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.

Comments

Re:Growth, Growth, Growth....

[Riskable]

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.

Re:Tracking Spam

[GSloop]

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!

Spamgourmet.com

[mr.ska]

I've been using Spamgourmet.com for about a year now. It provides you with an unlimited number of valid, disposable e-mail addresses, and lets you decide how many times each address can be used. The first N e-mails sent to that address are forwarded to you, and everything else is eaten.

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.

Re:I block Asia, Russia and other places

[alcmena]

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. :)

Re:How profitable is spam?

[AnotherBlackHat]

know its cheap, but I'm really curious to see how much spammers really profit from their ads. There has to be a certain profile for the person who really believes that they can enlarge their penis by "clicking here".

Maybe the spammers should focus on only AOL addresses since their members seem to like daily solicitation, and leave the rest of us alone!

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!

Re:Suggestions to avoid spam.

[bero-rh]

If you are getting 40 spams a day, you are doing something stupid.

No, not necessarily. I get about 80 spams a day, and I've tracked most of them down to a couple of things:

• The bug-gnu-utils list is gated to spamnet, formerly known as usenet. While I post to bug-gnu-utils with an obfuscated addresses these days, I can't prevent people from sending bug reports to bug-gnu-utils and Cc'ing me -- thereby making my address visible to spambots harvesting spamnet.
• Address mentioned in public places by someone else, such as "If you're seeing that bug in the Red Hat packages only, contact their packager at ..."
• Address listed on a website (feedback requests, without obfuscating the address to make it easier for users) - this is also what generates a lot of spam on our security contact address

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.