Slashdot Mirror
Email (As We Know It) Doomed?
Mephie writes "A pretty interesting article at Slate.com takes a look at how spam may be killing email as we know it. With the increase of spam, the argument is made that more users will switch from blacklisting spammers to 'whitelisting' specific, trusted addresses, making email more like instant messaging: if you're not on someone's 'buddy list,' you have to prove you're an actual person (e.g. identify a word in an image) to send a message." May be?
Tolerate no spamming what so ever. If one complain about a customer with an proven case of spam would arrive at a abuse department, shut that account down. There is no need to allow this, and no need to "warn" users doing this.
My ISP limits me from commersial activities at my homepage, why not limit the e-mail account from spamming.
The biggest problem today is that the price of spam is not charged from the spammer, but the poor user who recieves the shit. For all you americans out there, sue a spammer, make him/her pay for all loss of productivity he/she has caused. It'll make you rich, and perhaps make spammers think twice before clicking that send button.
Another doomsayer, give me a break, the Internet is going to fall apart in $random years, we'll be swimming in spam and popup ads, hackers will wage "cyberwar" on our "infostructure" unless we do something about it. Whatever. Use the proper tools. By now if you're still swamped in spam/popups/adware, then you're an idiot.
The moron who cut me off on the road this morning is a danger to motorists, highways are doomed to failure!
Previously bayesian spam filtering was demonstrated on slashdot to be very effective. Once this becomes commonplace, and seamless, no extra configuration required on the users behalf, hopefully we will see the end of spam.
However, combined with whitelists this could be quite useful. Bayesian filters to filter out spam, except for whitelisted spam. Eg mailing lists of advertisements you sign up to being whitelisted could be effectively. I suppose that when you sign up to a mailing list that would normally be recognised as spam, when it sends a confirmation e-mail your client could recognise it and ask if you want to add it to your whitelist.
Anyway, with the introduction of bayesian filters into an ordinary client means that the future of e-mail may not necessarily have to be so bleak.
Then, I should ofcourse plug this Openchallenge submission about Learning e-mail classifier:The use of a naive bayesian algorithm in automatically filtering spam and classifying e-mail has been discussed and also implemented in the past. Implement an automatic e-mail classifier system which works together with an IMAP server. The system should: a) constantly refine the database used to classify messages either by periodically re-analyzing the IMAP folders or by tracking each incoming message and periodically checking to which folder the user actually moves each message. b) assign each incoming message an extra header item which contains the path of the IMAP folder where the message belongs according to the classification algorithm.
Also, you could also mine your site for smammers like this.
So, my point is that just during last two years the spam problem has exceeded so much that there is enough interest in fighting it seriously. Spam will die.
If you have a mail box that where you don't recieve any legitimate mail, then, of course, you will have a very high percentange of junk. It's not rocket science. The more people use it, the less of an annoyance that small percentage of junk is.
I'm afraid not. E-Mail allows me to send a message, or respond when I want to. Much better flexibility than IM.
Spam will catch up. There are already a small number of spamers working IM effectively, and it could get as bad as e-mail at any time.
Yeah, e-mail is going to be outdated, just like postal-mail has long been outdated, and telephones have been outdated. You heard it here first... According to 'JeffSh', IM is going to replace them all...
</sarcasm>
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I just can't really see email going away, especially not in favor of IM. Emails true usefulness, the thing that makes it a 'killer app' is that it is asynchronous. Unlike IM, when I send someone an email, it is unnecessary for them to be online, or have their IM client running in order to receive my message. Their email server is more than happy to hold their email for them until they can get it, and allows them to respond when they can.
Additionally, it's not like IM is spam-free. A quick google search reveals a growing business in providing anti-spam tools to IM users, so I doubt that making email more IM-like will help, though I do see some limited use of whitelists to be beneficial.
Businesses however, can never get away with using whitelists, or even most blacklists to reduce the amount of spam they have to deal with. I know that at our company, we cannot block nearly the number of netblocks that we would like to, as we need communicate with customers almost exclusively by email, and cannot afford to lock out potential buyers for any reason.
The solution to the spam problem is not an easy one, especially not for businesses, but small steps forward are made all the time, in better pattern matching, address lookup, etc that one day will (hopefully) allow for spam to be stopped, or at least to stem the tide...
as i see it, the only way to rectify this situation is to make spam a legally punishable offence. a jail term, a hefty fine, anything! i just want something to be done! everytime i think about all the spammers making a quick buck by killing off email slowly, i get pissed as hell.
the same way DOS attacking a website is a serious offence as it costs a lot of money, spamming is no different from a DOS attack on individual users. those individual users being attacked number by the millions and this is an everyday DOS attack on all of us.
write into a newspaper forum, send a letter to your senator. do SOMETHING. create more awareness and resentment towards spammers; its the only way to get anything done about them. i'm halfway through a letter to my local newspaper as i type this.
If one complain about a customer with an proven case of spam would arrive at a abuse department, shut that account down.
I don't think it's quite as easy as that. If one customer using my laptop gateway sends a spam from my IP address, is that the end of my cybercafe? If one angry employee at IBM sets off a spamming program as he walks out the door, does IBM vanish from the Internet?
A while back our server got blacklisted for a week or so by SPEW because it was in the same 16-bit IP range as a machine that has been used for spam. That's potentially 65k machines! It was at this point that I vowed not to co-operate with any of these anti-spam measures, which inevitably martyr innocent users at random and don't touch the big spammers with the resources to change IP address and ISP three times a day if necessary. The cure is worse than the original disease!
Virtually serving coffee
os x's default email app, mail, seems to toss spam directly into the trash with (about) 99% accuracy... that is, 99% of spam is correctly identified as spam. perhaps twice i've found emails that i've wanted to receive in the trash, but that's over many months, and the mistakes will never be repeated after a quick "whitelisting".
anyway, if you're really upset by spam, it's pretty friggin' easy to avoid it... do NOT put down your regular email address for any site that wants to email you a password for registration. get a trashy hotmail account (or whatever) just for verifications, and use your regular email addresss for real communication.
perhaps spam, collectively, is a huge problem, but the problems it causes for typical individuals are small, especially given the existence of spam filters. that's why spam won't "kill" email by any measure.
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The reason I like e-mail is that it is asynchronous. If I want synchronous communication, I use the telephone.
Am I the only person who doesn't receive spam? OK, that's a little bit of a lie, but by and large, I reckon less than 2% of my email is real spam. It's not like I don't get any email - I receive probably 60-100 emails per day over about 3 different accounts, including several mailing lists.
.net about a year ago (I think???), and then these settings were added and enabled for everyone so if you didn't notice it, it will still be enabled.
I think the secret with spam is to stop spreading your email address around the internet. I object to having to provide my email address to forms to register for every damn website (eg. download.com) - I always give a false address if I can. If I can't, I will very seriously reconsider whether I need access to that site (I usually don't). I have an email account that is used solely for the purpose of registering for websites or what have you. Whenever I stick my email address into any form on the web I always check to see whether there is a checkbox that lets me opt out (or in) any mailing lists. The only sites I don't mind signing up for are those that I am genuinely interested in receiving future correspondence from, but they are few and far between.
I also have an email address that is used solely for usenet - this one receives by far the most spam.
Another interesting thing that people may not be aware of is that the default setting for hotmail accounts allows your email address and personal information to be shared. Go to options->personal profile and have a look at the check boxes at the bottom. This never used to be the default setting until the service switched over to
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
The telephone gets bombarded with equally determined spammers and yet that hasn't changed. Certainly, you might not pick up the phone if it's not a number you recognise, but you're still going to look. It's the same for email.
The only reason email will go away is when mobile (cell) phones become as convenient and cheap a way to communicate as email currently is.
I had spam yesterday where they spelt Viagra wrong. Unless Viagrea is a new wonder drug?
Not funny at all. You knew what they meant; a filter on your inbox on the keyword 'Viagra' wouldn't have. Someone I know once worked on software to do realtime filtering of keywords in "family friendly" chatrooms. He said it was almost impossible; a human's ability to communicate FUCK without out actually typing it was far ahead of any rules he could encode into his software without breaking legitimate conversations. That's one of the reasons the spam problem is so difficult to solve purely with technology.
This wouldn't happen. Anyone who lives in the EU: check your emails - are any sent from EU nations? NO. If the US would stop this stupid insistence on your personal details being everyone else's property but your own - then we wouldn't have to put up with so much sh*te being sent to our inbox about mortgages on another continent. I hope the EU goes through with the (jokey) threat to find and list the names of the people breaking the law - so if they ever take a holiday to Paris, we can be waiting.
Pimping my Karma Whore since 1847.
Look, it is not hard to understand. Spammers send out their garbage because someone is responding with cash or a legitimate email address that can be sold to other spammers. If you are posting your email address to a public area (e.g., Usenet), then you might as well get a new email address.
Here's a tip: use a throwaway account (Hotmail/Yahoo) for all your on-line purchases, and use your ISP email address for personal communications. Never, ever post your ISP address anywhere and never use it for on-line purchases. Once your throwaway account starts getting spam, get another one. Never, ever respond to any spam with "remove," "take me off your list," or "you #$(&*#@$!!!!"
If everyone did that, then most spam would dry up and blow away. (And if my 89-yr old Grandmaw can do it, so can you!)
Yeah, right.
``Yeah, e-mail is going to be outdated, just like postal-mail has long been outdated, and telephones have been outdated. You heard it here first... According to 'JeffSh', IM is going to replace them all...
''
Call me a net junkie, but this is indeed the case for me. I hardly receive or send any snail mail, and I only occasionally get phone calls. About half of the conversation I partake in is face to face, the rest is electronic (email, IRC, IM).
With the advent of VoIP, we can voice chat with others around the world at lower rates than would be possible over the phone (Speak Freely rules), largely obsoleting the telephone for personal communication between people with suitably equipped computers.
The Internet _is_ revolutionarizing society even now. I know that many people and organizations prefer doing things the old way, but I also know that many people prefer the comfort of doing everything in one place. Since especially the younger generations tend to fall in the latter category, it is likely that computerized communication and business will dominate in the future. Computers haven't taken over the whole world yet, but they're getting there. That's why we need Open systems, so that whose who want can shape their world, instead of being fully dependent on giant multinationals.
---
"There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a
vacuum."
-- Arthur C. Clarke
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Let's think outside the (mail)box for a second.
Imagine a system where only whitelisted e-mail with a confirmed return address gets through. That would be enough to kill spam. The problem is, how can we allow previously unknown people to get on this whitelist without human intervention and gray/blacklists. Complicated? Not necessarily.
Here's the idea: suppose that we have a certifying service attached to our e-mail address. Say, my e-mail address is me@foo.com and my certifying address is certify.me@foo.com. Now I would want to send e-mail to you@bar.com but you do not know me and you are using a whitelist. No problem. I send you an electronically signed e-mail, and my mailing program, upon deciding that you are not already on my buddy list, cc:s the message (or relevant parts of it) to certify.me@foo.com. When your program receives my message and checks that I am not on your buddy list, it sends a signed query to certify.me@foo.com. The automatic service behind that address verifies that
Upon receiving the certification your program adds my address to your whitelist and accepts the original message. After all, you now know my e-mail address. Even a spammer who would be willing to reveal his identity would be pummeled to a certain death by millions of certify requests (which would make his ISP very unhappy). And should a spammer once get on your whitelist, just blacklist him.
This would not be a burden for mailing lists, because the certifying procedure is only invoked during the first contact.
This scheme would triple the initial number of e-mail messages, but because it's a one time event, the overhead is small. Considering that 95 some percent of all e-mails seem to be spam, this could actually reduce the traffic significantly after all the spammers have either been auto-spammed back for every single piece of spam that they send, or vanished into oblivion if none of their messages ever reach people.
So, anybody willing to implement this?
Existence usually comes as a surprise (Idem)
I think the commercial software vendors are largely responsible for the massive increase in spam. IE is basically an ad delivery system; there's no way to control pop-ups, and no way to block images from ad servers. This is because from the corporate perspective our job as computer users is to view as many ads as humanly possible. Don't expect MS to be of any help. And don't expect any useful legislation either, as the DMA has a powerful and generous lobby in Washington.
But where proprietary software fails us, free software supplies the features that people actually want. Mozilla has built-in pop-up blocking and a great deal of work is going into spam filtering. On my linux box, I use spamassassin and vipul's razor for email, and filterproxy and mozilla to block ads and protect my privacy on the web. Very rarely does any spam make it into my inbox, and I almost never see ads of any kind online. However, it fills me with horror to use other peoples' computers. How can anyone stand all the flashing and blinking?
Conclusion: decent tools are the answer, not bug-eyed rants about the death of email.
OK i thought of a way to stop spam. It is very simple. Charge people to send e-mail. Yep, let's say you charge .0001 per e-mail that is sent out. That would be 100 e-mails for a penny. Spamming would then be unprofitable, and people would gladly pay a few cents a month to stop spam.
Now this may be a situation like the mouse putting a bell on the cat, great idea impossible implementation, but I don't understand enough about e-mail to know.
Comments as to why it wouldn't work?
The reason I like the telephone is that it lets me be lazy. If I'm feeling energetic, I go and yell at them in person.
The only thing that anti-spam laws will do is have unintended consequences, perhaps of restricting legit email.
Bullshit.
Look at Washington state, or California, or any of the other sites that have anti-spam laws... I don't see anyone complaining about legitimate email being restricted, but I do hear about spammers being sued, and people collecting money.. and it is doing something, because 1/2 of the spam I get now has a disclaimer of "this isn't intended for people in Washington, California, etc.. if you are in one of these states, please don't sue me" at the bottom.
The laws are working.
If you are posting your email address to a public area (e.g., Usenet), then you might as well get a new email address.
Ahh what wonderful logic - "if you want your email address to be useful to you, then you better not tell anyone about it" - which, of course, makes it useless.
It's harder to understand than you know then. Spammers send out their garbage because they think someone will buy their product. But have you noticed how many products you get pitched to you exactly once? The spammer isn't successful, he gives up, he curses the spam-enabler who sold him the Millions of Addresses CD for US $295.00. And the spam-enabler finds another sucker.
It doesn't matter if nobody buys the product. What matters is that the spamware peddlers keep going and going and going...
Isn't this exactly the behavior that was going to kill email? How would the average netizen contact you if they aren't on your IM Whitelist and you never check your email? Have you considered that you never recieve emails from new people because it is nearly impossible for new people to contact you. This goes double if your IM client is AIM and you have no provision for offline messaging whatsoever.
I read the internet for the articles.
I have had several serious misunderstandings with people when communicating over IM.
Instant messaging is a difficult medium. It as immediate as conversation, but without being as clear and concise as email or other forms of writing. With most writing you read back what you wrote to make sure that you didn't accidently write something that can be misunderstood. Since IMs happen in (almost) real time this sort of care is not generally used. Also people do not type at the same rate so the thread of the converstation is often lost.
If the subject is important I always use another medium.