Happy Birthday Spam.

Not the meat we all know, but unsolicited commercial email (UCE) is 25 years old this past weekend. Spam has hit the ripe age of 25 years old, and what a quarter of a century it's been.

While spam on the internet has been around for 25 years, spam on Usenet has been around for less time but is just as insidious as it's email counterpart. Both methods of spam offer the mailers a relative margin of anonymity.

Usenet spam was first dropped on Usenet by Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) by accident and followed up by the thousands of off topic and commercial posts we see today. Advertisements for adult entertainment, software for cleaning our computers so the FBI can't see where we've been on the internet, internet services such as webhosting and yes, how to make money sending spam.

In the fight against Usenet spam many tools are used such as filters, automated bots and retromoderation. Retro moderation is the process of cancelling posts after they have been posted.

Many of these methods do not work due to the way Usenet itself works. Messages are carried instantly from one server to another and if a message is cancelled on one server it is not necessarily cancelled on another.

Reports are sent to Internet Service Providers (ISP's) and News Service Providers (NSP's) for abuse. In some instances abuse reports are sent all over the world to report spammers. Companies that work with spammers websites may get abuse reports as well.

The whole theory is to close the spammers account, close the website account, and to close accounts that they use for collecting money from people who actually read the spam and try to buy.

Reports to companies that collect money for spammers are typically ignored however. These companies often have agreements with their customers that state "if you spam, we close your account". But rarely have I seen that happen. Companies like PayPal and iBill ignore spam complaints when Usenet is involved.

One prolific spammer named Matt Trivisonno has been spamming Usenet for months advertising his website. He has used at least twenty Usenet Providers to send his spam and continues to have accounts closed and simply opens new ones somewhere else. Reports say that abuse email sent to PayPal, KAGI and iBill have all been ignored.

The most ironic part of this is that Mr Trivisonno is a reseller for Newsfeeds.com, a Usenet provider. Newsfeeds has also been sitting upon the fence of inaction as one of their own resellers sends spam to Usenet. One note is that he does not use his own reseller account to spam through as he knows this would violate his agreement and would have his reseller account closed.

Are these companies simply unfamiliar with Usenet or are they promoting spam? By not investigating these reports and simply ignoring them they are in fact supporting spam.

Another case in point is Evidence Eliminator (EE). EE was a prolific spammer of Usenet sometimes spamming twenty to thirty messages a day to each newsgroup. A group of usenet users fought back to combat this spam to no avail. Finally a group of rogue users started posting full versions of Evidence Eliminator to every newsgroup that had been spammed. Spam slowed down but can still be seen in some groups.

What can be done about Usenet spam? Unfortunately at the moment not much. The way Usenet works simply works against the administrators. New methods of filtering must be devised daily. More abuse staff must be hired to read reports and close accounts.

For now automation and retromoderation continue to be used. Maybe someone will come up with the killer design for a spam trap. That person will indeed be hailed as the saviour of Usenet.

As a followup, one of the companies Mr Trivisonno uses to collect credit card payments has responded. We will see how KAGI.com handles this issue. They responded before this article went public.

Bruce
May 05 2003