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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."
Still, there is promised security of the MS passport system etc. In this case it looks like more like a spam enhancement system. since this is supposed to be something to verify your login across the net. This means that most email addresses there have been preverified by MS as being valid.
a gift to spammers everywhere.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Finally, a well-written article that highlights the downside of spam.
...)
Yeah, we all know that email is a "powerful new marketing tool", but few have written about how much negative impact it has to the economy and our everyday lives.
I have an email address that I've never given out, and 90% of the messages I receive are spam. The email address on this posting ONLY receives spam... mostly in some funky character set that I can't bother to being to read. This address gets about 40 a day (and likely more after this posting).
So, industry self-regulation? Well that doesn't seem to work - and it didn't work with Enron (or WoldCom or Andersen or
So I think it's time that we hit them where it hurts. Pass -strong- laws. Pass laws that permit individuals to sue in certain circumstances.
They passed laws to control the misuse of FAX machines... and although not perfect, they do help. Then again, how many people do you know that have a fax machine at home? Betcha most people have unplugged theirs due to FAX Spam.
Granted, a lot of spam gets through on guesswork (such as every common permutation of John Smith @ hotmail.com) but you have to wonder if something odd is going within the company when (as a test) you register ibtgsrq at hotmail dot com and within two weeks it starts receiving the usual fake degrees, penis enlargment and general porn stuff.
subnote: ibtgsrq stands for I Bet This Gets Spam Real Quick - and it did.
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Recently, I ran a script against the mail server logs, testing what email addresses receive how much mail. And I was quite surprised to find a large number of hits for mailboxes that don't exist. For example: ... ...
8 - diane@domain.com
2 - diane1@domain.com
2 - diane2@domain.com
2 - diane3@domain.com
2 - diane4@domain.com
2 - diane5@domain.com
And also, such classics as jsmith@domain.com (and all numbers attached.)
Obviously, they can't afford to do this all of the time, but do it once, and use web bugs to track who opens the message, and boom. Instant verified email addresses.
I created a couple of throw-away hotmail accounts before my current long vacation, as something to hand out to people I really don't want to know after we say goodbye.
There were of the form (slightly changed to protect the poor accounts)
qris9.4food772a@hotmail.com and
3metre3e4w.pa7@hotmail.com
not the kind of addresses a script could guess by incrementing numbers. I carefully un-checked all the "please let M$ partners spam me" boxes as well. For the first 2 weeks after creating these accounts, not a single message came in. Then they both started getting occasional spam, obviously targeted.
A couple of weeks ago I handed out the first address to a number of people while in Spain, and then checked it regularly from cybercafes around Portugal. Within days it was getting 3-10 portuguese language spams per day. Now it gets about 20 spams per day in various languages, but the second account is still only getting 2-3 per day.
Strange.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Greg Egan is an author, programmer, and scientist.
:)
In one of his short stories, he mentions having a setup where a whitelist of people you know are allowed to send you email for free, and anything else requires a minimum payment (which can be set from 0 to as high as you want). Tired of spam? I wouldn't be, for 25 cents a spam. That'd pad my bank account nicely.
How could it be done? There are already proposed extentsions to the SMTP command set so that clients and servers could agree on an amount and pass a token to each other (be sure you're using a TLS aware MTA, like Postfix), and it could be verified by both sides with the 3rd-party escrow server (which manages the money). Paypal is the only current online money system with enough momentum to make this work well for everyone, but maybe another one will come up
Either way, it makes it easy to stop spam by removing the one thing that spammers like -- the cheapness. Only people who want spam (haha), or people who don't live in the 21st-century (MTA wise) will have to deal with the 20th century scourge known as spam.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I've had that happen a few years ago. I traveled to a part of the US that I'd never been to before and used Hotmail to keep up on email. Within a couple of days, I was getting spam targeted for businesses in that area. This surprised me because I didn't even know what the URL's were for the businesses in that area. The people I was sending and receiving emails from also started to receive the same spam. The only explanation was that someone in that area (an ISP?) was sniffing email addresses and then selling them.
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=ad.law10 .hotmail.com
Same for ad.pav0.hotmail.com, law2-ad.hotmail.com, and many others.
Don't fix, what ain't broken - maybe Microsoft understood this rule.