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.
Men worried as pr0n spam drops (Score:3, Funny)
Read More [mithuro.com]
Broadband (Score:4, Insightful)
Checking your email via web or pop now takes seconds not minutes for your email to download (as it used to for dialup).
So people are less annoyed (than they used to be) about waiting for 50 messages to download and most of them being spam.
Filtering has got a lot better too, I have not recieved a single spam with my gmail account.
Re:Broadband (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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: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: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.
Re:Broadband (Score:2)
My family doesn't check their Spam folders, so neither do most people (probably)
Desensitized (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Desensitized (Score:5, Insightful)
After a while, the next generation of people are accustomed to it. Because of the lack of outrage, the system stays in place.
It applies here perfectly too. Nothing will be done about spam as long as most of the people out there will put up with it, and some of the people out there even go so far as support it.
Re:Desensitized (Score:3, Insightful)
Spam isn't a system, though. In fact, spam is more nearly the lack of a system.
The cost of elminating spam would be very high. If you took the legal approach, you'd have to create a global police state over every email that anyone sends. Even then you're likely not to get full cooperation, so you'd lose whole countries full of people from the internet. If you took the technical approach, then you'd lose the ability to send an email to anyone, from anywhere, without any passwords or keys, and without ev
Re:Desensitized (Score:3, Insightful)
Eliminating spam could be free, if it weren't for the 2 idiots out of 1 million who actually buy the spammers products.
And I'd be able to fly, if it weren't for that damn gravitational force.
And while we're talking about the high cost of eliminating spam, what about the high cost of maintaing the e-mail system, of which 60% of so is used only for sending spam, according to a recent slashdot article.
High cost? E-mail is virtually free. In fact, it's so close to free that companies are competing to g
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.
Re:Desensitized (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe the percentage the article talks about, is just that small increase in quality ?
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.
Re:Desensitized (Score:2)
Really? Most of mine is for m0rtgag3s, pen1s enlargement, h0t v1rg1n t33ns and an aweful lot of phishing mails.
Seriously, who would buy a mortgage off spam?
The other really stupid thing is the amount of spam that only applies to the US which arrives at my
spam lets me know my mail is working. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:spam lets me know my mail is working. (Score:3, Insightful)
here is a link for ASSP, if you like it give them money. http://assp.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
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.
Obviously they don't read Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Obviously they don't read Slashdot (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Obviously they don't read Slashdot (Score:3, Insightful)
Heh. Riiight. Now get off the high horse. (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me tell you a story. Back before SPAM, giving your email address to people was _not_ considered some "unwise use" of it. It was the _whole_ idea of email.
E.g., I put my email address in all my newsgroup posts. _Not_ because of being "SOOO important", but because some conversations that ensued were really just between two people. No point spamming the whole newsgroup with stuff that really didn't concern everyone else on that newsgroup.
Especially since it would be often off-topic for that newsgroup anyway. E.g., if I made the ISO standard dumb comparison to a car in a hardware newsgroup, I would fully expect that anyone going on a non-hardware-related car tangent (e.g., "actually, the <car model> doesn't have a diesel option") would do so in email.
If anything "e-penis" would have been the exact opposite: the
Or, yes, when I wrote a game walkthrough, I did put both my email addresses in it. Not out of a sense of being "SOOO important", but simply because I _didn't_ consider it to be the alpha and omega of gaming walkthroughs. I figured that there _is_ plenty of stuff I had ommited, so email seemed like a good way to, you know, _communicate_ about that. Let people send me corrections, or ask additional questions.
It may no longer seem that obvious any more, but some of us actually used email to _communicate_ with people. Even strangers. That was the whole idea, in fact. (Family members already knew my telephone number, after all.)
Email was _not_ supposed to be some top secret, jealously kept secret even from idiot acquaintances who might leak it when they get virused. It was, in fact, _supposed_ to be usable for even perfect strangers to contact you, should they need to do that.
And that we've got at the point where all that got turned right on its head, well, you've just illustrated the damage that spam did. What should have been a valuable communication resource, got turned into something top secret and where a message from a stranger would more likely be deleted than read.
Re:Heh. Riiight. Now get off the high horse. (Score:2)
I recently had a popular web site (election-related) that was getting tons of hits, and I had a contact form that sent me e-mail on an "unlisted" account.
For a while - until there were too many comments, since I hadn't expected that level of popularity - I was replying personally to those mails, usually (when I remembered) from the "unlisted" account.
Now, several months after the site's relevance and traffic have passed, I started getting spam on that a
Re:Heh. Riiight. Now get off the high horse. (Score:2, Insightful)
The very first time I got myself into an online Diablo game, I almost went to the moon when I saw there were _strangers_ from some foreign countries _playing along_ with me. It was also exciting to get involved in some emerging communities, use ICQ and talk with complete strangers that live on the opposite side of Earth, and so on.
I think all this changed for two
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 m
hhhmmm... (Score:2, Funny)
Jan
Re:hhhmmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Better filters? (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps part of the reason is that many e-mail clients have better filtering mechanisms in them now than in previous years. With clients like Apple's Mail and Thunderbird, spam filtering can get quite accurate. I get as much spam as ever (if not more), but I rarely see any of it. The filters appear to do their job quite nicely.
We may not be getting less spam, but the tools to help deal with it have been improving, and are being made available to more and more e-mail users.
Yaz.
Re:Better filters? (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally, I have no idea about my spam rates since I filter out spam myself in Thunderbird, plus that the organizations I belong to seem to do a good job of keeping some of the spam out using SpamAssasin and other tricks.
Re:Better filters? (Score:3, Insightful)
At best that's a very minor part of the reason as only 1 in 100 people use those. We're talking people here, not /.-ers.
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 anyw
I still don't like it (Score:3, Insightful)
I use filtering as much as everyone else I know, but I guess I still find it insulting that I should have to. That I'm able to filter email on my end doesn't change:
the fact that some of it still gets through to annoy me and waste my time.
the fact that I'm likely to occasionally miss important emails because filters occasionally get false positives.
the
Yup. And it's even worse for business (Score:2)
For example, as a business you can't just filter out every email that contains "to remove yourself"
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 u
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.
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.)
Re:Spam with trigger words in the pictures (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Spam with trigger words in the pictures (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, where are those copyright zealots when we actually could use them? Have the rights users sue them for using works of art in mischievous activities.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Spam with trigger words in the pictures (Score:2, Informative)
'but they are minding it less.' (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't find this very strange. People adapt, and their expectations change.
Most people learn to spot spam at a glance, so even though total amount may have increased even those without spamfilters probably use less and less time deleting it. That doesn't mean we accept it more though, it just mean we aren't as bothered by it as we used to.
People get educated and axquire tools (Score:2, Insightful)
And so the problem dissolves.
Personally, I get 150 Spam per day. 1 or 2 of them appear in my inbox and are quickly deleted. SPAM isn't much of an issue for me.
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.
Re:one possible cause (Score:2)
I thought that it was very telling how people were so outraged over 9-11, but attacked people who pointed out that more people die in traffic accidents every year, and that we could save that many lives every year simply by driving more safely.
I too find popular reaction to tragedy a little bemusing... It is a fact of life that people die - around 200,000 per day retains a stable worldwide population - which is the same ball-
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.
Re:of course I mind less, 4 a reason (Score:2)
I can't, I mean I could, I was, I sometimes still am, but if there exist tools that stop the trash it before reaches me, then I'm ok. I don't have the time and and don't feel the sudden urge to start complaining to anyone regarding amounts of spam. I also don't have the time to participate in good filter development. What people can do at their level is to somewhat effectively stop th
Buying from spam okay, buying online not okay (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Buying from spam okay, buying online not okay (Score:2, Insightful)
And given that people are generally happy with services like Amazon, eBay and PayPal, they see no reason why services like Amaz0n, eBäy and PayPa1 should be any different.
Didn't you post the exact same thing (Score:3, Insightful)
If not, my Dejavu-ometer need recalibrating.
Differing interpretation (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Differing interpretation (Score:2)
Or it could be due to an increase in the total number of users thus driving the number down by watering down the particular group, much as one can drive the proof of a mixture of alcohol down by including things that aren't alcohol.
I was going to use a reference to Sperm-Competition Theory, but I figured no /.ers would understand that.
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:X-YahooFilteredBulk (Score:2)
I'm thankful for spam (Score:5, Funny)
I'll never be shy in the locker room again, and the ladies love me!
Now, if only I could shut that lady who keeps saying mean things about my dikky up, I'd be fine. Personally, I have no idea what her standards are.
Re:I'm thankful for spam (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I'm thankful for spam (Score:3, Funny)
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:tolerance (Score:2, Insightful)
people accept the state, because they do not know about any alternatives
Alternatives to spam? Surely you're not claiming you have an alternative to spam which involves still having an email account.
What we have to do is to educate people, teach them not to click "yes" to everything they see
Agreed.
and to filter as much spam as possible.
Filter it? Why do we have to teach people to filter spam? What do you care if I filter spam or not? Why does it make me stupid to tolerate the spam I receive?
T
One word: Filters (Score:2)
But nowaday? The spams pop up for a second in the incoming folder of thunderbird and promptly dissapear to where they belong to after that. The felt exposure of spam is less than ever. The only thing is that its 200 or 300K traffic per day, but thats less than some flash adds have, neglectable.
Statistics are misleading (Score:3, Insightful)
I get so much spam nowadays (which is thankfully filtered by SpamAssassin) that I no longer have time to sift through my spam folders looking for potential false positives, so using this articles logic you could argue I was more "accepting" of it, when really I have just resigned myself to forever receiving spam.
They are right about one thing though - CAN-SPAM has proven to be virtually useless.
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:Spam has destroyed the medium (Score:3)
Vigilantie justice, my friend. Start to get outraged, get other people outraged, and make the spammers pay.
Of course, that may be illegal, but I can't think of anything within the law to fight back, honestly.
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
Re:Spam has destroyed the medium (Score:2, Insightful)
They purchase a product from me then I e-mail them the software in return; Those people that never receive my delivery will start firing off e-mails, which I do receive quite perfectly, upset that I seem to be swindling them. I am completely unable to respond in any manner!
Sometimes I can play around with the return rece
i don't care about spam but others do (Score:2, Insightful)
They are slow in recognizing spam, and some get so overwhelmed with the amount of crap in their inboxes (which for some users only means 20 or 30% of their emails are spam) that they want to abandon email all together.
Of course somebody could put a better filter in place on the server and/or clients, but some people just can't handle email much yet. (
The survey could be misleading... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The survey could be misleading... (Score:2)
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)
In other news... (Score:2)
I would expect the number of people understanding this statement less because of mangled syntax to decrease to zero quickly when 75% of the Slashdot population say they favor stricter editing standards.
Silly be not.
Answer is easy... (Score:4, Insightful)
All in the wording... (Score:4, Insightful)
Could it be that spam filter are just better... (Score:2)
Using my gmail a rarely get any spam anymore.
I'm justwondering how many spam email needs to be deleted before read until spammer just give up and go back to stuffing snail-mail-boxes.
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.
People accept most things.. (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree... (Score:2)
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:My dreams dashed away... (Score:2)
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.
Well, if you're going to compare all advertising to spam, one of the big draws to gmail is that there is a spam filter; and at the right of every message is a bunch of paid messages.
In fact, I just clicked on a message from a mailing list and on the right the googl
i am still (Score:2)
"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!"
which is very spamlike in its grammar
maybe, maybe not (Score:2)
or is someone else minding it for them? Most ISPs and most users have some level of anti-spam software running. So are they minding it less because they are seeing less spam in their inbox?
Spam will continue as long as it is profitable for those the benefit from spam. I say find a way to go after those that employ spammers
Yah... (Score:2)
On the otherhand, I'd be a homicidal maniac if I actaully saw all the spam I got, the 5-6 that slip past the filters per day annoy me... I'm up to close to 1500/day across 6 accounts.
Subjective Measurements? (Score:2)
That's an assessment based on the subjective impressions of the people who were polled. People typically do not measure the amount of time spent using email. Time spent in email could rise dramatically, in fact, at the same time total number of messages read dropped dramatically if the user began generating more outgoing messages.
These studies also tend to ignore the difference
Spam damages domain holders too (Score:2, Interesting)
Even worse i
How could I possibly mind? (Score:2)
Apathy not all bad (Score:2, Funny)
Apathy rising, urge to complain falling....
I mind spam less.... (Score:2, Funny)
unemployment ulcers (Score:2)
This is the same distortion that applies to unemployment statistics, which fails to take into account those whose case has become so hopeless they've dropped out completely. Republicans have a different place to count these people: criminal lay-abouts. But let's not get into that.
What the authors of this study might have concluded instead is that those who continue using e-mail are willing to inflict upon themselves fewer ulcers than before by channeling constant annoyance toward a situation unlikely to
But why (Score:2)
Why are 25% avoiding e-mail? Because of spam, or is there a large percentage who just don't want to use e-mail because they do not want to learn, or take up another impersonal form of communications? I know many people who do not want to use e-mail --- and spam has zero to do with it.
Though I am sure some people are more "accepting" of spam - they are prob
Re:But why (Score:2)
100% of the people I know (including most of my family back in Australia) who have told me they don't use email avoid it because of spam. They tried it, and just gave up because the work involved in grovelling through the spam is just too great.
Re:But why (Score:2)
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:I actually don't get spam. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I met a spam customer once (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I met a spam customer once (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Whitelisting (Score:2)
I get dozens upon dozens of "returned mail" in my yahoo.com account because people like that. I've contacted a few back and they're like "I didn't know you could forge an address..."
The best thing todo with spam is ignore it... COMPLETELY. Don't reply, don't return it and don't buy from it....
If you're paying for email access and still getting spam [on a high volume scale] then your ISP is simply
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.)
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 sti