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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.
'cause they include clever spam filters.
I'm trying out POPfile (Naive Bayes text classifier and a POP3 proxy) these days, it's looking good so far.
-- From Denmark
Whitelisting. If you don't know what it means, you only specify who you want to receive email from, and don't receive any other mail.
That would be a start!
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.
Between all of my email accounts, I get about 250-300 spam messages a day. My most active account at my own domain (which has a catchall) gets about 200-250 per day. I'd kill to only be getting ten spams a day.
I wonder how accurate that statistic is. Frankly, I'm amazed the "average" number of spams isn't already around ten a day or even higher. Almost everyone I know receives this much, and the ones who don't are pretty close. Maybe it's just because the folks I know use email more extensively than all the Grandpa Joes out there who only get a message or two from their grandkids in their mailbox every week? Such is the curse of email, I suppose...the more you spread your address around, the more spam you're likely to receive...
DennyK
I get more "Enlarge your penis!!!" Emails than anything else right now in my inbox (*sigh* if only it were true...)
Here we have the ultimate triumph of the marketdroids. These people think we would buy their stuff for sure, if only we heard the sales pitch. Hmmm... how about "not."
I've got news for them... you CAN'T sell ice to eskimos. This kind of ridiculous crap makes the sellers look like a bunch of charlatans (if the shoe fits...), and annoys the audience.
When I get carpal tunnel from pressing Ctrl-D, somebody's going to suffer.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
It seems we have found a use for Astrology!
Since when can a planet perdict an increase in Spam, read the headline, it sounds just like Astrology!
"Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
But at least my penis will grow by an inch or two.
And it'll always be hard thanks to those free viagra trials.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Yahoo has launched a 'war against spam'. I've actually had a yahoo account for a little bit more than a year and it has been relatively clean. (note that I've used it as my 'dirty' account, i.e. list submissions and suchs goes there...)
... 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...
I went 100% cellular to (among other things like convenience) avoid the telemarketers. Haven't had one call since, and it's been a year. I think I could live without email as well if the spam gets to be too much. Web access is a must, but I don't really need an email account. That's one sure way to avoid the spam.
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
Thus concludes the 8 o'clock news.
And now for the Spam forecast for tomorrow we switch to our techie in the basement.
john?, John are you there?
Yes margret, we're here in the basement of one of our nations largest ISP's, are we're looking on the screen.
As you can see, most spam will be concentrated in the north-west, and will slowly decent into the more southern regions of the nation. We can expect particulary heavy downfall of explicit spam, so parents, keep your children away from their mailboxes tomorrow!
As for the rest of the week, I am sad to say that it doesnt look good. we're likely to see a further increase, as we have seen in the last 5 years in a row now.
This has been John Geek from the basement of the heart of the digital world, back to you margret...
Why are other peoples sig's always more witty ???
Only ppl in you contact list will be able to actually reach you, all the rest will end in a catch-all folder automatically deleted periodically.
:) that is a single acct that gets up to 20 spams/day !!
Some online services already offer this due to the overwhelming ammount of spam you get. I have a Hotmail acct i use to sign up to stuff online since '95. It gets around 10~15 spam daily which is caught by the spam filter and around 4~5 that get thru "misterioulsy"
A new (secure) protocol?
It's because dummies like you keep responding to them! Stop encouraging them!!! They have no way of making you money, or giving you a horse-sized penis.
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
The problem currently is that there's so many people who are doing a very good job at blocking / stopping most of the spam that the average joe or public official doesn't realize just how much spam is sent to his mailbox every day (or at least would be if it weren't for the anti-spammers).
What if for a period of time, maybe a week or a month, a day isn't long enough, the anti-spammers just quit. All of them. Let the spammers have an internet-wide orgy. Let people see how much of a problem this is - let the lawmakers make better spam laws, and then have the law enforcement stop them.
Blocking the spam is counter-productive, it only encourages the spammers to come up with better ideas on how to get it into your mailbox. The spam needs to be stopped at the source.
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
I finally realised just how big the spam problem has become when Tupperware spammed me the other day!
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 --
Same theory with spam. Except my amount of spam will increase 1000fold, and yours won't increase at all. I'm messing up the average. I should probably stop soliciting impotence advice from Dr. Spam-alot.
Sex - Find It
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.
Wouldn't it be a good idea to reply to as much spam as possible with subject lines like "I am very interested" or "Please send me more information"? Or actual orders with faked names? I know, that would validate my actual email adress, but if VERY MANY people did that, I bet we could drive the spammers crazy since they couldn't find the one or two real orders in the sheer mass of faked orders. Maybe a little script that sends faked orders (with different text) from various faked adresses?
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.
What I don't understand is why spammers try and defeat the filters - it seems like a waste of time to me. Those who filter their email don't want the spam and won't buy anything from a spammer - so why bother?
I've got so frustrated with the vast quantities of spam I receive that I installed SpamAssassin. It works surprisingly well.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
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.
Perfect client side email filtering.
The more people blow this problem up, the more likely it is that legislators will try and tackle it.
And you know what that means; more bad "cyberlaw".
Much better to concentrate on solutions to a problem, rather than making repretitive and useless noises about the problem itself.
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
Actually, including the word "spam" somewhere in your address makes most spammers filter it out :)
i actually forgot 2 things (i knew i was forgetting them i just couldnt remember what they were)
ok, i'm pretty sure thats all of them now ;)
more like 6 months
:-)
I see a Moore's Law for spam - spam power will double every 9 months
So if you want to get into a growing industry work for/found an anti-spam company.
as ever with a
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.
I'll probably loose karma over this, but here goes anyway.
Of course spam is an important issue. And it's damn annoying too. But I simply don't believe all these stories about how email is going to become crippled by it.
There are spam filters. More importantly, the use of aggressive blacklists forces ISPs themselves to take a tough line.
The questioner asks what the future for email is. Well, it's simple: email is fine as long as the user is sensible. I have several accounts. I know that my hotmail account is entirely unusuable because of the level of spam it recieves. If I need to give my email address to someone I don't trust fully, I give them that.
I have a work address. This gets a little spam from time to time as the organisation gets targeted. I filter out these spams with my own spam filter.
Mailing lists tend to go to another address. So far, I haven't had too much spam from that quarter.
My personal address is known only to a few friends. So far, no spam.
The rule for keeping your address spam free is the same as it ever was: don't publish it.
Now, what about people who want to advertise their address for open source projects and the like? Well, put it in the source code, in the README files, wherever you like. Just not on your web page.
Since I moved my primary account 18 months ago, I have got no more than 1 spam mailout per month, which I just blackhole.
Thing is, if your address appears anywhere "visible", it'll end up on spammers' bulk mail address-list CDs - so they can spam you to offer spam-blocking software. Go figure.It's handy to have a few disposable free mail accounts...Maybe we should just start making fun of spammers, instead of lawyers and blondes. I have karma to burn, so here's a start. :D
A drug dealer, an axe murderer, and a spammer are traveling together. One night they stay in a small farmhouse near a barn. The house only has two beds, so it is agreed that the drug dealer will sleep in the barn, while the axe murderer and spammer sleep in the house. So they go to bed.
15 minutes later, the drug dealer comes in from the barn. "With all that hay and all those animals, my allergies are acting up. I can't sleep in the barn!" So the axe murderer agrees to go out there and gives the drug dealer his bed.
15 minutes later, the axe murderer comes in from the barn, saying, "Those animals are making too much noise! I can't sleep out there!" The spammer sighs, saying "Ok, ok, I can sleep through anything. I'll go out there."
A few minutes later, the cows, horses, and pigs all come in to the house, screaming "There's a spammer in the barn! We can't sleep with a spammer!"
"So let's return to the *original* definition of spam"
:)
What the one that applies only to Usenet? That's fine by me; the real problem with email is UBE anyway - *not* just UCE, although that's pretty foul crap anyway, but anything unsolicited and sent in bulk (read: not targetted at you specifically). This includes crazy charity/religious-headcase mails as well.
It also means that a mailshot from a company to "just say hi" to someone is still undesirable.
Besides which, it's still the ultimate in cheek to assume that someone's email connection is free - it's *NOT*, dammit, so any senders-of-UCE are stealing resources in order to try and sell you something.
I'm expecting to change bank *again* for exactly this reason.
Rewrite the definition: stamp out UBE!
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
I agree with the points you make, but FWIW in many (most?) cases you can tell your mail client not to automatically download images...
Yahoo: some "war" against SPAM...
Is it really a war, when you have to manually delete crap out of your "bulk mail" mailbox, instead of having it automatically deleted?
I understand that this is done in order to drive up your total usage, to get you to pay for more disk space, but still...
-- Terry
It gives you the feeling that there are people out there who care enough to send you personalized, thoughtful solicitations. They wouldn't send it to you if they thought you didn't really, really be interested in the product they're selling.
Also, it's pink and tasty.
why run from Vincenzo?
There's no way in hell we're going to be that lucky. A 50% increase in 5 years would make me jump with joy.
The truth is it's increasing at a much faster rate than that. Recent research has shown that it's going up about 400% per year!!! And my personal email account verifies that sort of increase.
I suspect Jupiter is going to be eating its own words. In 5 years I suspect we'll be seeing perhaps 50 times more spam, not 50% more.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
I configured SpamAssasin on our incoming mail servers earlier this year. Whew! Was I a happy man! Not enough is said about the great work the SpamAssasin team has done. It just works, filtering out >95% of the spam I receive (about 30 to 40 per day). And what about my hotmail account? I can't be bothered to look through that load of garbage anymore.
Real men don't need signitures!!!
The golden age of advertising is here, and it's only just beginning. If you think that you're immersed in marketing noise right now, don't even think that it won't get much worse.
Surely we're all supportive of freedom in the marketplace, but we don't have to be such market fundamentalists that we can't talk about legislation that would tell advertisers where they *can* advertise, rather than where they *can't*. We could settle this question of whether or not money equals free speech once and for all. We could create forums for advertising, and the market could be more equitable.
Why take such a step? Advertising is taking over our lives, and it's displacing many of the more meaningful aspects of human culture that have been developed over millions of years. It's all going away...
Use your imagination to see 50 years into the future...the people who are pushing the desceptive ads of today are just trying to be competitive....they and their successors won't stop pushing advertising further and further into every moment of our lives because their competitors won't stop pushing advertising further and further into every moment of our lives.
Imagine...we could actually end this spiral that's quickly taking human civilization down the toilet.
If I sound like a radical to you, it's only because we're all so perfectly accustomed to it, and we have no idea what things might be like without so much of it. As I type this, I can see logos and slogans on my screen, to my left, to my right, behind me...just look around...it's everywhere!!! AAAUGHHH!!!
Your right to speak is not the same thing as you having a right to have me listen to you. There is no guarantee of an audience.
Next, you will be telling me that it's illegal for me to wear headphones and listen to music while you are speaking publically, because you have a right to have me hear you.
And then you'll tell me it's illegal to change channels when a commercial comes on.
That's just utter BS.
Commercial speech may be protected under the first ammendment, but I'll be damned if that means I have to listen to it.
-- Terry
I hate spam, and thus run my own mail server and employ various spam filtering / blocking techniques. The reason I do this is because I hate spam and for a long time had no other choice but to deal with it because of my long time email address with my local isp (been with them forever). I had asked about spam filtering and all I was told was "Configure outlook express to block senders. . ."
.
Now the average joe is not in the position to run a mail server and deal with spam in the many ways that some slashdotters can. . . Leading to my question. .
Would you or better your mother pay a small monthly fee to have an email account that was free or almost free from spam? Employing such techniques as spam assassin or better something like tmda (tmda works like this, you add people you want email from to a whitelist, those not on your list can email you but they get a message which they must respond to be added to your white list).
Would you be willing to pay $5 a month, $10? How concerned is the average person with spam? Or are they just use to it and are willing to click delete over and over again.
So can I as an individual get an injunction on the dozen or so USian citizens who are harassing me each day by sending me all that tripe? I could if they were physically present when doing it...
Client filtering will not solve the problem.
The reason it will not solve the problem is because it validates your address, when the email is not rejected by the destination server.
That means that your address is "in play": it gets added to lists, and passed around, until everyone has your address. A percentage of what these people send *will* get through to you: client filtering can only go so far, before it blocks everything.
Client filtering requires that you download the email -- paying for the priviledge, eitheir directly, or indirectly, in term of time and resources.
Client filtering means that any given SPAM can be pre-tested against any set filtering algorithm, and modified so that it does not trigger the filter, before it is ever sent to you directly, in order to get around the filter.
Client filtering is an idea that's appealing only to people who don't really understand email technology, or who are acting willfully ignorant because they have a secondary agenda.
Everyone who keeps suggesting client filtering has one or more of these attributes:
1) They sell client filtering software
2) They are an SMTP service provider, who does not want to burn compute cycles on their server by doing acceptance filtering, and rejecting the email
3) They have a broadband link, and thik that everyone else has one, too
4) They are a SPAMmer
-- Terry
An 8.5% p.a. rate of increase? I hope these estimates are correct - I'd expected it to be much worse.
I run a business and consider spam (defined as unsolicited bulk email and not as you incorrectly state as a sender that I don't recognize) as theft of my time and my resources. (I own a business).
Entities spamming me are blacklisted. I will never, ever consider doing business with them. If they are annoying enough I take the time to report them to their ISPs and (hopefully) have them kicked off the network.
If you want to advertise, then you better fucking pay for it. Otherwise (regardless of "introductary messages", which are as much spam as an invitation to park Ms. Abachas 70m $ on my bank account) you are stealing from me and my company.
It's as simple as that.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Why not just become a hermit and accept only the e-mail from the addresses you know? It's not that hard to interface with a pop3.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
fully recommend myrealbox.com, it is run by novell, absolutely will not spam you, Until a few weeks ago, I would have agreed, but now I'm regularly getting spam like
From: Wealth Creation & Preservation
Subject: Please Confirm Your Order
Since I've only ever given this to one or two trustworthy people, I suspect it's been just guessed as I used simply my surname (I was pleased not to have to be Smith7799089 as on larger services).
.. 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.
Spammers have web sites. And they live in homes. Cant we go and spam their homes, for example ring the bell at 3am in morning and ask them to pay licensing fee. U know I have put a notice board on my phone line that any unsolicited mail coming through this wire... which is my property has to pay me 100$. So how do I collect this fee?
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
I have a couple of hotmail accounts: one which I use to sign up for junk serivces. That one was so overrun by spam (100+ messages a day) that I had to shut it down. The other account I am very selective about giving my address away. I only use it for legitimate discussion forums, e.g., my Slashdot registration. I only get "NewsLetter from Hotmail.com" mail about once every month or so. Zero spam. Just be selective with your address -- hotmail itself won't "give you spam" like you claim -- I mean that's self-defeating, remember they're paying for the space!
Not everyone is in your position. It is not about mental capacity, but about time and money. When I check my mail on a dialup connection, and if I haven't checked it for a day or two, I have to download large amounts of spam. So much, in fact, that it drowns the e-mails I actually want to read.
The address I'm talking about now is not a very active one. It's mostly for friends and relatives. So rather than deleting the occasional spam amongst a number of valid e-mails, I have to spot the occasional valid e-mail in-between lots of spam mails. So I'll just point you back to the example with an old friend who tries to get in touch through e-mail, but never gets a reply because it was accidentally deleted, being hidden in tons of spam.
Snail mail? Sure, I'll just write a letter, take 50 dead tree copies of it and send it through snail mail to the 50 or so people on a private mailing list we run. That's sure to save me both time and money, right? Sigh.
I've already explained how spam is a serious problem to me personally as well as my employer. I forgot to mention how ISPs also have to deal with spam. If I am on a large ISP, you can guess how much spam they have to cope with. The spam wastes their bandwidth and disk space. The result is that running the ISP becomes more expensive, which again might lead to a lesser quality service or increased subscription fees.
How serious it is depends on the person, but you cannot deny the fact that it is a very serious and very valid concern to a lot of people, me and my employer included (I don't know about my ISP). People have all the right in the world to "whine" about spam. Why? Because spam is a serious problem to them.
(And your comment about dead-tree-mail is obviously nonsense. I don't even know why you bothered to try that one.)
Clever signature text goes here.
Are they just compensating for all of our spam filtering?
Spam Assasin, Moz, etc, all have great anti-spam features, are they just sending more to make up for what we're dropping?
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
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.
why not just have ISPs disable outgoing SMTP traffic except to their own mail servers, and throttle users to 10 emails per day?
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
... 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 :)
In 1970 there were 500 Elvis impersonators in America. Today there are 150,000.
It is expected that in the year 2020 one out of every three people will be an Elvis impersonator.
People shouldn't have to spend their time dealing with spam. Why should I have to? Why should I have to get multiple e-mail addresses because of spam? Why should my employer have to spend lots of money and resources on fighting spam, when it could have been spent elsewhere to improve performance rather than trying to prevent performance from deteriorating because of spam?
How does spam cripple e-mail communication, you ask? Again, you said it yourself. People have to start hiding their e-mail address. It will be harder to find a contact address to get in touch with them.
You are talking about spreading FUD. At the same time, you kind of contradict yourself by showing that yes, e-mail addresses can become unusable because of spam and yes, spam can cripple e-mail communication.
So where's the FUD? Spam is a serious problem to many, and you, as someone else I responded to, don't seem to understand this. You only seem to be able to see it from your own point of view. Maybe spam doesn't bother you. Well, I can inform you that it does bother me, my friends and my employer. A lot. It costs us money. It costs us time. This is not "gloom and FUD", it is reality.
Clever signature text goes here.
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
Mercury Predicts: The sun will rise tomorrow.
Venus Predicts: A slashdot reader will not get laid tonight
Earth Predicts: You are here X
Mars Predicts: Continued fighting in the Middle East.
Saturn Predicts: More pictures will be taken of its rings.
Neptune Predicts: An unsinkable ship will eventualy sink.
Uranus Predicts: Someone will relpy to this post with a Goatse link.
Pluto Predicts: Disney characters will not enter the public domain any time soon.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Hash cash is the answer.
Ok I want to send letter M to person T, I find
h = HASH(M || T)
Now I have to find a random string R where HASH(R) matches h for the lower K bits [you choose K] this is called a "collision".
Now I send the message M, to person T along with R. They verify it.
This can be used initially just to sort email so you can prioritize it [e.g. hash cashed email and non].
The trick is the bulk of the time is on the sender and it really hinders. If it takes them a second or two to find a K bit collision then they obviously can't spam millions of people a second.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Those that can use VI know the following will stop 85% of the bull.
b l', `bl.spamcop.net', `"Spam blocked see: http://spamcop.net/bl.shtml?"$&{client_addr}') dnl
FEATURE(`dnsbl', `relays.ordb.org', `Rejected - see http://ordb.org/')dnl
FEATURE(dnsbl, `ipwhois.rfc-ignorant.org', `Rejected for bad WHOIS info on your IP - see http://www.rfc-ignorant.or
g/')dnl
FEATURE(`dns
I agree with you that it is necessary to be careful and that spam forces us to take measures against it, such as using different e-mail addresses or obfuscating public addresses and so on. My point is that this shouldn't be necessary, but since we do this as a result of spam, spam makes e-mail less accessible to a certain extent. While e-mail won't disappear completely as a useful medium (my current work address is only used internally in the company and I do not receive any spam there), spam certainly makes it somewhat of a hassle to use sometimes. Especially since I have at least one address which I've had for several years - since before spam really became a serious issue to me. Back then I didn't consider it to be necessary to protect my e-mail address, being a newcomer to the net and perhaps somewhat naive.
I sorely regret that today. The sad thing is that I don't really want to drop this e-mail address either, since it's the one I've been giving out to friends for several years now.
Spam simply makes it more difficult to use e-mail since you have to, in a way, watch your back all the time. And even if you do, there's no guaranteeing that some fool (stronger language deleted) won't quote a mail from you in a public forum or similar and include your e-mail address. That has happened too, which is why I dropped my previous e-mail address at work. If you don't foul up yourself, you can be sure that someone else will do it for you...
Clever signature text goes here.
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.
What you propose, trusted networks and directory servers, is a privacy nightmare. While I loathe spam, given the choice between giving up my privacy or receiving spam, I will receive and filter spam any day.
I think a much simpler solution would be to require any incoming message to contain an anonymous electronic cash stamp in the value of, say, five cents.
Of course, that will never happen because the US government hates cash--that's why we haven't gotten the electronic variety, and it's why the physical variety keeps getting less and less useful. Instead, spam, like terrorism and anything else, will be used as an excuse to introduce ever more intrusive identification and tracking mechanisms into the Internet.
Yeah, right. Tell that to Digicash and others who failed miserably as attempts to introduce "electronic cash". Their old site isn't even responding anymore. Anyone remember Mojo Nation? Look what's hosted there now (no, I didn't mis-type that, it redirects there... try typing the URL yourself to see).
These are two high profile companies that come to mind right away. It's pretty clear by this point that digital cash and micropayments have been a miserable failure. A lot can be said about what went wrong and why, but the ultimate unescapable conclusion is that a digital cash system with micropayment-level transactions is anything but a simple solution.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Are you referring to SPAM or the "product" that most spammers seem to be pushing?
Guns don't kill people -- people kill people.
But the guns seem to help a bit. (apologies to Eddie Izzard)
The only time I get spam is when I make the mistake of putting my real address into an NNTP client and posting to a public group. After that, I'll get spammed until I start using WHOIS to contact the source of the spam.
As much as I think Google Groups is a great resource, I think it has increased the amount of spam I receive. It makes the mistake of using your real address in a newsgroup permanent. Think about it - it's a giant repository of email addresses.
You.
Data transfer is subject to the law of supply and demand. Therefore, everyone who is online pays for it, at least indirectly. No spam would mean less demand, leading to a lower price.
I get roughly 100-300 messages a day, and probably around 20 of those are actually for me and from people I know.
I have filters setup on the client side, but just haven't really bothered to set up server side stuff yet (procmail and the like).
normally I'm not all that patient, but I guess this is one area that doesn't really bug me that much.
I used to go through and unsubscribe to them all in the feeble hope that would help, but not sure it did much (many ignore it, others send you more or sign you up to more with that, and others have "broken" unsubscribe methods).
I think I get so many because I own a few URLs and spammers then assume I own companies (while technically that isn't entirely untrue - I am starting up a small financial consulting business, I'm not exactly a rich CEO at this point - yet those are the bulk of the e-mails I get).
from what I can tell, if you want to avoid spam - don't ever sign up at a gambling site, and have two e-mails - one that you give to friends, and one that you give to random things on the web.
obviously always click the "don't send me shit" button, but they frequently ignore that anyway.
and then setup your server (if you have one) and/or domain so that it only passes through the e-mails to addresses that exist (as opposed to anythingAtAll@mydomain.com).
I guess a lot of that is common sense to most.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
I have tried both http://www.mailcircuit.com and http://www.spamcop.net . Both are usable, neither is good enough yet for all. Mailcircuit ($20/year) will drive fellow email list users ape because it does not allow whitelisting, so its ping-pong email acceptance messages get thrown all over the place, i.e., adding its own spam population. Spamcop ($30/year) does not have ping-ponging, and so does allow three or four garbage messages per month through, but its reliability is excellent. I use Spamcop now, but will switch if I find something different which does everything I want. On the other hand, Spamcop is in heavy development (and it is nonetheless extremely reliable, I get tons of email every week), and their people reliably respond to email queries; whereas Mailcircuit told me they would solve the problems of which I spoke to them, and did not, and belatedly claimed that it was impossible (give me a break).
/dev/null instead of holding, and (d) the ability to do everything through SMTP/POP3, i.e., to never ever have to use webmail or web interaction, to do everything by automated email commands.
What is needed, in my opinion, is such a service with (a) whitelists, (b) ping-ponging, (c) blacklists which
J.E.B.
Joshua Corps
Of course, the last thing the US government would want is to increase the use of untraceable monetary instruments, so hell will freeze over before that happens.
It won't work for the same reason that the RIAA killing Napster or trying to copy-protect new discs won't work. For every person out there who creates a new technology to stop someone from doing something "bad" there are ten people who will find a way to bypass it, either for fun or for profit.
AOLers, on the other hand- well, when was the last time you heard anything intelligent from one of them?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I had mine for about 3 years and it was relatively spam free until about 3 months ago. I don't know what happened but now it's a porn mail magnet. I wish there was a way to open the mails in text form, forward them without opening them, or prevent them from fetching outside images when you open them, with those options I might be able to filter them better without having to open them first, now I simply delete them without reading.
My Hotmail was never free from spam. I was using their "block this sender option" but they have a very low limit on how many address you can input there.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Just accept things the way they are and keep quiet about it. Right?
Wrong. I do not accept the situation as it is now, and it will only become worse. I will not have anyone trivialize this problem, because it is a very serious problem to many. Me included.
Until you have a bullet-proof solution to avoid spam which does not take up our network admin's time, please don't give me any more "helpful" suggestions. Until you do, we do have to deal with spam. I still have to set up filters or delete them manually. Our network admin still has to maintain the spam filter and also make sure that it doesn't filter out valid e-mail.
In theory, it is very easy. In practice, it takes time and resources. It costs me money to filter it on the client side because I still have to download it over a dialup connection. My ISP does not have free spam filtering (if at all). Dropping the e-mail address is not an option. I shouldn't have to drop an e-mail address because of spam. If I do, it will just have proven my point that spam is indeed a problem which affects us severely. Having to change an e-mail address because of spam is quite severe, wouldn't you say?
The problem is still there. It doesn't go away just because you ignore it. It becomes even worse.
I have the right to "whine", and will continue to do so as long as people who either have unlimited free bandwidth or get no spam at all continue to claim that it is "not really a problem". What do you know? Are you me?
It isn't a problem to you? Good for you! But you really should read the message you replied to, where I said that:
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.
That's just arrogance and a failure to understand other people's situation, which is likely to be completely different from yours.
Don't get me started on HTML e-mail please. The HTML e-mail I receive is either spam, or plain text e-mail wrapped in a HTML container. The HTML e-mail I see is rarely used for anything. They don't even use text formatting! They might as well have sent a text/plain mail.
Clever signature text goes here.
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?
Direct client-side bandwidth costs are too.
All you have to do is look at the data services offered by cellular providers - Spam could easily double or triple (maybe even more) your monthly cost with such services due to the bandwidth it consumes.
As a result of spam, I can't check email from my phone. My phone (Kyocera 6035, integrated PDA/phone) is more than capable of reading mail, but the 14.4 per-minute connection (And even the unlimited Vision connection if I sacrificed coverage and got a Treo 300 on Sprint) just can't handle the 50 or so messages I get a day, 95%+ of which are spam.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
No need to get violent. No need to kill. The solution is simple, cheap, and pretty easy.
Just start using SpamAssassin. It's free and installs easily on modern unix systems using either sendmail or procmail. If you're stuck with Outlook on Windows, there's a company selling an installshield-based version for only $30 (considerably less that even the cheapest of murder plots). They claim to be working on support for other windows based clients, so if you're windows based and using another program, relief is probably on the way. They have a 2 week free trial version.
Spamassassin really works. They claim it filters about 95%, which should put your spam level between 12.5 to 15 messages per day.... very close to the desired goal of 10 (and nobody needs to die).
With SpamAssassin, every message gets a spam rating. Legitimate messages usually score under 3 points, and SpamAssassin's default threshold is 5.0 points. You can adjust the threshold where messages get filtered... I personally set mine to 7.0 because I'm a bit paranoid of losing any legit messages. But even 7.0 works great... most spam scores well over 10 points. If all your legit messages are scoring very low (quite likely), you might be able to safely lower the threshold a bit and get under that magical 10 per day. Personally, I find it filters nearly all spams even at 7.0.
Be sure to turn on all the "network" tests including the blacklists and razor. By default, these might be set to 0.0 points each, so they won't get used. They do take some time because they involve communication with other sites (very large ISPs with one mail server for thousands of uses don't want to spend that much time per message, but as an individual you almost certainly do). The blacklists often block legit messages, so give them low scores, but it's safe to set Razor (a database of known spam messages, with "fuzzy" matching) to a high value like 4.0 or even 5.0.
There's been a lot of hype lately about Bayesian filtering... and maybe someday lots of email clients will have it built in. And maybe large numbers of users will go to the trouble to sort their messages properly so the filters on each machine "learn". Maybe.
But right now, you can download SpamAssassin for free (or pay just a bit for a commercial much-easier-to-install-on-windows version), and instantly 95% of your incoming spam will be gone. Well, most people just have SpamAssassin modify the message and then they use their mail client or procmail to deliver the message to a "spam folder" (so you can occasionally look through it and remember the bad-old-days before you finally broke down and went through the not-really-that-difficult process of installing SpamAssassin).
It really works, it's free (or cheap), and it doesn't involve killing anyone.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
CNN (Atlanta) reported that popular website Slashdot (www.slashdot.org) will have more and more dumb news stories for the years to come. As one avid reader "cOkErUlZ" put it, "I'm just seeing more crap on /." Another reader how did not want to use his screen name for fear of lossing karma put it, "I check /. every hour, sometimes I get up just to miss the LOTR ads on TV, and lately all I see is crap about spam, and fancy busness stuff. I mean get real, if I wanted to read shit like that I would goto cnn.com"
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
Try the Republican National Committee
Yes, I got election spam from rnc.org, encouraging me to vote Republican.
I usually voted Democrat, except in rare cases (If someone like Rudy Giuliani ran in an election I was involved with, I would've voted for him.) Now, I will NEVER vote Republican, no matter how sleazy or scummy the Democratic candidate is. (i.e. Bob Torricelli)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Recently I stopped clearing out my "Spam" mailbox, as I want to run an analysis of which of my spam rules are hit the most and which are obsolete and can be deleted.
Last deletion (i.e. the first message in the box) is dated November 14
It's Dec. 3 - I have 748 messages in the box.
So after 30 days time the number should be around 1500 plus/minus a few hundred. But it's definately going to go over 1000.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I'm getting really ticked about this spam crap. This is something that the ISPs need to handle, and handle fast.
Why is it that they feel responsible to filter out Napster, Kazaa...filter out port 25...filter this, filter that, monitor this, monitor that....
Yet none of them can do something as simple as an opt-in spam guard. It's turned on by default..and you don't need some fancy enterprise edition. You need Exim, Exiscan and SpamAssassin. Done. Should take a half-competent fresh college grad admin about an hour to do.
Sure, some ISPs do it already. I remember when I was on Earthlink (2+ years ago) they had it...worked ok. How about everyone else? How about doing it FOR FREE?
You don't win the war on drugs by going after drug dealers or importers. You win the war on drugs by poisoning the drugs so noone wants them.
You don't win the war on spam by going after spammers or Asian servers. You win the war on spam by doing your part to educate end users and block it for them, thus removing the spammers' audience.
Corporate MS/RIAA/MPAA/FCC-like nonsense happening. When are these people going to wake up and do their part?
FYI, system stats to date for just my personal server at home:
SPAM caught to date: 4193 in 84,397,706 bytes
Viruses caught to date: 1018 in 277,420,970 bytes
Yes, I'm donating my spam collection to spamarchive.org.
http://www.cloudmark.com/ makes a really quite good spam filtering system for Outlook.
Even sets up it's own 'spam' folder so you can review what's been filtered before it's trashed (you do have the option of sending them straight to the delete file)
I haven't reached the 95% success rate that's bandied about, but I've only been running it 2 weeks. I suspect that after a couple of months of learning, it will come close. Very unobtrusive, and best yet I haven't seen it filter OUT something that's NOT spam.
I'm pretty impressed, and it's a free D/L.
-Styopa
Exactly.
This is one of the really critical factors that people who say "just hit delete" don't understand. It's disheartening to see get rich quick schemes, fake diplomas, and many other types of fraudlent or at least highly distastful messages.
It puts people in sour mood. Not only is it aggrevating, it dilutes one's optimism that other people out there deserve some of your time to help them, to put that little bit of extra time into answering, to go that extra mile and attach a useful file, find a useful link or two, or something along those lines. A session at the computer that's intended to communicate with others begins by first avoiding unwanted and usually very unpleasant communication from spammer.
Even if bandwidth is free, even if you had plenty of time, having to look at ads for beastiality porn, diet pills, pryamid schemes, herbal "viagra"... even only briefly enough to discern them as spam and delete them, is enough to sour ones mood.
Immediately after having briefly encountering filthy messages from the sleeziest, scummiest people on the planent, most people then go on to correspond with friends and family, co-workers, customers, or well-meaning strangers who've contacted them for some legitimate reason.
It's just plain wrong.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
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.
Almost, but not quite true. Digital cash needs to be administered and backed by a BANK. In the case of the USA, the bank (the Federal Reserve BANK) is controlled by the government, but this was not always the case; historically, private banks issued paper currency backed by gold.
For a more current analogy, consider Visa/Mastercard/etc. These are NOT backed by a government; no one guarantees to merchants that swiping a digital stripe on a card means that they will eventually get money. The BANKS guarantee this.
Anyway, I would agree that until a major national institution with the finance to back up digital cash decides to do so, it won't go anywhere.
Is there a version for Pegasus? Something easy to install?
God is real unless declared integer
I suppose that we are far better predicting spam rates in 2007 than we were in 1997 at predicting 2002 spam rates.
Did our prediction accuracy increase when we could finally build a Quad 2GHz Xeon board?
C'mon people... in 2007 spam will take many other forms than just email.
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.
Imminent Death Of The Net Predicted!
This sig no verb.
I have stayed remarkably spam-free with my current email address. How?
I read the privacy policies of ISPs before joining. I will not accept sharing of personal data - period. This has to be in black and white. Any ambiguities or pattern of changes to favor marketers, then the deal's off. Any sales pressure (offer expires in 10 days), then no deal.
Don't leave your email on greeting card sites. These are perfect targets for bots. I got hit with this on my previous addy.
When any paper/web application asks for your email, leave it blank
if the app won't accept blanks, use abuse@website.com
don't reply to ANY spam - even those that have an opt-out URL. The opt-out only tells the spammer that the email addy is a live one and you'll only get more spam. Leave it alone and it will go away on its own.
if I want to join a group but question the email abuse, then I'll use a throwaway email like Hotmail. This is a tactic getting less and less use, because there are fewer groups worth joining.
only subscribe to groups that lock down the subscriber list. Lists run by Majordomo are usually safe, although you should confirm with the list admin that the list is indeed locked down.
Tell your friends to distribute your email to no one. If someone contacts your friend looking for you, either forward the message to you directly or include you in the the reply in the BCC: field.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
there are people out there who care enough to send you personalized, thoughtful solicitations
Oh really? You must be lucky. I got one this morning literally entitled "[FIRSTNAME], 50% Off Vivitar Digital Camera!"
No, my first name is not FIRSTNAME -- that's more of a nickname.
They wouldn't send it to you if they thought you didn't really, really be interested in the product they're selling.
Yeah. A recurring favorite here is "NEW 3 Stooges Talking Wall Clock"
Also, it's pink and tasty.
If one really could eat email spam, what color and taste would it have? Nutritional value? I'm thinking something like pork rinds.
So you see, spam does prevent me from using e-mail as efficiently as I would want, and I have the right to "whine" about it, because I shouldn't have to go this far to use e-mail properly.
Clever signature text goes here.
SpamGourmet.com offers free disposable email addresses for registrations and other limited-use applications.
A 1997 Wired story early described how analysts get paid for being quoted (Forrester denies this, sort of).
:)
A 2000 Salon article.
NYT 12/1999 ($$$): The original magazine article titled "$6 Billion in Online Holiday Sales by the End of This Month! $24 Billion in Internet Ads by 2003! 2.3 Trillion E-Biz Predictions by 2010!".
NYT 5/2002 ($$$): Jupiter "crumbles" (uh-oh! better get some quotes out)
And yesterday the Times parroted the Reuters story.
Parenthetically the Jupiter founder Josh Harris went on to another interesting project you may have heard of. (Sadly, it's long since disbanded.)
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!
I disagree completely. I've been using a whitelist for a while now and it works flawlessly. Here's the deal. I set up the initial whitelist based on my address book--people that I regularly send email to. Then, the procmail filter I use runs every email I receive against the whitelist. If the sender is on the list, it goes to INBOX. Otherwise, the email is held in a pending-message folder and they get an automatically generated reply that says something to the effect of "Hi, I haven't received your email yet because your email address hasn't been verified. Please reply to this email to verify that you are a real person and not a spammer and you will be automatically added to my whitelist."
Person replies, they get added to the whitelist, and the original email gets delivered. Spambots don't reply. Easy as pie.
The one saving grace of the system I use is that all email, spam included, gets put into a BULK folder. I periodically sift through the BULK folder to make sure I haven't missed anything important (like a message from my bank or airline or something) and delete all the spam.
I use a variation of this procmail script on my email system.
In fact, now that I've effectively killed spam on my email account, my email address has become MORE useful--I don't hesitate to publish it on my website or give it out to folks.
My other computer is your Windows box
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
I use Popfile, and that does a really good job of helping me filter my e-mail.
So far, 208 e-mails processed, only 4 e-mails were mis-classified, only one spam was filed in the wrong bucket. 0 of the errors in classification marked a legitimate e-mail as a spam.
And that's only because I created a bunch of buckets. People using a 2 or 3 bucket approach are reporting higher rates of accuracy.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
One of the sites I own now was one of the first (1995) big Real Estate sites on the web. Email addresses were posted everywhere. I bought it two years ago. These addresses get SOOOO much spam. I finally turned off the catchall account but we still were getting easily 300-500 messages a day. I know it sounds like an exaggeration but it's not. It was sickening and ridiculous. So I finally started putting the biggest problem sites that I could trace into access with reject and that cut it down to about 30-50 a day. So I rely on filtering to keep them out of my face. Not a solution but a bandaid.
You should see all the Access Denied entries for azoogle.com in my log files. Those jerks, you'd think they'd take me off the lists after being denied so many times.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I don't want to pay for email.
I already pay my service provider to get me online. That should cover the bandwidth I use up as well. It shouldn't cover the bandwidth spammers use up.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Yahoo has actually added a "This is Spam" selection to the message list screen in the Inbox. Because I can recognize the vast majority of SPAM based on the sender/subject line combination, I normally just open my Inbox, check a bunch of boxes, select "This is Spam" (next to delete button) and hit submit. They do seem to catch quite a bit of SPAM, but a lot still slips through (I just checked my mailbox and I have 3 pieces of junkmail in my Inbox and 10 in my bulk mail folder since last night).
I agree that it would be nice to open the message in a way that at the very list disabled images though as every now and then I'm not sure that something is SPAM and I open it to check. I normally end up clicking on the "This is Spam" link in that message, though, 'cause it normally turns out to be SPAM.
Life has many choices. Eternity has two. What's yours?
Most of my EU spam comes from Spain. I also get a lot from Wanadoo.fr, Austria, and Germany. Finland is interesting because privacy laws protect spammers there from having their name and contact information published on a whois server. Fortunately, the ISPs for most EU countries are often responsive and shut spammers down (unlike Asian countries, like Korea or China).
and if you have time, those get sent to abuse@aol, etc. -not that they'll do anything, but it's good to annoy them
I don't know about AOL specifically, but I've had good results getting some spammers removed from similar services, namely Yahoo and Hotmail. Then again, most of the spam I get is from incredibly stupid bottom-feeders who've found my resume on some job board or other (one good reason not to go to a "whitelist" -- any device you could think of to make sure the legitimate recruitment e-mails came through would also allow some if not all of the others) and who want me to sign up to some multilevel marketing scam (hint: Primericatroids please FO&D!).
When they get slimy and underhanded enough to want to offer me a job where I pay them for the priveledge of having it, I get motivated and nasty enough to make sure they lose their e-mail addresses. I send a brief note plus the full text of what I've received from them, and usually the folks at the other end of abuse@ jump.
Then again, I don't get much other spam, so I occasionally do have time to pull out the big guns. (Also, as a first line of defense, I suggest using an e-mail handle that's not English...mine are Latin and Japanese...)
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
1 tonne=1000Kg=2200lb=0.982tons
I stand corrected. I always saw it referred to as a "metric ton." Love that logical spelling, though.
The metric system has been around for longer than the USA.
The first adoption of the Metric system by any country was in 1795 by France -- 19 years after the U.S.A. was founded. The first record of any type regarding the development of a metric system was in 1670. That was 50 years after the first European settlers arrived at Plymouth Rock and began "development" of the U.S.A.
I'm a little over 100 per day. This is with my correct email all over hundreds of postings to newsgroups over many years and my name on a web site as the contact address, with the website in several popular directories. The 10% annual growth is a wild guess and can't be anywhere near correct. Mine has doubled in the last 3 months.
If no one sends spam, then no one will filter spam. Spam volume must eventually reach some equilibrium, but that will probably be at the point at which the spammers are earning around the minimum or subsistence wage.
It would be a relief to get back to that level. After about 15 years with the same email addresses, 3600 is about the monthly dose. Thanks to SpamAssassin i'm only seeing a small part of them. But if i had suddenly had as much money i could spend in my life, i would sit down and write Anti-Spam software or join an existing project.
Yours, Martin
Fuck, I've been beating that for years!
What really pisses me off is that that my 'secret new address' somehow got leaked. Since then I've been using aliases whenever I sign up for anything (ie slashdot@autopr0n.com, ebay@autopr0n.com, etc, since I run my own mail server) but I've yet to get spam on any of those accounts. rrr.
Die spammers, DIE!!!!!!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I got my first Internet account in November of 1993. There was NO spam. None. I got newsletters and product update information from companies that I had deliberatly signed up for. Now my email box gets 40 - 200 spams a day! Most of it HTML with cute little links back to servers trying to let momma know that the email address they are hitting is valid (which is why I use an email client that does not fetch ANYTHING in an HTML document). My inbox is useless.
I also remember when Usenet was spam free. I remember the firestorm that arose from the infamous Kantner and Seigle (sp?) "Green Card" usenet spam. Now Usenet is a festering sewer of spam. Most newsgroups are useless. Every on-topic post lost in a sea of feculent filth.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
I've got two choices for dealing with it:
- Pre-screen my email with my ISPs webmail:
- Use filters on my email client and download everything:
As for not publishing your email address - total bullshit. I resent like hell that I have to use a fubared email address here atThis stops me from having to download the megabytes of HTML and viruses, but it is slow and clunky.
Sorry, but downloading five MB of crap a day just to get the one or two emails that I actually want to read is not worth it. It adds to my monthly bandwidth consumption and it causes my anti-virus software to go insane.
Hiding is not the answer. Stopping them from abusing the system is the only answer.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
What, these people have never heard of Google? Pricewatch.com? Pricegrabber.com? ResellerRatings.com?
If you think business will need to rely on blind dispatch of email to random people to grow and prosper, then business is in deep doo-doo.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Even paper cash was a mess until it was backed by the full faith and credit of the government, for analogous reasons.
You could just send out a bunch of spam advertising your competitors' URLs. The exposure they'd get from the spam would be more than counteracted by the harm they'd suffer from having their site disconnected.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Email services as we know it must fundamentally change. The only workable solution that I see is white listing.
I know that there are great filtering programs out there but I end up going though all of the spam anyway to make sure that I don't flush an important message. The only difference is that instead of deleting spam from my inbox, I'm deleting it from my spam folder.
I ISP needs to implement white listing on there server and it needs to be made so that list maintenance is as easy as possible.
One idea is to put a disposable 'code' word as part of the email address. emails with the correct code word would pass directly through and the sender's email address would be added to the white list automatically. The code word part could be changed by the owner at any time.
Any mail received that didn't have the correct code word OR the sender's address wasn't already white listed would be put into a queue. The ISP's server would automatically reply to the sender with a message that basically says "You are not on this person's white list. If you are not a spammer and want to be added please reply to this message with a single line in the body: X2ke34Y."
The ISPs would want to vary the above message to make it difficult for a spammer to automate the reply. Maybe "Please reply with the second word from the third sentance and the forth word from the first sentance all in caps." Anyway, you get the idea.
If the person follows the instructions and replies the queued message is forwarded and the sender's email address is added to the white list. Most spammers use faked email addresses so they won't even get the instructions. Queued emails will be held for a predetermined time period before being sent to the bit bucket.
The ISP should provide an easy way for the user to deal with the few spammers who will actually provide a legitimate email address and follow the instructions to force their spam through.
This would be a big change and a bit more of a hassle but not nearly the hassle of wading through hundreds of 'Increase the size of your penis' spams each day!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
A correction, Mojo Nation's URL was always mojonation.net. Someone else is there now but it's a related company, another effort by MN founder Jim McCoy.
Failure to attach proper headers is no defense. Just because something lacks a "Precedence: bulk" doesn't mean it's not SPAM. Most SPAM I get does not have that header.
You seem to have bought into this whole "UCE redefinition" thing.
What you are really talking about is the ability to cold-call an individual vs. the ability to telephone solicit everyone on the planet in the middle of them having sex with their wives.
Excuse me, if I think there is a middle ground.
FWIW: You aren't going to get funded by sending business plans to a VC's home email address, particularly if you don't have a preexisting relationship.
-- Terry
As good as mail filters like SpamAssasin and Bayesian filters are getting, maybe it's time to take a super-hard-line stance against spam, false-positives be damned. I'm thinking something along the lines of:
1) Block all traffic (not just mail traffic) from offending IPs (open relays, or whatever).
2) If that doesn't stop the offending behavior, block the whole class C.
3) If they still don't shape up, block their entire provider until they cut them off.
4) If the provider is unwilling, cut off _their_ provider.
5) Repeat step 4 until satisfaction is achieved (i.e. you get to somebody who is willing to cut somebody off completely in order to restore the rest of their network to good standing).
If you get banned because one of your neighbors is a spammer, tough. Either switch to a non-spam-friendly ISP or complain until they shape up. That's the price to pay to stop spammers.
The hitch would be getting people to participate in the boycott. However, if everyone is given fair warning, more people would be willing to participate. If a widespread warning of "the following networks will implement a boycott spammy folks in a blackhole sort of way, possibly affecting their neighbors too", and listing the networks at risk (so people have time to bitch to their ISP or move), more people would say "hey, that's a good idea."
This is substantially different from the current RBL, Spamhaus, etc. because it's on a much wider scale and actually intends to disrupt legitimate traffic. If noone is inconvienienced by black holes, they have no incentive to change their ways. Also, extreemly aggressive boycotts like this should work quickly - the inconvienience for the "innocents" should not be long term.
Again, the difficulty would be getting enough of the interenet to participate in such a boycott. It might be impossible.
The whole reason the Internet works at all is because we've agreed on standards for protocols of communication and cooperate to pass around everyone's data. If enough people stop cooperating with spammers (and those who cooperate with spammers), the spammers will no longer be able to use the internet to peddle their crap.
... "Give me a woman who loves beer and I will conquer the w
Wow, and you're only rejecting email from like 50% of americans or so.
From someone stupid enough to think that *@hotmail.com spam is actualy sent from hotmail servers, it's not suprising.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
.25%! Thats better then CTR on most websites. Thats better then the CTR for autopr0n.com (which only has textads, though).
:(. Someone needs to take spammers out and shoot them in the street. Someone other then me.
That's depressing
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Yes, its much better to throw people in jail and stuff then it is to spend a few minutes setting up filters. I think the RBL is a bunch of crap, but trying to stop spammers using the law is like stop hackers with the law, rather then with firewalls and other security technology.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Look at the docs it seems that you have to check your 'pending messages' folder once in a while.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
this...
(...)average american will get over 3600 of them a year. The future of email is??"
just begs for re-writing it this way:
1. Send 3600 spam per American per year
2. ???
3. Profit!
Ironically, that's what the rough equation actually is....
Digital cash, like real cash, needs to be administered and backed by the government.
Umm, no. Digital cash needs to be issued by any party that you trust to redeem the value promised by the "cash". That may be a national government, or it may be an outfit like E-Gold, or some power company that promises to deliver a certain portion of a kilowatt-hour in exchange for the digital coin in question.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I know that these domains aren't actually sending the spam, but the most spammers set their from addresses to msn, hotmail or any free mailer.
Then you know that disallowing their server wont stop any Spam, so why do you do it, other then your own stupidity?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Every mail server on the planet simply has refuse to relay messages from any untrusted hosts/PCs (ie: dialup clients) at a rate faster than one email per 5 seconds. At that rate a million emails will take 57.87 days to relay. No human fires out emails at a sustained rate faster than one every five seconds, so this will only catch automated bulk mailers.
"Filtering does solve THAT problem."
You're right. I guess I bypass that problem all together and focus on the root of all evil which is the spammers themselves.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin