Spam wars
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Spam wars refers to internet battles between spammers- (ie, businesses who use unsolicited bulk-mailing) versus anti-spammers (privacy advocates, concientious hackers, software protection providers).
In recent years the legal war between the two camps has exceeded the bounds of law and spilled over into internet espionage and hacking.
Because the basic governmental form of the Internet is anarchy and because of its international nature, traditional civilian governments have been unable to enforce even those few laws that they have seen fit to pass (ex. CAN-SPAM Act). The speed of development and advancement on the Internet also leaves government resources strained to keep up. In the face of lawlessness, the traditional solution in the trenches has always been in the hands of the vigilante. So it is with the Internet. It's Dodge city, and the sheriff hasn't moved in yet. Modern day digital vigilantes, seeking to bring order to this lawless land, view themselves as wreaking digital justice against those who they see as sinning against the society of the Internet. Service providers that host known spammers can expect to be attacked by these vigilante groups and individuals.
Likewise, the spammers and bad hackers engage in ever increasing levels of sophistication, and sometimes just depend on a certain number of extremely unwise people. The recent reports of successful phishing come to mind.
This arms race pits technologist against technologist, and to the innocent bystander, those wearing the white -vs- black hats are pretty clear. A blind eye is often turned to the vigilante's efforts, despite the fact that a denial of service attack on a spammer haven (as an example) does take up valuable network bandwidth.
Just as traditional legal entities have trouble dealing with spammers and hackers, they likewise have difficulty dealing with the vigilantes. To date, no major arrests of vigilantes have been reported in the mainstream news. The public outcry against such prosecution would likely be very widely heard.
This page Stopping e-mail abuse has almost exhaustively covered anti-spam tecniques
Spam war approaches
There are different approaches for dealing with spam
Most solutions use a combination of more than one
- Blocking spam
- Fitering out spam
- Greylisting
- complaining to providers, law enforcement, or newsgroups
- Attacking the spammer or spamvertised site
Blocking spam seems to be by far the best way of fighting spam. If we can trace the spammers source we can simply reject their emails. Using RBL checks or SPF records are some means by which this can be done
Filtering spam: There seems to be no perfect way of blocking spammers , some spammers will surely get their mail thru. So people use mail content filters like spamassassin to filter out spam mails. These filters use heuristic checks, bayes checks , and colloborative checks like razor or DCC
The problem with spam filtering is that there is always a possibility of a false positive , wherein a non-spam mail is detected as spam