Spam Hits 95% of All Email 270
An anonymous reader writes "Commtouch released its Email Threats Trend Report based on the automated analysis of billions of email messages weekly. The report examines the appearance of new kinds of attachment spamsuch as PDF spam and Excel spam together with the decline of image spam, as well as the growing threat of innocent appearing spam containing links to malicious web sites. Image spam declined to a level of less than 5% of all spam, down from 30% in the first quarter of 2007; also, image pump-and-dump spam has all but disappeared, with pornographic images taking its place."
Summary only link (Score:5, Informative)
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Indeed, though as a mutt user, I feel left out.
Seriously, though, I had no idea spam could be so colourful and attractive looking. All I get is random ascii. If I'm lucky, I may see something like (altered to protect the click-happy) the following:
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I dunno....I thought "pump-and-dump" was another word for "pornographic images"....
Ewww.... (Score:2)
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My spam is still lame :-P (Score:5, Funny)
Huh? Where? Man, all I ever get are stupid Viagra spam and "O3M S0FTWARE!" (and variants thereupon).
Humpfh. Everyone gets pr0n spam but me.
Dan Aris
Re:My spam is still lame :-P (Score:5, Funny)
Re:My spam is still lame :-P (Score:5, Funny)
Re:My spam is still lame :-P (Score:5, Funny)
Do you recognise the canine? Then yes, that's bad.
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SPAM @ 95%?! (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:SPAM @ 95%?! (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:SPAM @ 95%?! (Score:4, Funny)
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Thanks Google, for not letting me obfuscate or otherwise modify my email when posting directly from Gmail!
Luckily the spam filtering is excellent and I've only seen one spam in my in box in months.
Re:SPAM @ 95%?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Bizarrely, they should be easy to identify. Most of them are in Russian. Whatever bayesian network they're doing should have figured out by now that I don't read Russian.
The other one is the same template, over and over, all beginning with the same phrase. I have no idea why that one keeps getting through.
I'm sure not complaining; they're clearly filtering out a huge amount of sheer misery.
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I occasionally get spam in my Gmail inboxes - especially when it's written in other languages. Thunderbird filters those out, thankfully.
call me a cynic, but (Score:5, Insightful)
While I'm not denying spam etc. is an annoyance and does cause a lot of people some problems, do we really want to accept at face value some words from an organisation that could well have a vested interest in making the problem appear more threatening than it really is?
Personally I'd prefer to teach people how to avoid spam/virus infection - in the same way we teach people how to avoid clinical infection, than to go around wailing about how bad the problem is.
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Re:call me a cynic, but (Score:5, Insightful)
Can we go to my scheme yet? (Score:2)
I have a modest proposal: Hitmen. And Hitwomen. It's simple enough. Everybody using email who are frustrated with spam donates a buck or so a year. The millions of dollars are used to hire teams of investigators who track down those sending spam, then you hire somebody to dispose of them.
This includes programmers that writ
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That's not an unrealistic number (Score:5, Interesting)
The highest two-week percentage of rejected incoming email that I've seen broke 97% a few months ago. It's normally between 90% and 95%.
It's loads of fun dealing with this crap.
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The FortiGates are configured to just drop the SPAM, so 100% of SPAM detected by the firewalls never get past the firewalls.
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Re:call me a cynic, but (Score:4, Interesting)
Flirting.
Let us pick some text randomly off a googled link and exercise our imagination.
"First for Emailing - UK's only Emailing Academy
We are offering you two free e-courses value $45 each. One is our new success emailing communication programme and the other is our popular lifestyle coaching programme
SUCCESS EMAILING Communication Tips - series of 4 communication tips modules. Designed to get you connecting and interacting more easily and effectively plus monthly success emailing newsletter with tips, quotes and news..."
When there is a large industry which advertises itself in terms like that instead of the original [flirtzone.com] then perhaps there would be a point to be made that email communications are unusually inefficient. In the meantime, well, sure looks to me like anyone who has ever interacted with the opposite sex should have no problem imagining a form of communication in which 5% efficiency would be a striking -- well nigh unbelievable actually -- increase, and somehow that communication medium has not died out in several millions of years.
*looks around* Ah
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Well, let's assume I am, shall we?
In that case, explain the existence of the site I faux-quoted and its ilk.
Methinks that if I was indeed kidding, there would not exist the market which this class of business caters to. (Or, for that matter, the porn/prostitution/yadayadayada classes of business.) However, since they do exist, we can deduce that the market that they are addressing does indeed exist, and it would appear to further be a re
Who giving up, US or the spammers... (Score:2)
That empties the possible pool of suckers out there so you might as well give up and find some other scam. (Remember, there zipper-heads want to get your money for free. If they can't... Well fuck it...)
OK, another data point (Score:5, Interesting)
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Geez, are you writing your email address on bathroom walls with a "For a good time email...." next to it? That's an insane amount of emails in such a short time. Wouldn't it be easier to abandon an obviously tainted email address and start fresh with 2 new ones (1 real, 1 decoy/spam depository)?
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Then how would he brag about getting 51985 emails per day?
Re:call me a cynic, but (Score:4, Informative)
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Last year we were running about 80% spam
In July 07 we were at 90-92%
August-07 we reached 95%
Looking at the numbers this morning we hit 96% for the week.
Numbers rounded to the thousands
We run a cluster of 4 Eprism 2000 Appliances for inbound mail
This week we received 21,490,000 total inbound messages
We rejected 15,757,000 on RBL and Block lists
6,591,000 were passed through for spam filtering.
858,000 were passed as clean.
We only saw 200 infe
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And yeah, I'd like to see a lot more emp
doubtful (Score:2, Interesting)
Did they track private networks? Encrypted Email?
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Mine is full of spam... (Score:3, Funny)
Most of the subjects are as follows:(filtered for privacy)
Courses next term
[Course name here] Grades
IMPORTANT: Calculus Final Exam Time
Hello from [Relative name here]
[Subscribe newsletter here]
Funny pictures
Why wont it stop?
Re:Mine is full of spam... mod funny! (Score:2)
Actually mine IS full of nothing BUT spam (Score:2)
(Some of the spam is REALLY funny [Hello {company name} why is your dick so short {no proper punctuation}]).
The amazing thing is that I have NEVER given out that address to anyone, at anytime, for any reason.
NOBODY knows it but the spammers so I claim the best/worst mail/spam ratio: 0% mail/100% spam.
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Those were my organization's summer levels (Score:2)
Not new. (Score:2, Informative)
And Security Focus has a great article [securityfocus.com] that shows how all of these numbers are totally made up.
penalize the seller not the messenger (Score:2, Insightful)
The entity initiating the process is identifiable ( the contact information must be accurate in order to effect the sale ) unlike the spammer that can utilize many techniques to avoid identification.
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Then again, I might be a tad irrational with my hatred of mass spammers.
Any different? (Score:3, Insightful)
And we have seen the huge (cough) progress made in removing that snail mail spam from the system.
Honestly, there seems to have been more progress in weeding out the digital spam then the paper sort.
Even vague sort of laws and protections and such.
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Good point. I'd estimate it at ~75% for me, defining SPAM as 'unsolicited commercial package that I'm not interested in'. Near 0% for fraudulent letters, which I got about a half dozen of when I was a teen. Near 90% of the spam caught by my filters is fraudulent and illegal in nature.
At least I can heat my house a bit with the dead tree spam.
Been there for years (Score:2)
That's an AVERAGE?? (Score:2)
Anecdotally, I don't think mine is an unusual scenario, which causes me to wonder: how many people are getting 96-100% spam, in order for this average to hold true? I mean, are there folks out there being inundated
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So I would guess that my usage patterns put me somewhere near the average and I'm seeing the spam levels that they talk about. You might be very lucky
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in four days i've received 1514 spams
I guess I have only received 30 or 40 legitimate emails for the same period.
97.5/98% of all my emails are spam.
Thunderbird does a pretty good job. I delete/flag manually 5 or 10 spams per day only.
Why do I receive so many spams?
I've got 3 different emails.
My primary email address didn't change for years.
It is available on my company's web site.
It is obvious (surname@mycompany.com)
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Honestly, if you were seeing 95% of the content in your mailbox as SPAM, you would have ditched e-mail by now.
Usually, the 95% does include e-mail sent to a bad recipient. The logic used by most anti-spam solutions is if that an e-mail got sent to mail server where the sender didn't know your e-mail address, the e-mail get
Talk to the person adminning? your mailserver (Score:2)
My account on my own domain doesn't get much spam, that is because the username is fairly unusual. HOWEVER the amount of spam the server gets is rather larger. It is offcourse rejected as it silently drops email for a non-existing account. Now it all depends on how well known your domain is, I had obscure ones that barely got touched and popular ones were I needed a seperate machine to just deal with it all. I don't even bother reading the admin email, you should as this is the official way to get in touch
So where's the invisible hand? (Score:3, Interesting)
We've seen some "free market" solutions which basically required that you pay a fee to every mail provider so they don't trash your email. And this didn't particularly help spam either.
I come to the conclusion that spam as an issue is one of two things, or both of those things:
1) Not that big of a problem (hard to believe if you are a mail provider / ISP yourself)
2) Impossible to solve by means of free market solutions, and requires cooperation and standardization of new technology.
Point 2 is hard to happen since every little startup that comes with a mini solution, trumpet it on their own and hence they are only a nuissance to deal with in the big picture (due to lack of a single standard, it's impossible to have clients which make the process of whitelisting easier and even half automatic).
Here are couple of solution which would get us half-there, but are only quarter-implemented right now:
1) Whitelist SMTP servers by talking back to the supposed mail of origin and comparing IP-s. The SMTP may return list of IP-s this host responds from. This is then cached and used for further authentication on this domain. It *may* lead to DoS if many hosts do a first-time check simultaneously, but it's unlikely (and less problematic, given we're eliminating 95% of bad emails this way).
2) Test-for-human-intelligence in your first email to a new email. Such as, I don't know, some sort of CAPTCHA you fill-in? Once this is done, communication can proceed without further tests between those two emails. The receiver still has the option to block you, lest you employ a mechanical turk.
Those solutions are boring, they're incomplete in a way, they introduce hassle, but if we *all* agree on those, they can be made less of a hassle, and still not lose their efficacy.
That would require the likes of AOL, Hotmail, Gmail and so on free mail providers to cooperate with the likes of Microsoft, Apple, Linux devs and so on, to implement this on both the clients and servers.
Right now, I could see Hotmail cooperating with Microsoft (.. wink, wink..
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Both have an advantage over email in that you can control who you receive messages from because the sender identity cannot be faked. In RSS, you poll to get updates, so you know with certainty who you are polli
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I'd say the agreement that needs to be made between us is to start shunning ISPs who behave so impolitely. Email is a commons, and subject to the tragedy of the commons. The solution to the tragedy of the commons is politeness.
This commons is so large that there's actually room for consider
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Spam auf deutsch? (Score:2)
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Why we can't stop spam with our current techniques (Score:5, Interesting)
If you want to stop spam, you have to remove the economic incentive. To do that, you need to cut off the co-conspirators that are allowing the spamvertised domains to be established and hosted. If you can either prevent them from getting a cut off the action, or punish them severely for taking their cut, then you can stop spam.
Until then, if all we do is try to filter spam out, we'll just continue to see the costs of inaction. Beyond that, we're ignoring the fact that filtering has real costs, as well. Filtering doesn't prevent the spam from traversing the internet, and furthermore it requires human time to update as the spammers change their tactics.
Re:Why we can't stop spam with our current techniq (Score:3, Insightful)
We can't stop it because we aren't addressing the real problem. Spam is an economic problem. People send out spam because they make money off of it. And they will therefore continue to send out spam as long as they make money off of it.
If you want to stop spam, you have to remove the economic incentive. To do that, you need to cut off the co-conspirators
You're right, but for the wrong (IMO) reason. Spam has economic incentive because all the costs of email are borne by the recipient. Botnets have made it even cheaper. You must remove that if you want to really fix the problem.
If you do not remove the economic incentive, nothing will work because it will just be an arms race and the "good guys" will necessarily always be on the defensive side.
Email is dead, long live Email (Score:5, Interesting)
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It will never work. Considering the trash in my brain, I must conclude that it has already been done, and it has already been compromised.
Only a few more percentage points to go... (Score:3, Interesting)
Greylisting to the rescue! (Score:5, Informative)
I hate to bring up anecdotal evidence, but, while I still get spam, my flood has gone down to a relative trickle simply by plugging postgrey into postfix. I could probably reduce it to zero with a bayesian filter, but I won't bother. Scanning through my logs, my server rejects literally thousands of spams every day, and I'm just one guy with two email addresses and a handful of aliases.
So, it would come as no surprise to me that spam volume is that high, I just never see it. I almost want to turn off my filter for a day just to see what would happen.
Well, maybe not.
Re:Greylisting to the rescue! (or not) (Score:4, Interesting)
Basically, greylisting is putting an email transaction on hold to see if the sender will retry. The idea is that if the sender is illigitimate, they won't bother resending. However, spammers have been onto this method for as long as it's existed, much moreso lately. All they have to do is take greylisted hosts and move them to the end of their script for later processing. The second time around, the spam gets through anyway. Even with its meager benefits, most organizations want email to come through as quickly as possible, and greylisting delays email by its very nature. It's also much less effective than existing technology that won't hinder most legitimate mail like DNSBL and/or SPF, spamwords+OCR (for image spam), and blocking on unknown recipients.
To summate, if greylisting makes you happy, then don't let me dissuade you from using it. it does indeed stop some spam. But please don't give the false impression that it's a magic bullet; most of the complaints we receive are from clients who've enabled greylisting and can't figure out why their mail is delayed.
[1] I am also a consultant to another firm who hosts manged email with spam filtering. Due to the complaints above, we have also disabled greylisting there. It was only effective at stopping about 5% of spam reliably, but a delay is put on all mail that isn't otherwise whitelisted. There are plenty of other methods which are both more effective and don't slow down the mailflow or tie up much resources on the MTA.
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Also, postgrey, like most greylist p
So, it's not the Russians (Score:2)
My point is not that Americans are evil, but rather than we need to look a lot closer to home in tackling these problems rather than looking for some grand criminal conspiracy to crack.
The conspiracy may exist but if local ISPs simply refused to route packets from zombied boxes then their owners would soon work out they had to do something.
Even trustworthy people/companies sell you out. (Score:2)
I have a personal email address on my own domain that used to NEVER get spam. I moved into my own apartment a month ago and I signed up a new phone number with Bell Canada and a new account with my local city utility company. I gave that email address to both without thinking- usually I give one of my alternates. Well, now that address is getting tons of spam of the worst kind.
So, either Bell or my local utility sold my address.
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IE vulnerabilities (Score:2)
Re:white lists are the way to go (Score:4, Insightful)
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Or his business uses a, you know, web form for contacting him with a captcha. Once they pass that stage they get whitelisted.
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I can't even the use apparently moderately effective "blacklist Chinese and Russian IPs" technique. We correspond all over the world.
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Comcast, Cox, Cablevision, a good chunk of Roadrunner (they're spotty about it), any European ISP owned by Orange telecom, any IP in China, most of Korea...
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ISPs should also be blocking outbound port 25 traffic from dynamic addresses (and if you need to use an external mail relay, use a tunnel or port 587.) Some ISPs do
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I can actually understand the ISPs on this one. Yes, spam costs a huge amount of money to the economy as a whole, however it's not such a major cost to the ISPs themselves.
I sort of agree. (Score:2)
Its like the telephone itself.
Its NOT the phone company's problem if people call you in the middle of the night and threaten to cut off your balls.
They're just the messenger.
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Agreed, but it's worth pointing out that fixed addresses aren't exactly the cat's meow, either.
When I signed up for a DSL account with SBC/ATT, I asked for static addresses and and got my delegation request fo
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Agreed, but it's worth pointing out that fixed addresses aren't exactly the cat's meow, either.
/29 netblock processed a few days later. All good, right? With everything setup on my end, I send out a few test messages to my personal ATT email account (hosted by the folks at Yahoo), and it gets the 'YahooFiltered: Bulk' treatment 4 out 5 tries.
When I signed up for a DSL account with SBC/ATT, I asked for static addresses and and got my delegation request for tiny
In my experience, the current blacklists treat anything at the end of a DSL line, static or dynamic as a dynamic address nowadays. I've hosted my email on my domains on a DSL line for ages but I'm now looking at alternate solutions (among which possibly just routing the stuff through my ISP for problematic domains).
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Looking at my corporate mail servers, it's obvious that many of the major ISPs are not filtering. In the US, Comcast is one of the WORST offenders, but Verizon, Road Runner, and others are pretty damn bad too. It's a world-wide pr
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Neutral carrier, (Score:2)
ISP's transmit data, I really don't want them to be starting to be clever. What next, RIAA requests that people are limited to X posts to usenet so they can't post large binaeries? Limit P2P traffic? Sniff traffic in general for undesired elements?
In a way, my PC becoming a spam zombie is part of the price of freedom. Do you really want the internet to be regulated?
Oh sure, you can start light, but in the end sooner or later someone will abuse it and push for ever more stringent restriction, all in the na