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Jupiter Forecasts 50% Increase In Spam
Mr. Sketch writes "According to Yahoo, the amount of spam is expected to increase 50% in the next five years, meaning the average american will get over 3600 of them a year. The future of email is??"
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That's the only way for legacy mail accounts.
I think that ISPs might decide to fight back. They're providing all the bandwidth to send this junk, and if they have to raise rates to their customers to do it, people will leave, causing their revenues to drop. It makes sense for them to nip this thing before that happens. Legislation, software filters, whatever...
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
you only specify who you want to receive email from, and don't receive any other mail.
That would be a start!
Yeah, a pretty bad start, since it would take away most reasons you leave out your e-mail address; to let people you don't know contact you.
If we have to start whitelisting people to make e-mail usable, we have clearly lost the battle against spammers, since it would make e-mail much less usable than it is today.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I think then the problem is that email just becomes slow instant messaging. I think widespread use of whitelists would be very bad for the email system.
Spencer Ogden
... Wouldn't a moderate number of 'Western' countries (North America, the EU, and a few others who might want to tag along) banning the sending of unsolicited mail and the marketing of tools and lists with which to do it make a serious impact on the amount of spam recieved? Sure, a certain amount of it comes from abroad, but quite a lot is domestic, too, and quite a few countries in these areas are prepared to pay for it who might not be if it were banned.
There needs to be a mechanism for the governments to pick up the excess cost of people recieving spam, rather than Jo Punter paying for it in a few extra pennies every time he dials up to check his mail...
A new (secure) protocol?
The ability to send unsolicited email to practically anyone has long been a valuable online tool for everything from online protests (like filling your Congressman's mailbox with anti-DMCA flames) to communicating with intriguing personalities. A good deal of anti-spam legislation can be interpreted in ways that infringe on this basic cyber-right. Worse, the anti-spam cause could also be used by authoritarian interests to crack down on all unsiolicited emails.
Likewise, anonymous remailers and open relays have been used by people to protect their privacy almost as long as email has existed. These valuable tools of freedom can also be targeted by the Ashcrofts of the world in their bid to tie back our liberites, all in the name of crushing "spam".
Let us hope that privacy-loving interests will continue to develop technological solutions to the problem of spam, thereby keeping the solution to the problem market- and freedom- based rather than relying on the "good graces" of the State to keep junk mail out of our inboxes
Same here, i get *maybe* one email a day, and thats usually from a mailing list or something.
i only recently got a couple spams on my "real" email account (the one i run myself), my yahoo account i dont check for weeks or months on end (its one of those spam catching accounts for registering places, etc.) and my email at myrealbox.com never gets spammed.
i have never done any sort of spam blocking/filtering/etc.
here are some tips in case you dont know them already:
andeuh.....thats about it! so, to recap, do type your real user@host email address, anywhere!, and don't sign up for shady stuff with a good email address. man, this sounds so easy, why is it people have such a hard time...
Spamming is illegal throughout the European Union - I don't get hardly any spam from Europe (I get about 60 a day!), and if I get some, I am entitled to cash 250 Euros from the spammer... it works!
Unfortunately some third-world countries like Korea, China, Brasil and USA (!!!) still allow spam or are reluctant to fight spammers, so spam is still a big problem to the whole world.
Until those countries don't wake up and outlaw spam, the problem will persist
PS: I recently have put most of APNIC in my sendmail access-list - it eliminates 60% of the spam, but spam from USA is still an issue.
Greetings,
ms --
If I only had time to respond to all those fine offers from Nigeria, I would own 850,000,000 (eight hundred fifty million) bits of email already.
- Are you on a dialup?
- Do you receive lots of e-mails every day?
- Do you find that your own mail drowns in incoming spam?
Probably not. Not only do I get plenty of spam every day. That extra minute of having to deal with spam really bothers me, because I shouldn't have to waste my time like that. It might lead to me accidentally skipping a valid message because I mark a lot of spam messages for deletion and don't notice that important e-mail from a friend from long ago who's trying to get in touch with me because he has important news... Down the drain.Spam doesn't bother you? Fine, but don't pretend that it is not a problem to others. Don't try to blow it off like that.
It is, in fact, a major problem to a lot of people. Not only for personal e-mail, but our network administrators have to deal with absolutely huge amounts of spam that affect the network and its stability and reliability.
Our company has to spend considerable resources on fighting spam - resources that could have been spent fine-tuning other parts of the network to make everything run smoothly.
And then there's the amount of spam written in HTML and with images. Why should I spend money on downloading a huge spam message over my dialup connection?
Spam costs me money. It costs my employer money. It costs a lot of people money.
Spam is a real problem to a lot of people.
Clever signature text goes here.
Expand the definition!
Of course spam will increase 50% in the next five years, because the definition of spam has ballooned to include "any and all e-mail that does not originate from my bestest friends of many decades" and "any e-mail for which I do not recognize the return address."
There are those who will posit that *any* introductory e-mail, even business to business, is rotten, filthy, maggot-infested SPAM and the person daring to say "hello, my name is" to someone they don't know via e-mail is a rotten, filthy, stinking spammer.
They are wrong.
Business depends on the ability of people to communicate, often with those they don't know who work at other businesses. One-to-many commercial advertising "buy this product today" bulk mailed to a list of unknown addresses is spam. "Hello, my name is" to the marketing or press relations department at another business and similar correspondence is not.
Like it or not folks, as e-mail becomes more important, it will be used by business to do business. Hopefully they will refrain from jamming everyone's inbox with "buy buy buy," (something I do not support), but if businesses and professionals can't introduce themselves to one another, the economy stops. Period.
So let's return to the *original* definition of spam and stop screeching SPAMMER!! SPAMMER!! SPAMMER!! everytime we don't recognize the return e-mail address, shall we?
If you make spamming illegal here some spammer in Kryziafkigasistan will just set up a server farm and start blasting away.
American laws don't usually concern people in other countries; especially countries that aren't our tightest allies.
The Internet is global and it would be next to impossible to stop it once and for all. What's to stop somebody from popping up rogue servers for a day or so, blasting out spam, then taking their server down and moving it to a different IP address?
There are so many ways to evade the law in this area, and, ultimately, while we're fighting the "War on Terror" nobody is going to commit any real enforcement resoruces to chasing spammers.
Making it illegal would have a very small effect, in my opinion. Heck, those "Send a buck to each name on the list" scams are illegal but that doesn't stop them. So is the "I'm a Nigerian Prince with $20 Billion and I've chosen you, a broke college student, to help me get it out of the country" scam. Hasn't stopped.
Ultimately we're stuck with it until it becomes unprofitable to do it. Until that day comes better filters and a lot of [DELETE] are probably the best we can hope for.
-Coach-
Perhaps the world's greatest tragedy is that ignorance is not impotence.
A little calculation...
There are about 12 million businesses in the US alone. If one tenth of one percent of them sent you one email per year, it would amount to 1000 messages per month. Just a single, polite inquiry once a year by a tiny fraction of the legitimate businesses in the US, none of whom would suspect that they are causing a problem. As common as spam may seem, most businesses haven't discovered unsolicited email as a marketing tool.
That's the main reason we need anti-spam legislation. Not especially because of the aggressive efforts of a few assholes, but because of the clogging potential of even light usage by a vast number of businesses who mean no harm.
The future of email is??
I'm no fortuneteller but a good start would be an email protocol that fucking authenticates the sender so that you could be guaranteed that every email in your inbox has a from header that doesn't lie. No more untracable spammers. No more viruses that claim to come from your friends. As an added bonus, this would stop the flood of emails from various postmasters warning you that an email you never sent was not able to go through.
Seriously, SMTP needs to be redone and the sooner the better. I know there are things like TLS and SMTP auth floating around, but they are not pervasive or mandatory, so they do no good at all.
As sad as it is, I think whitelisting is going to be the only way to go until some decent legislation is passed to fight spam. The FTC is going after the fraudulent stuff, but until spamming is actually made illegal, it'll just continue to get worse. Unfortunately, I do not trust the current regime to legislate this...we could end up losing even more civil rights than we already have.
Besides, whitelisting isn't all that horrible of a concept when you really think about it. In an offhand way, many of us use the same concept by using a Hotmail or Yahoo email address for everything and only giving our REAL address out to the people we trust. It's just a different way of thinking from the "good old days" - which definitely sucks, but so do banner ads, pop-ups, et al...and they aren't going anywhere.
Another word: facility! Of course if you know who you want to correspond with you use whitelisting. But in many cases people do not have the ability to block mails from first time senders. Simple case: You are a business, lets say an ONLINE business. You whitelist all the domains of your existing clients, cool! But how do prospective clients contact you? Ok, you can have one address that is open (sales/enquires@domain.com.au) and the for the rest of your (your business') address you maintain whitelists. I sysadmin for academics - having them maintain a whitelist would be like pulling teeth since they are hopeless and they collaborate with people from so many domains. For others whitelists are even less practical.
IMO Bayesian is the way to go but it still does not address the fact that filthy spammers are STEALING bandwidth, cpu cycles and hard disk from the recipients of their junk!
In my work environment I don't care, but what about my broadband account with a bandwidth cap?
An 8.5% p.a. rate of increase? I hope these estimates are correct - I'd expected it to be much worse.
.. that refuse to disconnect anyone spamvertising yahoo store URLs? I'm surprised yahoo has the gall to carry the story.
I write as the postmaster for a consumer email service, who enforces a strict abuse policy to prevent abuse at source. I do not consider client level filtering as a viable solution, it is a temporary stop-gap.
It cures the symptoms not the cause, around 90% of all inbound traiffic to our email system is UCE and somebody has to pay for this, in both traffic charges and server capability. This is a hidden cost passed on all email users, ultimatly the consumer.
It is for this reason that client side filtering is not a long term cure, it addresses the symptom not the roor cause. The long term solution must be the introduction of a trust network. The technology to make to possible is readily available in public key cryptography, what is lacking is the WILL. A system like this need not compromise anonymity, there are cryptographic protocols that allow for the establishment of anonymous trust with virtual identities. These same system can also be used to ensure email is cryptographically secure.
This system requires the introduce of a core network of trusted directory servers as part of the MTA backbone, a network of authoritive MTA's which can and will vouch its users.
This system is also vastly superior to the current black lists, which are far too centralised, clique and arbitrary, and fundamentally ineffective.
This proposal does no even prevent commercial email, if anything it allows this to legitimise, punishing the fraudsters and crooks whilst rewarding the responsible. It is entirely feasible to choose to accept commercial/bulk email from their bank, or OSDN.
Given time this will also provide participants a two fold advantage reduced costs and superior service.
Wouldn't it be a solution if the people who coordinate the web installed some new central servers, like the DNS servers, to check emailadresses for sending spam?
The DNS servers return an ip address for a given domainname. The spamcheck servers would return a value for a given emailaddress.
This value could be modded up by the number of people reporting this emailadress as spam and modded down in time when people stop reporting this address.
Your provider will check every received mail with the central servers and store their spam value.
Your mailclient will receive only mail from your provider with a lower value than the value you configured. The rest will be removed from server at that time or only the headers of the bad mails will be send to your mailclient and put in a spamfolder where you can approve or remove them manually.
... ok whatever ways of masquerading email addresses on sites just will not work. I know spammers are deemed rude and rather unintelligent, but surely they are gonna run some basic tests to clean lists up, like converting $'s to S's and removing nospam. What about choosing an email address that intentionally has nospam as part of the real address? then they are likely to filter it out :)
If people don't have the mental capacity to fairly easily filter out most spam, maybe they should stick to dead-tree-based mail...
-1, Utter Bollocks...
Why should I have to put up with endless financial scams and obscenity laden drivel whenever I check my email? Saying "oh, it's not hard to hit delete" is a cop-out. If you don't object to deleting 10 mails a day, what about 50? 100? 200? 1000? Presumably you have a limit on how much you'll take personally, so what are you planning to do when you start getting double that?
You wouldn't put up with it in any other medium (phone, post, people coming to your house), so why email?
Nae bother
Hi. That should be 'lose', not 'loose'.
Thanks,
'Lose', Not 'Loose' Guy
--thanks for the recent upmods! i'll be able to post again soon
I've been seeing a marked increase in the number of articles claiming we're all going to be knee deep in spam any day now. Most of these stories seem to be based on information comming out of a press release from MessageLabs - who interestingly sell services to defeat spam.
So IMHO I think the story should really be...
FUD increases sales of SPAM related services by 50%
SPAM is annoying, it's true. However, filtering it out is not rocket science - but then most people pull out the cheque book before engaging their brain.
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
Here here. Got it installed on the mail server at the ISP where I work, and boy does it rock: 40-50k messages per day caught. Check my journal if you need details.
Carousel is a lie!
I have the mental capacity to filter spam, thank you very much. I have a procmail blocklist that is over 1000 lines now (I prefer single-domain blocks, plus a VERY small number of "content" rules like dropping HTML without a charset, due to false positives)
Normally, I read my mail on a machine with good filtering on a cable modem connection.
Problem is, I'm not always reading my mail at home. Sometimes I'm mobile, and often using my cell phone as a modem. That's a 14.4 connection that I pay per-minute. Eventually I could upgrade to a 1xRTT solution, but even with something like the Sprint "Unlimited Vision" plans, those only average 40-50 kilobits/sec. Thanks to spam, I cannot afford to check my email from my phone, and even if I could, it would take a half hour to download all the shit in my mailbox.
There are also plenty of dialup users in this country. It's not an issue of not wanting broadband or not being able to afford it, it's an issue of simply NOT BEING ABLE TO GET IT EVEN IF THEY WANT IT. This was my case until last February or so.
Simply put, these people PAY to receive spam. Even over a cablemodem, you pay in the form of increased ISP rates to offset their bandwidth/server disk space costs due to spam.
In short, client-side filtering is NOT the answer.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Consider who is bringing you this information and take it with a grain of salt. Jupiter is in the business of consulting, and is on nearly every reporter's Rolodex as a source of that all-important statistic to anchor whatever tech story they're writing. So right off the bat they have a potential conflict of interest -- accuracy v. self-promotion as "the source" the data.
If you listen carefully, nearly every time a web usage statistic is cited it will be attributed to either Jupiter or Forrester Research -- another (surprise) consulting firm. Listen to the news for these names and you'll be impressed how lazy and naive reporters can be, they often do a lot less research than it appears.
Next, the NYT profiled them a couple of years ago in the Sunday Magazine. I don't have a link, but recommend you consider buying it (and I never do that!). Basically, it detailed how little experience the average analyst has; how difficult and unscientific it is to come up with data on things like banner ad clicks or to extrapolate tech trends; and quoted one analyst admitting that they were instructed, should the media call with a question they couldn't answer, they should make something up. Often they are spectacularly wrong, but who calls them on it? Again, the all-important goal is to get their name in the press, Jupiter is willing to give an opinion, it's free advertising. Note how Jupiter's name made it into even this short posting?
I hate to think of businesses making important decisions based on such loosely-derived bits of data. So when I see a spam prediction such as here, I know there's a fair chance it's either an uneducated guess or simply pulled out of someone's ass. Maybe they're right, but I'd like to hear about their methodology. If they say they just went to the Oracle at Delphi (don't those names sound familiar?) then get on with our lives. Spam will still be a problem either way; there are proven ways to fight it; realistically we will never allow it to get to such levels.
I encourage anyone interested not to believe me and do their own research. IMHO, this is one of the biggest scams this side of the pollsters and brokerage houses. I am deeply contemptuous of their work. Just a statement of opinion, not libel, no siree.
P.S. May I throw in that I don't like seeing spam victims blamed for their plight. I have been scrupulous with my email for years and still the spam is inexorably growing, largely because of some idiot who opted-in to a dozen things mistakenly typing in my email address instead of his. Now my address is burned into a CD somewhere. Fault is unnecessary; and regardless of fault, the blame lies with the spammer. Naive users do not "deserve" to have their email paralyzed, rather they deserve our sympathy and help.
Many broadband ISPs (such as Cox Communications) have started putting caps on traffic. If you are running close to those limits, the "tonnes[sic]" of spam you get might just put you over the cap for the last time, after which you might see your Internet access yanked.
What about people who pay for Internet access by the amount of traffic that they move? How about people who retrieve e-mail over long-distance phone connections when on travel? What about the ones who use their cell phones to retrieve e-mail, paying a per-minute charge?
That your ISP chooses not to itemize spam as a charge on your bill does not mean that it is free to you.
Spam costs businesses billions of dollars per year. That's money that could have been spent in salary increases, new office equipment, building renovation, R&D, development, production, or even office parties. All of it stolen by spammers.
I am so sick and tired of the short-sighted just-hit-delete response to spam. Why don't you give me your credit card number and let me use it to send you crap that you don't want? Then you can tell everyone that it's no problem because it doesn't take long to throw away the stuff I send.
I predict lots of people will go one step further. Web submission page. No mail box, no bulk spam. If you want to write me, fill out this handy form on a website.. I'm looking to doing this soon as de-junking a POP3 account is just too much lost time. I am looking forward to dropping traditional e-mail entirely.
Notice how most postings on slashdot are real comments and not a bulk dumping ground for adverts. They have something here by not taking bulk posting to this forum. Those who do FLAME, SPAM, or TROLL can't do it in bulk. It's one submission to one site, not 5 million. There are no bulk spams here that also hit 5 million other websites with one click.
Soon my e-mail will be like, "Fill out the form at slashdot.org/~technician"
The truth shall set you free!
Filtering is not a solution.
It's still wasting the bandwidth my company pays for.
On another note, spampal is a free solution for windows. Works like a champ!
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin