Slashdot Mirror
You've Got Spam: AOL Blocks 1/2 Trillion Spam
yohaas writes "Yahoo! News is reporting that AOL blocked more than 500 billion spam messages for its users in 2003. That comes to 40 messages a day per user. The company regularly blocks 75-80% of all incoming mail as spam! The article also lists the top 10 spam phrases for the year, including such come-ons as: 'Viagra online', 'Online pharmacy', 'Get out of debt' and 'Get bigger'."
I know AOL bashing is a treasured hobby of many Slashdotters, but based on those numbers it seems that they're doing a fairly good job at blocking spam. Especially since they're a huge ISP who has to be conservative with their spam blocking techniques.
Instead of sending the mails to the bitbucket AOL should do something about the abuse. They've got the IP addresses of half a trillian zombies and open proxies. Where's the AOL goon squad? They should be kicking down doors, not writing press releases.
if they block 500 billion spam messages if a couple trillion spams are sent around in a year? Despite how large that number sounds, I still see client AOL inboxes stuffed with all sorts of junk, and see this more as a publicity stunt on AOL's part. I read the article, and no where in it does it say how much spam total there was in 2003. 500 billion may sound impressive by itself, but if it's 500 billion blocked out of 50 trillion, it's not such a big deal.
AOL blocks a lot of legitimate email as well, however. If you prefer to run your own email server (for example, about half of all the Linux broadband users on Slashdot) then you cannot send to an AOL user... same goes for SWBell users too I think. Sure they block a lot of email and I can kinda understand their purpose in blocking "dynamic" or "residential" IPs... but that is collateral damage.
If they're blocking that much spam, makes me wonder how much of the mail that was NOT spam is being blocked. Maybe AOL users are not getting all the email they should be getting.
On the other hand, I get spam from AOL and they dont seem to be doing anything about it, maybe they should be concetrating on blocking their outgoing spam too.
=9,765.6 petabytes [I guessed at the average size of a spam email]
I wonder how much that costs AOL?
A less deceptive way of phrasing it is that AOL has blocked 500 billion emails from reaching the intended recipients. I doubt very much that this figure takes into account the ridiculous rate of false positives that AOL's rather loose definition of "spam" results in.
Do you think that a bunch of poor people in China are all of a sudden picking up laptops and peddling viagra? It's not the Chinese, it's the same people who have always sent spam. They are just buying their hosting/bandwidth from companies overseas, where regulations are non-existant.
Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
they simply want everyone to use AOL. if you cant email your friend on AOL, its your fault, and you gotta use AOL to fix it. maybe one day they will block mail from any non-AOL members. i could see it happening.
http://ipod.fresh27.net/
Nor is it any better of a move if done with the approval of management. Each ISP who does it will alienate its own customers -- "You let spam into my mailbox to prove to me that spam is bad? I already knew that, shithead!" -- and will lose customers to those ISPs who do not breach their customers' trust in this fashion.
In short, letting spam in doesn't demonstrate that spam is bad. We already know that spam is bad. All it demonstrates is that you are willing to hurt people who trust you in order to make a point. That's called being an asshole. And that is why this "protest" has been shot down time and again.
I've done a lot of email work with companies.
It's damaging email. It's hurting business. It costs BILLIONS a year to slow down spam to make mailboxes not entirely useless.
A manager: "I can't see how someone serious about doing business could keep relying on email."
Mail is being discarded (no bounce backs, no trail) all over the place.
Now, when the US House stops blocking spam to their own mailboxes, maybe we'll get some laws with some balls and maybe the FTC, FBI and similar agencies might get the budget and motivation to track down the HUGE amount of spam that is illegal in that it's perpetrating scams or illegal medicines.
We convict the minor players and offer them real prison or they get to appear on the new Fox show:
"Cane the Spammer".
20 whacks. Each whack given by a system admin selected by lottery.
Do it public and demotivate the kiddies willing to blast out some mail for some guy for $500.
You are quiet correct, as a sysadmin, I know full well just how much money spam costs, and a big chunck of it is not paid for by the spammer. Its paid for by the network that has to pay for the bandwidth that is used to deliver the crap the spammer sends to me, intended for my customers that don't even want the f'ing shit. I have to pay so a spammer can choke my mail server full of crap that will just get deleted. I have to pay for the spammers that employ dictionary attacks to get spam through to any user they can find. Its my bandwidth that suffers so that they can bombard just a few dozen more people with their nonsense ads that no one wants to see. I didn't ask for it, nor did my customers, why the fuck should I have to pay for it then?
And if that is not enough, I can assure you, a great deal of spam is comming in from windows systems that have been infected with some exploit and turned into mail relays. Real Time Blacklists have been a lot less effective over the past few weeks due to spam comming from dsl and cable lines now with a new vigor. Its not just a couple comming from an owned pc, its a couple hundred.
And yet, its still fucking legal! Explain it to me God, explain it to me, I want it explained, Jesus!!!!!!
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
The solution to this is to strictly enforce some laws we have, like the California law that makes it a criminal offense to accept a credit card number online from a California resident without first disclosing the actual business name and address of the business. If every spammer who violated that law did the required six months in the county jail, we'd have far fewer spammers.
every time slashdot has a story about spam, i again wonder to myself why the world hasn't turned to the obvious solution: a new email standard. i read a comment recently to the effect of "if a given protocol allows cheating, it's a bad protocol". it should be clear to everybody that this technical problem can not be solved with legislation (not that it shouldn't be illegal anyway, but it's folly to expect laws to have any real impact). the world needs an email protocol which is encrypted and authenticated, traceable and secure, and easily combined with whitelist or pay-to-deliver filters.
And yet, its still fucking legal!
Using a virus or a trojan to take over a PC and use it to relay spam is definitley *not* legal in the USA. I really want to see someone tie this to an individual spammer and get the bastard sent up the river..
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Spam is not illegal you say? Since when is sending pornography to children legal? When did it become legal to commit credit card fraud? Just how is it legal to pretend that you're some foreign government official with an "offer you can't refuse" so long as people send their bank info?
The vast majority of spam is very much illegal, always has been! It's not like breaking the law is any more or less illegal just because it's done by spam instead of some other medium.
The real problem here is enforcement. That's the problem in China, as you mentioned above, and it's also the problem in the United States, Canada, Europe and elsewhere. The problem with spam is that it's so big and so difficult to track individual spammers that most law enforcement agencies just don't see the value in it unless the spammer sends something really bad. If a spammer starts sending out lots of adds for child porn, chances are that the cops will bust them. But simply trying to commit credit card fraud seems to not be seen as a sufficiently "evil" act to warrant the sort of international investigation that would be required (and probably for good reason, the cost of such an investigation would be huge with only a limited chance of a conviction).
Unfortunately the sad fact of the matter is that we can't depend on laws and law enforcement agencies to solve the spam problem. Think about it, it's illegal to steal cars, but nearly everyone still locks their car door instead of just hoping that the cops will bust any car thief. When it comes to spam, we've got to use filters (preferably at the ISP level) and hope that the police can at least catch the worst offenders.
Well.. its not amazing, spam grows at leaps and bounds each day that someone new moron thinks they will make money from doing spam, cause the hear about it on TV and online so much. I spoke to a Failed spammer recently and he said " I lost my isp connection, and they never paid me" So that leaves one to think that only the High end guys are probably really making TONS of money off of this anymore, they have the little guy actually doing the mailings. AOL has so many email accounts and allows each user to have so many per account that it is not unbelievavle that they are probably blocking themost if not in the top 5 --Dave http://www.whitehatsystems.com/