Slashdot Mirror
Spam Increases Make Things Tough For Companies
dosten sent us a link to a story running
on Cnet about the spam epidemic. My favorite stat is that by 2006, we'll be getting 1400 spam
a year. Of course, I already get that every week. Talks about
foreign spam relays, block lists, and so on. Decent piece explaining
a huge problem that's only getting worse.
2. SPAM click rates will continue to fall, and bandwidth costs will soar, so eventually the point will be reached that most SPAM will no longer be viable economically- this may be some time away, but I think it is certainly a possibility.
Ahh, but you do realize that most spammers utilize others' bandwidth for their task? That's why it's so popular (no overhead). What we really need to happen is for companies with open relays to sue spammers for the cost of the bandwidth useage... Not just blocking the spam.
-Riskable
"Those who choose proprietary software will pay for their decision!"
It helps if you run your own mail server, I do.
Three months ago I changed my email address. I told all my friends and created a new email address for them. Then, for every site I registered with, I used a slightly different address. I created a few generic addresses as well, for online shopping or one-time stuff.
So far, only places I actually visited have sent me spam, but now it's easy enough to cut them off.
And the mail is not annoying, I don't mind getting a buy.com sale email, because I buy from them.
It's a simple solution, and it works well.
Since around Dec 7, 2000, (the date I installed Spamassassin [a really great spam-catcher I must say!] on my mail server) I have received around 650 spam messages.
By the way, spamassassin is really really good. I have not had any mail that was personal get flagged as spam, (only a few list-serv messages) and out of all those spams, about 5, certainly less than 10 spam messages actually made it through without being flagged as spam!
If you get a chance, try spamassassin. It uses razor, and many of the RBL lists, as well as key-words. Plus it's really configurable, to match your prefs.
I'm probably going to install spamassassin on several of my clients mail servers to block spam site-wide.
Cheers!
It's perfect for registering online or leaving a temporary contact address. I've used it almost exclusively for one of my accounts, and I get virtually no spam on that account. It's a lifesaver.
I can highly, HIGHLY recommend that you sign up with them. You'll thank me later.
Mr. Ska
Here's a hint. Don't give spammers your e-mail address in the first place.
Don't give it to shady businesses or websites, don't give it to amateur websites run by people you don't know, don't give it to small or medium sized businesses, don't give it to well known or big online or meat-space companies that have a reputation of being irresponsible in such matters, and don't give it to anyone whose privacy/non-use clauses don't look sincere or aren't backed by anyone you know.
And munge your e-mail address when used on Usenet.
That's it. I haven't gotten ONE SINGLE piece of spam in 4 years. I give my e-mail address to my friends and co-workers, the only people in the world who need it. It's on my website which is hosted from my ADSL line on dyndns.org, and it's never been reaped. It's in my profile at some online-groups and semi-private blog places (my CS clan's web-forum for example), and they've never been reaped.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!
All that we need is a honest to goodness education campaign by the ISPs to clue in their lusers.
Secondly, I find the figure of $1 per spam to be kind of ludicrous. It takes me about 5 seconds to recognize a piece of mail is spam and delete it.
So let's assume that like most geeks, you're way on the end of the bell curve when it comes to processing information. Suppose the average spam delay is 30 seconds per person. They just said the guy worked at "a major telecommunications company"; let's assume that they're in the same league as SGI, another company mentioned in the article which has revenues of $300,000 per year per employee.
That works out to about $150 per hour in revenue, or $2.50 per minute. So that 30-second spam distraction costs $1.25 on average.
And assuming their mail beeped and distracted them from something else, the cost could be a lot higher; distractions substantially reduce productivity. And if they click on a link or actually read the spam? yet more time gone. $1 is probably too low.
I've noticed a similar phenomena. I've been quite vigilant about reporting spammers and have been trying to report them to all of the possible channels, including the SEC if it's yet another pump-and-dump scheme.
;)
The best part is reporting first-time spammers. I make damn sure that when I see a spam I haven't seen before that I report it. I had the great satisfaction of watching some girl who wanted to be the next Britney Spears or something get her website shut down for spamming. Those people are the big spammers of the future. If somebody gets started in spamming and gets their access canned right away, they hopefully will realize that it's not as easy money as the person who set them up with spamming software said it was.
But it is an uphill battle. Some companies are claiming that I did, in fact, opt-in at some point to receiving spam from their "partners". Taking care of those folks and tracking who initially sold my address has resulted quite a bit of improvement in my spam count. I don't have the opt-in networks, just the bulk viagra mails and whatnot coming from Asia, at this point.
I've also noticed that unless you report spammers, they will spam you forever. I have some addresses that haven't been used for years that are still getting spam. I notice this because I get error messages occasionally because the auto-bounce message has nowhere to bounce to.
When I get in one of those moods, I'll crank call all of the 1-800 numbers listed in the spam. That doesn't do anything for the spam count, but it does wonders for my mood.
Gentoo Sucks
I prefer "support@[website]". For example, to get RealPlayer to quit bugging me, my email address it was assigned was "support@real.com". I also make an extra effort to ensure all the correct check boxes are selected to "yes" as well. :)
Opinions vary, but I believe that the response rate is 1-3 per 10,000.
Responses aren't sales, but if we use junk mail as a guide, there's approximately a 10%
sell through rate. That means 1-3 sales per 100,000. As a guess, most crap sold via spam
is about 90% profit and sells for about $40.00. A dedicated spammer could easily saturate the market,
which is about 150,000,000 people. That works out to about $50,000.
That's a lot of assumptions, but I believe $50,000 is within an order of magnitude of correct.
Not enough to excite me, but unfortunately more than enough to keep those assholes going.
I have a friend who works for an ISP. He claims a spammer offered to pay the ISP $10,000
a month to cover the cost of dealing with the spam complaints, if they were allowed to continue spamming.
The spammer clearly thought that spam was worth more the $10,000 a month.
-- Spam Wolf, the best spam blocking vaporware yet!
No, not necessarily. I get about 80 spams a day, and I've tracked most of them down to a couple of things:
All of those aren't stupid things to do - but spammers make use of them nevertheless.
Pointing them to my SMTP server's terms of service and trying to claim payment usually doesn't generate a response at all. [And if you can't afford a lawyer, trying to take a spammer to court won't do much good]
Actually, the only spammer ever to react to one turned out to be a 14 year old kid who fell for a "make money fast, we assure you it's legal" scam, and I don't really want to make a victim pay more than they have.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html