Anti-spam efforts
Robert Miles
Google Groups accounts used to post spam:
Don't expect much sucess getting the Google Groups abuse
department to hide the spam posts in their database, and advise
other newsgroups servers to cancel them, at least if you don't
have a gmail account or a Google Groups account. I'm going
to try getting such accounts next.
They seem to be raising the number of spam posts you need
to report from a particular spammer account to make that
account unable to post any more spam - first, 20 was often
enough, then 25 was usually enough., now 30 seems to be
enough. I suspect the Google Groups abuse department
simply has too low a budget to keep up with all the spam
reports we're sending.
If you think a spammer has enough picograms of common
sense to take hints, and has posted enough spam from the
same account to allow this, the most effective way to give
hints about which newsgroups to avoid is to report spam
only in newsgroups you want them to avoid for at least the
last week (preferably the last month), then report 30 in a
row near the oldest end of their spam posts. ignoring
whether those are newsgroups you care about. Including
spam reports to groups which are not newsgroups seems
to get the abuse department's attention faster, even though
it has no other effect on newsgroups. Including newsgroups
meant for posting in other languages doesn't seem to hurt
your efforts - few spammers post spam in more than one
language, even those without enough picograms of common
sense to recognize newsgroups meant for posting in other
languages. Remember or record what pattern you used
for picking which of these old posts to report, so you can
add at least 5 more later if the abuse department decides
to require more to close an account. This works more often
than reporting the last 30 (or last 100) posts of any kind
from that account, which DOES NOT leave any hints about
which newsgroups to avoid.
The best way to identify a particular account is to use
a newsreader to get the full return address for the account
(not the nickname the spammer may share with other
accounts), then use this web page to start finding more
spam from the same account:
http://groups.google.com/groups/advanced_search
Specify Search within a site or domain: groups.google.com
to include newsgroups, but only those copies in the Google
Groups database.
A few spammers also post something on-topic or at least
not spam in a few newsgroups; watch for that and DON'T
automatically report them as spam.
The spam including graphics characters in the subject
line and the spam for medicines often also includes
something to make the email method of reporting them
fail - more people need to report these, to allow for
these failures, preferably by entering the message ID
on the bottom line of the web page above to find them.
A few spammers seem to take the above efforts as
instructions not to post spam in this newsgroup until they
are ready to lose yet another account, but then go ahead.
For these, see if you can follow their pattern of account
naming well enough to guess their next account, and if
you can find it, also report spam from that account the
same way.
The Google Groups abuse department used to take
reporting problem posts in any category other than
ordinary spam as a signal for faster action IF they
agreed with the abuse category you assigned; I'm not
sure if that's true any more.
Chasing out most of the spammers from several
newsgroups seems to have encouraged many more
on-topic posts. I'm starting to need more help with
the anti-spam efforts to keep up with the spammers
who still post to this newsgroup, despite their reduced
number.
Robert Miles
Tiger Lily
and *.*@truth.*
that kills most of ABC's aliases
i tried to block Chung, but that hung up my filter completely
plus, by blocking in that format, i can add a * where necessary and
choose his new @XXX domain
/me rolls her eyes
ta Robert!
Blash
rec'd in the last year.......
I just ignore them.....
Robert Miles wrote on 7/16/10 10:17 PM:
Robert Miles
news:8acjqa...@mid.individual.net...
> Robert Miles wrote:
>> Some updates on my new, mostly successful efforts for shutting down
>> Google Groups accounts used to post spam:
>>
>> Don't expect much sucess getting the Google Groups abuse
>> department to hide the spam posts in their database, and advise
>> other newsgroups servers to cancel them, at least if you don't
>> have a gmail account or a Google Groups account. I'm going
>> to try getting such accounts next.
>>
>> Chasing out most of the spammers from several
>> newsgroups seems to have encouraged many more
>> on-topic posts. I'm starting to need more help with
>> the anti-spam efforts to keep up with the spammers
>> who still post to this newsgroup, despite their reduced
>> number.
>>
>> Robert Miles
> block *.*@love*.*
> and *.*@truth.*
>
> that kills most of ABC's aliases
>
> i tried to block Chung, but that hung up my filter completely
>
> plus, by blocking in that format, i can add a * where necessary and choose
> his new @XXX domain
>
> /me rolls her eyes
>
> ta Robert!
Depends on which newsreader you're using. Mine doesn't seem
to pay any special attention to * characters. However, it offered
no objection to creating about 50 different rules to block Chung,
one for each return address, and enough more rules for other
spammers to reach a total of over 1500 rules.
It does allow marking all posts from a certain domain as already
read, but makes it take quite a bit of effort to delete them entirely.
I've asked Microsoft to add a feature for finding and deleting
all posts crossposted to a certain other newsgroup, but they've
shown no sign of trying it yet.
Robert Miles
Robert Miles
are as good at ignoring spam as you are. You may want to just
ignore the rest of this thread as well.
"Blash" <bla...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:C866974E.E634B%bla...@comcast.net...
> FYI.....I spent more time reading your single post than all the spam I
> have
> rec'd in the last year.......
> I just ignore them.....
>
> Robert Miles wrote on 7/16/10 10:17 PM:
>
>> Some updates on my new, mostly successful efforts for shutting down
>> Google Groups accounts used to post spam:
>>
[snip]
Robert Miles
news:vo80o.12923$OU6...@newsfe20.iad...
> Some updates on my new, mostly successful efforts for shutting down
> Google Groups accounts used to post spam:
>
>
> The spam including graphics characters in the subject
> line and the spam for medicines often also includes
> something to make the email method of reporting them
> fail - more people need to report these, to allow for
> these failures, preferably by entering the message ID
> on the bottom line of the web page above to find them.
>
> A few spammers seem to take the above efforts as
> instructions not to post spam in this newsgroup until they
> are ready to lose yet another account, but then go ahead.
> For these, see if you can follow their pattern of account
> naming well enough to guess their next account, and if
> you can find it, also report spam from that account the
> same way.
>
shortly after they create a new account and before they
posted enough spam that reporting all of it is enough to
close their account. For these, you may have to come
back to that account day after day to report enough
spam to close the account.
A few spammers don't seem to have enough femtograms
of common sense to find and follow the instructions for
creating free email accounts that they can use for
creating a new Google Groups account, especially
some of those in China, where that country's laws
offer significant penalties for using fake email return
addresses. Therefore, when these spammers have
their Google Groups accounts disabled, they often
wait until the rising number of spam messages to disable
the account enables it again. If you see signs of this,
report even more spam from that spammer to keep
the account closed longer. Not useful for spammers
who have already learned how to open free (gmail, yahoo,
live, hotmail, etc.) accounts frequently, though.
Note that Google Groups does not have abuse categories
to report kooks, people who always post off topic, or
people who post legal porn. Expect these to be difficult to
report in any way that will do much good.
Also, at least one of the kooks in this newsgroup runs
his own newsgroups server, instead of using Google
Groups or some other newsgroups server. Therefore,
reporting that kook to Google Groups is not likely to do
much good, and following the usual email spam reporting
procedure is unlikely to do much more than give that kook
your email address.
Google Groups seems reluctant to hide any spam that
gets replies, unless all these replies are also spam and
reported as such. Therefore, when reporting spam with
replies, also report any of these replies which are also spam.
For similar reasons, think twice before being the first to
post the first non-spam reply to any spam. That makes it
difficult to use the reply I've thought of for any colon cleanser
spammer - "So you've found the place where all spammers
should hide their heads, and want to keep it CLEAN. But
why are you trying to get us to attract other spammers by
giving them free clean places to hide their heads?". A
number of spammers use this reluctance by posting more
spam in response to their previous spam, though, in order
to make it more difficult to report.
I've been reporting Google Groups spam using both of my
email accounts as return addresses for the spam to
newsgroups I care about, and dividing the extra spam
reports needed to close accounts between those return
addresses, in order to give the Google Groups abuse
department and the spammers more information.
However, I've seen little sign this does any good, so
I'm now trying to see if reporting a spammer using only one
return address makes any difference other than saving some
time.
Reporting large batches of spam mentioning a particular
website sometimes works, apparantly for those companies
with only one spammer with only one Google Groups
account. Not very effective for companies with more
spammers and more Google Groups accounts, though.
Reporting websites with large amounts of spam here
is more effective for stopping spam for those websites,
at least until the company comes up with enough
money to register another domain and create a new
website:
Not sure you can do that if you don't have a Norton
antivirus product with the antispam (email only) feature,
though. Hopefully, this at least keeps those companies
from paying their spammers for a while, and keeps
those companies from having reachable websites for
a while.
I've read that tinyurl and and at least one other
URL-shortening service are good at deleting entries
used in spam. I haven't found time to explore the
details, though.
> Chasing out most of the spammers from several
> newsgroups seems to have encouraged many more
> on-topic posts. I'm starting to need more help with
> the anti-spam efforts to keep up with the spammers
> who still post to this newsgroup, despite their reduced
> number.
>
> Robert Miles
The other computer I use for finding spam to report
is currently having enough problems I cannot use it
much. When it's ready to use again, I'll need to catch
up on spam to newsgroups I subscribe to only through
that computer.
Robert Miles
Ellen K.
computers of the spammers!
"Robert Miles" <rober...@teranews.com> wrote in message
news:23I0o.10139$KT3....@newsfe13.iad...
Robert Miles
news:RqT0o.33143$3%3.3...@newsfe23.iad...
> What you need is a good hacker who could figure out how to disable the
> computers of the spammers!
Do you know any?
> "Robert Miles" <rober...@teranews.com> wrote in message
> news:23I0o.10139$KT3....@newsfe13.iad...
>> "Robert Miles" <mil...@usenet-news.net> wrote in message
>> news:vo80o.12923$OU6...@newsfe20.iad...
>>> Some updates on my new, mostly successful efforts for shutting down
>>> Google Groups accounts used to post spam:
>>>
>> [snip]
>>>
>>> The spam including graphics characters in the subject
>>> line and the spam for medicines often also includes
>>> something to make the email method of reporting them
>>> fail - more people need to report these, to allow for
>>> these failures, preferably by entering the message ID
>>> on the bottom line of the web page above to find them.
>>>
[snip]
>> I've been reporting Google Groups spam using both of my
>> email accounts as return addresses for the spam to
>> newsgroups I care about, and dividing the extra spam
>> reports needed to close accounts between those return
>> addresses, in order to give the Google Groups abuse
>> department and the spammers more information.
>> However, I've seen little sign this does any good, so
>> I'm now trying to see if reporting a spammer using only one
>> return address makes any difference other than saving some
>> time.
When reporting a spammer with just one return address,
reporting 40 spam posts is no longer enough.
>>
>>> Chasing out most of the spammers from several
>>> newsgroups seems to have encouraged many more
>>> on-topic posts. I'm starting to need more help with
>>> the anti-spam efforts to keep up with the spammers
>>> who still post to this newsgroup, despite their reduced
>>> number.
>>>
>>> Robert Miles
>> The other computer I use for finding spam to report
>> is currently having enough problems I cannot use it
>> much. When it's ready to use again, I'll need to catch
>> up on spam to newsgroups I subscribe to only through
>> that computer.
>>
>> Robert Miles
>>
The other computer is working again, EXCEPT for this
newsgroup. I subscribe to about 140 newsgroups on that
computer but only about 15 on this one, so I'm now
catching up on sending spam reports for spam on those
newsgroups during the last month.
So far, I've found that creating a gmail account and then
using it to create a Google Groups account does not make
them hide the spam much faster - at least a week.
Reporting spam by the email method with just one
non-Google return address gets them to hide about 2/3
of the spam reported in 13 months. Reporting spam,
divided between two non-Google return addresses, usually
does not get them to hide it in 7 weeks, but has been able
to block spammers from posting any more from the same
account if enough spam is reported that way (was 40 total;
not sure if that has been increased since I tried it). I can't
both report the old spam and disable any new spam
accounts, so I'm now only trying to report the old spam
(over 8000 found on that machine back as far as 2005
and not reported yet).
Do any of you want to help me find out whether
reporting the same spam by at least two people with
Google Groups accounts speeds up their hiding process,
if they even bother to hide much spam after it's
reported??
https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin
https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount
I've found that for reporting spam for which you've
already found the message IDs, a Google Groups
account is faster. However, for the spammer account
disabling, some timing problems with this faster method
make their software more likely to decide that you're
fast enough you must be a computer program, and
therefore disable YOUR account instead for several
minutes. Therefore, I recommend that you do NOT
log in to your Google Groups account while trying
the account disabling process.
Also, I've found that if their web site says that the
message ID you entered for spam during the last week
does not point to any post in their database, it's more
likely to indicate that part of their database is overdue
for updating than that they've already deleted it. Keep
these until the next day and try reporting them again;
and if necessary, keep trying for a week.
By the way, I've seen signs that some of the pharmaceutical
spammers are now hiring assistants who cannot post in
English to create one Google Groups account after another,
and are now posting spam mainly for the less profitable
types of pharmaceuticals. At least this reduces their profit
margins.
One item about spam not in English - if you have a Google
Groups account, you can click on the button to translate it
to English, and usually get enough of a translation to decide
whether to report it as spam, or just ignore it.
Robert Miles
Ellen K.
> "Ellen K." <firstiniti...@dslextreme.com> wrote in message
> news:RqT0o.33143$3%3.3...@newsfe23.iad...
>> What you need is a good hacker who could figure out how to disable the
>> computers of the spammers!
>
> Do you know any?
>
I know one but he won't do it.
Robert Miles
I'm currently having problems again on the computer I'd prefer
to use for reporting spam - the last few reboots never finished.
Could someone else in the newsgroup handle the spam reporting
(at least for this newsgroup) for at least one day, until I see if this
reboot attempt succeeds?
"Ellen K." <firstiniti...@dslextreme.com> wrote in message
news:82l5o.47494$xZ2....@newsfe07.iad...
>
> "Robert Miles" <mil...@usenet-news.net> wrote in message
> news:e7j5o.54826$YX3....@newsfe18.iad...
>> "Ellen K." <firstiniti...@dslextreme.com> wrote in message
>> news:RqT0o.33143$3%3.3...@newsfe23.iad...
>>> What you need is a good hacker who could figure out how to disable the
>>> computers of the spammers!
>>
>> Do you know any?
>>
>
> I know one but he won't do it.
>
>>> "Robert Miles" <rober...@teranews.com> wrote in message
>>> news:23I0o.10139$KT3....@newsfe13.iad...
>>>> "Robert Miles" <mil...@usenet-news.net> wrote in message
>>>> news:vo80o.12923$OU6...@newsfe20.iad...
>>>>>
[snip]