Spam is Dead 485
Vainglorious Coward writes "Two years on from Bill Gates' promise to eradicate spam, an article in The Observer claims that spam has passed its peak and is now declining. Is it just me that hasn't noticed this?" I got almost a third more spam in 05 than 04. I guess I exist outside the bell curve on this one.
Oh Please (Score:5, Interesting)
Centralized Email (Score:4, Interesting)
Gates and co. would have to have an effective monopoly on email traffic for that to work. (Which might have been conceivable before the advent of Gmail, by the way.)
Maybe not declining, but simply changing (Score:4, Interesting)
My spam peaked early 2004 with about 30,000 mails per stuffing not only my inbox, but also my DSL connection. I had a "catch all" option on several dozen domains and most of the spam I received was addressed to non existing mail boxes. Due to my local spam filters very efficient handling of the problem I only started to worry about the situation when downloading all the spam started to take hours and my provider complained about the daily traffic.
The problem with the non existent mail addresses became a large one sometimes in 2003, when enough people had some kind of spam filtering that deflected most of the usual spam. I guess that sometime in 2004 even the last catch all rules have been disabled, so that today simply guessing email addresses will gain nothing for the spammer.
So maybe spam has not really peaked, but there are simply different waves of spam techniques. Some of them rely on mass, others on tricking the filters. We may simply be in a "smart spam phase". A lot of the spam that reaches me today shows the message as a picture instead of text and I have not yet figured out why thunderbird will display those pictures, since I disabled this.
But the article is right in spam becoming something like a background noise. I still have to manually mark about 100 mails per day as spam, but I got very fast in recognizing it and it only takes a few seconds. I'm always astonished if I meet friends whose email address have not been public for more than a decade and who are very annoyed if one or to mails per week pass their spam filter. To me it is like complaining about banner ads. It's just an unavoidable part of the internet ecosystem, like mosquitos.
Chriss
--
memomo.net [memomo.net] - brush up your German, French, Spanish or Italian - online and free
Re:Oh Please (Score:3, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Someone Forgot To Tell The Spammers (Score:3, Interesting)
> there
I post to Usenet all the time, using an unobfuscated email address and I don't get any spam, so either what you're saying is no longer true, or gmail's spam protection kicks ass!
Re:Centralized Email (Score:5, Interesting)
Who will maintain these lists? Anyone. Google? Consumer Reports? will they be free, or require micropayments or subscription fees to access, or be ad supported? Who cares, markets competition will work it out between vendors and consumers. At any rate, the basic system is sound, and does not necessarily require any sort of vendor lock-in to work.
To the user, all you have to do is set up your email client with the secure server(s) providing lists of valid micro-payment and email-insurance vendors (or use whatever defaults it comes with), and then tell your client how much money you require (reject, or move to SPAM folder, all messages that don't come with a payment or insurance policy of over $0.015) or whatever. Then say you get a piece of marketing mail you don't want insured at $0.02. Your computer checks the micropayment insurance vendor list and finds the vendor specified is valid, then it goes to the vendor and finds that the listed payment is valid, so the message goes in your inbox. You look at it, you decide it's spam, you click the "get insurance payment" button in your email client, and it goes and retrieves the $.02 and puts it in your account. The spammer who sent it will then see that you collected their payment, and either decide it's worth $0.02 to them to get stuff to you, or else take your name off their list so you don't collect any more of their micro-payment insurance policies.
Re:Spam is dead for me. (Score:3, Interesting)
Why not register a domain and have all the corporate email addresses just forward everything to the corresponding gmail account? (you say you gave up your domain, so I'm guessing you're all joeblow@gmail.com). It would look a lot more professional. Domains are so cheap these days that there's not really an excuse to continue to use amateur-appearing tactics. You'd probably be better off with this compromise, or a similar one.
Big deal. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Centralized Email (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyway, the OP is only half right. Yes, you cannot solve an economic problem with legal or technical bandaids, but you don't have to completely centralize things as long as you make it impossible to divide by zero. At least that's how the spammers think of their costs. If there is even 1 of the red real kind associated with each piece of email, the spammer's 'economic model' collapses into dust.
Okay, so let's blame Al Gore. After all, everything else is his fault. Because he was so effective in getting unconditional funding for those pointy-headed hackers, they didn't even think about building real economic models, and ever since then we've been cleaning up the resulting mess.
Yes, I'm joking about the blame, and if they had been too worried about how the money parts would work, maybe they never would have gotten around to inventing the Internet in the first place. On the other hand, there needs to be some balance between the reality and the abtract, and the Internet hasn't found any good balance yet.
My Adblock filters (Score:2, Interesting)
*.falkag.net/*
http://adserver./ [adserver.]
*.atdmt.com/*
*.indieclick.com/*
http://adsrvr./ [adsrvr.]
*.burstnet.com/*
*.tribalfusion.*
*.doubleclick.net*
*.loanweb.com*
*/ad.asp?*
*/ads/*
*/sponsors.*
*/advertise/*
*/adimage.php?*
*googlesyndication.com*
*personals.yahoo.com*
*/banners/*
http://ads./ [ads.]
*.valueclick.com/*
*.chitika.net/*
*/bannerads/*
*/marketing/*
*.adrevolver.com/*
*&adspace=*
24 filters, and I don't see more than 10 or 15 ads a DAY. I can't beat Yahoo, though, because they store their ads right in with the pictures for news articles and stuff. Keenspot uses the same dirty trick; I can't read some Keenspot comics without having to see Keenspot ads.
really? (Score:5, Interesting)
Note, also, that I turned off spam protection in hotmail, turned it off in yahoo mail, have none for my ISP one or my Uni one (both would only mark e-mail as spam instead of blocking it anyways, so I would know), and etc. Considering how high the signal-to-noise ration is, the possibility for false-positives understandibly outweighs the miniscule spam concerns I would have.
So what the hell am I doing right that most people seem to be doing wrong?
First off, none of my addresses are entirely intuitive or plain. No numbers even, nothing other than pure letters, but nothing that would show up unmodified in a wordlist or namelist (not even with good ol' "two random letters at the end of the string"). My sister has a gmail address of the same length as mine, but gets literally hundreds of spam messages every single day. The difference is that hers is her last name, while mine is my first name with two letters from my last; so hers is likely to show up in wordlists. That seems to be the kicker.
Meanwhile, my yahoo address seems to attest to the idea that signing up for things online won't get you spam, BUT the things I sign up for are message boards at places like BeyondUnreal.com or the official The Trews webboard or maybe to view some newpaper online (for those amnesiac days that I don't remember about BugMeNot). So nothing particularily sketchy.
In other words, as long as a person is relatively smart about how they handle their e-mail, they should be fine, 'tis my theory. This theory is not without major flaws, though, I'll admit. And furthermore, sometimes a person just wants a specific e-mail address, and it sucks then that it might just doom them to spam.
And further going down the questionable route of using my own personal experience as a scientific study, seeing as I had no spam until that one message, it would look something like this, starting arbitrarily in 2000:
2000 - 0%
2001 - 0%
2002 - 0%
2003 - 0%
2004 - 0%
2005 - 100% OMFG 2005 IS TEH SPAM APOCALYPSE
2006 - 0% (so far...)
So, in other words, I can prove anyone right. Parent? Sure, spam has
increased DRAMATICALLY in the last while. Naysayers? Bah, spam isn't
a problem! Etc. Ah, subjectivity.
Re:Spam is dead for me. (Score:5, Interesting)
Unless you work for Google (in which case you should have mentioned it before you started this thread) that is almost certainly a violation of their Terms of Use.
Re:Technical Solutions solves all problems (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes there is. It is called a gun.
And its application is a bullet to the head of the anti-social person given by the governmental authorities of the day. The anti-social person can no longer affect society and can no longer by pass any methods intended to keep him in check.
But of course there is a major moral problem with my suggestion and should never be taken as advice.
I'm just stating the theoretical situation in which technology trumps social behavior. Obviously, its an extreme and we don't want to be going around shooting spammers (even though I'm sure some of you want to) but eventually given enough technology you can prevent everything.
Or rather what I am saying is that all social and political problems can be solved with technology. It just depends on your application of the technology and how far you are willing to go with the application. I'll take a bit of annoyance with my freedoms though.
Re:Centralized Email (Score:2, Interesting)
Micropayments for eMail (Score:2, Interesting)
For this to work, servers would have to indicate the going rate for messages (either by size, number of recipients, number of messages, etc.), and then the sending system would have to either accept it and actually transfer funds before sending the message, or just abort the transaction. The sender could choose how much they want to pay for this "ePostage" before sending it, and then the server could handle it automatically.
The main problems I forsee with such a system are eMail lists (as someone else already pointed out), and automatically generated eMails from other services (free or otherwise) that the user has signed up for. Why should Google AdSense or PayPal or eBay have to pay to notify me that my contact information is invalid, for example (I'm sure a skilled con-artist can see obvious ways to exploit something like this)? And do the users also deserve a share of this income, or just the ISP?
In addition to that, a few technical matters will need to be resolved before anyone can start thinking about even implementing such a system:
0. A new protocol to replace SMTP will be needed (it's not appropriate in my view to add this to SMTP, which is based on a trusted model rather than a costed/financial model). The protocol could be exactly the same as SMTP, but with one additional step inserted immediately after the "HELO/EHLO" stage in order to reduce development overhead for everyone.
1. Automated micropayment transfer protocols will need to be available to these new mail servers, and high-volume servers will need to be set up by the various providers of these financial services. Features will need to be able to handle currency exchange in a simple manner. Dispute procedures will need to be very, VERY well thought out.
2. The potential for criminals to launder large amounts of money by setting high rates or just claiming high volume when it doesn't exist (and both sides indicating this to be correct) in order to facilitate transfers between one another would be of great concern to government and military organizations aiming to impede the funding of so-claimed enemies (e.g., mafia, terrorist groups, trade blocked nations, etc.).
3. Micropayment service providers will likely compete on such things as percentages (e.g., they keep 0.05% of each micropayment to help cover their costs), various service charges (including fees for dispute resolution), usage fees, monthly service fees, etc. Banks are well-known for these types of tactics, and these micropayment providers will likely earn the same notariety.
In the end it will all just end up being very expensive and time-consuming, and I suspect that people will simply abandon it in favour or reverting to SMTP again in order to save money.
It's an interesting pipe dream, but I don't see how it will catch on in our current global economic climate given the current costs of doing business.
Re:Maybe not declining, but simply changing (Score:2, Interesting)
This strategy isn't too well thought out, it just makes sure that everyone loses. Using an adblocker means that I get to see the content on X site while not having to see the add. I come out ahead and it costs the company a little bit to show me the content. They also don't recoup any of that cost in terms of advertising dollars since I never saw the ad. Overall the company is slightly worse off and I'm slightly enriched.
The strategy of avoiding the site, however, means that no one sees the content or ads. No one is any better off, and no one is any worse off. A better strategy would be a combination. Adblock, and visit, sites that have annoying ads. Don't adblock the non-annoying ads. Viewing non-obtrusive ads on certain sites leaves both you and those socially responsible marketters better off. On the other hand, annoying advertisers will see their costs soar with revenue stagnant.
Re:Centralized Email (Score:3, Interesting)
Huh?? (Score:3, Interesting)
How Lucky You Are To Get Mail In English (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Take Spamassassin
2) Make it work in Japanese
3) ???
4) Profit.
Re:really? (Score:4, Interesting)
I have had the exact same email address since 1990. It is just three letters long, and is plastered all over the place on Usenet from the 90s, various old web pages, mailing list subscription lists from before they were confidential. I receive about 1300 spam messages per day on average, every day. And that is AFTER the MTA (Postfix) eliminates a lot of spam through DNS blacklists, RFC and RDNS compliance checking, and so on. I'll be doing greylisting next.
I also help to run the mail system of an ISP. Spam and viruses, by far, are most of the email these days. By far.
Spam is a horrible disease on the Internet. It increases the cost to everybody, in bandwidth, the cost of staff at ISPs battling it, and in end-user time wasted on it.
Larry
Re:Centralized Email (Score:2, Interesting)
Reductions in Spam (Score:3, Interesting)