[PLUG] ORS and spam - success rate of "remove" options in spam

Rich Shepard rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Fri Apr 5 14:06:04 UTC 2002


On Fri, 5 Apr 2002, Greg Long wrote:

> However, recently a friend informed me that he was getting a considerable
> ammount of spam until he followed the "remove" instructions enclosed in
> his spam emails and they stopped coming. I will ask him for more detail,
> though this raises the question: Are there any recent studies on the
> effectiveness of these remove links? My guess is that supposing 9 out of
> 10 work, that 1 in 10 will get you more unremovable spam than you can
> shake a NIC card at.

  When I called the optamail.com folks on the phone they said that their
removal URL actually works. I told them why I didn't use it and they
responded by (ahem!) "removing" my name from all their distribution lists.
This worked for about a month. I'm now back to receiving spam from all the
spammers they support (optamail.com, and their upstream ISP --
appliedtheory.com -- are spam factories). I'm more than a little annoyed.

  What I learned, second hand, was that Applied Theory Communications, Inc.
in Syracuse, NY is in deep financial trouble. They won't drop spammers or
anyone else as long as they pay the bills. Optamail.com is run from an
answering machine in New York City. Cannot contact a human at that number or
via e-mail.

  Some of the other spam factories have either invalid phone numbers or none
listed on their records. Some have administrative contact addresses at
hotmail.com! (I wish all the free e-mail hosts would go away.)

  One of the current crop of spam factories works through cerf.net. I've
traced this to their parent organization, att.com. When I spoke with someone
at AT&T they told me the proper address for reporting cerf.net-distributed
spam is 'noc at attens.com' (for AT&T's Enhanced Network Services, which is
cerf.net). So far, both spam reports and other e-mail to the Network
Operations Center have gone unanswered.

  Wish I had more of an answer for you, but it's a waste of time and
resources for us all.

Rich





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