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)
Re:Oh Please (Score:3, Interesting)
GMail spam increase in 2006 (Score:4, Funny)
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:really? (Score:4, Informative)
For my home system, I use POPFile (http://popfile.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]), which has a nearly perfect (99.34%) accuracy rating after using it for almost three years now.
N.
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:really? (Score:5, Funny)
Dude, it's just a junk email, let it go. It's not like it's a family heirloom, you don't have to pass your one junk email down to your children and your children's children.
Steve
Re:really? (Score:3, Funny)
You mean those children he should be having with Ali and Ali's sister? http://homestarrunner.com/sbemail35.html [homestarrunner.com]
Re:Yes, New Year's (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh Please (Score:5, Insightful)
Gee, thanks for giving your financial support to spammers. YOU and others like you are the reason the rest of us get 30-something spams a day. Not to mention the unfathomably dumb way you chose to spend your money...
Re:Oh Please (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh Please (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, so that's why the PhD was bogus! And here I thought it might be bogus because it was from an unaccredited university, because you bought it instead of taking the required courses, doing the thesis, and so on...
Please don't buy things from spammers, you're the reason the rest of us gets spam!
Re:Oh Please (Score:3, Informative)
Honorary doctorates are something universities give to people for their achievements outside the university. Some universities give them out only for academic achievments , while some give them for other things (such
Re:Oh Please (Score:4, Informative)
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.)
Re:Centralized Email (Score:5, Funny)
Boy, I bet they never thought of that.
KFG
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Centralized Email (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Maybe not declining, but simply changing (Score:4, Informative)
You know, I don't know about you, but I tend to bring repellant when I go into the jungles we call the internet.
Ad Block [mozilla.org]
Almost 100% effect and is 100% lethal to banner ads.
Annoyances don't have to be. Well.. If you don't mind the DDT.
Re:Maybe not declining, but simply changing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Maybe not declining, but simply changing (Score:2)
Of course, it would also deprive sites of ad revenue, meaning a lot of sites would simply die, and then where would you find porn?
Re:Maybe not declining, but simply changing (Score:5, Insightful)
I actually have a problem with ad blocking. I am well aware that a lot of sites depend on income from banner views and clicks. And since they offer their content free to me and I want it to stay that way, I usually do not filter banner ads. This is not a moral question, just a personal decision. I even click on ads if interested. But there is a limit how much annoyance I can bear, so I block pop ups and stopped visiting sites like macosrumors, which seem to try to compensate decline of content by increasing the amount of ads, page reloads, non working links etc.
Re:Maybe not declining, but simply changing (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Maybe not declining, but simply changing (Score:3, Insightful)
Way back in the early days of banner ads, ISTM there were more interesting ads and fewer obn
Re:Maybe not declining, but simply changing (Score:3, Informative)
Regarding the big picture, this does not solve the problem. Websites can finance themselves by placing banner ads because people actually see (and click) those ads and purchase something, giving the ad publisher revenue which he can invest in banner ads. If you make banner ads inefficient by downloading, but never displaying them, there will be no more initiative to place any ads, therefore removing
Re:Maybe not declining, but simply changing (Score:3, Informative)
No, you should not buy anything you do not want. And its not your duty to sustain the market for banners.
But if you want to buy a product advertised for by a banner you should not NOT buy it because it was advertised on a banner. And it would actually help to sustain the market for banners if you would not decide to ignor
Re:Maybe not declining, but simply changing (Score:3)
Well, actually I give a fuck and I also think he is right. I didn't realize that putting the sig into the text prevents filtering, and basically he told me about the intended way in a mannerly fashion. So I changed it.
Words Matter (Score:5, Insightful)
As it stands, this is simply an opinion piece, and is labeled as such on the Observer's website. Apart from a loose reference to remembered statistics on the website of a company that sells spam-filtering software, there's nothing in the way of solid evidence to support this guy's claims. What's more, he asserts that things like phishing mails and penny stock solicitations somehow fall outside the realm of "spam". He further goes on to claim that the "new wave" of spam won't actually last, because things like penny-stock spam "rely on credulousness"; he basically asserts that common sense will prevail against the "new" spam where it failed previously. I seriously doubt that the same caliber of individual who falls for the Nigerian e-mail scam will somehow be immune to the siren call of the "penny stock" scam--which, incidentally, has been around for years.
While the author has some valid points, I think he's drawing conclusions on bad assumptions and gut reactions, not hard data.
Mea culpa (Score:2, Insightful)
You're totally right, I should have written "piece", not "article".
/me lashes self
Re:Words Matter (Score:3, Insightful)
Small-time white-collar crooks like spammers tend not to be too bright, and are always trying harebrained schemes to get rich quick. I think it's perfectly possible that most spammers spam just because everyone else is doing it, and they wrongly believe it's an easy scheme to make money.
spam is dead, long live spam (Score:5, Insightful)
spam/ drugs/ terror/ pedophilia/ etc. will always require personnel and effort to prevent, forever. it's just a cost of civilization. for to not fight these things allows them to proliferate and spread. it's a maintenance issue, just like taking out the trash to the curb every thursday. it's not like you take the trash out one day, and you never have to take it out again. no, trash constantly accumulates, and it always will. if you think terror, or hard drug use (really only hard highly addictive drugs are a problem), or spam, or pedophilia, or other problems like these, is something you can oppose or (even worse) accept, and the problems just go away, you simply don't understand what these problems are really like
every generation, there will be some group of idiots who think bombing the feberal building in oklahoma city or flying airplanes into office towers is a wise move. likewise, every generation some group of a**holes will see smuggling heroin and cocaine as a good business move (it is, but its the social byproducts of the business itself that is the problem). and, every generation, someone will think "hey, i can just send out a million emails." nothing you will ever do will stop such people from constantly being reborn anew in every generation, forever
these thinks, just like spam, must always be fought, for all time. yes, you can change protocols, but there is no technological fix to human ingeniousness and cravenness: someone will always try to game the system for their benefit, despite all of the suffering it creates for the rest of us. a lot of slashdot types would be thinking "technological fix!" "technological fix!"
true wisdom on the issue of spam and other social ills like it are ones of acceptance of the problem, and constant vigilance of the problem, at the same time. it's not like you can accept the behavior as OK, and its not like you can fight it and kill it once and for all. what is needed is more people understanding the true nature of social ills like spam/ terror/ hard drugs/ etc and understanding that, by their nature, they are mundane criminal policing issues like burglary and vandalism: always with us, but always unacceptable, all at the same time
this is wisdom on these issues. beware anyone who says you can accept these things, and the problems go away, or people who say you can fight these things, and kill them once and for all. such people don't know what they are talking about
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 so
Re:spam is dead, long live spam (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with these never ending "wars" is that they keep building up. With this "nor should you think it wil ever end" mentality is that it gets to the point where you are actually making things worse by being so relentless. Take the war on drugs, for example. How many people are hurt because drug use is criminalized rather than treated as a health issue (which it is)? That is what you get when you start waging "war." How much farm land in Columbia is destroyed and people poisoned because the US dumps herbicides all over the place to kill coca crops? Lots. At some point you need to back off theses never ending "wars" and ask youself if the casualties are really worth it.
As for the "war on terror," how much terrorism is CREATED by the war on terror? You go into a country thinking you are going to kill all the terrorists and guess what? You've just pissed off a whole bunch of people who previously didn't feel particularly strongly. Also consider the freedoms that people are willing to give up once "war" declared. "War" is a very powerful term and I think we should reserve it for big things. Pretty soon people will start believing that "war is peace, peace is war."
And back on topic... why is there a "war on spam?" Just install damn filters and be done with it. Any half decent spam/virus filter (and there are many out there) can stop at least 90% of all SPAM. So what is the big deal? Just push your services provider to install better filters and get on with your life.
-matthew
Re:i already addressed you in my orig comment (Score:3, Insightful)
Apparenly you don't solve it by going to "war" with it either. I'm not talking about acceptance. I am talking about doing what you can, but at a certain point recognize that you can only do so much before you are doing more harm than good.
there will always be malcontents who seek violence, and unconstrained access to highly addictive substances just results in a lot of addicts. do you deny either observation? then you don't understand what terrorism/
Someone Forgot To Tell The Spammers (Score:2, Informative)
In the past 72 hours I've got over 300 spam which got past my ISP's spam filters. 98 yesterday alone. When I clean out the spam trap for my mail account it still has thousands piled up in there I need to erase.
Nostadamii these people ain't. A little logic may explain the diminishing amount of spam by their measure, such as changing behaviour on the internet. I find much of it is directly linked to postings on USENET groups, some of which have seen floods of cross-posting trolls. Some newsgroups seem
Re:Someone Forgot To Tell The Spammers (Score:3, Informative)
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!
Spam is dead for me. (Score:3, Informative)
I've had an e-mail address for over 15 years. My spam in the past 2 months is less than I had 10 years ago.
I post my main address unobfuscated on
I gave up hosting my own e-mail late last year. I moved all my employees and family to gmail. I'm saving $4000 annually in labor and maybe $4000 in hardware, software and bandwidth.
With giving up my corporate domain name address I'm giving up headaches and spam.
Try it, you'll love it.
Re:Spam is dead for me. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hows that for a useless "me too" post?
Re:Spam is dead for me. (Score:2)
No such thing if its for a minority opinion
My experience with gmail is different. (Score:2)
Not quite dead (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Spam is dead for me. (Score:2)
Re:Spam is dead for me. (Score:3, Interesting)
Why not register a domain and have all the corporate email addresses just forward
Re:Spam is dead for me. (Score:3, Insightful)
So this approach doesn't work very well at all.
Jason.
Re:Spam is dead for me. (Score:4, Informative)
Set up your MX-record to yourdomain.gmail.com. Set up POP3 & SMTP to the same. Set up A-record for mail.yourdomain.com to some gmail server's IP. Send e-mail to initialize@yourdomain.com. Wait 24 hours or less
Google can brand it and stick ads in the AJAX interface.
Re:Spam is dead for me. (Score:3, Insightful)
We're switching 3 big companies from Exchange to gmail.
They'll save $100,000+ annually.
They'll have access from their cells.
They'll have reduced spam.
Vanity domains are a commodity for spammers. Gmail polices their network nonstop.
Professional? That title comes from doing your job ahead of time and under budget.
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.
Less spam (Score:2)
I report all of it to SpamCop [spamcop.net].
Web 2.0 says no friggin way (Score:5, Informative)
Spam is Dead (Score:2, Funny)
I don't recieve less spam (Score:2)
Is spam dead? (Score:2)
It depends (Score:2)
At work, I get very little spam. My company's filter, coupled with SpamBayes [sourceforge.net] with a year of training does extremely well. The bigger problem is that I occasional miss e-mails that vanish in the ether.
With my GMail account, about 30% of my e-mail is spam that gets through. I'm hopeful that number will go down with training or Google tweaking their service.
It does seem that the days of getting wildly pornographic images in my work e-mail are long gone. Sniff.
Spam can't be forced out. (Score:2)
The ONLY way spam will go away is if stupid people stop buying the products advertised in it. If spam pays, they will find a way to send it. That's the bottom line.
http://religiousfreaks.com/ [religiousfreaks.com]Well, Duh! (Score:2)
Anecdotal evidence... (Score:2)
Nope, spam isn't declining for me.
Wtf is a "Penis Launcher" anyway?
Re:Anecdotal evidence... (Score:2)
Apple Mail's spam filter works great though. My only false positive ever was a message from the university but they were asking for money, so I can understand Mail's point of view.
Spam really is dead! (Score:2)
So don't hesitate and click on this link NOW! [slashdot.org] You won't regret it, your satisfaction is guaranteed and your personal data is safe with us!!
Gotten More, but Seen Less (Score:2)
However, the amount that actually makes it to my inbox has dwindled to maybe 1 or 2 a month. Spam filtering technology has outpaced and outperformed the spam sending technology beginning last year (IMHO).
On the other hand, I have not noticed an serious change in the spam algorithms in the last 6-8 months. It may be that there is a sufficient number of ungu
Bell curve (Score:2)
What? The whole point of a bell curve is that extremes are possible. If you're accepting that spam follows a bell curve then your single data point is competely meaningless. A bell curve isn't a trend that you can follow or not follow - it's a distribution.
Yes (Score:2)
Invalid association (Score:3, Insightful)
Something big begins to slow down.
Invalid conclusion: the two are associated.
Useful thought: maybe it would have slowed down by itself.
(I think spam must eventually tail off, because it operates on the basis of effort vs profit; as spam increases, I suspect the value of an individual spam decreases; it's not a stable system. In the end, the volume of spam should therefore level off, entirely without outside intervention.)
Gates Quote (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Gates Quote (Score:2)
It's Still There (Score:2)
Although Thunderbird catches 95% of the crap in my inbox (I'm up to about 200 junk emails per day) and I've trained it, a few get through. The ones that get though are almost always good-sounding terms jumbled into a "sentence" (sort of like some Slashdot replies). What's the point of that?
Is this designed to poison the filtering? Why bother?
almost dead, well caught at least. (Score:2)
I know you guys are going to flame (like usuall) for saying anything that is pro-ms or suggests they did a decent job, but could we at least reserve the flam
Want to stop it? (Score:5, Informative)
I was getting 2-3 flagged by spamass after passing through the mimedefang stuff before implementing greylisting. Post greylisting I've yet to get a single spam in my spam folder (they never made it to my inbox before, but I still had to deal with them.). I have things configured to flag at 2 points, discard at 7. My bayes filters have about 2 years worth of training on them, and I use RBL scoring too.
Re:Want to stop it? (Score:2)
Au contraire! (Score:2, Funny)
Why are you all so prejudiced against these great offers? I myself have bought many of these products *nudge nudge* and, although I haven't seen any results yet, I have great faith.
Re:Au contraire! (Score:2)
Step 2. Put traceable money in an account
Step 3. Give account details to Nigerian Spammer
Step 4. ???
Step 5. Profit
Spam: The social problem (Score:2, Insightful)
0. There will always be a criminal element determined to make "a quick buck" without regard for others as long as there are people willing to do business with this criminal element (in this case, the spammers).
1. Many people use the internet who aren't computer specialists, thus are easily fooled by
Spam is dead (Score:2)
I got almost a third more spam in 05 than 04. I guess I exist outside the bell curve on this one.
Why? Between GMail's filtering and Thunderbird's filtering, I have to deal with maybe 2 spam emails per week. I "get" plenty of spam. But it's DOA... in my spam folder.
Oh, ye of little faith! (Score:5, Funny)
Explanation (Score:2)
1999 - N
2000 - 2N
2001 - 4N
2002 - 8N
2003 - 16N
2004 - 32N
2005 - 31.999 N <- decline!
Greylisting cleared this thing away for me (Score:2)
Since most of the spam gets sent by minimal smtp on hijacked pcs which just dont know how to queue mail suddenly there was silence.
It takes some whitelisting at first and some kinds of traffic, like listservers take another route, but I could finally dare to open some known for long mail adresses that had turnend into spam sin
Phishing (Score:2)
Not that I actually *see* them, since spamassassin hasn't missed one to filter them into my spam box.
Here we go... (Score:5, Insightful)
( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
(x) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
(x) Blacklists suck
(x) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
I haven't gotten spam for years ... (Score:2)
Personally, I prefer losing an unknown amount of email rather than manually checking the Bayesian filter to see if there are any false positives. Is that so wrong?
Re:I haven't gotten spam for years ... (Score:4, Informative)
The page is upside down (Score:2)
erm (Score:2, Funny)
Error while connecting to reality - ECONNLOST (Score:2)
"these rely on credulousness, which has a finite supply"
I don't know what planet the author of this piece is living on, but around here the place is filled with morons who wouldn't know a phishing scam from a hole in the head.
Help me smuggle $6,000,000,000 out of Nigeria (Score:4, Funny)
Bill still has over a week to go! Be fair! (Score:5, Funny)
Bill Gates, prognosticator (Score:5, Funny)
Given this track record, I expect he will next claim that he will eliminate corruption in Congress.
Spam Is Dead (Score:3, Funny)
Let me guess, some sort of pun related to the fact that most of the spam comes from zombie pc-s and can't be stopped.
Less spam? Or just seeing less of it? (Score:4, Insightful)
So he's not really getting any less spam at all, it's just getting hit on the head before it gets to his inbox.
I wonder if by "amount" he means "proportion"? With many more users getting on the internet now than "a few years ago" it's not surprising that the proportion of spam may have dropped a little (overall), but I'd be very surprised if there's actually less spam being generated.
In the last three years I think I've received one spam and two eBay phishing e-mails. I run my own mail domain, so when I register an e-mail address for anywhere I use nospam-[their domain]@[my domain]. This makes things very easy to trace and would seem to have some discouraging effect on places selling their address lists. The phishing e-mails were due to a hardware supplier whose customer database had been comprimised, for example.
Bad Attitude from Lack of Understanding. (Score:4, Informative)
His "Oh, it's not so bad," attitude is unfounded at best and what you might expect from M$ or the DMA as they promote, "legitimate" spam at worst. Spamhaus [spamhaus.org] tells us that there's still a big problem, despite steps that most ISPs have taken. The problem will get worse again as the spammers learn to get around those mostly trivial steps. It won't take much effort to read configuration information on broken Windoze machines and make them point to the ISP's SMTP to send mail like the end user does. In the mean time, the botnet continues spew network clogging spam, and DDOS and we all get to pay the price in slow networks and broken computers. It's not enough to sit smug behind your spam filters while the average user gets creamed. The nasties are strengthened and encouraged by that kind of attitude and they can get still you with a DDoS or Distributed Mailbomb [whitedust.net].
Flaws in Microsoft's operating system are what enables the nasties. They have to be corrected or avoided to fix the problem. Until then, the botnet will be both a weapon and profit center at everyone's expense. No, the answer is not "trusted" computing or mail servers that waste your time with MENSA puzzles and collect a penny for Bill. The answer is fixing what's broken. Email works despite it's great abuse by a few idiots.
declining by # or declining by %age (Score:3, Insightful)
At first I assumed he was only couting spam that made it past the spam blocking softwares, but as it appears his theory is proven based on a different set of assumptions and facts.
His entire article bases on the fact that the % of spams from all emails caught has dropped. This can mean one or more of many things which only follows his theory.
1. Spam has actually decreased
2. Spam has found ways to avoid being detected
3. The volume of email has gone up, with more actual email while spam increased at a slower rate
Honestly, I'd like to see more statistics and figures to decide how spam has changed in these past few years. Just by looking at #s from one company and what percentage they've stopped isn't enough to say much in my opinion.
I believe it. (Score:3, Funny)
For me the peak was two weeks ago when I received 30 emails a day from the FBI and the CIA telling me I visit illegal websites.
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.
Story is true but phishing is on rise (Score:3, Informative)
Spam is dieing as you can see at http://www.ironport.com/toc/toc_spam.html [ironport.com]
I think phishing by zombies are in rise.
http://www.antiphishing.org/ [antiphishing.org] report available in pdf http://antiphishing.org/reports/apwg_report_Nov20
BTW if you report spam, reportphishing@antiphishing.org is a good CC: target.
Wierdly, CAN-SPAM is working. But not as expected. (Score:3, Informative)
What CAN-SPAM does do is make it a criminal offense to forge headers. As a result, spam from any "legitimate business" is easily identifiable from the header. So it gets filtered out.
This wasn't what the Direct Marketing Association expected. But that's what happened. As a result, the spams from legitimate businesses don't get delivered. Attempts to get around this "problem", like Bonded Spammer [bondedsender.com], didn't really catch on. So spam is almost useless to legitimate businesses now.
This leaves the people who forge headers. They're now criminals. So they've been forced out of legitimate web hosting services onto "bulletproof" web servers in marginal countries. They can't send directly any more, or their connection will be pulled or IP addresses blocked.
So now they have to find some illegal way to send spam. Which is getting harder. Most of the open relays have been plugged. They've been reduced to spamming through zombies taken over by viruses. This means they're committing serious felonies, and long jail sentences are a very real possibility.
Spam is now a branch of organized crime, not marketing. And it's highly visible organized crime, which makes it vulnerable. It's not that hard to follow the money. We need to push for more law enforcement priority in this area.
That's why spam is declining.
Reductions in Spam (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Depends on the sense of dead (Score:2)
Re:Depends on the sense of dead (Score:2)