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.
Typical Spammer Stereotype (Score:5, Interesting)
You can't just pick up a mailing software, buy a list and sit back and watch the money roll in anymore, so the new kids wanting to be millionaires have to result to more devious tactics.
one possible cause (Score:5, Interesting)
Therefore, spam was there when they started emailing, and they don't complain about it because it is no change.
A simile here would be people who always lived near an airport tend to complain less about the airport than the people who just moved to that region. Thus, a change in the behavior of a user environment is more likely to be a cause for complaints than something that has always been there.
We do not complain about the high death toll caused by traffic anymore, do we? they did in the past!
B.
I met a spam customer once (Score:1, Interesting)
tolerance (Score:4, Interesting)
First, it was just the people who responded to spam, making it profitable to spamers.
Now I guess I really don't like people who have grown tolerent of it.
When I first got an Internet email address in 1992, it took me all of 2 unsolicted emails in my inbox before I started hating spam, and I still hate it.
The only good news out of this study is that people don't trust email. That's good. If you didn't ask for a company to send you an email, I mean, if you didn't explicitly ask them (sorry, clicking 'I agree' to an EULA that has a 'we will send you spam' statement buried deep inside does not mean you want to get it), the company that sends it to you is unethical and you shouldn't do business with it.
Period.
Spam pisses me off. It should piss other people off too.
Re:Broadband (Score:3, Interesting)
If only the physical spam would stop. (Score:1, Interesting)
Email's don't bother me, because they're quite easy to filter & delete. The tree-killing paper stuffed in my mailboxes each day is far more of an inconvenience.
Re:Broadband (Score:3, Interesting)
I've only received one or two. However gmail is completely useless at tagging phishing emails as spam.
I've just removed 6 ebay, 2 paypal and 1 wells fargo that have appeared over the weekend. It would be nice if their spam filter did this automatically for me.
One of the ebay ones managed to get around gmails phishing checks and so the links were still active.
Re:Desensitized (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe the percentage the article talks about, is just that small increase in quality ?
Re:Obviously they don't read Slashdot (Score:1, Interesting)
My commentary [userfriendly.org] on the absurd severity of the sentence caused quite a stir. In light of some of the other comments, this is unsurprising. I had merely intended to comment that 9 years is asinine, but in light of other comments made, one can see why people might think differently.
Just for reference to any delusional
Now, go look at the grid linked to the link that I posted, and consider, deep down inside, if 9 years is at all appropriate.
If you do, you can go join all of the other groups trying to hammer their point of view down on the populace by making it law.
Re:Broadband (Score:1, Interesting)
Spam has destroyed the medium (Score:5, Interesting)
5 years ago if I sent an email to someone, I was virtually assured they got it. Now, I am forced to follow up almost *EVERY* email I get with a "Got it, thanks" or a if I dont hear from someone in a few days -- a phone call. Not a big deal, but not exactly the modern marvel of technology we were looking for?
I've heard about VOIP spam becoming the next big thing -- I really weep for the future. What am I going to follow up PHONE calls with? Certified Letters?
Re:I actually don't get spam. (Score:2, Interesting)
Gmail takes care of mine now (Score:2, Interesting)
Even though it has caught a few falsely, I find it easier to check this in Gmail for some reason.
Re:Tips for fighting spam (Score:2, Interesting)
After thoughtful consideration, we are delighted to offer you a full-time job with salary starting at $75K. Please see attachment for details.
Sincerely,
Éric Desrosiers
Human resources
Big Corp Inc.
P.S. 1618 applications were submitted for this job! (Most were incomplete which caused the applicant to be permanently removed from consideration.)
My dreams dashed away... (Score:3, Interesting)
Spam is decreasing for me... don't know if it's improved blocking or what. But it kinda depends on which email account we're talking about anyway. One particular email accounts seems to be the target of some ridiculous bot(s) out there sending all these windows files. As a Linux user, I'm not worried but annoyed.
Is it a natural conclusion that people would become more accepting of spam emails? Well, I suppose it's possible. After all, the original draw of cable TV was "hey look! no commercials!" and now cable TV is just as polluted as over the air TV. (Over the air TV signal strength has now been tapered back to make cable more attractive.)
Oh well. Another Monday morning I guess... and I'll concede that I may never read the story I've been waiting to read for the past 5 years.
Re:Desensitized (Score:1, Interesting)
(For comparison, I haven't seen a real Windows crash for over a year now, and that one was caused by a faulty hard disk that also brought down the FreeBSD I dual-boot to.)
Spam damages domain holders too (Score:2, Interesting)
Even worse is when someone fakes your domain in spams. This is roughly the same as a "joe-job" attack, and now you not only get bounced messages from bad addresses on some spammer's list, but also complaints from anti-spammers who think the email headers have not been forged. I used to report spammers, until it got too hard and there were too many of them, and tracking down the actual spammer is quite a skill.
Since aol put their "report this as spam" button right next to something else on the browser toolbar, you can be totally innocent and get threats from your provider for spamming. Thanks, AOL. It's giving mailing list providers fits, too.
Yeah, ask ME if I tolerate spam more than I used to. The frustration is feeling so powerless to do anything about it.
Re:Better filters? (Score:2, Interesting)
I get about 400 spam messages a day, Thunderbird without fail catches about 75% of them. Every few minutes while working I'm distracted by the 'new mail' icon and out of habit I stop what I'm doing and go check. It's always some piece of spam.
I can't count the number of hours I waste each week task switching my thought process like that, I have a hard time staying concentrated anyway, and this is usually a prelude to `Time to check the news sites anyway' or some other waste of time.
It's to the point where I simply have to force myself to not leave e-mail open in the background, and only check it a few times a day.
Re:Desensitized (Score:4, Interesting)
He tells all his friends a secret nonsensical code word starting with "Z" to include as the first word of the subject line. The he sorts his webmail inbox by subject and ignores everything that doesn't start with that word.
He's not a big net user, so he doesn't need throw-away accounts or anything like that. For him, it's quite enough to be able to see what's from friends and ignore the rest.
Obviously, a more tech-savvy person could just set up a simple procmail script to send all the non-friend mails to
This isn't a universally applicable idea, but for someone who just needs personal e-mail from people he knows I think it's a pretty interesting solution.
Catch spam by creating honeypots (Score:3, Interesting)
Set up a honeypot on your website if you have one. I noticed that people were requesting /cgi-bin/formmail.pl about once a day, so I wrote a cgi-script that logged these requests. All the requests were probes that tried to see whether it would forward mails to any address. So I pasted the mail text into an email to this address: wnacyiplay@aol.com so that the spammer believed that it was a working gateway.
It's 10 days later now. The honeypot has absorbed 185 mails addressed to a total of 28,000 recipients. It feels good to know that I have prevented 28 thousand spam mails from being sent. You'd think that the spammer had noticed by now that the mails never arrive, but no...
As a side effect, the honeypot also generates IP addresses of compromised computers all over the world. I'm not sure what to do with those, though.
Re:Heh. Riiight. Now get off the high horse. (Score:3, Interesting)
Still, I don't know... there's quite a difference between "the magic is gone" and the outright avoiding email that we're seeing today. I think people still like to talk to other people, especially people sharing some common hobby/interest/whatever. It's no longer something new and fascinating, that's true, but we're still human and still noone's 100% introverted.
After all, you're reading Slashdot and actively taking part in the discussion at that. Obviously not minding all that much the possibility that some people (myself included) could be immature at times. You could have just as well gotten a bunch of "lol, you suck" answers, and I'm thinking you knew that, but that didn't stop you from posting.
So the magic may be gone, but the usefulness is IMHO still there.
And the fact that we've turned into a bunch of online hermits who'd rather hide from everyone, and would rather delete a message from a stranger than read it, is IMHO just diminishing that usefulness.
Re:Spam with trigger words in the pictures (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Tips for fighting spam (Score:3, Interesting)
For me -- as a 'foreigner' from your perspective -- filtering all english email messages from senders not in my address book would get rid of over 90% of spam, but being unreachable from Anglosaxon countries is not an option in my line of work.
For my mother filtering anything from senders whose email address does not end in
From your filtering rules I deduce that the US is still as tolerant as it always has been towards foreigners who want to keep their original family name, including those characters that are not directly available on your keyboard.
Wouldn't cutting the cables though the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean be more effective? You will find a lot of supporters of that idea on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.
Things like Spamcop are misguided. They will list any foreign message they don't understand as spam and are regularly abused here by people who want interfere with the email communication of others. Subscribing to a government information mailing list and then reporting it as spam is becoming a common tactic.
desensitization (Score:3, Interesting)
If you really want to find out how well people tolerate spam, I recommend this simple experiment: Place a small box with a button on it in front of someone. Explain to them that if they press this button, they will no longer get any spam. The button will cause the spammer to be rounded up, have his skin slowly peeled off with a pair of rusty pliers, be dipped in salt, and left to slowly die...
There would not be a single button un-pressed. That I guarantee.
Re:Heh. Riiight. Now get off the high horse. (Score:2, Interesting)
Also this "nuisance" isn't affraid to:
- pay for and spread viruses that act as spam zombies (more millions lost in IT wages dealing with those)
- scam and fraud (see how many spam ads are for "p3n1$ enl@rg3m3nt" frauds)
- try to ruin other people's reputation (see all the "joe jobs" aimed at anti-spam sites, or just using random innocent bystanders as scapegoats)
- DDOS/mailbomb/etc whoever criticizes them
- destroy, degrade and deface other people's resources
and a whole host of other behaviours ranging from anti-social to outright criminal.
Sorry, it seems to me like that's not just an "annoyance", like kids being noisy outside, it's a bunch of parasites draining society for their own good.
Also here's a concept for you: the punishment is supposed to make the crime not worth it. Those guys earn tens of millions out of their crime. Divide that by 9 years in prison leaves them with anything between several hundreds of thousands and _millions_ per year. That puts it into the range of being more rewarding than higher level management.
So if anything 9 years in prison is _too_ _little_ for these scumbags.
I mean, what next? Let's start giving 2 days community sentences to those who rob a bank, right?
And, oh, if they wanted to do a PHD instead, they could have done just that instead of spamming. Sorry, I see no point in that comparison.
Re:Better filters? (Score:3, Interesting)
Just to clear something up, as I think a few people are potentially confused: I'm not claiming that spam isn't a problem anymore because filters are getting better. I'm merely claiming that better filters may be part of the reason why this survey shows that people are becoming more tolerant of it.
We're getting to a point in time where a very large number of e-mail users aren't running an e-mail client, but who are using Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, or a similar service. Indeed, it seems these days whenever I run into an Internet user who isn't terribly technically-savvy, that person has a Hotmail or Yahoo Mail account. In cases such as these, they don't even have to sit around and download the spam messages.
Now personally I'm with you: I run an e-mail client that connects to POP3/IMAP servers to get my messages. Due to business use we're probably still in the majority, but a lot of "average consumers" these days are using web mail, many of which provide automatic filtering AND which don't require you to download a pile of messages.
Yaz.