paid for sense’ to report unsolicited email that I’ve been receiving, and the statistics are quite scary. In a recent deluge of spam, I got 245 messages – of those I report only 16 of them to SpamCop (6.53%): and that’s just about average for me. Exactly a week ago (give or take a few minutes), I “purchased” 25Mb of SpamCop usage, I’ve now only got 22.6Mb left. That means my “average usage rate” is 3.93 bytes/per second or 10.2Mb a month or 123.9Mb a year.

Now, remember that I only report an average of 6% to SpamCop, that means that I get around 65.5bytes of spam per second, 3.83Kb per minute, 230Kb of spam per hour, and 5.53 Mb of spam per day. That’s a lot of crap in my mailbox 🙁 Now to escalate that up to a yearly figure and I receive around 2.02Gb of spam! Sheesh! That’s over 3 CDs full of spam. Take in to account all the bandwidth and storage fees – PLUS my time spent sorting through it all (you could also include the SpamCop reporting fee) and it does add up: so much for the spammers excuse that “you shouldn’t complain as it doesn’t cost you anything”….

Oh yes, and because of an article on Slashdot, I’m now CC’ing most of the reports I send to SpamCop to SpamArchive. I don’t know what they are planning on doing with all the spam that gets sent to submit@spamarchive.org, but at least they’re getting lots of it now 🙂

Now, if I could only get my hands on people like Alan Ralsky and Laura Betterly (two big time spammers) *grr*. If any spammers (or, if you must, “senders of unsolicited commercial or bulk email”) are reading this: I DO NOT buy ANYTHING that has been advertised via these methods and I DO report it to your ISPs. Please stop wasting my time, your time and your ISPs…

I’ve been a bit busy the past few days, but I’ll bring you up to speed with what’s happening with Jerry, and how helpful he’s been (he’s sent some documents – a copy of ‘Albert Pilchards’ will, his death certificate and a certificate of deposit) so let’s continue the tale of the Nigerian spammer who claims I could inherit a fortune (for background information see day 5, day 4, day 3, day 2 or go right back to the very start with day 1).

Oh, and yes, transcripts of all the documents he sent (all were JPG format) have been made – ideal if you are received the same files from the spammer and were doing a search to find some “background data”….