Slashdot Mirror
MSNBC: Offices Remain Spam Free Zones
Makarand writes "Thanks to a good job done by the tech staff and filtering software, office
workers in the US are not bothered by spam mail and the value of email
communications has not eroded. A survey conducted by Pew Internet & American
Life Project, whose findings are reported in this article by MSNBC.com, found that spam is certainly a problem for personal email accounts but not
for company provided email accounts. This is contrary to the
perception that American workers are wasting too much time battling spam." YMMV.
I see the crap our managers have to filter out at work. Its not so much external spam as it is internal spam. Example, 10 people discussing what they'll have for lunch in 10 minutes, over 20 emails. CCed to everyone.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I think that home users don't have the resources, know-how, or time to work out an effective anti-spam system.
I can't even find a good IMAP spam filter!
Random is the New Order.
MM(F)V
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
"spam is certainly a problem for personal email accounts but not for company provided email accounts." That's because a single person won't sue a spammer. You piss off a company which has much more money than a little guy, though, and you're going to have trouble. Spammers are perhaps evil, but usually not stupid.
--Signature Spam
Sex - Find It
In part, certainly, but I wonder how much of the difference is due to the fact that spammers have a harder time getting work addresses. They're a lot less likely to be on public web pages, they're not used in chat rooms and they're much harder to generate by brute force.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
... I receive is spam. However, gnus categorizes the email conveniently in two categories based on the "From" domain: company email and "other".
I never even take a glance at the subject lines of "other" email.
So no, spam is not a problem for me in the office.
...free Spam is eagerly eaten by YOU! What a coun-try!
...because tech workers are embracing it! I mean, why fight spam when it offers to enlarge your penis by 237% in 48 hours? This is truly a golden age of technology! Hallelujah!
I wonder how much the lack of spam hitting business email accounts is because companies install spam filters? Our company throws all inbound email through spamassassin, and it works great.
Maybe company employees are wary of entering their email addresses into such forms as, "Money waiting for you! Enter email address:" and, "Find out who has a crush on you! Enter email address:".
Of course, we all know what this report means: spammers still have left some rocks unturned, and thus there is room to grow even if internet usage stagnates.
Rejoice!
Good filtering software, along with good filters, really makes the difference.
.cmd? .bat? .vbs? The other 18 I specified? Matched something in the antivirus pattern file? Delete the attachment, regardless of the source.
At work I use a product which allows me to filter on multiple levels:
1. Allow. If it's on the domain list, IP list, or if the message contains any of the keywords in the list, it's allowed through.
2. IP blacklisting. IP address matches? Delete it.
3. Domain name blacklisting. Domain name matches? Delete it.
4. Content filtering. Meets any of the content filters? Quarantine it.
5. Attachment blocking.
Virus infections in the past year? 0 workstations, 0 servers. Number of spams/day before companywide? Averaged about 800 for 25 users. Now? About 20 for 25 users.
Cost of the product? $1500 for the server license for both products. I'm happy.
-----
I don't do anything to filter out spam. There isn't much spam, though. The only people that actually get spam are those in the IT department who post to newsgroups. I am quite certain that newsgroups are the source of the spam that I get at work. It started within 48 hours of the first time I made the mistake and used my real email address. The problem is that Google archives all of the newsgroup postings, so my email address is forever sitting in an easily harvested place.
I use Spam Assassin at home, with an additional few procmail entries. One in particular to catch anything in Asian character sets.
At work, they've tried every "ready for exchange" solution there is. None compare to SA... and the biggest problem: They only work on English spam keywords. Everything from fucking "starhana" and Korea still gets through.
I get very little spam through my office e-mail. I don't know whether our admins use spam filters, but I have always attributed the low spam rate to the way I use the e-mail address. I use it mostly for internal e-mail, and I seldom give it to anybody outside the company. It doesn't show up in postings to Usenet (in a Reply-to field, for example), I don't use it to register at sites like nytimes.com, and I don't give it to people I don't know. That's not because I intentionally keep it a big secret, it's just a side effect of the way I work - I don't have much reason to give out my e-mail address. I believe that my lack of spam at the office can be credited to limited exposure.
Contrariwise, I wouldn't be surprised if there are people who get tons of e-mail at the office.
--Jim
Although I have heard of other people having problems at work with spam, I've been lucky so far. All of our email addresses are easily guessable (prone to dictionary attack) along with alternate addresses being 6 character usernames (prone to brute force attack.
Hotmail accounts on the other hand, my username is not easily guessable, but I received 47 spams and 1 legitmate message in the past 24 hours in my inbox while 9 spams were redirected to the junk mail folder along with 2 legitimate messages.
I wonder if the filters that are used by corporate America could be used by Hotmail, actually I wonder why they are not.
My next Slashdot post will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Now let's see a study to show how much effort IT departments are putting in around the country (or world) to eliminate SPAM in the office place.
I work for a major computer manufacturer (I'll give you a hint, we are again number one in personal PC sales), and I never see spam at work.
But how much money does my company pay a year for me to not see spam?
The amount of spam you receive is directly proportional to the frequency with which your e-mail address is publicly posted. Most offices don't publicly post the e-mail address of their employees, therefore, they don't get much spam. On the other hand, private individuals throw their e-mail address all over the place. Be it registering for some on-line service, or posting on a blog.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
just not for work email addresses. C'mon, who hasn't checked their private email account from work?
Most spammers go after domains that ISP's use. This way they get fewer pissed off people that have their own domains and no how to complain about the spam they get and won't buy anyhting anyways. Since most business email accounts are at the companies domain, they don't get as much spam. Plus people don't use there company email addresses ont he web as much.
*phew* I cannot begin to tell you how much of a relief it is that corporate lusers don't feel that spam is much of a problem. I'm guessing they don't see the bandwidth utilization logs and the filter logs. I'm betting this is the same group of lusers who keep emailing me klez.h.
Its called 'being on a distribution list'. I get so much e-mail I don't care about, I had to create a rule so that any mail sent only to me is placed directly in my inbox, otherwise it gets moved to another directory...
DILBERT:
Panel 1:
To: All Users
From: Network Admin
Please refrain from frivolous E-mail. It bogs down
the network.
Panel 2:
To: Network Admin
From: Dilbert
cc: All Users
I agree.
Panel 3:
Dilbert says, "Have you noticed there's too much
communication in the world, Dogbert?"
Dogbert says, "Yeah, every day at about this time."
We finally put a spam filter in place last week (good timing, eh?).
Just over 30% of our incoming email is currently being tagged as spam with well under 0.1% being false positives.
One interesting thing I did find was that nearly 60% of the spam is directed towards only 10% of our users. These are probably the people who are using their work accounts for non-work related purposes.
ÕÕ
i got a spam message the other night, and at the end was a paragraph saying that my email (work email) had been obtained off our company website for the purpose of the message (getting me to buy whatever it was). so i'm not sure how valid this whole thing is.
I'd cynically figure that employees hustle to delete or underreport spam that might show they're not using their machine solely for business, like they're supposed to most places. Then, of the charitable view, employees DO recognize they shouldn't be using the their work email for private pursuits and so don't share it. The average business doesn't need its employees roaming the internet, anyway, and there aren't many good reasons to be giving out your work email except to people who you do business with -- hopefully not spammers.
:)
At home, hey, we live closer to the edge. But I object to the stereotype of home users just not knowing how to deal with spam, like it's their fault. Perhasps they should be more careful, but nothing about being carelss makes one "deserve" spam (or fill in crime of your choice). It takes nontrivial sophistication to filter, and anyway stuff gets through. The filters are getting smarter, which is like building stronger locks to keep burglars out, rather than stopping the burglars from trying. Not that spam is anything but wonderful (someone here will say it is); how dare I imply it should be illegal.
Besides, spam can only grow -- it's not going away on its own.
well, the company i work at uses a small web hosting co for mail/www and i swear they sell my address... i almost shat in my seat when one of my [female] coworkers walked by and i was sifting through my mail by pressing the down arrow (50:1 spam ratio) and suddenly an ENORMOUS pair of breasts fills the preview pane of outlook. bit of an awkward silence after that. needless to say, i've been a bit more vigilant about spam filtering since then :)
"Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?"
Similarly, I currently have an email account with my university, but I use it almost exclusively for academic-related communications, and I've not received one spam email at that address in over a year now. And, I doubt the university has invested much money in spam filters for student email accounts.
This is all well and good for external spam, but what can be done for all the spam you get from within the organization? You know the Dilbert/Office Space-esque ones about birthdays, births, engagments, retirements, etc. And it only seems to get worse as the organization gets larger.
I find it ironic that slashdot links to stories that are hosted on a company owned by microsoft.
If find it odd that Slashdot posts several anti-MS stories every day and yet then proceeds to post a story linked to MSNBC... Who's side are we on here? Maybe if slashdot was truly anti-microsoft they would refrain from linking to their news network. Then again I see MS ads all over this site, so I guesse it's hard to avoid microsoft if you actually want to make money.
Stanley Feinbaum, professional journalist and master debater! God bless the USA!
Do you ever get the feeling that the news at msnbc is more for making microsoft look good and less for providing unbiased information to the public?
Last year I rarely got a spam complaint at the office. This year I get them all the time. It's not "innocent" spam either, now it's animated XXX GIF files. I'll be implementing an anti-spam system very soon.
Any time saved in this fashion is wasted when everyone leaves their desk to tell you that you left your cover sheet off this week's TPS report.
?-|||-----x<*))))><
My company's spam filtering software seems to not be able to recognize the fact the email with the following words in the subject Enlarger You Penis are spam. It does seem to tag internal mass postings from the HR dept. as spam though.
My home machine running spam assasin on the other hand never fails to recognize spam.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
I see people in schools and school districts getting absolutely hammered with spam. The worst part is that a lot of these idiots actually respond to the spams to order stuff!
The cycle works like this -
1. Spammer scrapes addresses from district web site
2. Spammer spews spam at them through usual vectors (open relays, open proxies, you name it)
3. Idiot users say "hmm, that looks interesting" and respond with ordering details!
4. Spammer says "hey, this works, let's keep at it"
All they do is put an educational spin on whatever it is they're hawking and then they turn the spewers on full-blast. The ugly part is that it usually works - they never even stop to think that maybe they shouldn't buy from spammers.
I know all about dnsbls for stopping spam. Realize that I'm not allowed to use any of them since other districts are run by absolute losers who can't configure a mail server properly to save their lives. They get listed as open proxies/relays/etc, and then they can't mail us. That's when the shit hits the fan and I get told to take down the lists.
Everyone needs to check out popfile.sourceforge.net. It's GPL, dead easy to set up and use, and quite frankly, it's brilliant. It uses naive Bayesian filtering, catches about 99% of my spam, and rarely if ever catches a non spam message by mistake. Spammers are going to HATE this tool. Try it. You won't be sorry.
What I mean by spam being theft of service is not the standard "they are stealing my bandwidth" complaint. Rather it is the much more insidious usage of electronic equipment for non-company, non-work related activities. That an email account can "magically" appear on a spammer's list is ridiculous. Obviously, it had to come from somewhere, and that "somewhere" is usually from mailing lists, newsgroups, or random surfing.
How many people have the NY Times bookmarked in their browser? There's a potential email address leak. How about a Passport account? You're giving away the store, friends.
But wide open email addresses are only the most visible symptom of the problem. The problem is that the computers at work are to be used for the company's work, and usage outside that scope is theft of company services. Sure, it's on par with stealing staplers and note pads, but it is stealing nonetheless.
Perhaps if you feel that you are not being properly compensated for your time at work, you should take that up with your boss (or *shudder* team up with a union and demand better pay). The way to equalize your worker-company relationship is not to steal time from the company.
In my company before we instituted Spamd we would all get a lot of spam because of the generic contact aliases we have for jobs, information, and general bitching. A few still get through, but spammers are not stupid perhaps just a little unethical.
Well, I wonder where, who ever came up with that information got it from. Even with extensive use of the access.db and rbl feature in sendmail, spam is coming in everyday because new sender addresses are used everyday.
There just is no way of filtering by subject or content without the risk of losing real mail. If there is something that does the trick, I'll be happy to know about it.
Kombi
I have an @microsoft.com account and a fairly guessable username. I'm constantly getting "thanks for signing up for our mailing list..." messages. I think there is someone out there signing me up for loads of lists just to smite me.
maybe in europe the situation is different?
.ppt are on the list of the files that go cancelled directly. =)
the offices _DO_ get spam.
and personally, i get spam. both work related and private...
thanx to mail.app at least i use enough filters; without those and before i got about 50 - 100 spams a day. so, enough filters. blocked domains (which include e.g. tripod.com and previously hotmail.com), blocked ips, messages containing certain words (sex and gambling terminology, last minute offers, all unrequested newsletters that cant be cancelled etc) - now maybe 1 - 2 spams reach the mailbox a day, not more.
many people seem to be allowed to send spam from work. including all the demands to go and get a coffee in 5 minutes and all the "funny" jokes in the powerpoint presentations etc. some of thoe "funny" senders are blocked now, and even the
mail.app seems to have resolved my spam problems. hooray...
the spam I receive at work from outside the company or the emails from within. First, if it's spam I can usually tell from the subject line. Easy to delete. The emails from within require me to at least read it. And once people learned that they can use nice, pretty and extremely huge, clip art I've found that bringing up that important email to "everyone" is a real time waster.
In addition, far too many people where I work will email a subject to death. Coupled with a large CC: to population along with the "reply to all button" some subjects just won't die the undignified death they deserve. And, you have to read every one because of the odd one that may contain useful information.
I swear, what once took a 1 minute phone call to resolve now results in 20-30 emails back and forth. The only good thing I see is the CYA factor. I've saved my butt a couple of times being able to forward a message that I sent long ago, that apparently was never read. Why wasn't it read? Must have been deleted with along with the spam!
Seriously though, I spend far too much time wading through needless email at work than I do spam.
This is sort of off-topic, but I'd like to suggest why it is that home users get more spam than corporate users: they don't care. I'm using Yahoo. I simply delete spam. It's not hard. It takes up about five seconds of my day. There is no chance of not receiving something due to filtering. In a corporate enviornment, however, it is different. They pay for the servers, they pay for the [small amount of] productivity lost. At home, nobody cares. Sure, if you were getting 20 spams a day you would care, but most of us are not receive that volume of spam.
A related question to spam: How is it that after I create a hotmail account, within one day, I can be getting spam? Does hotmail sell lists? Or are there people and bots that just put together random strings of possible user names? Does hotmail try to filter these out?
We use spamcop.net at work. It's gets 95% of the spam. The thing which made us move on it was female employees complaining of sexually explicit spam from porn sites--with an HTML enabled mail reader, sometimes the first thing they saw was some pornographic picture.
Unless a company makes a best effort to protect people from exposure to offensive material (as defined by them, within reason), the company could be sued by the employee for creating a hostile workplace. While I haven't heard of cases of this yet, it's only a matter of time. (I hope I didn't give anyone any ideas here...)
We've been experimenting with spamassassin, and it's roughly as good as spamcop (as to how much spam gets through to the end user), but it's free. Note: spamcop and spamassassin have to completely different approaches to determining what is spam.
Fucking scum.
If you're in the electronic design industry, don't do any business with this fucks.
Over the course of this weekend, my personal email account has received 7 spams.
Over the course of this weekend, my work email will have received over 50.
A quick googling shows my personal email address showing up twice as often as my work address.
Why, then, do I get so much less spam at home than work? Because the ISP I use is very aggressive about filtering spam, while the IT department at work is deeply fearful that "We might accidently filter a million dollar order" (yah, like anybody ordering a million bucks of stuff will do it SOLELY through email).
True, the above is nothing but a datum, not refutation, but still, the idea that "work gets less spam than home" is not ALWAYS true.
www.eFax.com are spammers
From the look of it, if you're a company paying a geek or herd of geeks to write filters for your mail or have purchased some sort of filtering software solution to screen out the spam, you're still wasting money on filtering spam! Office productivity might be up but the company is still having to spend $xxxx.xx on a filtering solution, which I'd bet doesn't offset the increased productivity.
Also, don't forget the cost, albeit small, associated with missed mail that was flagged as a false postive.
Spam wastes time on you!
:)
Sorry, there hadn't been one yet on this thread, it just didn't feel right
I work for a major games developer, and the only spam I get at work is the spam that goes to the entire company, as somehow a spammer managed to find out our all@company address.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Just because end users don't see the spam doesn't mean there isn't a cost. How much time is spent creating software to combat spam? How many hours do admins spend dealing with spam before it even reaches users? How much time do users have to spend circumventing anti-spam filters to send/receive legitimate email?
These are just a few of the obvious costs related to keeping spam out of user mailboxes. It would probably boggle the mind to know the actual cost of keeping spam out of Suzy or Sammy Secretary's mailbox.
.. The big problem when configuring spamfilters for work is dealing with incompetent MTAs belonging to critical partners (investors, VCs, clients). It's sad but unsurprising that many companies have open or broken SMTP servers which allow either out-and-out relaying or external relay by domain (external uses permitted domain in forged 'mail from:' header).
So, what happens next is you either (if you care) develop whitelists or (if you're BOFH) you give execs the choice between spamfiltering and no spamfiltering. When the users complain about no spamfiltering, fwd them on to the execs.
Life is so much easier when you don't care anymore...
At a previous employer, we had no WWW access, so there was no way to enter our address (from work) into any forms. We sure as hell weren't putting our addresses onto any websites, posting to USENET, sending chain letters to friends. It was used for business and business alone. Personal emails? I SSH'd to my mail server.
Personal emails at work were *STRONGLY* discouraged, and it was made clear that the company would read our emails if they ever felt like it.
I never used my work email address for anything. I'd say that 90% of the email I *did* get was company related stuff anyway, which went right into the trash can.
Just out of curiousity, what package cost $1500 and does all of that?
I'm wondering because that's all stuff that I'm doing currently, but it cost me $0 - all free software, obviously.
SPAM does not distinguish between personal and corporate email accounts. What happens here is that most people use the corporate accounts strictly for business related matters and corporate mail, while their personal emails are used for everything else (where the exposure to harvesters is most likely to happen).
I have lots of friends who post messages on the Usenet using their corporate email accounts. Guess the result? Lots and lots of SPAM.
bullshit
Why should anyone have to deal with any SPAM? We've all collectively wasted a lot of time on filtering it - wether at home or at work. Although, we can't prevent viruses and system intrusions, we should at least more easily be able to control SPAM.
What happened to the legislation in some states to punish spammers? Why are some providers doing little to stop this problem? At issue in my mind, is not the fact that sys admins have done a great job filtering SPAM (which is a positive), it's the fact that everyone has to put up with it and simply bouncing it does nothing to diminish the quantity.
You have got to be kidding! I get about twenty times the spam at work as I do at home. At home I just get one or two a week sent to webmaster, offering colocation, traffic enhancement, and other minor crap. But I work I get hardcore porn ads, Mrs. Mojimbo from Nigera, term life insurance, penile enlargements (add 4 inches!), diets (remove 4 inches!), and some stupid time traveller trying to get back home.
It's all my work's fault, of course. They inadvertently left an open relay in place long enough for us to get blacklisted by the good guys and primelisted by all the bad guys. It's fixed now, but damn! I get about 50 to 100 a day.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I predict that in one or two year free email account will be dead as most of people use it anyway just to subscribe for spam.
Less is more !
YMMV.. wtf is YMMV, wait I know!
/usr/games/wtf is ymmv
/usr/share/misc/acronyms | grep YMMV
defc0n@luminaire:~$
YMMV: your mileage may vary
or alternatively
defc0n@luminaire:~$ cat
YMMV your mileage may vary
(yes, i had to perform this task after reading the headline)
Nobody knows my WORK email address except my co-workers, clients and my loved ones.
Nobody knows my HOME email address except my loved ones and most of the rest of the internet. Any time I buy something, register something, or post non-anonymously to websites or newsgroups I use my home email address.
That's why I barely get any spam at work compared to home.
Do you ever get the feeling that the news at cnn.com is more for making AOL look good and less for providing unbiased information to the public?
Well, do you?
Just bford@ford.com (or something like that).
...
It's real easy to tell to because you get
b.ford@ford.com (undeliverable)
bill.ford@ford.com (undeliverable)
william.ford@ford.com (undeliverable)
bford@ford.com (no auto reply so it hit something).
He was real nice though, forwarded my questions to the head of marketing. I was inquiring as to why they don't make a Cobra 2 seater instead of the faster standard mustang body style.
Ford kicks Chevy's ass. GM sucks.
Ford/Jaguar/Volvo/Lincoln/Mazda
hrm, we use complex filtering software and techniques, and i still get lots of spam. i receive about 200 work related emails each day to a certain account, and about 25% of that is spam.
...
what i really wonder though is how many legitimate (non-spams) emails i never receive because of filtering software! i frequently get email or calls from people who claim they sent email that i never received. i also frequently get mailing list bounce warning emails (primarily from securityfocus lists though) claiming that emails sent to me are bouncing. hrm
-- ken williams
Several people I work with receive way too much spam (and the very offensive kind). For instance, one lady received over 100 spam messages in a day just after ordering NASCAR tickets online. BTW, here is link to the PEW Study advisory board - Full of high ranking execs from Pro-Spam companies.
I think one of the single biggest reasons is that people's home email addresses are sold by ISPs, are used when shopping online [1], posting on message boards/mail lists/newsgroups which are harvested [1], etc etc etc.
/.ers also have the misfortune of being a member of common lists @theircompanydomain.com, ie. webmaster, postmaster, etc etc. There are many many many spammers that walk the domain registries sending to those addresses. That certainly skews my view of the world, as I get about 200 to 400 spams a day.
Most companies don't sell their employee lists (but I see an opportunity for increasing the bottom line), and most employees, while they surf voraciously at work, use non-work email addresses when shopping online, viewing porn, etc. Further, many companies don't have their email systems connected to the Internet. I think its the minority of companies that are acutally employing effective anti-spam techniques.
I think many
[1] and hence sold
We use spamassassin at work, which we've just setup recently.. We've been using pegasus email for years and years. Since the machines were ps/2s running dos 3.x. pegasus doesn't cut down on spam, but there is *no* excuse for email clients such as outlook that can infect your computer with such apparent ease. If you use a client like this, or force it on your users, you are an irresponsible net citizen.
They already had those fscking TPS reports, there's no free bother time for SPAM.
I'm to lazy to have a real signature
for me this is because we all (12 or so of us) use the same frickin' email address! one of the employees usually comes in about 4 in the morning and deletes the spam off the server that we connect to...
:-(
effective, but lame
at the place I work we have 3 full time people monitoring an expensive piece of spam filtering software. so if may save a couple of minutes of time off of the other 500 people, those 3 have been pulled from other duties to take care of the task...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
This would suggest that american workers are not people and therefore don't have personal accounts in the first place.
Ughh..republicans
because I get MORE spam at work than in my personal email account.
A friend and I were having a debate, and I wanted to bring it out into the open. Our debate (might have been done numerous times already, but still) comes to spam in snail mail. Anyone have any good insights? Electronic Spam vs Snail Spam. Why outlaw one and not the other? I know most people hate spam of anykind, so some should be devil advocates :)
I still get spam addressed to my old company's two old obsolete domains (I can't persuade them to turn that off!), plus my old company's current, my current company's current address (I transferred from a subsiduary company, so get to see both email servers) and now both companies are in the processes of changing their domain names again, so it looks like another two servings of spam for me.
Fortunately, I use filters which catch 90% of the 25 or so daily spams.
As comparative data points, my home email (freely used in Usenet, etc) gets about 50+ spam per day, but as I use POBox.com, they kill 75% at the server, and another 20% gets forwarded with a spam tag, to get binned at my home PC.
Oh, and my Hotmail address (an obvious [firstname]_[lastname]) gets almost zero spam, filtered or unfiltered - I think I get more messages from M$ than junk (well, non-M$ junk anyway!)
what i really wonder though is how many legitimate (non-spams) emails i never receive because of filtering software!
That is how the spam war will end: The spammers will become sophisticated enough that no matter what we do, any filter we try to use will result in too many false positives (falsely labelled "spam") to be of any use.
(False positives, of the four possible outcomes, are by far the worst, if you think about it.)
Spam is only going to get worse.
and I'll tell you why. The only reason businesses don't get as much spam compared to home users is because of one difference. The average home user doesn't have an IT department at their disposal to help fight spam. At the company I'm at we still get tons of spam for the same reason home users do. Too many people treating their work account like their home account and signing up for lists and things they shouldn't be. Spam has gotten so bad that we're considering implimenting the silver bullet of spam filtering, TMDA. The only problem is that this is very difficult to impliment and it goes purely on a whitelist only basis. Spam is everywhere and anyone who says differently is either downplaying the problem, or living in a bubble.
... to the American Association Against Acronym Abuse (AAAAA)
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
If spam gets so bad that the filters cause too many false positive, then it's time for whitelist-only email. For many email users at work, whitelists are all that's needed. For example, 99.5% of email received at my work address is from a coworker. The other 0.5% is from my home account, a former coworker who is keeping in touch, or other addresses I already know. Many people never need to receive messages from unknown senders at their work address. Sure, there are exceptions, but that just means a little more effort maintaining the whitelist (i.e. any email address that originated from my business card scanner should automatically be added to my whitelist).
with an HTML enabled mail reader, sometimes the first thing they saw was some pornographic picture.
The obvious solution would be to not use an HTML "enabled" mail reader...
May we never see th
First Post!
:)
I finally got it!
I'll tell you - the IS staff at my work has (to my knowledge) done only one thing to keep the spam from flooding my inbox: denied open relays from sending email to me and the rest of our staff. Apart from that, they're doing nothing.
I have an Outlook rule that catches about 90% of my spam, but I can't save anymore server-side rules because my rule exceeds the 32K maximum Exchange Server packet size.
I read this article and seriously wondered what these people were smoking. I've had my work e-mail address for almost six years. I get over 100 spam emails a day now. Tomorrow morning when I get into work, I should have somewhere around 300 emails sitting in my spam folder. Then, I should have about 30-40 that haven't been caught by my filters.
I think the survey takers got some bad data.
At least in my office environment, where we've got new Pentium 4s running Windows 95 unpatched (it's an old-school custom-job database/workflow "solution" tying us down).
We get our share of "You've been accepted!" but more common by far is "Japanese lass' sexy pictures" and "A very powful tool" - you know the drill. Our IT people's idea of security is forbidding accessing personal email accounts on the Web.
I'd trade virus emails (which crash Outlook even when you're running VirusScan or similar) for spam any day.
Companies are wasting insane amounts of money writing and maintaining spam filters. This is money that's unavailable for enhancing the business or providing new jobs for employees.
I think the conclusion saying american workers do not spend huge amounts ot their time fighting spam is incorrect. It's all about cost shifting with spam...
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. The slower the better. Remember, knees first, so that they can't run away
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Where I work, we get affected by each Outlook addressbook-reading virus as they come through, even though Outlook is banned on the internal network, with threats of firing employees who use it.
...
Somehow, people don't seem to get the message.
While these occurrences are not common, they generate a huge amount of email.
They also generate a large number of clueless replies from people, asking to be taken off internal mailing lists that have been spammed, or back to the person whose addressbook has been compromised asking them to stop sending messages!
It all comes back to education in my opinion
Explicit emails, graphics or not, are not welcome. What if the same user, using Eudora or whatever received a message with the word "fuck fuck fuck" in the subject line? Still offensive and could provoke "hostile workplace" initiatives.....
That's actually what I do now. A filter for each of my mailing lists (which are all nice enough to use the [abbrev.] convention in every title), and a filter per left-over person that goes into my generic "Keepers" folder.
No spam filtering in terms of what most people mean, but it turns out that unless you have a lot of people emailing you out of the blue (tech support, maybe an Open Source project lead), this means that around 90%-95% of the stuff that *isn't* filtered into a folder is spam, and the percentage is going up every week. That's for my personal account, which is less focused then the average work account, where I think your numbers would hold.
This can't be perfect, but it also can't be fooled or defeated in the general case. It's a hell of a lot less sexy then the latest Bayesian filters, but in another six months, the whitelists will work better.
When I've worked for BBN Planet, they did not do ANY spam filtering, whatsoever. Since I've made a mistake posting a few messages on usenet with my corporate e-mail address (which apparently got harvested by bots), in a few month my e-mail box became overflown with spam for the next several years while I was working for BBN. I no longer make the same mistake since, and all my usenet postings contain completely fake address. The bottom line - some companies do and some companies simply don't care.
Filtering isn't effective if it also blocks legitimate mail, and from anecdotal evidence it seems to do that excessively.
All my friends who work in places that have spam filtering implemented complain incessantly of emails not received, often times important emails on which their work depends.
Dell uses MIMEDefang on its Internet bastion hosts.
Sshhh... don't tell M$ Dell runs Red Hat and Sendmail on its Internet mail servers....
The fact that every individual employees don't have to battle spam doesn't mean that spam isn't a problem for business.
And I wonder how much non-spam email is going down the memory hole? For instance, take the case of a company that lost significant mail from foreign customers in a classic "Risks Digest" blunder: offensive words in English may be perfectly innocuous in other languages...
I am concerned that the debate about SPAM provides cover for a covert attempt to install corporate censorware. SPAM blocking should be done at the level of the individual recipient, by blocking options they choose. If it is done further upstream then this simply trasfers control of a very powerful apparatus of censorship to the upper echelons of corporate hierarchy. Can we really trust them to block ONLY SPAM and nothing else?
See, I get about five times as much spam as real mail on most days. Do I care? No. I spend less than 30 seconds deleting spam on any given day.
So.. let's see.
By NOT spending hours bitching about spam
NOT spending hours tweaking an anti-spam system
and just pressing delete... I figure I save myself a good 20 hours anually, at least.
People waste more time whining about spam and fighting spam than they would fighting it with the most simple method: the delete key.
yes, I disagree with spam. I think it's rude, wrong, and a waste of time. If I had 20x the amount of spam I get, I would probably speak differently.... but as it is, I get 20 or 30 spams a day, and it's not worth the effort to complain.
We could pretend it eats up valuable resources, or we could get real, and realize that the total disk space eaten by all the spam is really very small, relatively speaking. Even if it's 4 or 5x the amount of legitimate mail, it's still nothing.
I'm sure this is due, in no small part, to the excellent software provided by Microsoft. You know, the folks who bring you MSNBC and Hotmail.
Oh.....shit.....wait a minute.....lemme rethink that.
.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
and probably Canada....
Most other countries have a little more common sense when it comes to their women getting offended becuase of a nice pair or a bad word.
Bad words and boobies are reality. If you can't accept that, check out.
This is contrary to the perception that American workers are wasting too much time battling spam.
So only Americans get spam now? Well that settles it! I'm moving to canada!
...wait...
Sounds to me like their employees' email addresses aren't hanging around that long.
My email address has been public domain for
8 years now... makes all the difference in the
world as far as spam goes.
'sapientia potestas est'
At work, I get a ton of spam. I think I may have entered my work email address on one site once, and it just went everywhere. Now that I use a Hotmail account for all my public postings, I get no spam on any of my personal email accounts, except the Hotmail account, of course.
The ability to SPAM places the power of the mass media in the hands of the individual. Although SPAM can be extrememly annoying, I think the price to pay is well worth it because it can be used as a powerful force for the democritization of information. By quashing SPAM, the common person is cut off from the ability to reach a mass audience (they could start a web page but people must be AWARE of it in order that their message gets out). In other words, quashing SPAM has the effect of helping to silence dissent. Then the power of the mass media is held only by the corporate elite.
I work for a Rather Large Company (tm) and was tasked with architecting the mailgate for the entire company. Several requirements:
1) Ingress spam & virus filtration;
2) LDAP directory integration;
3) Message address rewriting on ingress & egress.
See, I was tasked with this when our company merged with 3 other ones, so we had a mess of Exchange and Notes servers out there. The idea was for me (your friendly local Unix sysadmin) to build a single ingress/egress point (my boxes) while the NT admins rebuilt all the exchange & notes servers into one coherent infrastructure. (That's a lot of work with ~40,000 employees!)
Anywho, the way I did it was to install a pair of Sun boxes in our DMZ with Trend Micro VirusWall on it, as well as their eManager product. That handles our ingress spam & virus filtration. That product proxies an inbound connection on port 25 to another pair of Sun boxen that run Sendmail gateways, which, thanks to some custom rules, do the LDAP lookups & address translations.
So we have multiple levels of SPAM & virus filtration -- the Trend stuff is very simplistic, crappy, relatively undocumented code, and works exactly as designed. As much as it looks amateurish to me, I can't help but to recommend it because it Just Freakin' Works. Also, if you're a big enough fish, the folks at Trend are incredibly friendly & helpful -- several of our suggestions made it into the product.
Someone high-up in our organization decided after Nimda and Code Red that all inbound messages with attachments should be quarantined for an hour, because Trend promised virus pattern updates within an hour after a virus outbreak. We were able to graft that on using some shell scripts. Works just peachy.
Between Trend Micro & Sendmail, we've got a GREAT solution that gives us plenty of filters. We have all the spam & anti-virus filters using Trend, and can block or redirect by domain using a mailertable with Sendmail. Also, the LDAP support in Sendmail wasn't very good when we started integrating that (8.10 was the first usable LDAP release), but by 8.12, it works great. We redirect the message internal to the company based on what's in LDAP, and it works flawlessly for ~1 million messages/day.
Tastes great, less filling. And mostly free software (Sendmail was free, as was the Directory Server, since that license comes with Solaris.) All we paid for was the Trend Micro stuff, which we had a site license for anyway since we use it on the Exchange servers as well.
So yeah, I'd have to agree that SPAM isn't NEARLY the problem at work that it is at home. Also, since we got the Exchange servers out of the SMTP business and "just" for mailboxes, we haven't had a virus outbreak since. Lovely!
--NBVB
Don't knock the Baysian approach until you've tried it.
As Paul Graham said, the thing about spam that can't change is the message. If they start sending things that don't have spam like messages in them, they're no longer spam.
Since the spam messages are relatively easily recognized by simple naive Bayesian approaches, these filters work very well.
I use bogofilter from ESR in a procmail script. the first thing the procmail script does is bogofilter, if it classifies as spam, I put in in "spam" otherwise it passes through to my other filters.
I never lose anything. Spam never gets through, and the false positives are all things like auto-replies from online ordering, or people who were dumb enough to put html attachment stuff into an email list. These happen only a few per month.
I get about a hundred spams per week in the spam folder. I use mutt, and when i delete them I have mut automatically add the spams to the database.
it works. It doesn't save my bandwidth but it saves me having to do anything about spam.
((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) http://www.endpointcomputing.com a scientific approach to custom computing.
Worse than that, blocking access to Yahoo will break your employee's access to some of their owner's groups. You know, that impartial third party publishing kind of thing that folks at different companies use to share experience and knowledge that benifits all?
Congratulations on decreasing your rate of virus infection. You might have done better by installing Mozilla and making that your default browser. Is there any bogus policy on that one? I just don't get why some big companies insist on the bug farm that is Outlook.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
does the phrase "reported in this article by MSNBC.com" ring any alarms for anyone else here?
My mileage most definitely varies, and far too much at that.
C|N>K
I have to filter approximately 20 messages daily from my inbox, and they've gotten worse as the holidays approached. I guess everyone out there's hung up on the rampant consumerism and decided that they could "make money at home with your computer" to afford a new bike for Jonny or some other such rot.
Yet you complain when others say that it sucks to not be able to find their mail under a pile of shit. Hmmm, how much of your time do you waste dissing people?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
But I laughed when I recieved a 1 meg email telling us to tighten up our email polices. Why was it a 1 meg email? Because the sender used a 999k black and white image of his signiture.
...where i work spam is a major problem. YET, the lawyers i work for, DONT want their email filtered at all. Can you believe that? They're afraid that some important communication will be caught and they'll look bad.
--- I was far from home, and the spell of the Eastern sea was upon me. -Lovecraft-
My personal email accounts are spam-free and I'm not doing anything in the way of filtering. On the other hand, at work, where there are supposedly junk mail filters in place, I tend to see about 50%-75% of the email as junk. And that's not counting the stuff that I'm filtering into the Trash folder by filtering on my desktop. (So until the folks running the company's email infrastructure can get their poop in a pile, I can at least deal with it within my mail client.)
As a few other posters noted, co-workers can be the source of an awful lot of junk email. And much of that can be more time consuming to deal with than the obvious spam. Seeing bizaare, Unicode-like characters is a dead giveaway of a piece of junk email and make it quite easy to get rid of. But... the message from HR that contains a Powerpoint slideshow announcing the new look of the HR intranet site actually takes far longer to deal with.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I noticed this two years ago when I went to work for a responsible employer. I wondered about it for a while and then reached the natural conclusion that these people would've reached if they weren't stupid.
SPAM isn't prevented in the workplace because of diligant admins or hard working filters. It's prevented because companies don't sell their email addresses.
Point:
I signed up for flash.net a few years ago and was getting spam within the first 4 hours of having an account. This was using a new email address that wasen't easily guessable and probably wasen't given out before. This was also before spammers learned about dictionary attacks. How did they get my email? Someone at flash.net gave it to them.
Nowadays, after having some 3 letter email addresses for a few years dictionary attackers finally decided to probe our domain at work and found me, now I get about 1 spam a week.
My other account which uses first.middle.last@my.work.com notation hasen't been found yet and probably never will be, unless my company sells out and gives their email list away, or I screw up and sign myself up for spam.
SPAM is pretty much only a problem now because people are selling email addresses.
Experiment:
pick a hotmail address with totally random characters that nobody would pick before and see if you get spammed. If you do, then Microsoft is selling your email address.
Hotmail doesn't care though because you're an individual, it's not a corporate account and they don't lose revenue.
Point 2:
People with publicly visable email addresses get spammed all the time.
Apparently this survey was only on email addresses of people who barely use email. Have these people put their email address on a corperate webpage and see how much spam they get in a few weeks.
Think about how much spam you get. Then ask yourself "How did these motherfuckers get my email address?"
Sometimes it's obvious. I went to a conference one year and gave them my email address, which they posted on a webpage. Two years later someone sent an email to 3 people in my group at work, guess which 3 people were at a conference? Somebody had probed the webpage.
If you don't want spam, don't give you're email address out to ANYBODY you don't know. Use throwaway accounts for any online purchases.
If you already get spam without giving out your email address well then switch providers, because obviously the dickfucks at your ISP sold your account to a spam list.
Thats all...
Or mine either. I get so much freakin spam at work it is not funny. We have Spam Assasin (I think) and it fails miserably on about 10% of all my mail. Which 10% does not sound like much but it adds up.
I've been at my new job for a little over 4 months and have not gotten anything in the way of spam.
However, I have had two telemarketer calls already. One was one of those pre-recorded messages from a "Cowboy Bob" talking about how I can get a free pager.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
For years my thinking on spam filters was, "spam is the user's problem". Generally if you are careful about where your email address goes, my reasoning went, you won't be bothered. And, sure enough, I wasn't bothered.
But then I discovered that customers *were* bothered and bothered enough to switch their accounts in order to get email filtering. A bit of rethinking was in order here.
I implemented Message Wall on one of our boxes and had it connect to our regular email box. I figured that this way we could implement filtering and, if we didn't like it, we could move it off with just a DNS change. (The normal installation is to put it on the same box as the mail server but I didn't want to have to reconvert the mail server if I didn't like it.)
Messagewall has worked quite nicely in cutting down spam and email-borne viruses. We've implemented it on a school district too. One of the great things about it (besides "free") is that it has upgradable definitions, it's dead easy to exempt a user from the service, and it's free (did I mention that?).
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
That's basically my setup here as well, except that after virus checking, I pass the email onto procmail to have SpamAssassin run over it. *Then*, if it ain't spam, it get's forwarded to the Exchange server where a second, different virus checker scans it.
I tried eManager, but it was awful. SpamAssassin is much better.
dave
This is just so wrong! My home/personal email account has received maybe 5 spam in 3 years.
At work I receive anywhere from 10-50 per day - before filtering (where I can, one of my address is straight into a M$ exchange server which I can procmail on).
This post is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Here's the question for you though ....
:) Does it have a web GUI front end thingy so they can point-n-click rules on and off?
Since I'm the Unix sysadmin, I built this thing. I also maintain the Sendmail piece of it. The NT admins maintain the ruleset on the spam & eManager rules on the Trend server. They use TVCS so they can update the rules on both of our gateways, as well as on the Exchange servers.
Is spamassasin NT-admin-friendly?
--NBVB
...SPAM RECEIVES THE USERS.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... *gasp*... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHA...
A survey conducted by Pew Internet & American Life Project, whose findings are reported in this article by MSNBC.com, found that spam is certainly a problem for personal email accounts but not for company provided email accounts.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAA...
Thank you Slashdot for posting this hilarious article. It's almost as good as The Onion. It's nice to end the day with such a great laugh!
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
Who TF smoked up this article? Is it just me who gets tons of spam at work?
Oh. Sort of like when I got a mail from stevecase@aol.com asking me if I wanted a larger penis.
I receive almost nothing at work. My work spam is stupid crap like somebody replying to all in response to the email that the benefits department sent out explaining the new dental plan. For some reason, everybody in the whole office needs to know if Derek Johnson over in Marketing doesn't know what "accrued" means in this context.
Having read the thread in -1 I feel I must add that you don't need to automatically delete anything when you're using a spam filtering system. For both my personal domain (lots of addresses each used for a different set of mailing lists) and my work acccount (oops, I have Key3Media my email, bad idea) I have SpamAssassin score the messages then have procmail throw the bad ones into a spam box. A quick scan of the subject lines in that box is enough to make sure that nothing was mistagged.
It isn't perfect, I do get false positives but they are usually "You're the winner" messages from eBay sellers and are easy to spot and rescue. At work I go as far as to archive all messages for a month or two just in case something gets lost.
I really should go through the archives and check the ratio of X-Spam-Status: Yes to No's is.
- RustyTaco
While the other one I created around the same time and then never used.
Both names are the same except the unused email address has '83' appended to it.
I needed to use the second address a couple of days ago because I was sick of getting so much spam and decided I would start sending everything through the '83' address. When I logged in to the account for the first time in about 2 years there were a grand total of 2 Messages in it, both from my ISP.
Which basically means no one has tried to generate or brute force my account. It's with iPrimus in Australia, they are reasonably large probably second or third for users in Australia. So they would make a fairly good target for spammers.
nich
37 - what does it stand for really...
Finally, an article that states the blindingly obvious but constantly ignored fact that spam is not about to destroy life as we know it. Can we move on and be paranoid about something else now?
Virtually serving coffee
Some webmail type systems have a gui front end for Spamassassin - http://www.horde.org is one.
To be honest, I don't change the rules much, just edit the whitelist.
dave
anyone else with real names that hotmail doesn't like?)
This is known generically as "the Scunthorpe problem". Scunthorpe, BTW, is a town in England. It's not a dirty word, except to regexp matches for c--t.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
That is how the spam war will end: The spammers will become sophisticated enough that no matter what we do, any filter we try to use will result in too many false positives (falsely labelled "spam") to be of any use
At this point people will most probably switch to whitelists or somesort, however I had a horrible thought once when thinking about this.
<horrible_thought>
Another approach other than a whitelist is to include a signature like PGP in the email. This could be placed in the headers of the mail and attached by the mail client. Mail servers could have an option to check these signatures automatically, or the signature can be checked by the recieving mail client at the expense of a bit more bandwidth. Once the clients can transparently sign and verify messages this means that a user can choose to only to accept signed messages (i.e. I don't add you to a whitelist but you need a valid key). These keys need to be managed by some central authority which revokes keys if they are found to be used by spam, therefy causing all the messages sent to be useless.
My horrible thought is that MS is in the best position to offer this becasue of the Outlook/Hotmail dominance. They would call it their spam inititive and ship all updates to outlook with this feature, the next update when the feature is widespread would auto-enable the feature. This would block out most mail to and from non MS agents in the name of fighting SPAM.
</horrible_thought>
He who defends everything, defends nothing. -- Fredrick The Great
The real problem with home users is that 0.04% of them (read morons) actually buy the stuff being solicited. Talk about a minority rule. The best anti-spam algorithm is thus: "Don't buy their shit".
;-)
As much as I wish that were true, I know it isn't. Here is why: People still buy get rich quick schemes. This is how the spam mailing list and tools sellers pitch their scheme. "Just think about how you'll feel living in your new luxorious house, being your own boss, never having to worry about money, working the hours that you want to work...How it will feel to have more time with your family... The Amazing Spam-Money-Making System includes 100 million email addresses...."
So, even IF no one was buying from spammers it wouldn't stop new entrants into the spammer business. They just can't seem to pass up that amazing money making oppurtunity available only for a limited time.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
Most office workers don't use their work email address for anything much, so no one knows about their email address aside from maybe family and business contacts, of course spam will be lower. Any sort of server-side mail filtering is a gamble, to say the least. If anything gets mis-catagorized, it could be a disaster.... My company has discussed it and decided it is better to let users deal with it than risk trashing legitimate mail.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
if I was given an email address of the form xyz12@my-university.edu (initials + number)?
Seems to me, if you saw one such address, it'd be fairly trivial to come up with several thousand. I wonder if I might get less spam if they'd let me pick something less obvious.
Read Post reporter Shannon Henry's take on the same study -- online here.
- Telemarketers (we need a commercial statewide "do not call list"!)
- Virus hoaxes, cleanup & prevention (yes, we have multiple layers of defense)
- Fraudulent invoice scams (phone, fax, e-mail and snail mail)
- Spam
- Junk faxes
Spam is only #4 on my list of unnecessary time wasters. The telephone will die as a business tool before e-mail does, because it's much easier to filter e-mail than it is to pre-screen a phone call.I've complained about the spam situation more times than I can remember, mentioned how email addresses are being harvested off of our email servers, and described how much resource is probably being wasted processing and storing the spam, all to no avail. I mentioned anti-spam options, such as SpamAssassin, but nothing ever came of that, either. Perhaps I'm expecting too much from an IT department that's so heavily entrenched in Windows and Exchange...
Maybe this isn't totally on topic, but it is about spam and I just read it hear at work. I just got a spam email about Jesus and how he can save me, including a handy little prayer that will start me on my way, and also a suggestion to go to Google and search on "Bible". There's also a nice little opt-out link at the bottom.
Kind of caught me by surprise. I was expecting to delete my daily share of hot wet teen sluts.
Anyhow, the only workers inundated with spam are going to be those who post to internet sites and/or those who are responsible for reading email that comes into public email addresses (ie; webmaster, info, sales, etc). I am not surprised by the results.
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
....that's how many spam emails I get each day. We're forced to use Mac Outlook here at work, which has no HTML support and extremely poor filters; I can't unsubscribe, I can't weed them out, so I delete, delete, delete. An average weekend generates 300-400 spam emails.
And they're getting nastier. I went from tons of FTD.com and Perfumania emails to 50+ emails a day for rape porn, zoo porn, kiddie porn, and videos of people being bludgeoned. Jesus Christ, people. Leave me the fuck alone.
All but one of my users who complain about spam are actually receiving emails from sites they signed up for. It's amazing how a fiesty a 65 year old woman gets when you tell her the emails from eBay and hallmark are because she spends her time at work bidding on Beanie Babies and sending flowers.
I'm always very careful about not previewing spam email. I try to select all of the messages as a group and delete them. It's fairly easy to tell from the subject and the sender which ones are spam; I don't have to preview messages with subjects like "Barnyard animals!" to know that I don't want it.
Besides, previewing HTML spams only give the spammer the means to validate your email address and keep your account active.
You're not gettin' spam!!
For example someone showed me this , while it is no company, it must be the spammers delight to find out valid email adresses. Just try for example the name "black" (made up name) and you already get three valid email adresses. How hard would it be to point a robot at it and fire up different requests? Worst is actually that there is much more information than just the email address. I even doubt about the legality of such a system.
I'm pretty sure it's possible to find a lot of sites that allow this kind of functionality! I means, it's not as spammers shun from harvesting stuff from the whois database.
I just started using it about a week ago.
Even after starting with a very small sample of messages to define each bucket, the accuracy of determinations was suprising. Over the last week or so I've been correcting it on the emails it gets wrong. It's accuracy has been increasing dramatically. I havn't had to correct any assessments for the last 2 days.
Yes, the article said most spam never makes it to the inbox. It was filtered at the firewall or mail server. This means bandwidth was still consumed and servers were still burdened with locating and terminating the junk mail. This is a direct cost to the receivers, who must spend more on bandwidth and servers to maintain an acceptable quality of service despite the performance penalty of dealing with spam. It's theft of service, plain and simple. Why is it not prosecuted as such?
The top advert I get is from Microsoft.
google spam results
The advert
Spam - Get Internet Service From MICROSOFT!
join.msn.com Unlimited Access & Low Monthly
Rate - Call 1-866-900-MSN8
into the cost of fighting spam.
People keep saying spam costs money. Show me how spam costs money to the isp if they aren't filtering it. How much money, and how much of the total cost.
I don't know about you, but any ISP I've ever had doesn't filter my mail.
You are ranting about spam being evil, but not providing numbers.
Yes, it annoys people. So what. Lots of things annoy people. Once in a while you get a piece of gristle in your KFC burger.. so what.
I want to see costs.
I wade through tons of spam at work. I do have filters on my email client, which at least redirects most of it out of my Inbox. But I'd say I still get dozens, if not hundreds, each day.
I'm the sysadmin, though, so I guess I've got no one to blame but myself....
One of the other big offenders when it comes to spam is Exchange if the admin doesn't turn off anonymous LDAP. With anonymous LDAP, a harvester can easily harvest a list of every email address on that server.