Christmas Spam Level Skyrocketing

dbolger writes: "ZDNet has this brief, but interesting article about how the amount of spam we recieve in our inboxes has increased 650% since this time last year. Nice to know that that anti-spam legislation passed a while back is having an effect (not)." For PINE users, just remember the magic spell: "m s r f a."

Comments

Spam or junk?

[spamkabuki]

Looked at the headline and thought "Hmmm, I haven't gotten that much more spam...". Spam seems to be a bit of a misnomer here. Sure, there is some increase in holiday advertising and such, but spam (i.e. unsolicited e-mail) isn't what they are really complaining about here.

In the body of the article, they describe how jokes, animations, and greeting cards are clogging the system. Well, duh! Ask the USPS. They get clogged with lots of this stuff at this time of year; they're called Christmas cards.

This isn't really spam per se. It generally comes from people you know, even if you only hear from them once a year. Somehow the mailman and my mailbox cope with the onslaught every year. If your corporate infrastructure can't handle it, well what will you do if there is a legitimate boost in business traffic?

I guess these people will just crack the whip on corporate use policies again. Fat lot of good that seems to do.

All this trumpeting about %650 increased spam is an alarmist waste. (Not that I really want any more of the tons of weight-loss pills; credit fixing programs; appeals from Nigerian humanitarian organizations looking for my bank account number, promising free money for my help.)

Roll your own filter

[WyldOne]

I wrote one in TCL recently - still alpha testing it. Pre-screens e-mail in my pop3 account _before_ I d/l it with fetchmail. Mostly based on a hueristic approch. EG spam rules:

• If more than 50% of characters in subject are upper case = shouting.
  
• If the Subject has a random number or nonsense string at the end.
  
• If e-mail has no 'from', 'to' or 'subject' line
  
• If e-mail is not addressed to me
  
• Certain percentage of spam words (make, money,loan,etc)
  
• Certain spam phrases
  
• luzer list
  

Exceptions:
list of trusted sites/people.
Things specificly sent just to me.

It was amazing just what it did filter - I went from 10 spams a day to 1 a week. (mostly due to timing issue of spam pre-filter to fetchmail d/l)
It whacked almost 300+ spams from my 'public' e-mail account in one go. I also have it log the from/Subject - just in case)

Spam will kill the internet

[ab315]

I don't need statistics to tell me that the level of spam is going up, the number of messages I get from hot-n-horny teenage vixens wanting me to look at their webcam tells me that. And this is to a unique business email address which is used on my business web-page only and has never been posted to usenet.

What surprises me is how the major players who stand to benefit from universal internet use have ignored the threat of spam to the internet as a whole.

To the ordinary user receiving a daily mailbox of sexually-explicit advertising is a major turn-off. I know several ordinary people who just stopped using email because of this sort of thing, and just use their cellphones to make calls and leave voicemail instead. No telephone company would survive for a second if its voicemail customers got bombarded by the same sort of sexually-explicit advertising that internet users get by email.

Spam filtering is not a viable solution for average non-technical users. The industry needs to clean up its act or it will suffer major consequences.

If the present trends continue it would not surprise me if email actually drops out of mainstream existence and is only used by a geek subculture, being replaced by other messaging solutions that provide a safe environment.

Filtering helps spammers

[Charles Dodgeson]

ab315 says

Spam filtering is not a viable solution for average non-technical users

Spam filtering is actually a bad idea. Spam filtering actually makes life easier for the spammers. I have a short note discussing this. Among other things, it says

Attempting content filtering to detect and junk incoming spam is counter productive. Filtering like that only makes things easier for spammers. The spammer's ideal email list would include every email address on the planet with the exception of those who are inclined to take action against spam. The spammer doesn't mind the vast majority of people who "just hit delete". If automatic filtering means that those inclined to complain about the spam don't see the spam, then filtering actually helps the spammer.

I wonder if the increase in the use of filters is related to the increase in spam.

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