Fighting against Spam-Mail

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original in en Katja and Guido Socher 

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Katja is the German editor of LinuxFocus. She likes Tux, film & photography and the sea. Her homepage can be found here.

Guido is a long time Linux fan and he likes Linux because it gives you choices and freedom. You can choose and develop solutions according to your needs.

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Spam between your mail!? Spam E-mail is growing at an alarming rate and it is a major problem for almost everybody.
In this article we will explain what to do against this plague.

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What is spam-mail?

Spam-mail has many names. Some call it UCE (Unsolicited commercial email) others call it just Unwanted E-mail but all these names don't really say what it is. If you don't get spam (yet) then take a look at this collection of spam-mail (spam_samples.html). It's a random selection of spam-mail collected over just a few days. Read through the mails and you will soon understand that it has nothing to do with commerce or business. These spammers are criminals. No serious business man/woman would annoy and offend millions of people to find a few "idiots" who would buy their tricks.

It is a common misunderstanding of people who have not much used the Internet to believe that this type of advertisement can be compared to information they get from time to time from their local supermarket. Products sold via spam-mails are often illegal or no products at all. They are tricks to get your money.

How much?

Spammers get your e-mail addresses from webpages, news groups or domain records (if you have your own domain). There are individuals who use robots to extract the addresses, burn them on CDs and sell them very cheap to other Spammers. If you write your e-mail address in clear text onto your homepage today such that programs can extract it, then you will have a major problem in a few months time and you can't stop it. The problem will be growing every day!

In 1998 the percentage of spam mail sent to LinuxFocus was less than 10%. As of November 2002 the statistics are as follows:

Our server gets about 4075 mails per week. 3273 are spam-mails!
=> 80% of all mail is Spam.

That is 80% of the capacity of the mail server and 80% of the network bandwidth is for something that nobody wants.

Out of these 3273 spam mails about 40% originate in America (mostly Canada, US, Mexico) and about 30% in Asia (mostly Korea, China, Taiwan).

What to do with Spam

If you look at the spam-mails you will notice that almost all offer a possibility to be removed from the list. Don't do it! You are dealing with criminals. None of the spammers get anything if they maintain a proper remove list. Why do they still add this possibility? The answer is simple. It makes a much better impression on the reader and it's an excellent statistical tool. The spammers can immediately check that their mails arrive. In other words you confirm the reception of the mail!

There is also a simple technical problem with the idea of a remove list. LinuxFocus is not a very big site but we would need 1 person full time to unsubscribe 3273 Spam mails per week and then this person would need to unsubscribe one mail every minute . Every spammer uses a different method, it would be an idiotic task and it can't work. Remove lists are nonsense and help only the spammers.

The only right thing to do is: delete it.

Software to handle spam

There are many different options to filter out spam and this is good because it makes it harder for spammers to circumvent them. It's however an arms race. The tools to filter spam become more sophisticated but spammers improve their methods too.

There are 2 types of filters:
  1. Checks directly build into the MTA (Message Transfer Agent=Mail server). Here you can usually reject the mail. That is: you don't even store the email. You send an error code back as soon as you recognize that this is spam during the reception of the email. Typical tools of this kind are IP based blocklists and mail header checks. If you don't have your own Mailserver then your ISP would need to configure this.

  2. Filtering after the reception of the mail. In this case the email is successfully delivered and will be filtered out later.
We will now discuss the different possibilities in detail, all of them have advantages and disadvantages. The best solution to get rid of all spam is to use several different tools.

Rejecting email directly at the MTA

If you reject your mail directly at the mail server during the reception of the mail then the spammer can get back an error code and knows that this address does not work. If he is one of the "CD-makers" then he might take out the address. It can save network bandwidth because you don't have to receive the full message. You can send the error code back as soon as you find that this is spam.

To do this you need a good and flexible MTA. Unfortunately the two most common servers, Sendmail and the one from Bill Gates are not good at all for this task. Two very good alternatives are Postfix and Exim. If you can't change your server then you can put an smtp proxy such as messagewall in front of the server (smtp = Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, the Internet mail protocol).

We will now discuss some common filter techniques and how they work. We will not describe how to configure them exactly in each MTA. It would make the article too long. Instead we suggest to read the documentation that comes with the MTA that you have installed. Postfix and Exim are well documented. Some MTAs have even more options but the above are quite commonly available in a good MTA. The advantage of all those checks is that they are not CPU intensive. You will usually not need to update your mailserver hardware if you use those checks.

Filtering of already received mail

The following techniques are usually applied to the complete mail and the mail server who sends the mail does not notice that the mail could not be delivered. It means also that a legitimate sender will not get a failure report. The message will just disappear.
Having said this we must also say that this is not totally correct because it really depends on the filtering possibilities of the mail server. Exim is very flexible and would allow you to write custom filters on messages.

There are many more possible solutions to fight against spam. We believe that the above covers the most important ones.

The best solution is to use checks in the MTA as a first stage and then kill the remaining spam in a second stage with a post-processing filter.

HTML mails

A particularly dangerous form of e-mail are spam mails in HTML format.

Most spammers use the "unsubscribe possibility" to see how many of their mails arrive. HTML formatted mail offers a much better form of feedback: Images. You can compare this system with the visitor counters as found on some webpages. The spammer can exactly see when and how many of the mails are read. If you study Spam carefully you will see that in some cases the URL for included images contains a sequence number: The spammer can see exactly who looks at the mail and at what time time. An incredible security hole.

Modern mail reader programs will not display images which are downloaded somewhere from a URL. However there is hardly any modern and secure HTML mail reader. Kmail and the very latest version of mozilla mail offer the possibility to disable images from external sources. Most other programs will generate nice statistics for the spammer.

The solution? Don't use a html mail capable program or download the mail first then disconnect from the Internet and then read the mail.

Where does the spam come from?

Never trust the sender address in the "From" field of spam mails! These are either non existent users or innocent people. It is very rare that this is the mail address of the spammer. If you want to know where the mail comes from then you have to look at the full header:
...

Received: from msn.com (dsl-200-67-219-28.prodigy.net.mx [200.67.219.28])
        by mailserver.of.your.isp (8.12.1) with SMTP id gB2BYuYs006793;
        Mon, 2 Dec 2002 12:35:06 +0100 (MET)
Received: from unknown (HELO rly-xl05.dohuya.com) (120.210.149.87)
        by symail.kustanai.co.kr with QMQP; Mon, 02 Dec 2002 04:34:43
Here an unknown host with IP address 120.210.149.87 who claims to be rly-xl05.dohuya.com sends the mail to symail.kustanai.co.kr. symail.kustanai.co.kr sends this message further on.
The spammer is hiding somewhere behind 120.210.149.87 which is probably just a dynamic dialup IP address.

In other words the police could find this person if they would go to the owner of kustanai.co.kr and ask for server logs and a printout of connections from the local telephone company. You have very little chance of finding out who that was.

It could also be that the first part is faked and the spammer is really behind dsl-200-67-219-28.prodigy.net.mx. This is very likely since there is no good reason why symail.kustanai.co.kr should send the mail to msn.com via the dsl dialup connection (dsl-200-67-219-28.prodigy.net.mx). The mailserver.of.your.isp (symbolic name) is the server of your Internet Service Provider and is the only part from this "Received:" line which is reliable.

It is possible to find the spammer but you need international intelligence and police forces to go to prodigy.net.mx.

Conclusion

If spam continues to increase at the current rate then the Internet will soon transport a lot more Spam than real e-mail. Spam is transported at the cost of the receiver. More bandwidth is needed and often the mail systems need to be upgraded to handle the Spam.
Laws in many countries do little to protect people against criminal spammers. In fact some countries have laws which restrict only honest people (digital rights management etc. ...) and help the criminals (e.g. to get nice statistics about the spam-mail).

Join the Coalition Against UCE!
euro.cauce
http://www.euro.cauce.org/en/
cauce
http://www.cauce.org/


Internet Service Providers should check their mail systems. No unauthenticated access to mail servers must be given and the amount of mails that one user can send per minute must be limited.

References

mirror server hosted at Truenetwork, Russian Federation.