Off-topic informational anti-spam anecdotal

From: Sam Ismail <dastar_at_ncal.verio.com>
Date: Wed Jul 15 02:59:44 1998

This is totally off-topic but this is the kind of thing you all can
appreciate, and it may even help some of you.

For the last several months I have constantly been spammed by what can be
described as Son-of-Spamford. There's some spam e-mail software marketing
company in Los Angeles that sends out millions of these messages I guess.
They use web crawlers that steal e-mail addresses from web pages. They
then send out this spam letter with forged headers and false return
addresses. Very annoying. However, they do include a phone number and
address at the end of the spam. Interesting. I've included the message
at the end of this message so you can see if you've been spammed by these
assholes as well.

I was so incensed at one point that I was almost going to buy a plane
ticket, fly down to L.A. with a box full of this spam e-mail printed out,
kick the door open to the office that these guys are in, find the
president of this "company", beat the shit out of him (or pimp-slap her),
then start shoving the printouts down this person's throat (yes, this is
rather violent :)

But I soon figured out that the address was merely a private mailbox, and
the phone number rings into a voicemail box. Hmmm. Well, I have the
resources to find out where this number rings in to, possibly track down
the service provider, but then what? Then I realized, "Hey, I have a PBX,
a T-1 and a voicemail system with 16 ports...its time to have some fun."

Thus sprang forth the Spaminator! The Spaminator is something I threw
together in about 10 minutes. What the Spaminator does is call the
offendor's number, wait for the voicemail to answer, dial a digit to cut
thru the outgoing message, then it starts singing simple tunes by playing
"spam" in different notes. I recorded a "spam" scale with my own voice.
Basically I sang "spam" starting from A and going to G.

I created 10 different song files, with simple tunes such as "Mary Had a
Little Spam", "Twinkle Twinkle Little Spam", "Happy Spamday", "We Shall
Overcome (the spam)", "Jingle Spam", "Popeye the Sailor Spam", and a few
others. The Spaminator randomly selects three spam tunes to play for each
call. It plays the tunes, then hangs up and calls right back up again.
The Spaminator is currently running, filling up the spammers voicemail box
with spam tunes. Hopefully, it will fill up the voicemail box and they
won't be able to receive any other messages. Also, it will bring them
much anguish as they constantly try to delete these messages that don't
stop coming.

The last I checked the Spaminator had played over 100 spam tunes into
their voicemail box. I am ecstatic. The Spaminator will continue to run
over night. Tomorrow morning I will check its progress (it keeps a log of
all tunes it plays so I know how many it did).

If anyone is interested in utilizing the Spaminator for spaminating other
egregious spammers, let me know. I can easily program it to
simultaneously call out to other phone numbers and sing a symphony of spam
for them as well.

I hope that my simple solution brings some manner of grief to these
idiots, whoever they are. Ideally it will give them more anguish than
their constant barrage of spam has brought me. I will not relent. My
next step is to try and track down the actual owners of this "business",
try to find out their other phone numbers (preferrably home numbers) and
unleash the Spaminator on those numbers as well.

Thanks for letting me vent.

Sam Alternate e-mail: dastar_at_siconic.com
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 13 Jul 1998 16:16:46 -0700
From: "***Bull*sEye)*" <33rq2w_at_att.net>
To: vcoffey_at_bu.edu

Authenticated sender is <33rq2w_at_att.net>
Subject: ++BullsEye-*Targeting*Software*)+
Mime-Version: 1.0
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Received on Wed Jul 15 1998 - 02:59:44 BST

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