Comments: 268 +- IT: 12% of E-mail Users Have Responded To Spam on Wednesday July 15, @02:30PM
Meshach writes "An article in Ars Technica claims that 12% of internet users have actually responded to spam messages and tried to buy items. Although I find this hard to believe, it does explain why my spam folder is always full." Also in spam news, wjousts links to a Technology Review article about how spammers get your e-mail address, writing "E-mail addresses in comments posted to a website had a high probability of getting spammed, while of the 70 e-mail addresses submitted during registration at various websites, only 4 got spammed."
Related Stories
The Economics of Spam 832 comments
Junkie Loves His Spam 667 comments
An eye in a blue face
Saw an eye in a green face.
"That eye is like this eye"
Said the first eye,
"But in low place,
Not in high place."
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.
That's why... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm posting as an anonymous coward, so they don't spam my e-mail address.
They got my email (Score:3, Interesting)
and details regarding wow from this web site. Irony abounds.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe if you hid your email addy it wouldn't happen. :)
I've had joe@nethead.com for over a decade so it's already on every fsckin' list there is.
Re:They got my email (Score:5, Interesting)
Thats why when I (on rare occasion) forward an email, I delete all the previous email headers, and BCC everyone on the list so that the people I send the email to don't get their email address added. Of course, my email address is still shown as the source, so if the people I send to don't follow the same behavior as me, then my address gets added to the forward list.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not irony, that's exactly what the study says:
E-mail addresses in comments posted to a website had a high probability of getting spammed
It probably doesn't help that your email address is sitting there in plain text with no obfuscation.
Myself, on the other hand, I've never received spam from having my email harvested on Slashdot. Why do you think that is?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, Anonymous Coward's user ID is 666.
No joke. Look it up.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course people respond... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Of course people respond... (Score:4, Funny)
How else are they going to win the Nigerian lottery? You can't win if you don't enter.
Of course you can. I got an email just last week telling me I had won, and I've never entered it...
Parent
Re:Of course people respond... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
no kidding? (Score:5, Insightful)
12%?
Really? I honestly thought it would be much higher...just basing that off of some of my daily interactions with people. It's a good thing breathing is an involuntary action, cause there are a lot of people out there who'd forget to.
Re:no kidding? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Don't know why but it reminds me of this SNL Skit: Don't Buy Stuff You Can't Afford
http://consumerist.com/consumer/clips/snl-skit-dont-buy-stuff-you-cant-afford-252491.php [consumerist.com]
Re:no kidding? (Score:4, Insightful)
The folks responding to the "enlarge your member" ads didn't want to fess up.
Parent
Definition of "Spam?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Nigerian princes in peril are another matter, though.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Do legitimate businesses send unsolicited email? I have never seen one.
I have, very very often. It seems common in the b2b market in the UK.
And yes, I am talking about real, honest-to-god legitimate businesses, with reputations; as well as the countless spams from others with differing levels of legitimacy (all the way from slightly dodgy telecoms resellers, through SEOs all the way down to the pill peddlers we all know and 'love').
Re:Definition of "Spam?" (Score:5, Interesting)
When I chaired a society at university I got loads of spam (my address was listed on the university's website as the contact for the society), and so did the society's email address. Most of them would be asking me to spam everyone in the society with offers for summer "charity" work and so on. I usually replied with this, which scared them off:
This is a spam.
Quoting from http://www.ico.gov.uk/what_we_cover/privacy_and_electronic_communications/the_basics.aspx [ico.gov.uk] ,----[ Electronic mail ]
| Electronic mail is emails, SMS (text), picture, video and answer-phone
| messages. Electronic mail marketing messages should not be sent to
| individuals without their permission unless all these following criteria
| are met:
|
| 1. The marketer has obtained your details through a sale or negotiations
| for a sale.
| 2. The messages are about similar products or services offered by the
| sender.
| 3. You were given an opportunity to refuse the marketing when your details
| were collected and, if you did not refuse, you were given a simple way to
| opt out in every future communication.
`----
You have met none of these criteria. If I receive another message from you I will report your business as sending spam.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
One could mark a legitimate business' unsolicited email as spam, but that doesn't mean that purchasing a product because of the material in one of those emails is newsworthy.
Unsolicited email from a legitimate business is SPAM too. Just a less evil spam with an opt out function that works.
Though sometimes its easier to just not even do that and block those messages just in case that opt out is a trick to see if your email is alive or not.
But yeah unsolicited email, no matter who it is from, is by definition
Order of the day (Score:3, Funny)
Terrify people into compliance!
"Hey, y'know gramma - I heard answering junk email funds the terrorists." ...
"Yep, that's right - that email you've got right there advertising cheap knob-expanders? That came straight from Osama bin Laden's laptop, uh huh."
Which sites sell addresses to spammers? (Score:5, Informative)
I would have liked the article to state which sites sell e-mail addresses to spammers. They would certainly deserve it.
I use unique e-mail addresses for (almost) everything I sign up for, and I've never gotten a spam message from any of those unique accounts. I started getting a lot of spam when I first posted to LKML, which is published online.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Some occasional spot checking on my spam filter has shown no e-mail arriving to any plus addresses.
This may not be completely surefire, because spammers might strip out the +stuff at the end of the address. In practice, it should work for now, because according to research like this article, spammers are lazy.
If in the future your main e-mail address starts to get spam, you could set your account up so that "address+real@gmail.com" goes to your inbox and anything addressed to just address@gmail.com is assumed to be spam. (Obviously, you only give out example+real@gmail.com to those you trust.)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No suprises. Some problems. (Score:5, Insightful)
Otherwise, it is somewhat believable as many individuals new to the internet learn many lessons the hard way.
Mind you, "but another 13 percent said they simply had no idea why they did it; they just did." explains why I still receive 'send this to 10 people or you will has bad luck' from otherwise intelligent and educated people.
My Penis Enlargement Pills Worked Great!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Hey! I got a great deal on penis enlargement, breast enhancement, and this greasy stuff you rub all over your body to increase your sexual desirability scent! Works great! Now if I could only get the dog to stop sniffing me, all the women would be barking at my door!
Sad to say, one of the places that I buy "generic viagra" from would not return my money when it did not work as well as the "super size me" products... I will just have to wait for my money from the deal I made in Nigeria to counter that loss.
sounds low (Score:2)
Correction (Score:5, Funny)
The dumbest 12% of internet users have actually responded to spam messages and tried to buy items.
The other 88% are what scientists refer to as "not retarded".
Re:In other news... (Score:4, Informative)
Not necessarily true.
50% of all people have less than median IQs.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you seen the bell curve? In this case average IS median.
How (Score:2)
I get a crapload of spam from the UAE (Dubai) and the only way I can think about how my email got harvested was that I once wrote a letter on an Al-Jazeera forum mentioning that not all Americans want to invade Iraq when the current Gulf War started.
I've noticed multiple resellers have my email now are are even soliciting me to buy their spam list as they are spamming me.
What is most annoying is that I am now getting emails that state that "this is not a spam email because is it from blah blah".
Spammers sim
Lately... (Score:5, Interesting)
and that was it. No link, no pictures. My theory is I have a really good friend who goes through a whole lot of effort just to make me smile. Either that, or it's an insult on my manhood designed to make me feel inadequate.
Re:Lately... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Lately... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Lately... (Score:4, Insightful)
Every so often I go through my spam folder, it's pretty funny. I've noticed lately that a lot of them don't even have links, it's like they're just trying to annoy us. For example, I received this yesterday:
and that was it. No link, no pictures. My theory is I have a really good friend who goes through a whole lot of effort just to make me smile. Either that, or it's an insult on my manhood designed to make me feel inadequate.
A lot of spammers aren't very smart. They use pre-built off-the-shelf tools, and sometimes they click the wrong button and end up accidentally sending a mal-formed message to three million people by mistake. Sometimes there's a bug in the software, or it's just misconfigured. It doesn't really matter to them - after all, it doesn't cost them anything to send the spam, because they're stealing resources from others.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
For example, I received this yesterday:
Forge your huge love sword
and that was it. No link, no pictures
This is because many spammers are totally incompetent. Other symptoms:
* Messages with subject line '$SUBJECT'.
* Sender names made up from non-name words joined together 'Vivacious F. Baking'
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
My email address has only been on Slashdot (Score:5, Interesting)
I got this username and email as an experiment. I have only posted it publicly on Slashdot and have not used it for anything else. I don't even check it. I just checked. I have 5,000 messages in my spam folder. And gmail deletes them after a month. So posting my email publicly on Slashdot only is resulting in 5,000 spams a month.
Sources (Score:3, Interesting)
What disturbs me isn't the spam that comes from botnets of infected Windows PCs on residential broadband connections. I expect that. What bothers me is the spam that comes from dedicated servers colocated in actual datacenters, with static IP addresses, domain names, reverse DNS properly configured, and valid SPF records.
For example, these are apparently all owned by one spammer, that I've received spam from in the past few days:
mx5.mit9zinger.com
mx2.finogento.com
mx1.finogento.com
mx4.pinchmir.com
mx1.travel1soe.com
mx2.kintopuzi.com
mx1.petchin.com
mx1.abaganawena.com
mx1.tineraset.com
mx2.kimbolimbo.com
mx2.greenzetrain.com
From a technical standpoint, everything looks legitimate. Because they offer an apparently-working opt-out mechanism (I'm sure it really just marks your address as "confirmed", but you'd have to come up with a way to prove that) and they're not spoofing any headers, they're probably not in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act.
Want Spam? Use Yahoo Groups (Score:3, Interesting)
I have two email addresses on yahoo.com. One is a jumble of letters and numbers which I use to for access to things I have no desire to ever see again. Dump things like "we'll email you the download link". That email address, which has been around for 7+ years gets the odd spam here and there.
The other yahoo.com email address is used only to enroll in a number of Yahoo groups and never given out or used for email. (I'm a ham and for whatever reason the ham community has fallen in love with Yahoo groups.) This second email address receives between 100-200 spams per week.
Keeping in mind that the second email address has never been given out, where did the spammers get my email address from? I can only assume that either Yahoo sells email addresses used in groups for "targeted advertising" or that they have a huge security hole through which the leak Yahoo group email address.
In any case... What spam? Use Yahoo Groups!
Should we be surprised by this for some reason? (Score:3, Insightful)
If they can harvest 1,000 new addresses in a few minutes of bot-crawling the internet, versus a few dozen by buying them from someone with a form somewhere, the choice is pretty simple.
The take-home message of this is something we've known for quite some time - don't let your email address out on public pages.
How come nobody shoots spammers? (Score:3, Interesting)
You would figure with all the crazies on the internet (that we MUST protect our children from), that sooner or later, some hot-head with a gun and enough technical know-how to track down a spammer would start a spammer hunt and start mowing them down.
It's ONLY when we have a spammer-serial-killer that spammers will stop. Suing them doesn't work, there's a guy out there that makes a living just suing spammers in small claims court. Laws and even government crackdowns don't work. It will only be when spammers live in fear for their lives and the lives of their families that they will consider another line of work.
What's annoying is that they've gotten so adept at hiding their identities, they are probably the only people on the internet who don't get spam, furthermore, they are probably the least likely to be targeted by the govt-nannyism of the web.
All in the name of selling snake oil. PT Barnum wouldn't believe how true his law is or that it's grown by a factor of a 1000...
LinkedIn sold my email address (Score:5, Informative)
A friend of mine invited me to linkedin by using my personal email address and lo and behold I started getting a ton of spam relating to owning a business.
Never EVER EVER type your (or a friends') email address in to a website no matter how reputable they seem.
They will change their privacy policy the second they decide to make a buck.
And I hope the linkedin people go to hell because now that email address is about useless.
12%? No, according to research from last year (Score:3, Informative)
The idea that 12% have responded and tried to make purchases is ridiculous. Take a look at the paper I just linked. If you scroll towards the end, you can see the results of the experiment they did. Out of about 350,000,000 e-mails they observed being sent out, they only had about 10.5K (0.00303%) actually click on the link, and of those, only 28 (well below 0.00001%) people tried to make a purchase.
Now, granted, the poll included historical data, since they asked if people had ever clicked on a link or else tried to make a purchase before, but come on. 12%? Maybe back when spam was new or something, but as another person said earlier, almost all of us are "not retarded" at this point, or at least not stupid enough to go clicking those links. I wonder what percentage of people have actually clicked on spam links in the last year, as opposed to in their lifetime...
The Best Solution (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I use a greylisting SMTP proxy [sf.net] (that I wrote myself). It eliminates about 90% of all spam before I even have to download it. Spamprobe takes care of the rest. It's only on very rare occasions that spam ever makes it to my inbox, and there are practically no fals positives; and I've been using my email address for close to a decade now, on Usenet, on mailing lists, on crappy forums (like this one), and have never bothered to shield it or cloak it. Spam just isn't a problem for me any more.
Of course, that d
Rebates. (Score:3, Interesting)
I submitted a rebate form to MSI. They submitted the address to multiple spam sources.
No, I'm not guessing. I got IP addresses from helpful people at a couple of the companies, and it correlates with the day they found out I was suing them for refusing to honor the rebate. So, that's one way it can happen.
Re:Misleading (Score:4, Funny)
That was my thought too. People responding to 12% of all spam is quite a bit different than 12% of people having every responded to a spam email. A 12% response rate for an email marketing campaign is enough to make any marketers nipples hard enough to cut glass.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I have put up a couple of ads lately and the email harvesters have found a new technique. They reply to your ad, if you respond to their mail, you are on their list. But they use the same text in the message every time.
"Kind of sucks that it's almost impossible to get dates through Craigslist now, though."
Try http://www.plentyoffish.com/ [plentyoffish.com]