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Spam Businesses Google The Internet

Spammers Choose GMail 325

Posted by CmdrTaco from the my-inbox-it-hurts dept.
EdwardLAN writes "A study by Roaring Penguin has discovered that during the past three weeks, the amount of spam originating from Gmail has risen sharply." My spam has been pretty ridiculously high for the last few weeks, although I have no idea if this is part of it. It really does seem like gmail's spam filters are declining these days.
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Spammers Choose GMail More

Spammers Choose GMail

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  • Invite-Only (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anubis_Ascended ( 937960 ) on Thursday July 17, 2008 @07:49AM (#24226623) Homepage
    Maybe they should have just kept the system invite-only, instead of opening it up to everyone -- that would help, the way I see it.

    • Re:Invite-Only (Score:5, Funny)

      by betterunixthanunix ( 980855 ) on Thursday July 17, 2008 @07:50AM (#24226649)
      It's still in beta. Bugs like massive amounts of spam originating from the service are bound to turn in up in beta software.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by damuhatori ( 1203278 )

      Maybe they should have just kept the system invite-only, instead of opening it up to everyone -- that would help, the way I see it.

      Sure that would help, but it would mean less ad views for Google.

    • Doubtful, when they first started, and had the invite-only thing, there was a lot of sites that would give away account-invites to boost their own traffic/advertise, and even invites being auctioned off, plus you could give your invites to yourself, and breed invites, get our 5 invites, create 5 accounts, get 20 more invites...

      It was all just marketing, if they started off with just a free-for all, it wouldn't have made as much hooplah as it did, "common man, gimme an invite" - "you gotta a Gmail account?"

  • Gmail's spam filters (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 17, 2008 @07:50AM (#24226639)

    How does spammers creating gmail accounts to send spam from imply that gmail's spam filters for inbound mail are declining? (if that is indeed what the summary is supposed to say).

    • Re:Gmail's spam filters (Score:5, Funny)

      by HardCase ( 14757 ) on Thursday July 17, 2008 @08:54AM (#24227385)

      Now listen, if you've waited this long to complain about Taco's reading comprehension skills, you're way too late to get into the game.

    • Re:Gmail's spam filters (Score:5, Insightful)

      by spikedvodka ( 188722 ) on Thursday July 17, 2008 @08:57AM (#24227423)

      I find it interesting that gmail's spam filters are in-bound only (If that is in fact the case [citation needed])

      on the e-mail system I run, every message gets sent through our spam/virus-detection system. I don't care if it's inbound, or outbound, it gets scanned. period.

      yes my site is much smaller than gmail, but still... isn't the first rule "Don't trust the users!"?

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by TheSeventh ( 824276 )
        I've often wondered this as well. Why not put sending limits on accounts, plus spam check outgoing mail? An account is used to send spam? disable it (permanently or temporarily.)

        I also think ISPs should be forced to do this. If they have a customer who sends massive amounts of email, they should have to investigate the nature of those emails. If they have an IP that is sending out spam, disable that customer's account until the problem is fixed. It would really disrupt a botnet if every time they a

        • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday July 17, 2008 @01:26PM (#24231277)
          Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Re:Gmail's spam filters (Score:4, Insightful)

            by KlausBreuer ( 105581 ) on Friday July 18, 2008 @03:14AM (#24239039) Homepage

            Actually... I think (even ;) Slashdot is right on this one.

            ISPs should not check your email. It's noe of their damn business.
            ISPs should check to see if you're generating an excess of emails, slowing the net down for everybody (hey, over 80% of email traffic is spam).

            Thus, yes, even I would allow them to have a look at email contents if the amount of generated emails exceeds a certain (very large) amount.
            However, they are most certainly not allowed to check the content every time, (even if) looking for spam or the usual eeeeevil terrarist.

    • I don't know, but I see how the spam filters could've been fooled. Since you can have as many accounts as you wish, you can use them to harvest some spam you're sending by yourself, and see which messages get past the filters and which do not. Now get or write a python module for accessing GMail, another module for genetic programming, glue that together with some custom p3n!s enlargement generator and you're done. Anybody could hack such a thing in a matter of hours.

    • Re:Gmail's spam filters (Score:5, Informative)

      by gravis777 ( 123605 ) on Thursday July 17, 2008 @09:20AM (#24227675)

      I definately agree. I have had no issue with increased spam in my inbox, and as I never check the spam box, I cannot say one way or the other. Me getting one or two spam messages in my inbox every couple of weeks does not say to me that there is an issue with their spam filter.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by novakreo ( 598689 )

        You probably should check it at least once a month (since spam messages are deleted after thirty days)—I've had several important messages show up there, and I always use the Not Spam/Report Spam buttons when needed.

        Potentially losing genuine mail is far more of a problem than briefly seeing spam in the inbox.

  • One thing Google could do about incoming spam... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tgd ( 2822 ) on Thursday July 17, 2008 @07:50AM (#24226645)

    Half of the spam I get on my gmail account that actually gets past the filter is in some language other than English... in fact its almost always in Cyrillic as well.

    Give me a damn drop down that says "I speak English, anything not in English is not to me".

    Won't solve their outgoing problem, but adding "this is my language" support would be a big help on the incoming, at least with my spam patterns.

    • Yeah I've thought the same thing, too. It wouldn't be that hard to filter. You could just select a charset (like Latin-1) and if less than 90% of the characters in a given message aren't representable in your chosen charset, automatically kill it. That wouldn't require figuring out the actual human language it was written in; it's a pretty trivial automatic test.

      • Re:One thing Google could do about incoming spam.. (Score:5, Informative)

        by tgd ( 2822 ) on Thursday July 17, 2008 @08:15AM (#24226891)

        Yeah thats why I mentioned the Cyrillic thing.

        In reality doing it via language matching should be pretty trivial. I'd hazard a guess if you had a list of 30 languages and you pulled out the top 50 most common words in each language you'd probably have near 100% success in detecting the primary language in an e-mail. I'm sure an algorithm either purely based on that word set or based on a larger dictionary choosen based on that matching could be done to determine with a very high confidence what language an e-mail is in and if there's more than one or two languages in it.

        They also know my white list of contacts. In my case I'd bet 90% of my e-mail comes from them so those can be immediately put in the inbox, reducing the number that need to be scanned at all.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jmauro ( 32523 )

        Doesn't help me. Most of my gmail spam is in Portuguese which uses the same character set as English. At some point I was hoping they'd cross pollinate translate.google.com with gmail so the spam filters could learn that if the message is in Portuguese to me it's spam.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Inda ( 580031 )
      I wrote to them about this during the early Beta. They were not interested.

      My mistake was signing up for a Spanish (Spamish?) site. I don't speak Spanish but I guessed the form fields for username, password, email address. The floodgates opened afer that.

      Back to the topic, why doesn't Google just change their CAPTCHA? It sounds too simple a solution...
      • CAPTCHA is broken: it's not just various implementations that are compromised, but the entire theory.

    • Or how about providing this option "I dont expect email from senders outside of the USA. Put all foreign mail into junk."

  • Companies blocking Gmail? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mgkimsal2 ( 200677 ) on Thursday July 17, 2008 @07:52AM (#24226671) Homepage

    The IT staff at my dad's company blocked all communication with Gmail servers a few months ago, on the grounds that it was 'insecure'. Locking down an MS shop (XP/Exchange/etc) from the 'insecurity' of Google (while still accepting hotmail.com emails) still strikes me as a bit odd, but I've been hearing more reports of lax Google security with respect to spam/spammers. Perhaps they (dad's company) were on to something?

    Anyone else having issues with people blocking Gmail?

    • Gmail servers have hit a variety of DNS blacklists in the past. They still get on every now and then. I have to run a whitelist in front of my blacklists to make sure I don't block gmail by accident.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by coop247 ( 974899 )

      Locking down an MS shop (XP/Exchange/etc) from the 'insecurity' of Google (while still accepting hotmail.com emails) still strikes me as a bit odd

      Why is that, because you don't know what you're talking about. Despite all the flack MS receives, there is a reason Google Docs has done absolutely nothing to unseat Office in the corporate world, security. Are MS products secure, no, but they take it seriously. Ask Goog about security and they say, 'trust us'. Big companies don't trust anyone, rightfully so. I guess you also missed Googles gaping GMail privacy hole [slashdot.org] earlier today.

      • Re:Companies blocking Gmail? (Score:4, Informative)

        by mgkimsal2 ( 200677 ) on Thursday July 17, 2008 @08:18AM (#24226937) Homepage

        MS takes security seriously? Perhaps nowadays, but that's a relatively recent trend (last few years), and they've got a lot of mindshare to win back on that score.

        If you're going to adopt a policy re: mail, blocking all webmail accounts would make more sense than *just* gmail, especially making that policy months ago. There was more evidence to point to spam originating from compromised Windows boxes than from Gmail.

        What the heck does Google Docs have to do with this conversation? But I'll bite anyway... You really think *security* has anything to do with why Google Docs hasn't taken off in the corporate world? Nothing to do with requiring people to be connected (increasing bandwidth costs) and having to use browsers to do work they weren't meant to do (document editing)? No, Google Docs simply can't replicate the functionality corporate workers need right now. Maybe some day it will, but I'd say it's far more likely functionality is keeping it out of business rather than security.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by Drakonik ( 1193977 )

        Wow. I haven't seen a gaping hole like that since my prom night.

    • We'd like to block them, Yahoo, and Hotmail...but too many of our smaller customers use it for their e-mail addresses.

      The thing that is really killing us lately is the bounceback spam...when spammers send spoofed e-mail to bad addresses on legitimate mail servers so the bouncebacks come to our addresses. They easily bypasses SpamAssassin...I was thinking of testing out Postini (Gmail's filter) to see if it gets them.

      Funny you mention the MS shop...we're actually using CentOS and Qmail right now, but we're p

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by imipak ( 254310 )
      sounds familiar... [slashdot.org]

    • I run mail for several people. Its very frustrating because on one hand, lots of people (including my customers) use Gmail or have contactst that do. On the other the same customers are complaining more and more about the amount of spam they are getting. (and a lot comes from there)

      Its frustrating.

  • It's still not much of a problem (Score:5, Informative)

    by stinerman ( 812158 ) on Thursday July 17, 2008 @07:54AM (#24226695)

    I've got maybe 3 a week, which is up from the normal of 1 per month, but it's not really too big of a deal.

    IIRC, marking an email as spam or moving the message to the spam folder (if you're using Gmail's IMAP function as I am) helps to train the filter.

    • It's the outgoing spam from Gmail that's the problem, not the incoming spam, and there's been messages on the Gmail forums about Gmail servers being blocked for spam. If Google doesn't do something about it, then Gmail accounts will end up "read only".

      And having Google themselves impose outgoing spam filtering is something else to worry about, if you're a Gmail user.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by mgkimsal2 ( 200677 )

        Not sure how much of an issue filtering for outgoing spam would be, except perhaps an extra delivery delay. Charge for that feature as 'authorized' accounts, or something like that. I'd pay a nominal fee, tied to a credit card, to 'authenticate' my outgoing mail.

        I've never sent anything that's *remotely* spammy, and people I correspond with generally don't.

        What problems do you see with outgoing mail being filtered?

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by argent ( 18001 )

          What problems do you see with outgoing mail being filtered?

          False positives. Even if you never send anything that's remotely spammy, you can still be caught by filters... I dig legitimate mail, including mail that doesn't look at all spammy to me, out of my google *incoming* filters on a regular basis.

          I often think the biggest cost of spam has been the decreased reliability of email caused by spam filters making mistakes like that.

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by everphilski ( 877346 )
            I dig legitimate mail, including mail that doesn't look at all spammy to me, out of my google *incoming* filters on a regular basis.

            I get several incoming emails **a day** that get caught in the inbound email filter. The thing that is so silly is they are all on several mailing lists I subscribe to, so you think the filter would be smart enough to realize gee, this guy has wanted several THOUSAND emails from osg-users, even though this one looks like it might be spam, I'll let it slide and see how this g

  • Why not apply spam filters on outgoing messages? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mgkimsal2 ( 200677 ) on Thursday July 17, 2008 @07:55AM (#24226709) Homepage

    Gmail used to be touted as the best spam filtering service. Certainly it's good, but apparently they only feel the need to filtering incoming messages. Why not filter outgoing messages as well? Can't quite be a CPU problem, because outgoing has be be just a small fraction of incoming, right?

    Is it just tradition? People never expect anything they send to ever have anything done to it? Google could set another precedent in webmail by introducing outgoing filters which would block or slow down mail appearing to be 'spammy'.

    • Nice idea, but what if you're discussing spam content? Then your email will appear spammy, even though it isn't.

      Or, what if you write poetry? A lot of modern poetry reads like seriously fucked up spam. Also, scripts read as nonsense, and nonsensical scripts, even more so. Example, from "Waiting for Godot":

      (with magnanimous gesture). Let's say no more about it. (He jerks the rope.) Up pig! (Pause.) Every time he drops he falls asleep. (Jerks the rope.) Up hog! (Noise of Lucky getting up and picking u

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by hankwang ( 413283 ) *

        Nice idea, but what if you're discussing spam content? Then your email will appear spammy, even though it isn't.

        I have mail accounts which are filtered by SpamAssassin, which does a fairly good job, and it looks like the actual text content of the email can only contribute so much to the spam score. I tried sending myself emails from a different account with text like "president nigeria $8,000,000 viagra penis enlargement rolex' and it stayed below the spam threshold: each spammy subject gives one point, so

        • Hi!

          I'm not concerned with recieving spam - as you noted - spam filters work well, and I also noted that. I am much more concerned with labeling outgoing email as spam, as it is a fast and slippery slope from halting viagra adverts to straight censorship. My concern isn't technical - it's conceptual.

          cheers!

          RS

    • They do. And its a pain in the butt if you want to send a newsletter to people in your org/company/group.

      Maybe I just look like a spammer for some reason.

    • "The email you are sending appears to be spam. Are you sure you want to send this email?"

      I had the same idea but on second thought it would be a hard strategy to enforce.... they'd have to set up an extra call center just to handle the flood of complaints: "Hey you guys say my email is spam, WTF... it's an email newsletter I send out to my men's club about the benefits of Viagra!"

      Not to mention the instant killing of any type of email meme jokes...

  • I have noticed this in the signups to my mailing list. I'm not sure why they are signing up, maybe they think they are leaving comment spam? Anyway all the addresses have the same format, a long first and last name followed by 2 numbers eg: EleftheriosZhytup84@gmail.com . Strange.

  • They'll close the holes when it is out of beta.

  • Google Groups (Score:5, Informative)

    by Yusaku Godai ( 546058 ) <hyuga@gu a r d i a n - h y uga.net> on Thursday July 17, 2008 @08:03AM (#24226769) Homepage

    I haven't noticed any particular trouble with spam originating from Gmail, and Gmail has still been pretty good at filtering most of my spam.

    But if you really want Google to do something about spam, go after them for their negligence on google groups. They've allowed the service to become almost unusable due to the amount of spam they allow through. For actual Google Groups it's not a big problem, but for USENET groups it is. Most people on USENET are just dropping anything coming from Google Groups outright. Any legitimate posts from Google Groups are considered an "acceptable loss" given the amount of godawful spam they allow through. It really cheeses me off that Google won't do something about it.

    • Re:Google Groups (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Lincolnshire Poacher ( 1205798 ) on Thursday July 17, 2008 @09:06AM (#24227531)

      > Most people on USENET are just dropping anything coming from Google Groups outright.

      Google Groups is well overdue for an active Usenet Death Penalty; in my opinion it is the only sanction which will make them take note. It was sufficient to bring Erols and UUNet to their senses. ( There is a conspiracy theory that Google is deliberately flooding Usenet; a UDP would disprove this in addition to forcing action ).

      Similarly, widespread blacklisting of Google Mail may be the only means of controlling the huge increase in spam. At present, a few individuals and companies are blacklisting but this is inadequate to make Goliath pay attention.

  • Already predicted (Score:2, Informative)

    by Scotteh ( 885130 )
    In Wednesday's article [slashdot.org], it was revealed that through a bug in Gmails software [holdenkarau.com] is was possible to send personalized spam. I guess it's true.

    • This has nothing to do with spam *to* GMail users, it's about spam *from* GMail users.

  • The summary implies that there's something wrong with the GMail spam filters. Actually, the problem is with the GMail spammer filters... the CAPTCHA.

    Also, both Google and spammers are being overly complacent about people blocking GMail:

    spammers also find Google attractive because of their strong reputation, which makes it highly unlikely the gmail.com domain would ever be blacklisted.

    Actually, several sites have blocked Google SMTP hosts that show large spam outflow (it seems to be specific hosts, as if specific accounts are allocated to specific servers or clusters of servers). Including, and I know the irony is thick enough to cut with a knife, MSN Hotmail. There have even been a number of posts to Google's help forums complaining about mail not being sent because Google servers are being blacklisted.

  • Captcha (Score:2, Interesting)

    by mcwidget ( 896077 )
    The fact that more spam is originating from Gmail is not indicative of Gmails spam filters being less effective, I think they only scam mail sent to Gmail accounts.

    We know that the Gmail Captcha was broken a few months back. It's more likely that a variant of that tool has become more widely distributed and/or cheaper and has found it's way into the hands of script-kiddies.
  • We really need to make a change in the way e-mail is done, but I don't know how. While white-listing seems like a good approach, there's always the catch 22 where somebody changes their e-mail address. I know public/private keys would also help, but I think that's too far over the head of most non-tech savvy individuals.

    • Require digital signing; people will catch on fast (Score:4, Interesting)

      by betterunixthanunix ( 980855 ) on Thursday July 17, 2008 @08:32AM (#24227073)
      Here's a quick way to solve the problem: require digital signatures for "important" emails. Want to sign up for Facebook? Digitally sign your reply to the "verify" email. It is quick, effective, and people who don't know what signing is will catch on really fast.

      • Most people don't like jumping through meaningless (to them) hoops.

        • Yeah, but they will tolerate it for certain purposes. For example, my bank insists upon verifying "unknown" computers by sending text messages to my phone. It is annoying, but they haven't seen a drop in traffic on their website, because people are willing to deal with the annoyance, even if they have no understanding of why it was imposed on them. Likewise, if we started forcing people to sign messages in order to gain access to the latest Internet fad, we would see a vast increase in the number of peop

          • I don't understand why "a vast increase in the number of people digitally signing their email" would cause any reduction in spam, unless you are saying that only signed emails should be allowed on the internet.

            • Ah, forgot to mention that part. Yes, presumably, if the overwhelming majority of legitimate emails were digitally signed, spam filtering would be a lot easier, at least if there was a good PKI in place. Even if spammers managed to get trusted signatures on their certificates, the amount of CPU time required to digitally sign a message would decrease the volume of spam they could send out (and those trusted signatures could be quickly revoked when if became clear they were used for spam).

  • My spam has been pretty ridiculously high for the last few weeks, although I have no idea if this is part of it. It really does seem like gmail's spam filters are declining these days.

    You don't say? I own a few domain names and to make life easier for me, I have setup 'catch all' e-mail forwards. I get about 30-40 spam messages a day. Gmail catches all of them with the exception of one every few weeks.

  • TFA is talking about the popularity of gmail accounts for sending spam now that Google's CAPTCHA has been cracked. This has nothing to do with how effective your gmail is filtered.

  • Fix the damn summary! (Score:3, Informative)

    by argent ( 18001 ) <(peter) (at) (slashdot.2006.taronga.com)> on Thursday July 17, 2008 @08:13AM (#24226875) Homepage Journal

    Most of the comments on this page are about *incoming* spam to google, when the article itself is about *outgoing* spam from google.

  • Spew from an unblockable (Score:4, Insightful)

    by redelm ( 54142 ) on Thursday July 17, 2008 @08:19AM (#24226945) Homepage
    However warped or rapacious, spammers are not stupid. They think that GMail is an unblockable address and its mail will get through. They want their "messages" to get through, so they will use it.

    Perhaps the GMail mailadmins will try to stop some, but they probably won't get it all. And they too will rely on GMail being "too big to block" for most mail recepients.

    This just highlights how the burden of anti-spam efforts often gets transferred to legitimate email senders by simplistic blocking. The unacknowledged false-positive problem. I have seen these come to a sudden stop when the company loses an important order because it false-positived the prospect.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gmuslera ( 3436 )
      Most blocking techniques based on source of connections (black/gray lists/dnsbl, etc) fail against spam originating from real gmail accounts, coming thru their servers. And filtering based on content not only is expensive (requires more cpu at the very least) but also very sensible to whatever trick the spammers are using some day.

      But once you have a way to automate creating accounts or at least being able to do it in mass (cracking captchas, or using social engineering, like putting a bunch of people to de

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by redelm ( 54142 )
        I suspect content-based filtering is underutilised because of a historical perception of "high cost". CPU is unbelieveably cheap these days with x2 and x4 CPUs. The problems are small and fit nicely in cache. Bandwidth still costs, but perhaps minimally with early content-based TCP abort.

        Ultimately, content-based filtering can also be used to identify spammers and refresh blocklists rapidly if they are still desired.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by gmuslera ( 3436 )
          Spam can easily go back to gfx form (or other kind of embeddable content, like i.e. pdfs). In that scenario, plain "content" filtering is or incomplete, or enough cpu intensive in busy/underpowered enough servers, AND, the bandwidth needed to do even an early detection will be high.

          In the other hand, connection source blocking can cut the connection after receiving a few bytes, but cant do anything again widely used real servers... like gmail.

          Complementing this 2 techniques with some sort of user feedback (

  • Google should hire hit squads (Score:3, Funny)

    by spidercoz ( 947220 ) on Thursday July 17, 2008 @08:35AM (#24227103) Journal
    Start assassinating some of these fucking degenerate spammer asshole motherfuckers and watch the junk disappear. Seriously, these cocksuckers need to be burned at the stake. Blackwater would prally do it.

    • Re:Google should hire hit squads (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Animats ( 122034 ) on Thursday July 17, 2008 @10:32AM (#24228643) Homepage

      Blackwater would probably do it.

      There's something to be said for this. Many of the major spammers have been identified (see ROKSO [spamhaus.org]). The anti-spam community needs "boots on the ground" to do something about them. There are private companies in that business. Blackwater [blackwaterusa.com] is one; Kroll [kroll.com] is another. Spammers today are part of larger criminal enterprises, which makes them vulnerable to private investigators.

  • I didn't read it (Score:3, Interesting)

    by koan ( 80826 ) on Thursday July 17, 2008 @08:38AM (#24227141)

    I just wanted to add something interesting, I forwarded an account to my gmail in order to use gmail's filters to rid me of most of the "sorting" work, periodically I log into the original account to clean it up.
    After about 6 months of doing this, I notice when I log into the original account there is almost no spam in it these days.
    I guess they lost interest in that email since I never actually look at anything in it.

  • I wrote the release... (Score:5, Informative)

    by dskoll ( 99328 ) on Thursday July 17, 2008 @08:46AM (#24227253) Homepage

    Well, I did this study and our results are here [roaringpenguin.com].

    We in no way imply that Gmail's inbound spam filtering is bad. It's probably excellent. It's just difficult or impractical for Google to filter outbound mail without either human review or complaints because of false-positives.

    What we're saying is that spammers are trying to evade IP reputation systems by hijacking organizations with good reputations or which would be impractical to block. There will be a CAPTCHA-cracking arms-race, but unfortunately I think the system will reach equilibrium with spammers quickly breaking CAPTCHAs and continuing to abuse free e-mail systems.

  • The real issue: Gmail considered secure (Score:5, Insightful)

    by scorp1us ( 235526 ) on Thursday July 17, 2008 @08:51AM (#24227341) Journal

    With most big name email players like gmail, yahoo, etc, now using DomainKeys, the value of having an email address on any such system has skyrocketed. Gmail addresses are also usually even more respectable addresses. So being on gmail and a getting through because DomainKeys work makes it is a privileged domain.

    What the proper response should be:

    1. Gmail makes signing up harder
    2. Gmail scans all outgoing mail (and between its own servers)
    3. mail receivers don't skip the spam screening even if there is DomainKeys

    What should really happen is SenderKeys, which augments DomainKeys. You will get your own domain key when you can become "verified" like at Ebay and elsewhere. SenderKeys is implied by DomainKeys.
     

  • "Opera's revolutionary new email client."

    or

    FROM MR PHILLIPS ODUOZA
    EXCUTTIVE DIRECTOR ELECTRONIC TRANSACTION BANKING

    While my dspam has noticed a substantial amount of misses, most of the ones it's missing are the Opera ones, because they contain so few tokens similar to most other spam. They seem to be using absurd titles "Obama killed in bathroom luncheon" or "40,000 Troops die in Iraq" Oh well, retrain FTW!

  • Please, you're all worrying too much, all of these problems and more will be solved by Email 2.0.
  • How does a spam filter "decline" ?
    I could understand its efficiency declining or its effectiveness declining, but the filter itself ?
    Time to find an English translation I think.
    No matter, the summary and the actual article are talking about 2 different things anyway.

    And while all you mods are reaching for the troll option, just bear in mind that if no-one publicly questions the inappropriate use of language, then it is seen as acceptable and copied by others, until there are no rules being followed at all.

  • Maybe it's because of ... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by timbck2 ( 233967 ) <<moc.liamg> <ta> <2kcbmit>> on Thursday July 17, 2008 @11:10AM (#24229281) Homepage

    This [slashdot.org]. [/.]

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