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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."
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?
about spam stopping software.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
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
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.
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
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.
Maybe you have lots of friends and they're all filling out those "notify my friends" forms?
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 $.50 / minute downloading spam for half an hour, even though your local filter blocks it from your view will you still be happy?
There are people who want to re-invent the email protocol to solve the problem. Yeah, doing something technological can help the FUTURE, but what are we going to do for the 5 years it takes to develop, implement, and deploy this new technology?
Think about it.
The real problem with spam is the economics: it costs next to nothing to send a message, the only real cost (time) is borne by the recipient. Fix that problem and spam will go away. It doesn't need legislation, which in any case could apply in just one jurisdiction.
A system like Hash Cash could solve the problem. The most popular free mail clients could start including hash-cash postage with each sent message, and then in a couple of years' time start to drop incoming messages that don't have postage paid. AOL could include hash cash in their mail client easily. *Easily*. That spam-detection centre they run is not cheap. Even Microsoft would add hash cash to Outlook, Outlook Express and Hotmail, since it's another encouragement to upgrade to a new Outlook release (which of course requires a new Windows version).
Getting the whole world to upgrade its mail clients is a hard task, but getting every government in the world to pass anti-spam laws and enforce them is much harder. Goodness knows it's bad enough trying to get _one_ legislature to take a sane view on anything technology-related.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
that the biggest purveyor of filling my postal mail box with crap that I haven't signed up for or asked for (ie: cd's and cd holders that are worthless), is now fighting spam. Give me a break! How about they stop mailing those stupid #@%@$%^& 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
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.
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".
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
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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?
95% of all email is spam. The rest is my project manager sending out emails about TPS reports.
You can't handle the truth.
like anyone'e opinion/ideas on what may be done about the spam issue besides filters.
all i did was register a new domain, run smtp/sendmail/squirrelmail from home (dsl connection). this really is a $40 solution, provided you already have the hardware (you have to pay for the domain).
Make sure you don't give out your address too much, and spam becomes non-existent. if, and when you start receiving spam, turn on spam filters (they come with squirrelmail). if this fails, just change your email address, cause damn, you're running the server!
We're like rats, in some experiment! -- George Costanza
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 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
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.
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--
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.
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.
$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.
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!
On the server I administer, I have a nightly cronjob set to parse the spamassassin logs, and email me the stats.
Since the logs were cycled on Sunday morning, there have been 8332 messages, 5824 of which were spam, for a percentage of 69.89%.
This number has increased substantially over the last 3 weeks. This time last month we were below 50%.
"The guide is definitive, reality is frequently inaccurate."
The problem with filters at the ISP/Mail Server is that one persons spam is anothers desired mail. How do correct for this?
Those few people can type "enlarge my penis" into Google and click on a link that comes up.
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!
...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.
Corporate speech and individual speech are equally protected under the First Amendment.
Wrong.
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.
Just who are the people who are responding to spam?
-Men with small penises who are insecure about them
-Someone who wants a diploma but is too dumb to go to college
-Someone gullible enough to think that they can buy pure human growth hormone for 29.95 a bottle.
-A person who really doesn't know how to find a teenage beastiality plump asian tranny webcam on their own with a search engine
-Someone who wants to "make money fast" and has never been burned by a scam before. (Or is too dumb to see that this is one)
Should I go on?
Think about how many complete fucking morons you run into every single day, now understand that about 75% of them have email addresses and receive spam. Out of 10 million spams, all it takes is a few gullible fools to give a return on investment.
People sometimes ask my why I rag on stupid people so much. It's because their ignorance causes me inconvenience in many forms...spam is one of those forms. (others include needing ID to buy liquor, pot being illegal, and car insurance in denver being so fucking high)
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
Truth in advertising laws.
Restrictions on how/when/where some businesses can advertise. (Tobacco/Alcohol)
Nike v. Kasky
It's not as clear-cut as you make it sound.
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.
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.
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.
Of course it is possible for ISPs to configure their mail servers to check hash postage on each message and drop them if it's not valid. This would save the storage costs of spam. And if a particular other host always sends messages with bad postage you could stop accepting connections from that host. But all this is optional: I feel a postage system has the best chance of getting started if it is adopted from the bottom up by mail user agents rather than ISPs' mail servers. Both is better though.
I don't think that hash cash works by having a problem sent from the recipient to the sender which the sender must then generate the answer to. Rather, you have a one-way function where it is hard to generate the answer but easy to check that the answer is correct. The 'problem' includes the recipient's email address and the message content - so you cannot reuse the same postage for two messages.
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).
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
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.
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
Corporate speech and individual speech are equally protected under the First Amendment.
Seriously, what gave you that idea? Are corporations citizens? Do you think they have the right to vote? Does the second amendment apply to them? Does a sufficiently old corporation have the right to run for president, if it was founded in this country?
My impulse is to think that was an incredibly asinine statement, but I do not claim to be an expert on constitutional law. In fact, "mildly informed" is putting it too strongly. So educate me, back up the claim that "Corporate speech and individual speech are equally protected under the First Amendment."
God is real unless declared integer
1. what happens with Mr. DumbGuy sets up a proxy on his dialup account, and then doesn't take the necessary steps to secure it? That would technically not be the ISP's mail server, but much more spam comes from these types of instances that large mail servers being used for outgoing spam.
,etc all send more spam than open proxies in the US. Your 3 point program would not address anything outside the US. When you have laws that force their ideas upon a part of the internet, all of the stuff you were trying to get rid of in the first place will just move outside of the US's jurisdiction.
2. if you "legally" require software to contain certain settings, and that software is open source, it would be pretty easy to get around any settings that are "legally" put in place. This is called tarpitting, and is already used on many mail servers, but there is no reason to make it a law.
3. what happens when yahoo.com or aol.com get on that list. What, you think all spam comes from an end user?
Your 3 point program has lots of holes. One of the biggest holes is the fact that most of the spam comes from sources outside the US. Brazil, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Russia
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
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
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
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.
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-
- 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.
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.
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
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
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.
Whats your email address again?
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.
I'll agree on the brain dead part. From what I've learned from my host, AOL has put in a new system that automatically blocks based on complaints from AOL users. The more complaints, the longer the block stays in place. Apparently no human ever looks at it (until something goes wrong). This means AOL can be unreachable pretty much at random, and it can happen several times a day.
I remember one instance not too long ago where AOL even admitted that address had been forged and they were blocking incorrectly, but they couldn't figure out how to unblock manually. This was straight from an AOL represenative's mouth.