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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."
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.
Bayesian filters are definitely the way to go. They flat-out *work*. Other programs I've used just didn't perform, like Cloudmark Spamnet.
The srticle states that 40% of Internet traffic is Spam
No, the article states that 40% of email is spam.
Which, frankly, seems low. But perhaps they're including corporate email, which often sees a much lower spam level.
I'm still trying to find estimates on how much of all Internet traffic is from SMTP -- I've seen estimates of anything from 5% to 30%.
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 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.
I run a small site (~100 users) and our spam filter, which is designed to be relatively forgiving, catches about 35% of the total messages that are handled by our mail server. 40% seems pretty low to me.
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.
You can see our mail stats here.
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
You know... You could fix this kind of situation yourself. If you set up a real DNS zone, AOL would have no way of knowing you aren't running a legitimate mailserver. Shell out a few bucks to get a name, then spend a day or two figuring out BIND (or worse WinNT DNS), then viola! You will be doing it correctly!! And who would have thought, when you do it right, ISPs will honor it!
- 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.