People are More Accepting of Spam 278
twitter writes "Many news organizations are reflecting the opinion of Pew Internet and American Life Project staffer Deborah Fallows that '...email users say they are receiving slightly more spam in their inboxes than before, but they are minding it less.' I think that's an odd conclusion to draw. You would expect the number of people using email less because of spam to decrease to zero quickly when 25% of the population say they avoid email! To their credit, they point out that CAN-SPAM has done nothing to help." The Reuters blurb about this study has a syopsis of their findings.
Spam with trigger words in the pictures (Score:3, Informative)
They change the bogus names and email addresses, of course, but the ads clearly are coming from the same source.
of course I mind less, 4 a reason (Score:5, Informative)
Of course I mind less, but I do because a good reason: the server I pop my mail from uses paid-for spam filtering (nothing revolutionary, but quite good), then my Thunderbird also squeezes them quite a bit. What I get at the end is below my getting-angry-about-it threshold. But, I have to tell that overall I get quite more spam than let's say this time last year. The reason I don't mind is that the number of spam I get after double filtering is _not_ higher than before.
X-YahooFilteredBulk (Score:4, Informative)
Unfortunately, a lot anti-spam measures (including Exim 3's system filters) only take place after a message has been accepted for delivery. For me, this results in a lot of bounce messages frozen in the queue as they cannot be returned (Hotmail mailbox full, etc). I've switched on features like verifying the sender and the headers, but this doesn't catch them all, and in some cases might even stop some legitimate spam (one of my mailing lists uses incorrect syntax for the "RCPT TO:").
More effective anti-spam systems need to filter before the message has been accepted. If you wait until then, it is already too late and it is on your system. No, refusing accept delivery is much effective IMHO, and forces the MTA's further up the chain to deal with it. They shouldn't have accepted it in the first place! When you get spam, return 550 (or whatever the code is) and let the SMTP client deal with it. In an ideal world, ever provider (ISP, or free service like Yahoo) will implement stricter MTA's. If the spam rejection can be pushed far enough up the chain, life for everyone will easier.
BTW, according to Philip Hazel (a message I recieved to a question I posed on the Exim mailing list), Exim 4 will offer much more functionality along these lines, including the invocation of C funtions after the DATA phase of the SMTP input. I guess this would be the spot to plug in Vipul's Razor, although I don't know what kind performance hit that would lead to. Mr. Hazel also pointed out that some stupid clients are in contravention of the RFC and will continue to try and delivery a message if they recieved 5xx after the DATA phase... oh well: they'll be using my bandwidth but they won't be putting any crap on my server.
Re:Spam with trigger words in the pictures (Score:2, Informative)
Depends which client you use, I guess. My Thunderbird never downloads images unless I request them manually.
Apart from the problem you describe, this also inhibit "beacon" images to function (you know, embed a single-pixel image from some webserver so you can look at the logs as a kind of spam delivery notification.)
Gmail + Thunderbird Bayesian filters = :-) (Score:5, Informative)
Considering what I use it for, I get astonishingly little spam through the gmail filter, and Thunderbird picks out the rest and moves it to my junk mail folder for periodic review. Twin filtering is the way to go...
Re:Spam with trigger words in the pictures (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Broadband (Score:5, Informative)
From my experience with it, it does do this, and it does it well. It puts a big "This message may not be from who it seems to be from" message at the top of the screen, and doesn't load any images.
Then again, I've only had two eBay phishing spams, and they were both obvious.
Re:Desensitized (Score:4, Informative)
I have received a few spams that really do look genuine, "I tried sending this to you before" sort of thing, that could fool quite a few people. However, the trouble is that I get this same spam five or six times a day. People are more likely to respond to a one-day 'offer' spam than when they're being drowned in them.
And if spammers are being paid by the number of spams sent, rather than spams replied to, this shouldn't change soon, thankfully.
I don't mind because Thunderbird is excellent... (Score:2, Informative)
And this is not a troll against commercial software, just my experience. It may be the simple reason that people don't mind spam: the spam-catching software has greatly improved.
Re:I don't mind because Thunderbird is excellent.. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Spam with trigger words in the pictures (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Broadband (Score:3, Informative)
Agreed, it does do this (and pretty well, only today did I see one manage to evade having it's links stripped) - however I would prefer it if they moved them to the spam folder automatically.
Otherwise they just clutter up the inbox.
He's a comment reposter (Score:1, Informative)
Re:I met a spam customer once (Score:2, Informative)
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=143527&cid
Word for word duplicate.
Pertinent, yes, but definitely rehashed.
Re:X-YahooFilteredBulk (Score:1, Informative)
Perhaps it's because it's been posted before On 12/1/2001 [slashdot.org]?
Karma whore...