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

Re:msrfa?

[KarmaPolice]

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But this doesn't work unless you know what to look for in spam...and none are alike

Re:pine

[carpe_noctem]

Mutilate Spam Right Fucking Away.

Yahoo Spam filters

[LS]

I use a yahoo address for my email, and have it forward to my local server's mailbox. Yahoo adds a header "X-Rocket-Spam" to mail tagged as spam, and I use procmail to filter these out. While their spam detection still works pretty well, ever since the economy went to shits their filtering has progressively gotten worse. I suspect that they are letting certain spam slip for a fee. It used to catch everything, but now I get at least 10 messages a day getting through.

LS

Both sites and advertisers are desperate

[Artifice_Eternity]

I was laid off from a marketing/"branding"/ad firm in July, b/c they just weren't getting the web development business they once had. Banner ad rates have plummeted, and we are being assaulted by ever-more-maddening varieties of web ads (huge banners, popunders, clickthroughs, and now "shoshkeles"!?). Sites feel they have to give advertisers more for their money, simply in order to bring in the same revenue as during the dot-com boom.

When will this madness stop? Users may flee sites that harass them too strongly. Then again, the general level of advertising in our environment has been slowly but steadily increasing for decades. I doubt this trend will stop anytime soon.

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.)

Re:the rest of the world...

[MS]

The rest of the world (= non-us) accounts for about 67% of all internet users, and is growing more rapidly, as there is more room for new users. The US is reaching saturation.

Despite more than 2/3 of the Internet-users beeing non-us-citizens, 90% of all spam originates in the US. This is most likely due to permissive legislature in the US. In Italy for example collecting (e-mail)addresses and other personal data is illegal, unless you have written permission from the user, or you have a business realationship (italian law #675/96, aka privacy law).

IMHO, stopping the increasing number of spam-mails is only possible with legislature forcing opt-in methods for advertisers and huge fines for those who don't conform.

Ciao,
ms

Not news - an advert (or press release)

[ukryule]

This "news" report comes straight from a press release.

So, a company selling email filtering software say that email filtering is ever so important? What they actually said was:

"Our database of holiday-related email messages and attachments has grown 650 percent since last Christmas,"

But their job is to build up a database of junk, so it's not really surprising - it's just saying that their database is up to date (or that their database was very out-of-date last year).

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.

Re:Spam will kill the internet

[Halo1]

Yeah, just read this: http://www.clifto.com/8345.html. This guy calculates, using publicly available numbers about the amount of businesses in the USA, that even if only 1% of all *US* companies sends you only 1 message a month, you end up with 8345 ads *PER DAY* in your mail box.

So even if they'd send you only one per year, you'd still get on average about 695 ads per day. So people, instead of JHD (Just Hit Delete), please try to find the time to figure out where the spam was sent from and where the spamvertized sites are hosted and report the spammers or they things may become very ugly...

Jonas

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.

Spamcop.net seems to have worked for me..

[ltm]

About a month ago, I started reporting my spam to Spamcop.net .. you sign up for a free account, and every spam you get, you post to their website. (Additionally, there's a utility out there called Spam Deputy that will auto-post selected spams to your Spamcop account from Outlook.)

Spamcop takes the headers and fires off Abuse messages to every domain it finds in the trace of the spam.

The results? Well, I check my email and my wife's, and we used to get roughly identicle spams .. After using SpamCop for maybe 2 weeks, my spam count dropped off the map, while her email still gets hit. I'd say I've gone from 20 spam/day to 1 spam/day.

It's kinda spooky. Don't know why it worked for me.