Slashdot Mirror
80% Of Incoming E-mail At Hotmail Is Spam
The Llama King writes: "According to this AP story at The Houston Chronicle, 80 percent of the e-mail that makes its way into Hotmail's user inboxes is spam. And that does not include the UCE caught by Hotmail's filters. This is the first of a three-part series the Associated Press is doing on spam."
Not only that. Since Hotmail implemented one-click filtering, spammers have been using to: and cc: instead of bcc: so the commercial messages you have requested get throught into your mailbox. Annoying as hell. One reason I went over to Yahoo. Later I changed to spamcop, since yahoo aka large-intrusive-popup-ad-parlour sucks :-)
No, spam does not have to work because there's so much of it. What does work is selling harvested email addresses to assholes.
All these things are pretty standard these days, but webmail providers (not just hotmail) don't actually seem to bother. Remember, the more times you check your inbox, the more ads they have viewed.
One of the better articles I've seen on how to stop spam covers Social and technical measures (Google cache), by Richard Jones - using Google because that site isn't reachable right now. It doesn't have all the answers, but has some very good ideas. Most importantly, they can be implemented by ISPs without legislation, important though that is in the medium term.
I think a combination of strong filtering, strong terms of service (e.g. take credit card numbers of those who sign up for email service, and have an automatic and substantial fine for abuse), and legislation could really help. Spammers moving offshore actually makes filtering easier, for those people who don't do a lot of business with China at any rate...
One key point is that spam-filtering should be controllable by the individual, to allow people to make sure they receive email that might look like spam (e.g. most commercial newsletters) and server-based so that nobody needs to download spam over slow dialup or mobile wireless connections. SpamAssassin is the best tool I've found so far.
Set Junk Mail Filter to "high" and Junk Mail Deletion to "automatic"
And block as many domains as you can in the block sender list. Every time you receive a new piece of junk add its domain to the blocked list if possible.
I just tried this recently and the spam I had to review went down from a 100 per day to about 10 per day which is much more manageable.
Of course the spammers will probably get more sophisticated and we'll just have to think of something else.
The only reason all cover-ups appear to fail is that you never hear about the ones that succeed.
Or just move back over to your old FreeBSD servers and type 'cd /usr/ports/mail/spamass-milter; make install' (assuming Billy G doesn't mind using sendmail).
:)
In fact, amavisd-new (or is it -ng?) supports spamassassin/razor now, so you get 3 milters for the price of one
- Oliver
The right to bear arms is only slightly less stupid than the right to arm bears...
> Judging from my inbox it seems that 80% of
...
> outgoing email at hotmail is spam.
If you read the message headers, you'll probably discover that most of this spam isn't actually *from* hotmail. It just shows a hotmail address in the "From:" line. The "From:" line is no more accurate than a return address written in the top left-hand corner of a letter you'd get in the mail. In other words, it can say whatever you want it to say.
And as someone who has more than one e-mail account, bring able to change "From:" without trouble is a *good* thing
-- Rick
spamassin has a bug that sometimes it decides things are in mbox format but it drops the empty line before the ^From\ line. This can be very bad if the 1st message is spam and the second one isn't. When I tried to report this, bugzilla was having a bad week.
Spamassin also is very bad at deciding attachments are spam because any large image will have enough 4 letter regex hiding that it hits. I figure it false positives at least 5% of time.
I've used a free email service for over two years and have NEVER received spam. I'm sure it's partially because it's less well known than hotmail but also because the have a serious commitment to blocking all spam and pursuing action against incoming and outgoing spam.
From the Myrealbox No Spam Policy:
"Spam is no good.
Don't do it.
It causes bad karma and cancer (and perhaps some other diseases).
Yes, this is true.
No, it's not a joke.
Oh, and spammers rot in hell."
"For each violation of the no spam policy, users will be fined ten dollars ($10 USD) for EACH E-mail sent. This damages provision does not preclude Novell from seeking other damages as well."
They give you IMAP, POP in addition to a nice webmail interface. I'm assuming they'll start charging for at some point but this is a good example of how it is possible to block spam if the service provider is committed.
I have a Hotmail account which I obtained purely for testing purposes. I have never given the address out to anyone. I occasionally login to Hotmail to keep the account active... and regularly have to delete hundreds of spam messages of which only about half are automatically flagged as spam by Hotmail.
I just checked the account after a week or two and have 56 new messages in my inbox, 81 in my junk mail folder.... all of which are spam.
From my experience with Hotmail, my conclusion is that your post is, to be kind, somewhat less than truthful.
I have a very similar experience. I signed up with Hotmail (and all of the major services) just to have a Hotmail account, but have never even mentioned in passing to anyone that I have one. My Inbox right now contains 260 messages received in the last week, 259 of which are spam, and the remaining one from Hotmail Services asking me to pay for a "faster" Hotmail account. Oddly enough, I also have a Yahoo! account which I've used heavily and given out freely for the past few years (until around May when I registered my own domain name), and receive at most maybe four or five spams per month. So, yes, I think Hotmail is a shitty service, and while maybe they don't directly sell addresses, they make it very easy for harvesters to gather them and very easy for spam to get through.
The funny thing is, once I registered the new domain, I started getting four and five spams a day at Yahoo! (probably from address harvesters crawling thru whois entries), but since I now only check the account to make sure I don't miss any mail from senders who don't have the new address yet, it doesn't concern me much.
Additionally, for major providers like AT&T, Hotmail, etc, they'll take every single username that they know of at hotmail, and try it at AT&T, and see what bounces.
Add to this the fact that they often do these tests while bouncing through 500 open relays that they don't control, and you have an extremely hard to detect, hard to control wardialer.
Well, duuuh. What do people actually think that Hotmail, Mail, Excite, Go or other accounts are for? If you get on the Internet, you go through an ISP, which provides an email account, sometimes up to 5. That's where you get your real mail. For public exposure (signing on to news sites, etc.) email, get a Hotmail account, and just let it fill up with junk. I see it as getting a benefit from the Microsoft tax.
... forums like Slashdot, Kuro5hin, and Fsckedcompany; sending rebuttals to online news journalists; and mailing webmasters/programmers about their sites/programs.
Hotmail:
more spam-prone exposures, like logins to pr0n sites, yowza.
Go and Excite:
miscellaneous uses that I haven't thought of yet.
... you will just be using your own bandwidth to fill up your own hard disks.
Suckers.
Here's my strategy. My ISP: 1 email account; personal use (friends and associates). Mail(.com): identifying myself in public commentary
Thus, my ISP email is utterly clean of spam. My Mail(.com) account gets a couple pieces of spam a week, with some replies from journalists, webmasters and programmers; I logon to Mail(.com) once a week to delete some spam and find some replies. My Hotmail account is a windswept and dusty wasteland of spam, getting 2-6 pieces of spam a day, and has some notices from the sites I subscribe to; I logon to Hotmail every 1 to 4 weeks to delete essentially everything, which is dozens of spam mails. The Go and Excite accounts are still being evaluated for their usefulness; I just login once a month to keep 'em active.
So, thank you Microsoft for providing me a spam filter. Go ahead and even sell the list of your Hotmail clients
[also misbehaves on Kuro5hin as Peahippo]
Have you looked at sneakemail? It generates permanent random mail addresses that forward back to your "real" address. You can configure the name that gets inserted into the name when it forwards (i.e. "Spanish Cypercafe One") as well as the name people see when you reply ("Mr. Fly").
It saves a lot of tedious filling out of Hotmail accounts and attracts a surprisingly small amount of spam. (And you get to find out who spammed you...)