David Scott Anderson is not merely a resume spammer -- he's a singularly
unapologetic one.
Last Tuesday, Anderson spammed me with his resume ("Robust understanding of
Internet and other new-economy technologies"), which listed a
dsanderson3at_private address as a reply point. I dutifully forwarded his
spamogram to Yahoo's abuse address, with a copy to him, which I try to do
with spam if I have time.
Anderson was not just irked. He was positively peeved. He fired off a
nastygram calling me an "asshole" for reporting him to Yahoo. Quoth
Anderson in his reply: "I have looked at your site, and AM NOT impressed,
you are a sniveling little technophile who has the arrogance and sense of
self importance the actually believe someone cares!"
He confidently predicted that he's "not afraid of Yahoo warning me about
spamming" and said "don't bother to respond, or if you do, respond to
Yahoo's SPAM Bot, I am sure they will be greatly moved by your whining."
I wrote back, again copying abuseat_private, saying: "Of course you are in
violation of Yahoo's terms of service. Perhaps they will not choose to
enforce it, but I suspect they will. Not only are you an recidivist
spammer, you are an unapologetic one." (For the record, I have no idea what
Yahoo did, if anything.)
That exchange was no surprise. As anyone who's tussled with spammers knows,
a heated response when you report someone is hardly unusual.
But what happened next was. Later that day, near as I can tell, Anderson
reported my mail server to SpamCop and OsriSoft.com -- alleging,
incorrectly, that I was spamming him. (This is, incidentally, the same mail
server that runs the Politech list.)
To their credit, SpamCop wrote to me on July 6 saying that Anderson's false
accusations violated SpamCop's rules: "I took action against him according
to our Terms of Service." You can see the SpamCop report here:
http://spamcop.net/w3m?action=checkblock&ip=server1.cluebot.com
OsriSoft.com, on the other hand, appears to have incorrectly listed my mail
server as a spam-site for a few days, preventing some list subscribers from
receiving mail or sending submissions to Politech's list address. On
Saturday, one list member who was wondering what happened sent me this
excerpt from his mail log:
>Jul 4 13:19:20 [deleted] sendmail[6743]: NOQUEUE: ruleset=check_relay,
>arg1=server1.cluebot.com, arg2=216.110.36.217, relay=server1.cluebot.com
>[216.110.36.217], reject=553 Mail from 216.110.36.217 refused; see
>http://relays.osirusoft.com/
The Politech mail server is no longer listed, but a policy of
add-first-and-check-later raises troubling questions about how reliable
blacklists can be. I like the concept in theory, but in practice they seem
to be far more problematic than smart (perhaps eventually collaborative)
end-user filtering. See:
http://relays.osirusoft.com/cgi-bin/rbcheck.cgi?addr=216.110.36.217
As longtime Politechnicals know, this isn't the first time I've been
accused of spamming. A Fleishman-Hillard sysadmin reported Politech to the
same cluster of anti-spam services:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/15/technology/15SPAM.html
Since last week, Anderson has variously (a) threatened to sue me, (b)
accused me of racism, and (c) announced that he had reported my server to
uceat_private, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's report-spam-here address.
Excerpts from a representative email:
- "I will be contacting an attorney..."
- "Is it possible that you are a racist. Did you go to my site and see that
I am African American, and have a problem with that?"
- "The resume was sent to you by a service, not me personally..."
He's also complained to the Well (which I use for email), with the Subject:
line "Harassment Complaint."
Yes, of course these complaints are spurious. Yes, they can and should be
ignored. But I wonder what would happen to someone else -- who may not be
as familiar with the Internet and the law -- who attempts to report a
spammer. If their account is blacklisted by a "anti-spam" service, if they
receive legal threats, and if their Internet provider is contacted, they
may not be so nonchalant in reply.
In other words, the current system isn't working. It's too user-hostile,
and (in the typical refrain) arose as a successor to the
postmaster@hostname system that, in turn, was developed when the Internet
was a far smaller and friendlier place. It's also -- one report today
estimated that 80 percent of Hotmail's incoming mail was spam -- hardly
bringing us towards that clean-inbox goal. My cnet.com email address is
just a few weeks old, but I'm getting as much spam sent to it as legitimate
mail.
One obvious minor solution is not to reply to spammers and send mail only
to the abuse@ address. But in my experience, copying both addresses works
better: Some abuse admins aren't quick to respond, while spammers seem to
be more willing to delete you from their lists if they know they've already
been reported.
Back to our benighted resume-spammer. Philip Greenspun, who founded
photo.net, popularized the idea of a "hall of shame" for some of the Net's
most anti-social miscreants:
http://philip.greenspun.com/copyright/hall-of-shame
I've added Anderson to my own list-of-spammers. I get hundreds of pieces of
spam a day, true, so it generally would not be worth the bother. But anyone
who is so doggedly noxious and who successfully manages to disrupt Politech
delivery -- a first, I believe -- deserves a dishonorable mention! Here's
the site:
http://www.mccullagh.org/avoid/david-scott-anderson.html
-Declan
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