Slashdot Mirror
Forty Percent of All Email is Spam
PCOL writes "There's an interesting article on spam in today's Washington Post which includes an inside look at AOL's spam control center in Northern Virginia. The story reports that roughly 40 percent of all e-mail traffic in the US is now spam, up from 8 percent in late 2001 and nearly doubling in the past six months; that AOL's spam filters now block 1 billion messages a day; and that spam will cost U.S. organizations more than $10 billion this year from lost productivity and the equipment, software and manpower needed to combat the problem."
Compared to Slashdot posts!
And 90% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Ironic. Forty percent of spam is pork.
So who gets the 60% of the regular email I'm supposed to get?
call your congressperson and have them pass an anti-spam bill. that's the only way to solve this problem
Cyberbite Networks - Web Hosting, Dedicated Servers & Colocati
about spam stopping software.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
I seem to get a lot more spam than "legitimate" email. I guess I must have fewer friends. :(
90% of my email is spam
I wondder how accurate the AOL spam filter is. If some people are accidentaly getting their emails blocked or others not getting emails delivered. Does anyone know on which principal the AOL filter works. Is it just a bunch of email addresses known to be spammers or is it some kind of guessing filter that has certain words and phrases coined as spam.
I think this is a bit optimistic. I get 300 peices of email a day, and I'm lucky if more then 50 are legitimate mail.
01101001 01100001 01101101 01101110 01101111 01110100 01100001 01101100 01100001 01110111 01111001 01100101 01110010
The front line in the war against spam is inside an unmarked building in Northern Virginia, where a bank of computer screens tracks the volume of e-mail pouring into the system used by America Online's 35 million subscribers.
AOL is a spam fighter? Sometimes I think that spam was born because of AOL and its users.
LOL!
Are there any estimates to the total revenue generated by spam for spammers? If it were less than $10 billion, we should be able to simply bribe them to stop spamming.
This is not a signature.
I'd say more like 60% though. However, i'd also say that 40% of idiots make up statistics to prove their point, and 90% of people know that.
Anyway, I get about 1800 messages a day, total. Messages are ran through procmail and a complex spam filtering perl script that I wrote for myself. about 600-700 messages are blocked per day, therefore being more than 40%.
I'd also state that most SMB popups are SPAM.
Did you know 40% of all email is spam?!! to find out mo...
this sig steers like a cow. and i can prove it
Sure, we'll still have to worry about foreign sources, but I'm sure the U.N. will be happy to help with this issue.
I had a sucky sig.
I administer a Spam filter for a state University in Tennessee. Since I began filtering, I have trapped about 42% of all email bound for faculty and staff. Some spam still gets through, but the impact on our pop and imap servers has been greatly reduced.
550 Spammer Go Away!
I don't want to quibble about the specific number, but how do they decide what is spam? Much of the decision is somewhat ambiguous.
Once spam makes a substantial dent in corporate america's profits, you can bet there will be a federal law passed banning the practice. Granted, we slashdotters might not like the fact that Corporate America(tm) controls Congress, but in this case, it can actually do us some good...
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Yeah right. Just like the new telemarketing bill that has loopholes for some of the worst telemarketers.
So, we all agree that Spam is a problem. We all agree that legislating Spam out of existance isn't going to work, due to the international design of the Internet. So what needs to be developed is a backwards-compatible mail transfer protocol that authenticates the user to the sending server and forwards the message to the recieving server, who contacts the sending server back and verifies the user's identity.
I'm no software designer, but surely we could find some concept for migrating off of SMTP and POP and to a better, more secure protocol.
Other thoughts?
-cheezus_es_lard
The srticle states that 40% of Internet traffic is Spam. And where does this statistic comec from? From Brightmail...a vendor of anti-spam software. Remember...liars, damn liars, and statisticians
Always value the individual over the system. --Bruce Lee "I don't need a Sig - I have a custom 191" - me
Over 80% of the emails I receive into my main email box are spam. If I get one more "buy this pasta pot" or "enlarge a body part" email I'm gonna go crazy.
Seriously, I'd like anyone'e opinion/ideas on what may be done about the spam issue besides filters.
Any ideas? Post!
Aside from the AOL spam control center, most of the spam prevention discussed in this email is aimed at trying to stop the sender through legislation and black lists. Legislation will never work, and black lists are marginal.
The answer to this shortcoming in the current email infrastructure is redesigning email protocols to allow spam to be stopped as it is sent.
I don't have the answer, but something that forces the sender to verify that the recipient will accept the message before it is relayed will be a start. I also like the idea that came from Microsoft recently of forcing the sender to pay the recipient a small amount of money.
The problem with bayesian filters is that they filter too much spam. The more people that use bayesian filters, the more messages the spammers will have to send to get through. Because it is almost free to send messages, they will continue to increase the number of messages they send until it gets to a point that email infrastructure can't handle it anymore.
In the past 2 months, using a combination of tools including SpamAssassin, I have managed to block approximately 32000 spam mail a week. This is more than 50% of our incoming mail.
I will note that in general this is only coming to around 20% of our users. It is approximately 100 messages per user per day. This actually seems reasonable compared to one of my email accounts that is on a webpage.
So I would say the only reason the amount of spam is so low is that enough people in our firm don't give out their firm email addresses on the internet to strangers.
Although they do miss out on alot of great offers for Hovercraft Toys.
I think not- too much spam
I hate spiced ham. That fucking mailman leaves me way too much- way can't he just run off with my wife?
"Granted, we slashdotters might not like the fact that Corporate America(tm) controls Congress"
Enough with the wacky left-wing conspiracy theories.
Funny way Congress has of serving those who "control" it: they tax the hell out of the vast majority of corporations and are always adding on more regulations and hindrances.
I have no friends, 100% of my emails are Spam!
Citing "Freedom of speach", the first ammendment, etc, there still seems to be an ignorant crowd that thinks that we shouldn't have any legal means to curb spam. They still think technology can solve a social problem. As ISPs put increasingly invasive filters on email servers, legit email gets lost. When 99% of all email is spam, will you STILL think it's ok? When ISP's raise your internet fees due to spam, will you still defend its legality? When you are on the road paying $.50 / minute downloading spam for half an hour, even though your local filter blocks it from your view will you still be happy?
There are people who want to re-invent the email protocol to solve the problem. Yeah, doing something technological can help the FUTURE, but what are we going to do for the 5 years it takes to develop, implement, and deploy this new technology?
Think about it.
The real problem with spam is the economics: it costs next to nothing to send a message, the only real cost (time) is borne by the recipient. Fix that problem and spam will go away. It doesn't need legislation, which in any case could apply in just one jurisdiction.
A system like Hash Cash could solve the problem. The most popular free mail clients could start including hash-cash postage with each sent message, and then in a couple of years' time start to drop incoming messages that don't have postage paid. AOL could include hash cash in their mail client easily. *Easily*. That spam-detection centre they run is not cheap. Even Microsoft would add hash cash to Outlook, Outlook Express and Hotmail, since it's another encouragement to upgrade to a new Outlook release (which of course requires a new Windows version).
Getting the whole world to upgrade its mail clients is a hard task, but getting every government in the world to pass anti-spam laws and enforce them is much harder. Goodness knows it's bad enough trying to get _one_ legislature to take a sane view on anything technology-related.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Kind of funny when a post that attacks someone for "fear" includes a bit of anti-semitism midway through it.
"Propaganda's m'friend But I calls it "fact""
Propaganda is in fact typically a meaningless term. Quite often what is labelled "propaganda" is factual, but it is labelled "propaganda" for the sole reason that the opponent does not agree with the facts presented and would rather see them censored or otherwise dismissed.
that the biggest purveyor of filling my postal mail box with crap that I haven't signed up for or asked for (ie: cd's and cd holders that are worthless), is now fighting spam. Give me a break! How about they stop mailing those stupid #@%@$%^& cd's and filling the landfills with garbage that doesn't degrade. They are hypocrites!
Money not found! A)bort, R)etry, D)eclare Bankruptcy
According to some study I read somewhere.
I suggest you read Slashdot
I wonder how much it costs the USPS from lost productivity, equipment, software and manpower needed to combat the problem of THOSE DAMNED AOL CDs!?
Bayesian filters are definitely the way to go. They flat-out *work*. Other programs I've used just didn't perform, like Cloudmark Spamnet.
You know it's a funny thing because businesses like and hate spam. They like it because it brings in money and they hate it because they have to spend money on spam filters and lost work time.
Here is a possible solution. Spammers cover their tracks. Well instead of trying to go after spammers go after the business that use them. Those businesses MUST be traceable because they include ways to buy their product. If we must make a law, which would only work in the US, it should say "You can't hire a spammer to send your mail". Then when www.pacificmeds.com sends me a spam for "save money on prescription drugs" they can be fined.
Go after the source, not the person who fills the need. Once the need is squashed by the law spam will reduce greatly.
{Complaint}It the past 6 months are so I have been recieving about 200% more spam. I get to work in the morning and delete 90% of my e-mail becasue its spam. Out of every 200-300 e-mails I recieve, I actual only care about 10-20 of them, the rest is spam.{/Complaint}
The problem is that nobody can find a reasonable solution. Here are some examples of common solutions:
1."Make spam illegal out right."
Problem: OK, this is a bit extreme. Even if you did manage to do that, companies from outside the US or companies/people can hide where the e-mails are coming from, good luck catching them.
2."Charge for e-mails."
Problem: The people that want that are the post office folks. I seriously doubt anybody would sit back and allow this. Just thinking about pisses me off.
3."Find the people that send spam and destroy them."
Problem: OK, this is my personal favorite. But, the goverment already made that illegal. It's like the saying goes: "Some people are alive simply because it is illegal to kill them." BTW, all of you peeps out there that are going to yell at me for suggesting something like that: RELAX, IT WAS A JOKE!!! Have a sense of humor for goodness sake.
That's just my opinion,
SirLantos
The flying hamster of DOOM rains coconuts on your pitiful city.
Most of the new "spam" are resumes being emailed out by out of work programmers.
I don't have any problem determining what spam is and what it isn't. Why would there be any ambiguity?
This is a very interesting statistic.
Long time slashdot readers will note that the posts for any given story usually settle down to about 33.3%-45% "-1" ratings.
I'm just saying.
after renaming "french fries" Congress has just decided to rename "spam" as "french email" !
3 legitimate Emails and 81 spams this morning. typically my spam filter catches between 60-120 a day on my work address and I have to add 3-4 more rules a week to keep it down.
A simple solution is replacing the broken SMTP with something that requires authentication and doesnt give you the ability to modify the headers unless you run the server. If the spammers have to use real email addresses or had a real way of tracking them easily attached to every email, they would stop.
Just like how cockroaches scatter when you turn on the lights.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
My theory: most spammers are the cyber equivalent of "flashers" - sexual deviants who derive thrill from shocking unsuspecting citizens. I believe that the products offered are largely irrelevant. It is the shock value which motivates the spammer. Perhaps they could be prosecuted under similar sex crimes laws that allow us to go after the "flasher".
The front line in the war against spam is inside an unmarked building in Northern Virginia, where a bank of computer screens tracks the volume of e-mail pouring into the system used by America Online's 35 million subscribers.
If AOL is the front line, then it's "Springtime for Spammer and Pornography!"
The 40% figure is interesting - I wonder how they calculated that number?
At work, my email is about 80% spam, 15% inhouse email, and 5% legitimate internet email. My new slashdot@cindik.com address (started about two weeks ago and going away real soon now) is 100% spam (most of which is caught by SpamAssassin).
Terrycloth Lobster
According to POPFile only 18% of my email messages are spam, but it's 46% when you take the file sizes into account. The total memory fraction would seem to be a more relevant measurement if you're an ISP concerned about spam's costs.
So, when they say 40%, is that by number of messages or total size?
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
Forty percent? That's nothing. Sturgeon's Law states that ninety percent of everything is crap.
-kgj
Are you tired of not being able to play the piano or type as gracefully as you should be able to? Are your stubby fingers not as dexterious for those little jobs? You need our herbal finger lenghtener! When used over a five week period most test subjects lengthened their fingers by more than 20%.
It's all natural and quite inexpensive compared to the productivity increase you will have with longer more graceful fingers.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Now, a white list like this can be bypassed by a spammer claiming to be a friend of mine. It can't claim to be me, because my filters automatically delete anything sent to my address claiming to come from me. I'm wondering if anyone else who has implemented a white list for themselves has seen any problems with it.
i run a small isp's mail server system (~30k accounts) and just our dnsbl blocks about 60% of all incoming e-mail. spamassassin and various other techniques pick out about 5-10% more of the overall.
Blocking spam before it gets to our main mail server has extended the life of our mail server indefinately. The less we have to spend on hardware, the more time and energy we can spend on building quality of service for our customers. That keeps the customers happy, and keeps the business people doubly happy, since they don't lose customers and don't have to buy new hardware every year for a mail system.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
I use RBLs here and we block about 35% of incoming as Spam. Given I still get a lot of spam anyway, I'm assuming 40% is probably real accurate.
Okay, you caught me. Corporate America is our favorite scapegoat...
But seriously, though, in the US, money is power. Since the current administration is rather business friendly (and this is NOT necessarily a bad thing - I have to eat, too...), the big corporations have a bit more lattitude to "suggest" laws than they did in previous administrations. My point was that someone with the power to change things is finally taking notice of the spam problem.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
To those who suspect the messenger, the numbers match my company's experience. The scary part is that spam traffic continues to double every six months.
People who disagree with you are not automatically evil, greedy, or stupid.
it is creating jobs. it is increasing hardware sales.
it is a revenue generating system.
yay spam!
seriously though, I *wish* spam was only 40% of my mail.
I also wish I had a gold plated Bentley.
In fact, I'll take the latter over the former any day.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
95% of all email is spam. The rest is my project manager sending out emails about TPS reports.
You can't handle the truth.
For every action there is a counter reaction, right? Fight back! You can do it passively by setting up filters (Mozilla does an excellent job in that department) or spam back the spammers. The trick is to find spam that originates from a legid address. Send an email to that address and see if it goes through. Then set up a script on every single computer on your home network (which in my case is several FreeBSD boxes) and mail random crap to spammers (a cron entry works beautifully). Believe it or not I actually got a reply from a person saying that they got the point and removed me from the list. The other guys were persistent. In order to get rid of them (they did have actual usernames in the email address) I had to go to every goddamn gay porn site and subscribe them to free porn and a newsletter. I know, some of you will say that I have a lot of free time on my hands and may be I do. But every person who gets spam does something about it, including calling a senator and pushing for laws, I think we can fight it.
I found it interesting that there were comments about `legitimate' business' that feel spam is ruining their message. I have never looked at email not sent to me by people I knew. Email advertising is even less effective in my opinion than flyers that are sent in the mail. Admittedly any percentage that would check out that kind of advertising is put off by spam. I find the difference between unsolicited email from `legitimate' companies compared to scams to be negligible. I didn't ask for either.
I figure I get about 425,000 a day myself at this point (er, give or take). It's at the point where it's getting painful to go through my SpamAssassin "caughtspam" folder. But there are still enough false positives (really, one is enough) that I can't send the whole thing to /dev/null.
Meanwhile, I'm accruing a great collection of classic spam subject lines. Some examples (all real):
- "I don't need your social security number yet"
- "this mom loves to stick hot dogs up her cooch"
- "Pill to Increase Your Ejaculation by 581%"
- "i am not perfect but i suck c0ck"
- "I got revenge by fucking! Here's proof
:)"
- "Mission: To fuck as many mothers as I can!"
- "Fucking Machines! 13IN,
.5HP, 350RPM"
- "Your slut wife boss need some action!"
- "#1 COLON CLEANSER! SEE PROOF"
- "Maybe your pets dream of intercourse with you"
Mmmm, society at its finest.wordclock records
Just one man's data.
I just reported that 100% of spam is e-mail.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
AOL does no filtering on the content only on the header information. It does nothing with the content of the email messages. It forwards every mail that is accepted by its mail servers to the users. Thats why AOL only blocks about 50% of the stuff. Even if they accepted the mail, they should be deleting or giving me the option of deleting without seeing every mail that wants to increase my unit's size or my wife's boobs and the pharmacy come ons and the Norton junk. But AOL continues to act like a single lost email is the end of the world. Well give the users some tools and let them decide. No wonder they are losing subcribers, they don't know how to deal with the number one annoyance on the internet today.
Look at something like telemarketers. They do not call you at work, only at home. I see something like that as being the first step for Congress. Eliminate all spams to domains designated as Corporations. I think they will first try to stop spam from actually hurting businesses and then move on to individual users. After all, the People are really just an afterthought to Government.
Anyone have any idea how much snail mail is "spam"? Looking at my mailbox, I'd be willing to believe the 40% for e-mail spam in comparison is low. We worry about bandwidth and lost productivity when it comes to E-mail spam. Why don't we worry as much about the post office system and how much time and money gets wasted every day mailing me this unwanted stuff? Is E-mail spam costing us more than snail mail spam?
You call this a signature?
The problem with filters at the ISP/Mail Server is that one persons spam is anothers desired mail. How do correct for this?
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
but i wish only 40% of all email was spam.
96-98% if the incoming mail to my primary e-mail account is spam. 40% my ass...
If it is by quantity (the number of mails received it is probably close to correct) but if it is by data volume (if you open the html ones at least I would say that the figure is a bit low...
--My sig is bigger than your sig--
That reminds me. I'm looking for a Linux SMTP 'bayesian filter' proxy that can be remotely administrated via a web interface, that can interface with IMAP and POP3 mailboxes, and works well with any standard E-Mail client.
What we need is an old fashion torch burning mob running around and storming these Kings of Spam to roast them alive. I'm sure we would have NO objections from anybody. I hate the strange hints that my penis is too small. Is it? Is there something someone is not telling me? I don't think it's too small. I think it's normal.
WTF is up with these printer ink mail. Do they think I'm running an illegal printing shop and I need all this ink because I'm running 24x7? I should be printing fake 20 dollar bills and but more ink!
q.e.d.
Cheers,
-- RLJ
I (if you want to me, email at gergi@aol.com!) don't know why I get so much spam (gergi@aol.com if you know of a good solution to get rid of it!) I'm very friendly and social (gergi@aol.com to reach me) and I don't know why people would spam me at gergi@aol.com!
Later,
gergi@aol.com
Nosce te Ipsum
We use BrightMail and are very happy with them. If anyone can give you fairly accurate stats, it is them due to how they work.
They monitor a LOT of mail boxes...many customers plus many created mailboxes for spam. If a message hits a number of mailboxes in a short time span that message is forwarded to their NOC. A person looks at it and decides if it's spam. If so they tag it as spam before sending it to other customers that receive it.
It works very well. We now block almost all of the spam we receive and have not had ONE single false positive.
Well hey, I suppose if the supposed "email tax" ever went into effect somehow, we could that it for less spam. Unless Bill Gates one day decided he wanted to unleash his wrath on the world in the form of spam. That would probably be bad.
40% of all ISP revenues are from spammers.
It wasn't until I setup a spam filtering mail relay for my home network using a FreeBSD server running Postfix and SpamAssassin, that it really hit home just how much spam I was getting on a daily basis. Postfix is using RBLs and header filtering criteria, and that kills a lot of the spam outright. That which passes Postfix is analyzed by SpamAssassin and flagged as spam in the subject line. My MUA filters my mail and moves flagged messages to a designated SPAM folder for review before I delete it (because I will never trust an automated process like this 100%). Now that my legitimate mail is nicely sorted from my junk mail, the percentage is staggeringly obvious. I get 4 to 5 times the amount of junk mail as legitimate mail, and that is with Postfix kicking a large portion of the inbound mail before it ever hits SpamAssassin! I don't have precise figures on how many Postfix kicks, but my mail log is flooded with Postfix reject messages. And you can add to that the fact that I firewall access to my mailserver from all of Latin America and Asia because of the high volume of spam and network attacks sourced from those regions.
Based on my guesstimation, I'd say that 90-95% of my inbound email is spam. And given the fact that bandwidth and CPU power keep getting faster, cheaper, and more available, I can only see the spam problem getting worse.
Short of changing my email address, is there any way I can stop them?
I think this could almost be measured on a sliding scale based on lifetime of an account. Once a user opens a new account - unless the email address is easily guessable or his email provided sells it off - spam volume per real email will be low.
Then, you get a few friends your email. General email volume increases. You sign up for some server or other and forget to use a protect email... spam starts to drip in.
A little while later, the drip becomes a trickle as your email gets sold again, and again, and spreads like splitting amoebas.
Then... a few friends send you e-cards around Christmas, or invite you to some joke sites etc. Not your really gonna get it (I strongly b*tch-out any who e-card me at my work address).
To top it off, a LUG or whatever you are posting to puts their history on a public website... you start getting picked up by spam-spiders.
So over time, one will go from maybe 0-5% spam, to 50+% spam. As more people get you in their address books, the more likely it is that somebody will let your email slip to a spam-source. And spam-sources sell your email to other spam-sources... it spreads like wildfire.
The best way to protect yourself is to use a difficult-to-guess, 9+ character email, for which you never sign up for anything with, and only give to people you trust not to e-card you or have "sniffers" installed on their system which gives away the address book. Using bounce addresses might help also, as you could then switch bounces but still pull from the main email, and then filter the ones that get messy or drop them.
You have to have no sense of irony at all (or outrage) to actually buy a pop-up blocker from the asshole who keep spamming you. Might as well buy anti-spam software from a popup.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
$10 billion, that's a lot of money, and therefore an argument that George W. Bush might listen to. So, how about lobbying the US government into declaring spam "terrorist activity"? Just imagine the concept of special troops hunting down spammers, then locking them up without without a trial and throwing away the keys. Unless you bombed them off the face of the earth directly... In either case, we could even laugh our asses off while watching it live on TV!
If ISPs could find some way to limit each accounts number of outgoing messages, or charge per outgoing message over, say, 500 messages a day, this would probably be much less of a problem.
At the core of this problem is the Accountability Void, and the temptation that carries with it. When you look at the lengths that (some) ISPs and watchdogs go to block (much to libertarian chagrin) kiddie porn and other potentially offensive material, its clear that solving the spam problem is NOT about technical feasibility. If there was impetus there would be a solution. The problem is that the ISP can say "we dont send it, we dont receive it, its not our problem," the spammer can say "I send it, but I use fake accounts that get closed in 6 hours, so I don't have to take responsibility for it" and, for the most part, the receiver says "I received this, but theres really not much I can do about it." I describe this phenomenon as an "Accountability Void." No one is responsible for spam.
Until there is an accountability structure in place, either legislative, technical, or economic, spam will go on. One of these days, AOL or some other "big enough" player is going to do something that will "change everything" like demand digital signatures, or some other method that fills the accountability void and spam will cease to be a problem.
This too shall pass.
The problem is, you are still getting spam. The filter may block you from seeing most of it, and it may stop you from getting tags with linked images, etc... but it's still coming in.
You, and your ISP, are paying for the bandwidth it uses. And if you ever had to travel and get email by dialup/cellphone... you can expect that you'll notice spam simply by the large delays it takes you to download email.
Client-side filters only mask the problem... it's like having an air-freshener and big fan in a public washroom.... the stink is still lingering in the background.
Just who are the people who are responding to spam?
Years ago there was the excuse that inexperienced users thought it novel, but surely not now....
The only way it can work is for people to respond to the mails..
One stat that's held fairly constant during the 2.5 years that spamgourmet has been running is that 90% of email messages to spamgourmet addresses are blocked (actually ignored) as unwanted email.
A little background is in order -- spamgourmet users invent disposable email addresses at their whims, and by default each is valid for a particular number of messages (they can be "refilled" or made permanent for certain senders if the user takes action). Therefore, it can be said that, understanding the way this works, the users have declared that they actually want 10% of the email that comes to those addresses.
Granted, the users are engaing in "high risk" behavior because they know they are protected -- that is, disposable addresses fall into the hands of people who are likely to try to abuse them at a higher rate than normal addresses do. Still, for this sort of activity (signing up for things on the web, public postings, etc.) it seems safe to say that 90% of the resulting email is unwanted.
As a spamgourmet developer, I forward my "eaten" mail to a yahoo account. In the two + years I've been doing this, there have been only two false positive messages -- I can truly say I'm glad I didn't get the rest, because I saw them. My personal ratio is 77%, and this includes a great number of delivered test messages that didn't result in spammage later.
This may be a more expansive definition of spam than what is popular, but it works for me...
who's moderating the meta-moderators?
If there were a system that charged people for each time a mail left their organization's server for another organization's server, this would just about kill spam. It is used because it is free. Make it cost money and the problem is solved.
How could this money be put to use? Better internet services, perhaps to offset ISP costs, etc..
This type of change would be very difficult to implement, and is perhaps not ideal. It is an option to not only keep spammers from bouncing e-mails around, but it will also REALLY make people with open relay recognize that it is a "bad thing" and shut it down. Nothing like getting a big old bill for a bunch of e-mail someone bounced off of your server to make you think about investing a small amount to fix the issue. People might take their internet services more seriously, and the IT industry might even see a bit of a boost fromk the needs of people to get compliant and out of trouble.
Just an idea...
My primary email addy is yahoo, and while I do appreciate some of their efforts in blocking spam (and adding that XFiltered-bulk header) what pisses me off... is that they filter out my Homing Beacon newsletter from Starwars.com!!!
Eeegads! Thats probably the most valuable piece of email I get!
sad robot making broken music
Choose:
1- Create New Law
2- Let ISPs recoup some investment using new ideas?
Seems like instead of using profitable ideas, we shield ourselves with new laws. Why does this feel wrong?
Spam varies a lot from domain to domain. One of my mail servers gets 90% spam, the other gets about 40% spam. So, 40% and rising is probably correct for the average.
If you don't post your email, 0% is spam. If you classify all mail as spam then 100% is spam. Your a dumb ass.
Don't focus on a single approach to spam elimination. 1) filter your mail 2) secure your MTAs 3) boycott businesses that us spam for marketing 4) block unsecured MTAs 5) spam the spammers and companies that use them. Dealing with counter-spam alone would make it too expensive to use spam as a marketing tool.
I get maybe 2-3 junk mail messages a day to my real account and those are to the guy that previously had my domain name. I simply use a fake email to fill out forms on websites. If a valid email is required I have a hotmail account used only for that purpose.
Spam is not the unstoppable killing machine sent from the future to destroy mankinds' last hope of survival that you think it is.
Sure, spam is an objective, universal evil. But kee-rist, why pay $29.95 a month to access a walled garden of content with bad spam filters? I mean really. WTF?
According the Postini service my ISP provides, it's currently 66%, which makes a lot more sense. FYI, this is a very good filter. All false positives I've gotten were mailing lists, and there was only one spam message that got through.
URL for their statistics: http://www.postini.com/stats/index.html
so a, is a.o.l. hiring in the southern california area?
"Corporate speech is not the same as individual speech."
It is all the SAME, since all corporate speech by necessity is produced by individuals.
What is your angle? Typically, this is pointed up by those who want to censor certain types of speech because they do not like the content or who is saying it.
The Constitution does not work that way. There is no Asterisk after the first amendment that says "free speech does not apply if you are a member of certain organizations".
Wow. Nice to see AOL do something semi-useful. Now only if the U.S. Postal Service would block 40% of AOL CD's...
Excuse me while I look into this "Free Vacation!!!" I just received from "Stella".
If I had something intelligent to say, I would have said it.
- Make spam illegal.
- Persecute, sorry Prosecute local spammers and do somethnig humane to them (such a use an anesthetic when you cut off their hands).
- Find all countries still harboring spammers.
- Issue trade sanctions against them.
- If this doesn't work, invade them, find the spammers and burn their houses down.
- ...
- Profit!!!
Okay, it's extreme but it might just work...-1 flamebait.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Spam is not just a problem of numbers of emails, but also how big the darn things are. My filter's stats so far for this month reveal that while spam is barely over half of the quantity of mail I get but is over FOUR TIMES the size of real email:
Total Volume Sent on as Clean Mail: 211 (342.3KB ) 44.8%
Total Spam Messages: 260 (1.4MB ) 55.2%
This is the most important evil of the spam flood; not only do I not want it but it's huge!
AOL HAS to be one of the biggest reasons USPS is still alive today. Generally, people don't send letters anymore... people are stopping sending cards too... now they send an E-card... cheeper and just as thoughtful
" Didn't your mummy ever tell you that "two wrongs don't make a right"?"
No, they make a little wong.
I am an AOL bring-your-own-connection subscriber, and I've been on AOL for years, and yes, I read slashdot. For a while it was the only ISP that I could reliably use, and I've been too lazy until recently to change, and I'm still on there, bringing my own connection, until I wean myself off of that.
Six months ago, I was getting 40-50 spams a day. Today, I'll get 10-15. Not great, but a solid improvement. I report every spam I get via the button they provide, and hey, at least it seems to be working a bit. It might not be the best system in place (ok, no might about it), but it is working.
The base problem with spam is that it shifts the cost to the victim, the only technical solution is to shift that cost back to the sender so all (or most) costs are transfered to the sender of the mail rather than letting the receiver bear the cost of storage
An exelent proposal is IM2000.
-- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][
It seems to me that stopping spam wouldn't be that difficult. Spam seems to be catogorized like this.
Type 1- Legitimate headers. No problem you've got someone to harass to remove you from the list. You can look up the domain name contact the admin and generally make their lives difficult. And if all else fails simply block everything from that domain.
Type 2- Forged headers, can't even send a bounce message back no real options for tracing short of contacting the isp in charge of the ip address.
Type 1 doesn't seem to be a problem. Type 2 is where most of my spam seems to come from. It seems that the simple solution would be when
sendmail/qmail whatever is receiving the message and gets the reply-to address it should pause and see if it exists. If it doesn't just leave the connection open and if they are bulk spamming
the server it's coming through will quickly have issues when it has 20,000 hanging connections. When a user pops/imaps to check their mail have the pop server see if the reply-to exists, if they don't dump it to dev null. It would seem that this would keep emails trackable. For it to get to the user the user would have the ability to get back to a person.
So my question becomes, what's the hole in this kind of answer? It seems simple enough. Am i missing something?
And yes i know my spelling is horible...
#### ## Laroue ####
The article stated the figure came from Brightmail not AOL.
If it was AOL or Verizon, then I would think that the numbers would be skewed as they have sued spammers and those spammers have agreed not to send spam on those networks.
Grasshopper, remember the two rules of spammers.
1. Spammers lie.
2. If a spammer says anything, see rule 1.
Fight Spammers!
Email as in the idea of individual messages sent to individual accounts on particular IP addresses is still quite useful. The problem isn't email but the particular method used to transport email SMTP.
I think the technological solution to the email problem is to move away from SMTP towards a much more spam proof system. The core problem of spam is that the sender can fake the origin. Simply create a proticol where that isn't possible (for example all email is encrypted and to decrypt it requires knowing the senders actual public key).
Spam... aparantly it IS what's for dinner... and lunch... and breakfast...
Fuzzy Knights: New RPG Strips Tuesday and Friday!:
http://www.fuzzyknights.com
...at least as far as 90% of end users are concerned.
:) but isn't feasible in the real world.
On my Cingular phone, I have the capability of setting up a simple "Reject if not in list" filter, this weeds out anyone I don't know and anyone I don't want calling me on my cellphone.
On my mail filter I have whitelisting, if you're not on the whitelist, I don't see your e-mails ever. No need to holistic filtering techniques, RBL's, or anything else... if you're not pre-approved to contact me you eat a bounced e-mail.
Now that simple filtering method should cover all end-users, home accounts, and the like. The only accounts that should now be able to receive spam are your group and management accounts. root@, webmaster@, sales@, etc.. cannot readily be blocked this way unless you're looking to minimize your customer and user base (which would be fine on some days...
However, that is one place legislation can take care of business.... Any UBE\SPAM\Junk to management addresses should be punishable by large fines, perhaps some caning, beatings, etc.. as your local human rights limits allow =)
And for those that want to receive spam there is always the opt-in by not using whitelisting.
Your personal whitelist will just be something else you can carry with you like your checkbook or USB drive/smart card...go into an internet cafe, stick in your USB dongle, check your e-mail. Web based e-mail could keep your whitelists in their database, but I see this as a security hole since yahoo or whomever could add themselves to your whitelist as they want.
Umm, televison advertisements subsidize television programming. Junk mail subsidizes postage. Newspaper ads, radios ads, magazine ads, etc, etc do the same for their respective mediums. How does spam help pay for my internet connection? ABSOLUTELY NOT AT ALL. All it does is increase my ISP's costs on behalf of a freeloading spammer.
Well, using Popfile, it shows what percentage is SPAM and what percentage is good email. So far this year out of 3459 emails, 71% is spam and the remaining 29% is good email. I hate spam as much as the next guy but with Popfile, I never see it. I use it at work and at home.
You can see our mail stats here.
About 18 percent of the traffic carried by the US Postal Service is bulk mailing, but USPS studies say that postal employees spend 25 percent of their time sorting it. All a waste? Keep in mind that the DMA asserts the $50 billion was raised as a result of bulk mailings by charities.
I'd be interested in knowing what the total load on our economy is from the two forms, inluding manpower, network load, inconvenience etc. My suspicion is that the hyperventilation over spams growth is driving up the percieved cost, especially when you consider the cheapness of bandwidth, and that spam control is an automation battle leaving the real expensive resource, humans, to design the filters and clean up what they miss.
"The spammers are evil folks," Evil? Like Hitler evil?
Opportunists, yes. Using mildly unethical means to further themselves in business venture, often. But I wonder how many people who are apoplectic about the "evilness" of spammers cheat on their wives, cheat on their taxes, park in handicapped zones, etc. . .All no more evil than faking a return address, and certainly no less.
-----
Believe me, I'm as surprised by my comment as you are.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
By that point the damage is done to the ISP, and besides, your email client doesn't communicate with the spammer - your ISP's SMTP server does. The site you cite (ha!) mentions this. So you have to do it at the server level.
There is one problem tho - Unless I'm missing something, the way it works is a possible "sender" requests to send an email. The server then sends him a hash problem. But, then they BOTH have to generate the answer (because the server has to have something to compare to). So, the server has just as much work load as the sender.
For spam, that's OK - it has the end result of stopping spam IF this plan becomes MANDATORY. However, if it's backward-compatible, it will take spammers a while to catch on, at which point some poor ISP doesn't have the processing power to do all the computations, and they quit doing the hash. So it almost has to be mandatory, to ensure that everyone takes the hit equally.
Now, this has a further problem. Even if it stops spam completely, can you say DDoS? All I have to do is write a virus or whatever that keeps emailing a target server from wherever. In fact, it might not even have to be distributed - what if I keep requesting to send an email, but never calculate the hash? Does the server calculte the "answer" before I submit it? If so, I can crash a big mail server with my desktop. If not, I'll distribute it, same effect.
I think this is a great idea, but it will need a lot of work before it becomes effective. If I can figure out how to exploit it in 2 minutes (and I ain't an 3!33t h4x0r, either), it will be quickly rendered ineffective.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
40% of /. is spam... if you don't believe me, recall all the dup articles.
but at least we know Taco doesn't need a peen enlarger; the current poll even mentions Taco's 10 foot pole!
Either my ISP (charter cable) is doing an awesome job of spam elimination, or I'm wise enough to keep a hotmail spam account which I NEVER read (except to confirm web accounts) I actually have three email accounts in general. I have one I give out to almost nobody, it's used mostly by friends and family. A second that's used by sites I trust, any email sent there is strictly opt-in and I've been lucky (or choosy) with who I give that email to. Then I keep a hotmail account which I'll give to just about anybody. d1663m@hotmail.com as a matter of fact.. :) Hoo boy I can see the spam influx now! Otherwise I hardly ever see any true spam.
:P Some of our vendors are downright spammy..
However at work I was unfortunate enough to be mail-list-logged to a website which didn't protect my work email. So now I get SOME spam at work, but it's still not near 40%, unless you count vendor email.
Think about it. Telemarketing is more costly than sending out bulk spam, and now that we are going to reduce the number of people which telemarketers can reach, they'll turn to an equally obnoxious AND cheaper solution: spam.
I suspect that after the next 8 weeks when the system phases in, we'll see more than a quadrupling of spam in our inboxes.
Those who want to exterminate the Israelis are anti-semitic, for sure. All that "propping up" of Israel does is see that its neighbors do not invade and exterminate its people (the typical reason for this given is because they are Jewish).
And yes, anti-zionist is typically anti-semetic. It's just a code-word these days.
This has already been countered by using a valid return address of any poor sap. I can easily imagine having a list of thousands of addresses, and sending spam to one address with a from field of the previous address. Thus, address 3235 gets spam from address 3234. That would prevent one victim's address from getting black listed, and would keep the spammers effective.
My white list protects against this, because it auto-replies to all mail with a from field that is not known by my address book. I'm expecting that some spammer will send me spam with a victim's address, they will get my auto-reply, and they will be annoyed at me for sending them such spam.
BTW, if someone auto-replies to my auto-reply, my filters are smart enough to trash it, not reply to it.
1. Make ISPs themselves *legally* accountable for spam with stiff penalities for spam floods.
If an ISP hasn't applied the appropriate patches to it's software or is maintaining an open mail relay (or letting one of it's users maintain such) then it should be fined - heavily. Great incentive for keeping on the ball or *else*
2. Require *legally* (with stiff penalities yadda yadda) that *all* SMTP server and relay software be required to monitor the number of messages per unit time sent out from each connection or user as appropriate. Require that such monitoring software break the connection after a certain threashold is reached and block the connection/user thereafter. Provision would be made for an exception list to be manually edited for those clients that have a legitimate need.
3. Maintain a publicaly accessible national list of known (ie. caught) spammers to be blacklisted from *all* U.S. ISPs for a set period of time. Make this a legal requirement for all U.S. ISPs
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
We all agree that legislating Spam out of existance isn't going to work, due to the international design of the Internet.
No, we do not all agree. The majority of spam is "in-country" spam. That is to say that the sender is in the same country as the recipient. Some scammer trying to tell you about his "fantastic" multi-level marketing scheme is probably located in your country. Make the advertiser responsible for the mail and don't worry about whether he sent it through an open relay in Korea or paid someone in Brazil to blast it out.
Legislating child pornography out of existence hasn't worked either, but would you argue in favor of repealing existing laws? Would you argue against passing new laws that crack down on child pornographers?
A technical means to thwart spam is like the lock on your car door: You would not want car theft to be legal if the thief defeated the lock, so why do you want spam to be legal if the spammer defeats your anti-spam measures? We need to approach this problem from both a technical and a legislative means.
As for overseas sites, maybe thats where we need treaties and insentives for foriegn governments to crack down on said open relays (I know it will never happen)
Actually, I'm sure the Nigerian government will be glad to help out, seeing as they are losing all these taxes when the money gets smuggled out of the country.
//FIXME: Bad
"Many spammers have become so adept at masking their tracks that they are rarely found. They are so technologically sophisticated that they adjust their systems on the fly to counter special filters and other barriers thrown up against them. They can even electronically commandeer unprotected computers, turning them into spam-launching weapons of mass production."
According to the folks at SpamHaus, spammers are not only identifiable, they are typically part of well known spam gangs whose numbers seem not all that large. Responsible ISPs boot such individuals from their services. It is enlightening to see which ISPs are not so responsive.
As to point two. In order to combat those who "Joe Job" or use relay servers to spam, we really do need to apply existing law or adopt new laws to address this type of behavior. Spammers who highjack servers should face serious legal consequences. When spammers choose these types of methods to spam, what they are really doing is simply stealing. Our response to such behavior should be to invoke the normal consequences associated with theft.
Because of the current economic climate, state coffers are down around the country. Savvy lawmakers should begin looking in their own inimitable ways (read: fines levied), how their own states can "make millions from bulk email".
I've had an e-mail account pretty much since I got online to begin with, and at this point I get over 10 megs of e-mail a month on it, ALL spam.
I use Windows... like a two dollar wh.. why don't I just go ahead and not finish that sentence.
I don't want to quibble about the specific number, but how do they decide what is spam? Much of the decision is somewhat ambiguous.
No it isn't. You know spam when you see it. It's unsolicited commercial email. If you are trying to sell me something, or trying to get me to go increase page views on your website, and I didn't *explicitly agree* to receive such communication, it is spam. Very simple.
Generally, the only people who ask this are involved in spamming, and either don't feel right about it or are trying to muddy the waters. But I'll assume that you are genuinely curious :)
A lot of people here are saying that more than 40% of their email is spam and that the figure quoted is somehow wrong. A lot of people here also fail to take into consideration that the 40% figure is very likely an approximation or an average and is not valid for every single user on the internet. Being computer literate, having a website, posting on different websites and other internet activities contribute to more spam because of email harvesting. Sure, you and I get more spam than the average Joe, my spam is more like 80% of all emails received, but do not forget about all the people that are on AOL and have only given their email to their family relatives. Granted, they will receive some spam too, but surely not as much as the rest of us.
-- Daemon@Slashdot
practically 20 minutes out of each hour during prime time TV is dedicated to commercials.
I should point out that the ads pay for the programming, so there's some quid pro quo.
We cannot escape spam. We can delete it, and not look at it, in a similar way that we sometimes ignore TV ads by changing the channel. However, spam is here to stay.
I could say the same thing about, say, theft. Or drunk driving. Both of those are here to stay. But we have laws against those most people recognize it as wrong, and people go to jail for them. Spam can be the same.
I think that slashdot should start a list that we forward all of our spam to, and hackers around the world can use it to back track the spam to its original server. Than we do as much nasty stuff as we can to it. I realise it's hard to find the original source of an email, but if you have access to the mail server that the mail came into, it's not impossible. We should hack these servers, and take them down. Even if their innocent open relays, they will pay for being that stupid.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
spamd
I wrote a very simple perl script to generate a report based on the number of spams I get...
--- Every day I am forced to add another to the list of people who can kiss my ass...
Theres a simple solution: Spam is trying to sell you something. If you cant contact the person who is selling you the thing how can you be reasonably expected to buy it? The people who sell the products through spam should be held accountable for all damages from said spam, just like somone who hires a hit man is responsible for the murder (along with the hit man of course)
I think the best way to deal with spam would be for no one to ever, ever, read it. But the problem is that some idiots actually buy things from spammers, it's profitable to spam, if it wasn't they would stop. So lets stop spam through our own actions. Just stop reading it completely, even if it says 80% free inkjet cartridges Also, developing a protocol that requires authentication is stupid, you will just increase the amount of time it takes to send anyone an email.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
85% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
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I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
There is a perfectly good way to block spam within outlook: the Rules Wizard
Using nothing but Outlook rules I have reduced my spam by about 90%. The trick is setting up the rules correctly.
Mine go something like this:
1. If email comes form someone on my contact list, stop processing rules (this makes it important to keep your contact list updated)
2. If my name isn't in the To: or CC: box then move it to junk mail
3. If email subject or body contains following words, move to junk mail.
-I update this list of terms as needed. mostly pretty common things (sex, adult, penis enlargement, etc etc.)
The third rule is very aggressive once you've built your list of words. The trip is the first rule which lets anythign form your contact list though, which really decreases the false positives.
I've found that the biggest problem is that often online purchase confirmations get filtered as spam. But Iv'e learned to just look for these in my "DMZ" folder if I'm looking for a confirmation.
Anyway, the system works very well for me.
"Moderate drinking can help prevent amputated limbs" -- Abigail Zuger, NYTimes, 12/31/02
Mabye a system could be implemented whereby if a user decides that a certain piece of mail sent was spam, they click a button, and the person who sent the spam has to pay $.05. who the money would go to, I'm not sure, mabye to charity? If a user accidentally clicked, or it wasn't really spam, no big deal, the legit business wouldn't have to pay too much, but it'd certainly bankrupt the spammers.
This way, if a legit business sends out thousands of emails to legit customers, they don't have to pay per email. It's easier on small legit businesses to start up.
I'd also like to say that spammers are so agressive that they are causing thier own extinction.
I have a real, useable e-mail account that never recieves any spam at all, and I never delete/filter legitimate mail! How is this possible?
I have two e-mail addresses. One gets nothing but spam, and the other gets no spam at all.
I have a free account at hotmail.com and a private one on a server that isn't owned by a big business. When I'm giving my address to someone I know personally, I give the private one. When I have to give an e-mail address to sign up for some service or to get some account, or basically whenever I'm giving my e-mail address but I don't know who is getting it, I give my hotmail account.
Result:
-My hotmail account occasionally gets confirmation e-mails when I've just created one of those free accounts for some website, but I always know when they're coming. Otherwise, it just collects spam, which I periodically delete (and block the addresses it came from).
-My personal account never gets spam.
(I have a university account that forwards to my private account, so occasionally it gets what could be called "spam" that's aimed at univ. students, but if I stop the forwarding it stops the spam, so I don't really have a problem.)
PUBLIC SPLIT ON WHETHER BUSH IS A DIVIDER -CNN scrolling banner, 10/15/2004
The spam problem would go away if we could teach the 100th of a percent of morons who buy into it to NOT buy into it.
Send out messages to everyone in your address book with instructions on anti-spam procedures and a request to forward it.
Now, how do you explain what to do to someone who mistakes their CD drive for a cup holder? Or am I dreaming again?
I'm a novice system administrator, and I've been learning to set up e-mail servers lately...Wouldn't wide-spread SMTP AUTH nip all this in the bud? The only way you could send mail would be through your own registered account. If you send too much, they know with utmost certainty what account was responsible.
Now spammers would have to either abandon their "hit-and-run" tactics, or start stealing log-ins.
Or should I lay off the crack?
First, a fundamental problem: There IS NO COMMUNICATION between your mail client and a sender. Therefore, you have no way of submitting the hash problem TO the sender, he can only return an answer. Therefore, if this even happens, it HAS to be server-based. Re-read the site you quoted, nowhere do they talk about mail clients. There's a reason.
I wasn't thinking of the cost to the SMTP server but of the human cost of spam - wasted time in deleting it and the fact that people are turned off email altogether because of it. This, IMHO, is a much more serious problem than wasted bandwidth.
What, you think bandwidth pays for itself? So eventually your ISP costs go up, not so good. Besides, it's easier to stop spam at the choke point (server) than trying to track it down later. And for people paying to d/l spam on, say, a mobile device, having to d/l it IS the problem.
Also, note that if payment for messages (whether real cash or hash cash) becomes widely adopted, spam will stop because there won't be any money in it any longer. So the problem of costs to the ISP is also dealt with.
Yes, but GETTING it widely adopted is the big problem here. You have to mandate it, probably, and it's easier to get webmasters to switch than, say, my mom, who has no idea what a mail client is. And, for ISP's, the problem is in the voluntary-adoption period. Who takes the hit first? Who starts off with this, when it will increase CPU load even for the sender, while all the spammers are still out there? And how will you get wide-scale participation? It's all well and good to talk about this stuff, but there has to be some method of implementation, where you get from here to total adoption. And voluntary adoption wouldn't work, actually, because the sender's client probably won't understand what the receiving server wants when it asks for the hash, unless they also upgraded to the hash deal. So, in the voluntary phase, do you drop these emails? Do you let them through, defeating the point?
The recipient just has to look at the message body, the To: header and the postage, and verify that the postage is a correct answer (which can be done quickly).
I can look at the header and the body NOW and tell it's spam. Really, I didn't think it was ACTUALLY president Mugabe trying to send me money when I got that email. If you have to d/l the message, look at the message, and look at the header, then there is no advantage over the status quo.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
This technique works great for me, however during my testing phase, I uncovered one slight problem, and that was if the person trying to contact me didn't understand enough english to realize that a code word in the subject line was required, he wouldn't resend. But then, I couldn't understand his language either so I'd have probably lost his business anyway.
Where I work they no longer use email for about half of the employees. They had given them email accounts as part of bringing the county "21st century tools". While email was supposed to have the biggest benefit it turned out to be the biggest flop.
Turns out that the end users didn't use it because of the spam distraction. Most of the mail they got was spam so they ignored it all. When the computer geeks put spam filters on they worked for a while but it became too much work for them and by then the end users had already soured on the concept of email.
So now that email is no longer a valid business tool because of spam I wonder if it is the valid marketing tool that the spammers think it is. If fewer people are using email because of spam then fewer spam is being read.
I dunno. I've about quit using email too so I don't know that I really care either. I now stay in touch with those I care to using web BBS's rather than email.....no spam.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
Its very simple to stop spam with a tech fix:
Make it uneconomical.
Whenever your mail agent receives a new email from an unknown source, it could send back a return receipt requesting that the sender either click on a link or reply to it to verify their return address.
(You could also white list people, or you could limit this return receipt to only kick in when the mail look like spam)
If a spammer had to do this for each intended recipient, then they would quickly be out of business.
Black-lists, the current most popular choice, dont work, because its very easy to get a new source address.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Spam is a low-tech form of virus. It's the easiest type of virus to write and disseminate. It's also the most annoying per-capita, and the most ignored type of virus. It slips in under the radar, wastes your time, and its authors suffer very little in the way of repercussions.
-- Boycott Shell
Do spammers actually get anything out of all of the junk that they send, or are they just trying to piss everyone off? 100% of all people who respond to spam should be shot.
I'd estimate that 99% of mail I get is from people I am expecting it from. I could easily configure my email client to put this mail in another folder. At the end of the day (or more often), I can look at all the non-whitelisted mail for stuff that wasn't spam-tagged to look for new people to whitelist - takes about a minute. While spam may be a huge infrastructure concern, I really don't see it as a huge productivity concern.
Though once you add web popups, I bet the % of 'unwanted advertisements' would triple..
It was said to be 35% last month.. 40% this month.. at this rate email will be unusable by the holidays, and a total collapse of the infrastructure by this time next year.
Unless something is done to stop it.. donno what.. but something has to be done..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
As has been pointed out in several posts here, most people understand that buying from spammers is simply encouraging bad behavior. Since this is the case, I would guess that spam is no where near as effective in generating revenue for the spammers as it once may have been.
Perhaps the current increase in spam activity we all are seeing is the result of aggressive spam activity because their own revenue returns from spam are falling.
You will note that reputable companies, realizing the social backlash, are nearly never associated with spam. Affiliate based programs will generally provide for holding back revenues when spamming is involved as part of the Ts and Cs of their agreements, so that once lucrative channel has nearly dried up for spammers. Thus it seems that spammers are reduced to pushing scams and generally far less profitable products.
The spammers continue to push the belief that spam is and will remain an ongoing fact of life, but perhaps what we are really witnessing are the last death rattles prior to the ultimate death of spam.
BellSouth adds its range of IP residential IP addresses to spam blacklists in order to keep its users from running spam factories at home. I found this out after all of my emails to a friend were bounced due to my IP being on that list.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
Despite the obvious problems of jurisdiction, there is one thing that could be outlawed. That is a requirement that when the mass emailer gets a rejection of the spam, either through an SMTP 5XX code, or a bounced message (they would be required to codify the return addresses and have capacity to receive all the bounces and process them), then the address being mailed to should be handled this way. If the address had been successfully delivered to before, further mailings should be stopped after rejections keep coming back for 7 days. If the address had never been successfully delivered to before, further mailings should stop immediately.
Spam is regularly mailed to a few hundred email addresses that not only do not exist, but never have existed (in a few domains I have). A lot of it just comes from random locations, so that can be just propogation of bad addresses among small time spammers (you know, the CD of millions). But a lot of this repeat spam to never-existed addresses comes from bulk mailing houses, including places like rackspace.com, m0.net, and even weatherbug.com.
This is a clear case of abuse which could be used to help shut some obvious spammers down, or at least fine them heavily, without running afoul of things like first amendment issues. If there's no one there to read a message, then it isn't free speech. And once it is possible for them to know this is the case, then any further attempts are nothing more than intentional abuse.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Folks, it's not just email. My "old-fashioned," land-based telephone line, which I keep in case of emergency, is almost entirely a vehicle for sales - like 98%. It's like I'm paying someone to advertise to me and I hate it! Then there's junk (snail) mail, which has been a problem for decades. Anyone have any figures on what percentage of snail mail is junk mail?
80%?
sig.
I suppose 10% of my spam is valuable ... if I get 10% of 14.5 million ($US) from that Nigerian oil minister ....
-kgj
Lately there is a lot of media coverage on spam. Since everyone is pissed off with this, I bet we can see a solution pretty soon.
Speaking of The Tragedy of the Commons. Guess what? This argument applies to Internet email, too. The individual benefit a marketer gets by sending a single piece of spam is a relatively high positive number, and the impact of this extra piece of email on the world is a very small negative number. Therefore, spammers will continue to send more email, until eventually the commons collapses. In this case, perhaps the Internet will not be able to handle the load, or maybe people will stop using email for communication. But the collapse will come.
What can we do about it? The freedom to send any email must be restricted somehow. You can't have unrestricted freedom without the eventual collapse of the commons.
40% of Internet traffic is PORN.
There is no better time than NOW to keeping suggesting a server-based email system. Email as it is now is a tired protocol.
Spammers should send links to their host and then accept visitors like any other serving format. There are several projects working on this, but adoption is the holy grail. Yawn.
mug
You know, where the fact that somebody thinks that someone might possibly be taking 5 seconds to delete spam, and they multiply it out by absolutely everyone on the planet to arrive at some "cost"?
Not only is the 40% a fiction in itself, but saying spam costs "$10 billion dollars" is ludicrous. It's just someone jumping to a number to generate support for their cause. It's no more accurate than all the "piracy costs billions!", or "traffic congestion costs billions!", or "rough toilet seats costs billions!"
Is 40% what the user sees or what hits the ISP?
What if for one day - 24 hours - everyone who is running a spam filter at any level simply took the filters down. Show the users what the real flood of junk looks like. I bet the hue and cry would provoke real efforts - legal or technical - to solve the problem once and for all.
I find myself thinking; what's all the fuss about, I only actually see a half dozen spam messages a day in my Hotmail and POP accounts. But I know that for every piece I see there are untold dozens being blocked by filters. Filters merely hide the scope of the problem from the end users, but ISP's still have to deal with the bandwidth.
Take down the filters for a day and let everyone see the real scope of the horror that is spam
-Jetset
- I can't hear the forest for all the falling trees-
I use email constantly and average about 1 spam email every two weeks. This is for both my university account and the yahoo account I give out all the time to companies and vendors when I buy things.
/.'s need give out their addy to all the porn sites they surf? Is this why you get all this spam. What gives?
Do all the
You might want to check your math on this. By my calculations, 600-700 of 1800 is 33-38%. Therefore being less than 40%.
You were saying about making up statistics...?
"What if for one day - 24 hours - everyone who is running a spam filter at any level simply took the filters down. Show the users what the real flood of junk looks like"
Not everyone would pull this kind of ridiculous stunt, and what would happen would that the service providers who DID do this would lose all their customers, and those who kept the filters going would gain the customers.
What happend to the Spam Can Icon that used to adorn this topic? I think it's more apropos than the pig.
- Spam Gourmet
- Spamex
- Sneakemail
- Mailsehll
- Emailias
General information about disposable email addresses can be found in this PC Magazine article and this about.com article.Briefly, I'll explain how they work in theory. After signing up with a disposable email service, they give you a disposable email address that you can, for example, enter into forms. Mail sent to that disposable email address gets automatically forwarded to your email account of choice. But here's where they supposedly come in handy. You can sign up for a different disposable email address everytime you fill in a web form. If you start getting spam, you can look at the disposable email address the spam was sent to and you can do 2 things: (1) cancel the disposable email address so you no longer get spam sent to that address; and (2) you know who gave out your disposable address and you can take whatever action you deem appropriate.
This seems like a cool product, in theory, but I haven't seen anyone with real world experience with these services. If anyone here can describe their experiences, it would be greatly appreciated.
The other 40% is viruses
is to punish companies that *hire* spammers.
Let's face it; if we focus solely on the spammers themselves, we'll have little luck reducing the flow.
But if the court system allow people to sue the companies that contracted out for spam, a few hefty verdicts might cause corporations to think otherwise.
This morning's inbox had 5 legit messages and 20 pieces of spam. That's fairly common for me.
OTOH, I seriously doubt AOL's claim of 1 billion. AOL's spam filtering is brain dead. Every Wednesday, I send 40 emails to my clients. I used to use a pacbell pop account to do that but AOL filtered about 1/3 of them thinking they were Spam. They weren't - they were legitimate emails apprising my clients of information they have asked to receive.
To get around AOL's spam filter, I've had to open an AOL account for no reason other than to bypass their spam filter. My weekly emails suggest to my AOL customers that they find a new isp that doesn't deluge them with ads and, incidentally, is easier to reach by email.
Of course! MicroShit sells our names so we get spam in hopes that we'll pay them for their stupid butterfly. I get more spam in my care2 account, and don't even use that email on websites.
Well, theoretically, the spam is generating revenue for SOMEBODY right? I mean, even if nobody responds to any of it, the higher bandwidth bills are eventually paid to some ISP. Is it really true that spam costs $10billion a year?
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Isn't it possible to spam back at those nasty spamers themselfs??? I mean when they get a thousand mails per day, maybe they get the idea.
"Holy instant noodle"
Remember, these are already the countries that basically control the Internet. Any foreign spam could be billed against foreign ISP's/Carriers at a high premium, domestic spammers will face serious penalties. This will force foreign ISP's/Governments to crack down on spam.
Besides, how much spam do we Americans get from out of the country? I'm guessing it's a small percentage for most people. Does anyone have any statistics on amount of spam per country?
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I just created a web site whose terms of service are that if you send an email to the email address listed then you will be charged for spell checking the email at £10 a character. Anybody want to advise on what my chances of collecting are ?
The bikini - security through obscurity since 1943
that Yahoo has improved its SpamGuard?
Overall I've been pretty satisfied with Yahoo's filtering. It would be nice if you could block email from certain domains though.
only 40 % ??? i get something like 90% spam (which is about 45 / day)
If the Israelis were content with the lebensraum that they stole in 1948, driving the indigenous population out by means of massacres like Deir Yassin, then there might be a solution.
But they're not, and they continue to perpetrate war crimes against civillians in the occupied territories.
Call me an anti-semite if you like - I'm just a humanist and a hater of land thieves and war criminals.
The problem is that it doesnt take much bandwidth to send out spam. If the spammers had to send each email individually, or if they had to encrypt each message to the recipients public key, then the costs would be exorbitant.
And if you dont think the return-receipt idea will work, can you give one reason why? Personally, I dont want to be overchanged just because I run a webserver, like your scheme would require.
It just seems to odd to refresh the page to see more comments about spam, and I get a banner ad promoting one of the larger spammer hosters in the US ... Rackspace. Those who sign up for service from those scumbags are just as bad as the scumbags because that effectively helps support the spam they keep pounding my servers with. So far today, 98 attempts just from Rackspace addresses. Yesterday there was a total of 240.
And while previewing this comment submission, yet another Rackspace banner ad. Don't these guys know I'm never, ever, going to pay them for any services?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Yea, right--never in the history of the world has even a small percentage of people, let alone everyone, been 100% on the ball.
It's a particularly stupid suggestion when you follow it up in the very next sentence with most people using the internet are really fucking stupid
Now that span has joined the ranks of MP3's and Piracy as costing companies serious money, are they going to do anything about it? I seriously doubt it.
moo.
...and replace it with a new standard. All you free software people get to work!
I'll tell you what, my signal-to-noise ratio is WAY lower than 60%.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
In 1866, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations have the same rights as living persons. They leaned on the Fourteenth Amendment, not the First, but if a corporation is a person, it has First Amendment rights, too.
I agree this sucks, but it's hard to do anything about a century-old precedent.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
I work for a medium-small ISP in FR. We host around 6500 domains and 150k mailboxes.
Our abuse department is manned by one person 365 days a year, a bunch of scripts, a largish database integrated with our customers database, and lots of red tape. This person calls our customers when they are the source of spam or other non UCE conforming use of our network (including running an open-relay). He explains the situation politely and asks the customer to conform to the policy written in the contract. If the customer does not comply after the first warning, he must look for another ISP to do business with, for we send him an official letter (with official receipt acknowledgement)each time we interact with him.
All in all, given our company size, a bit over 1% of our costs are burnt by our abuse department. Needless to say, we relay these costs to our customers, as do most of our competitors.
This is only half of the cost of spam from our point of view. Our mail servers farm is sized in order to perform well even with 40% of the mail being spam. These are larger human and hardware costs associated with spam as well (though more diluted and thus difficult to pinpoint).
Spam costs people and companies a lot of money, we feel the need for the Internet mail system to be reengineered in order for the cost of sending email to become high enough so that spammers don't get away with their offense.
The Brightmail report is not a big surprise.
but inside corporations, it's more like 98% real email, and 2% jokes/spam/pr0n/whatever. Speaking from my experience (I receive upwards of 600 internal emails a day), almost all of it is work related. Email from the Internet isn't all non-spam, but spam is still only 2-4% of the email I receive.
I went to all my email accounts,work, home, public.
/.) from the list, I get 30 emails, 11 of which where not spam.
I had a total of 121 emails sent to me in the last 24 hours. 12 were not spam.
Now if I remove my public accout(the one I use for
I do have an account that only goes out to my 'trusted' sources. that account gets no spam.
so based on my accounts, it is higher then 40%. except for my trusteed account.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
All the 'propping up' of Israel does is to ensure that they can continue to steal land from their neighbours
Which they have not done yet. The Golan Heights, for example, was taken by Israel after numerous attacks from Syria originating on this land. Israel has no incentive to give it back, as Syria still sticks to the "we will exterminate you" plan.
"...who as a result aren't that keen on Israel."
You have it backwards. The anti-semitism (hatred of Jewish people) goes back centuries in that area. The neighboring countries have killed far many more Palestinians than Israel has. The main reason they hate Israel is because it is a place where Jews are not mistreated.
"But they're not, and they continue to perpetrate war crimes against civillians in the occupied territories"
They don't. The Palestinian army is responsible for the vast majority of Palestinian deaths in the latest period of senseless aggression against Israel. (just today, a terrorist hid in a civilian area inviting Israeli retaliation.... 2 Palestinians dead, used as human shields by another evil-minded Palestinian soldier)
"I'm just a humanist and a hater of land thieves and war criminals"
You won't find those in Israel. Humanist? Talk about a phony discredited religion. You also forget that the Jews are the indiginous people of the area.
40% by count, or 40% by volume? In my experience, spam is loaded with html, gif, and javascript content. Most of my legitimate mail is plain text. A single spam usually is larger than all the legitimate mail combined. I think the 40% statistic is misleadingly low.
Which was a hack.
Corporate personhood
Unequal Protection: The rise of corporate dominance and theft of human rights
Like most things legal (and otherwise) things aren't as clear as people think. Slashdot BTW already covered this subject.
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
Upon further investigation, the spammers were not only using the new "dicionary" attack but were using the highly controversial "thesaurus" attack and the dreaded "encyclopedia" attack as well.
Amazingly, Hormel's Spam Lunchmeat is 40% jellied fat.
.sig wanted. Inquire within.
What AOL doesn't say is that the only reason they have to filter that much spam is because they sell their own users information. My email account recieves no spam and I do use my email address on certain websites. Screw AOL.
I think there might be an solution here.
1. Use a mail filter.
2. Every once in a while enter the "I'm interested" email address or inlink into a database.
3. Have a junk submission program send it some junk. For Nigerian scams you could forward them all your collected spam.
Basically the idea is to keep out of you inbox and at the same time hurt the Spammer.
Spam is just one more area where Microsoft is neglecting their customers' needs. For all the years we've been on the internet, Microsoft has offered its users *nothing* but some rudimentary filters in Outlook Express and Outlook. As usual, this demonstrates that Microsoft *does not care* about its users.
I've used several spam filtering systems, all of which work extremely well. Right now I'm using POPFilter with Outlook Express. It works great. The one thing that would make it perfect, and I mean perfect, is an automatic whitelist of my addressbook. I haven't bothered to try to do that because I'm not a MS/Win32 or Perl programmer. But there's no reason why this code, or some Win32 implementation of it, couldn't be incorporated into Outlook Express for the benefit of Joe User -- without usability problems.
Again, these spam filters are very effective. Since Outlook Express is by far the most common mail client on the internet, building good spam filtering into it would stop most spam dead in its tracks. The only reason it flourishes is that most of it does get through, and getting it through is so easy and cheap. If this were made just a little harder, there would be a lot less incentive to try. The problem is, no one with any influence (MS and its users) is even putting up a fight.
Blame Microsoft for falling down on the job -- again.
Look, until Congress got inundated with fax's years ago they were happy taking the Direct Marketing Association's money and ignoring the fact the everyone with a fax was wasting a lot of money on expensive paper and supplies. It was only when they were directly affected that they passed legislation to stop it.
If billions are being wasted in time and equipment on this problem then that's a lot more than the DMA is paying them!
2 rules to remember:
1. Taking money from a group to ignore what they are doing isn't politics, it's a protection racket.
2. When you take an oath of office and then place your self above your constituents that is treason.
" Treason - A betrayal of trust or confidence."
The best investment you could make is "donate" a few thousand dollars to a Congressman. Depending on your industry you could get millions back and a loophole so you have to pay little or no taxes!!
I know a guy who regularly registers for things with president@whitehouse.gov as the email. I wonder how their spam filter is working these days! :-)
I'm probably going to have to upgrade my mailserver, which is getting overloaded by filtering all the spam coming in. It's money I *definitely* don't need to spend otherwise. Is there any way for a class action suit to sue a class of offenders?
I found a rather simple way to fight spam, which over time has proven very effective : I bought a domain and hosting with unlimited pop inboxes. I use the catchall account (this way, I receive all mail sent to anything@mydomain.com). Then, when I subscribe to something, eg FakePortal.com, I give them fakeportal@mydomain.com. That way, I know who sent me mail by knowing the address it was sent to. And if I do get spam, I just create an email alias with that name redirecting mail to /dev/null...
Something Ironic though, is that I got spam sent to aol@mydomain.com, which is the address I gave when I subscribed to aim... Maybe a script, maybe some spamees are spamers...
Bleh !
Talk is cheap.
This change will take 100 years if people don't start petitioning for change.
It will take HEAVY petitioning and lobbying of ISPs, Microsoft and other mail server developers and standards organizations before things will change.
I have half a mind to get this started.
I don't know how you people all get so much spam. Seriously!
I don't do ANYTHING right according to what you are supposed to do to avoid spam. I use the same Yahoo account I've had for 6 or 7 years. My username is only 8 letters and contains both my initials and home state abbreviation in it. I use that address EVERY TIME I sign up for anything on the web or when I buy something online or whatever. My wife and sisters send me free greeting cards quite frequently using that address. I don't use Yahoo's "bulk mail" folder or "this is spam" button, and haven't turned on any filters.
And still, I only get 2 or 3 pieces of spam a day, at worst. Compared to 10-20 legit pieces of mail.
I don't get it? How am I magically not getting spammed when all the people who are so pissed about spam and are actively trying to protect themselves get tons of it? I'm not denying that OTHER people have major problems with spam, I'm just amazed that I don't and can't figure out why.
ps. Please don't get pissed and add me to some spammer list or anything! I am seriously wondering what it is that makes me appaerntly immune to the problem. If I could figure it out maybe I'd have a useful suggestion for everybody else.
My motto is: Never give up - unless it's harder than you want it to be.
Jesus Christ! ...And totally mangling the English language and all common sense in the process.
Any sufficiently well-organized Government is indistinguishable from bullshit.
If a program is running to filter Spam, then that means it is using power, if there was no spam then no need for the spam filter. So the time spent processing, filtering the spam is wasting electricity which is made by either conventional;coal, oil, gas, hydro or nuclear power plants. If most of the power plants use coal then that means more electricity is needed to power the computers running the progrmas to filter the spam, and that wasted power means that more coal or oil is burned which causes air pollution which in turn we breathe, or which cause global warming!
I don't know if this is funny or serious.
Has anyone else notice that most spammers use windows and leave their port 139 wide open? I have great fun deleting their files and sending them a good old smbnuke.
This is just spontaneous speculation, but it seems that encrypting the email address itself may be an option. How about instead of sending someone your email address, you send along with it a PGP public key. That way, anyone who wants to send you email must have your public key to encrypt the email address with. SMTP server simply has your private key to decrypt all incoming email addresses with and only accepts the ones which are valid once decrypted. Did you give someone your public key you didn't want to give it to? Generate a new key pair and propogate it to the SMTP server and all trusted recipients. What do you think?
[blatant troll]
That 40% of all e-mail in the U.S. is now spam goes to show you what happens when people are left to their own devices. The same thing has happened in AIM's public chat rooms--tons of spam bots advertising porn, warez, outwar, etc.
Technological action, filters, is not enough. Regulations that hit spammers in the bank account are the only way to force compliance out of these miscreants. We must be virulent against spammers routing their wares through overseas and anonymous servers. These loathsome perverters of technology need to be extracted from their lairs and delt with with all force needed to exterminate their faulty business practices.
[/blant troll]
(Cowers away from the libertarian response.)
On vit, on code et puis on meurt.
Not that I like spam or anything, but I wonder what percentage of snail mail is junk mail. I'm sure that over 40% of what goes into my mailbox is junk. In fact, just the offers for credit cards alone would be close to 40%. Yet for some reason, the junk mail doesn't bother me nearly as much as spam. I wonder why that is.
Your username is Xre91jve12v0q5X5nNpRN1
There are laws that limit their so called first admendment rights.
Every anti-spammer has been saying the same sort of things for years now ("email will be destroyed, if spam is not killed").
Funny how nobody ever listens to experts. About anything.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill ignorance
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Now what we need is a central address to forward the headers of our spam to.
These headers are fed through the current set of spam filters and the ones which sneak through used to improve the rule set. From time to time a batch of legitimate mail is used to check that the system hasn't outlawed all addresses containing @aol.com (again).
Paying clients (TANSTAAFL) can download the latest rule set to minimise the spam leaking onto their network.
Alternatively, we could all agree not to buy anything from a spammer - ever.
A.C.
P.S. Does AOL really stand for Any Old Lamer??
A year ago, spam titles were kinda fun to read.
Today, they're all like hasty business notes from dyslexic employees of a big American company.
The spam war ruined my day.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
Recently, American President Bush signed into law making it illegal, punishable by up to an $11,000 fine, for a telemarketer to call any household on the do not call list. Further, a federal database of no-call numbers was created and made free to join. Story at http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/11/20 31247&mode=thread&tid=158&tid=103
Why could the same principle not be given to spam? Of course this would not apply to spammers from other countries, but it is a start. Just because it is not a total solution does not mean that it shouldn't be done.
This works until one of your friends enters your email address into a form on the web (say to send you a electronic birthday card) and it gets added to a spammers list...
I suggest anyone who uses my idea cut down on the potential leaks by having very few friends.
But seriously, I'm not an idiot. I know there are ways around my little scheme. That's why I said 100%-ish and not 100%.
I've had this setup for about a year now and it has worked at literally 100% for me, but then, I have very few friends. And hey, if spammers get my current e-mail address, I'll just change it and get another spam-free year (I hope).
PUBLIC SPLIT ON WHETHER BUSH IS A DIVIDER -CNN scrolling banner, 10/15/2004
We're all getting these spams every damn day - god knows my own spam-to-legit mail ratio is getting riddiculous, I'm probably on around 80-90% spam at this point on a business email address I've had for 4 years. But every time I get spam I just delete the fucker - which is what most people do I assume.... I just can't imagine that these chumps would actually get any business at all, or at least not enough to justify their time in front of the computer - has anyone got any info on how much money these guys can actually make from this?
I wonder if they are including as spam all the legimite email ISPs like AOL are incorrectly blocking? What kind of world is this when ISPs can, without permission of their customers, block email from friends and family members?
Even before this if you didn't hand out your email address, picked something that was not a common name or word, you rarely got any spam.
The only crud that made it through was for those annoying fake diplomas, which I suspected where doing dictionary and other attacks.
The annoying part was that the spammers used brake tags, and I couldn't get yahoo's filters to block it. I would also bet that was why the spammers stated using them, it was so easy to block the keyword "diploma" instead of "html break a, html break c" etc. They also removed said keyword from their subject line.
This only lasted for about a week, I haven't seen any spam since then.
Actually, Spam isn't so bad.
If you really wanna scare the holy hell out of yourself, check out the ingredients in Armour Potted Meat Product.
My wife got a can of this stuff to reminisce the days when her sargeant daddy used to feed her this stuff on crackers. We...didn't like how it tasted too much. Upon looking at the ingredients, we got queasy.
There was a web site with ingredients and I recall seeing a scan of this product.
I'm still mad that I can't find Underwood Beef Spread down here, and must go "up north" to find it. Oh, the chicken and devilled ham are omnipresent, but not the tasty beef that I reminisce from my childhood.
(Oh, and to the percent per cent guy, percent is the preferred, although it is still proper to also use per cent.)
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
There used to be a website that would look up the personal information of the spammers and publish it.
I remember reading about one teenager, and they published his father's company phone number and said, "If you wanna ask his father why he does this, here's his number."
Another spammer had an anti-spammer break in and find topless photos of the spammer (a female.)
Needless to say these might be illegal, but are they still around?
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
Today I tried to send an email from hotmail and received an "Undeliverable Mail" reply (from hotmail mind you). Where did hotmail put that message? In my junk folder.
I looked at an old email account which had 400+ messages, 99% spam.
It doesn't seem difficult to create an email account that would accumulate 100% pure spam. If ISPs did this, they could block all this spam from their users.
Not sure if this is a new idea.
I help run a mailing list for my car club on a friend's cable modem.. At the time, there were about 500 users between the direct mail and the digest versions of the list. Roughly 10% were AOL users. A couple years ago, AOL users just stopped getting email. Everything in the logs looked normal. As far as we could tell, AOL was accepting the email, but users weren't getting it. AOL was just sending them off to /dev/null without telling anyone. After about a year of this, we took the AOL users out of the subscription lists, and still don't have any in there.
This is just your normal majordomo list... confirmation email is required before you start getting list email, list and server owner addresses are read, footer at the bottom of each message gives info on unsubscribing, and we have a FAQ on the website. Sendmail wasn't relaying any messages. We never did figure out why AOL decided to block us.
UberQuerty, this is an efficient technique. Me, I found that even friends can sometimes compromize my "good" email address by entering it in one of these email postcard websites that are generally big email addresses collectors.
So I give everyone (including friends) revokable addresses from spamgourmet and I invalidate selectively the addresses that start getting spammed. SG forwards me all emails to a secret account.
As per dictionary attack, they'll be extremely unlikely to succeed against these addresses considering the precautions you can choose to use on SG, such as keywords.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
Well, I am a satisfied user of Spamgourmet.com. This site has a nice little stat: 91% of the email it gets is spam. And therefore destroyed.
Granted, spamgourmet addresses are disposable and are generally given to mail-order web sites or other web-based suppliers, who are likely to spam you or to refuse to ever take you off their mailing lists (which is also unwanted mass mailing, hence spam). So it's hard to generalize this example to the whole Internet.
Still, it's a rather sobering amount. So the 40% figure is prolly optimistic indeed.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
Angle_slam, I am a satisfied user of SpamGourmet.com ( described here) and sneakemail.com ( described here). My favorite is SG and I really want to help it getting well known (it is free and open-source too).
My experience: sneakemail is good for one-time communications or automated services. It creates addresses that are a random string, and this jumble of letters and numbers is very hard to memorize or to simply dictate over the phone.
So you should never use sneakemail for generating email addresses that are also account names (e.g., sites such as amazon that identify you through your email address), because you'll not be able to remember them. Also, don't use them to give to people over the phone.
Spamgourmet allows you to pick a user name and then to create addresses of the form word1.word2.username@spamgourmet.com, with a possible extra prefix to avoid dictionary attacks. So if your user name is Joe6Pack, and sleazy.com wants you to register, give them something like sleazy.reg.Joe6Pack@spamgourmt.com that you'll be able to remember and that will be easy to trace. If sleazy.com starts spamming you, you just disable the address.
I tried several disposable services, and my favorite are spamgourmet and sneakemail, in that order.
Make sure you pick a new, secret, never used address to forward the emails received by these services.
Did I mention I have absolutely ZERO spam since I started using these services? Of course I had to get rid of my old address that was spammed to death.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
You went through all 5824 messages to confirm they were spam? If not, then what you said is false. Rather, you have a statistics that says not that 69.89% of your mail is spam, but that spamassassin thinks that 69.89% of your email is spam. The actual amount of spam could be higher or lower than that, indicating false positives or false negatives.
You're not the only one to make this sort of a false claim.
redundant.
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./ articles specifically related to spam, this month alone.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/11
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/09/144
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/06
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/06
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/06
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/05/054
http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=0
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/02/141
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/01
The above are
Will someone please come up w/ a Slashdot Spam Article Filter?
#SickNotWeak
I wish our government would address some of the real threats to our country, like this. Basically our email accounts are constantly under attack by what amounts to terrorists, the spammers. If you follow the jargon, everything that the government doesn't like is "terrorism". How about they fight the "terrorism" that is spam?
If George had to wade through a hundred or so spam emails a day to get to the stuff he really needs to read, maybe he'd jump on the bandwagon. Unfortunately, he strikes me as the kind who doesn't use a computer much, if at all.
'Course if he did, we'd be sending thousands of taxpayer dollars to Nigeria in an attempt to help Mr. William Ngongo get that surplus cash out of the country, making a tidy profit on our assistance. And we'd probably notice that Mr. Bush's pants would have a strangely large bulge in the crotch, and that his breasts seem to be getting larger. But at least the government would be free of credit card debt at last!
This is the official notification of the Campaign to Raise Awareness of Sarxpam Scourge (CRASS) (sarxpam: unsolicited and unwanted sexually-oriented E-mail). Maybe some enterprising soul can think of something to actually do about it (I'm too busy unclogging my mailbox).
I used to lead a quiet life
In fact it was a bare existence
I passed out on many floors
I don't do that any more
Hello my friends
Is everybody happy?
Hey look me over
Lend me an ear
I'm a conservative
I like the small black marks on my hands
I'm a conservative
I like the crazy girls that I screw
Hey I know them all well
And when I run out of bread I laugh
All the way to the bank
Sometimes I pause for a drink
Conservatism ain't no easy job
I smile in the mornings
I live without a care
Nothing is denied me
And nothing ever hurts
I got bored so I'm making my millions
When you're conservative you get a better break
You're always on the right side
When you're conservative
You walk with pride
Pride is on your side
Pride pride pride
Is on our side
Oh boy
Pride is on our side
I like my beer
I like my bread
I love my girl
I love my head
I'm in the clear man
I'm in the dear
Because I'm a conservative
I'm a conservative
I really am
Oh yes I am
And it would mean so much to me
If you would only be like me
Yes it could mean so much to me
Hey look me over
Lend me an ear
I'm a conservative
-- Iggy Pop "I'm A Conservative"
Except for Great Britain. According to ISO 9166 and Internet reality
Great Britain's toplevel domain should be _gb_. Instead, Great Britain
and Nortern Ireland (the United Kingdom) use the toplevel domain _uk_.
They drive on the wrong side of the road, too.
-- PERL book (or DNS and BIND book)
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...