[tor-relays] Jerk spammers on tor-relays

[Keifer Bly]

➢ There are lots of technical folk on these tor lists.
There ought to be at least a few who'd enjoy killing some spam servers.

What exactly do you mean by “killing them”? If you are referring to forcibly taking the servers offline, that would most likely be illegal. Not to mention an amount of the spamming addresses are using Gmail and Yahoo mail accounts, and we can’t “kill” those sources.

Of course, one approach we could try to get rid of the spammers is the same approach that tor uses to distribute bridge relays (somewhat) as in we all report back to the list email addresses we are currently receiving spam from and then report to the list administrator to block those email addresses. Of course, the fact that the spammers are now attacking our personal email addresses would mean we would have to block the spamming addresses in our email accounts as well. Gmail, as well is I’m sure most to all of the other big name email providers allow to block emails from certain email addresses by creating a filter to automatically delete emails from that email address by going into the settings and filters. This may be a bit of a pain for those running personal mail servers, and I know it is a far from perfect stop, but it is something.

➢ I don't see that as a great improvement. Sex spam doesn't bother me.

The content isn’t “deeply disturbing” me either, but I use this email address and it is annoying to have it getting spam. And the spammers are being smart to bypass email providers spam filters by sending them from email domains that are legitimate email providers (gmail.com, yahoo.com, etc).

What do you all think of this solution?
From: Mirimir
Sent: Friday, September 21, 2018 11:47 AM
To: tor-relays at lists.torproject.org
Subject: Re: [tor-relays] Jerk spammers on tor-relays

On 09/21/2018 10:50 AM, Andreas Krey wrote:
> On Fri, 21 Sep 2018 18:23:48 +0000, Ralph Seichter wrote:
> ...
>> I'm not sure what type of spam you are referring to, but when I post to
>> this mailing list I see spamming attempts that are directly targeting my
>> MX, without using the mailing list infrastructure. The list admins would
>> not be able to reliably correlate which subscribed address is "A" even
>> if I shared my mail logs.
> 
> Create a dummy mail address. Make the list server send out mails from
> that address very slowly at random times to the recipients. See when
> the spam arrives on the dummy address. Repeat as many times as needed
> to get sufficient correlation between spam arrival and mail distribution
> timepoints.
> 
> - Andreas

Cool idea :)

But then we'd all be getting spammed by those test messages ;)

I don't see that as a great improvement. Sex spam doesn't bother me.

Another alternative is tracking down and killing the spam sources. It'd
be a huge project, and maybe a little morally iffy. But as Marv says in
"Sin City": "I love hitmen. No matter what you do to them, you don't
feel bad." So hey. There are lots of technical folk on these tor lists.
There ought to be at least a few who'd enjoy killing some spam servers.
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