One Third of Email Now Spam

Himanshu writes "The volume of spam received by business has doubled over the last two years and it's going to get worse. Analysts IDC reckons that spam represented 32 per cent of all email sent on an average day in North America in 2003, doubling from 2001. That figure is less than the 50 per cent or more junk mail statistic commonly cited by email-filtering firms like MessageLabs and Brightmail but it still represents a serious problem,"

Comments

I get tons. 1 in 3 ha!

[titaniam]

I get a ton of spam, check out some of my recent spams and a frequency plot. starting from when I began saving and filtering them. Many thanks to Paul Graham for his plan for spam, or I would be buried by 350 spams per day by now. It is only going to get worse! Based upon how many I get, the probability is more like 95% percent of my email is spam.

Virus sent spam

[Outosync]

I'd like to have a statistic on how much of that spam is do to worms relaying themselves from infected networks. 80% of the spam I now filter has a worm or trojan attached. I rarely get the marketing spam anymore.

Better?

[CGP314]

So things are better than the last time slashdot ran this story?

I doubt it.


-Colin

My tool

[TwistedSpring]

Well, approximately 95% of my e-mail is spam. I hacked together a tool called POPgun that takes a real basic approach to spam checking. None of your Bayesian filters and all that nonsense. It sits transparently between my mail client (which connects to localhost) and my mail server, captures the mails as they come in and rewrites them.

It does eight (yes, eight) tests on the subjects of every message. I havent even added body checking yet, and it catches most spam. I even tried replacing these 8 tests with the SpamAssassin engine and found that it was less good at detecting spam mails. The tests are so simple:

1. Is The Subject Capitalized Like A Headline?
2. Does the subject contain too many non english-alphanumeric characters?
3. Is the subject a duplicate of another subject in the same POP retrieve job?
4. Does the subject contain 4 or more spaces anywhere?
5. Is the subject more THAN HALF CAPITAL LETTERS
6. Does the mail have no subject at all?
7. Does the su-bject con+tain obvi!ous obfuscation?
8. Finally, does the subject hit on the blacklisted words?

The blacklist is checked after first collapsing spaced-out words like "V I A G R A" and removing the above-mentioned obvious obfuscation. It's regex-based and contains the typical stuff like "meds" "medication" etc, but also a test for a subject that ends in 3 or more spaces followed by a string of random consonants.

When it detects SPAM, it simply changes the subject line to indicate that the message is spam.

In addition to spam-checking, it also removes all HTML mark-up (removes the tags leaving plaintext behind), deciphers MIMEd messages and recompiles them into multipart/mixed format (so images etc. are attachments) and renames many-extensioned attachments, so girl.jpg.pif becomes girl.pif.

It's still in dev, but it'll be available on baxpace.com in the next week or so for Win32 (as an exe) and UNIX platforms. It's written in Perl.

I would have guessed much higher

[dre23]

Maybe 99%. More people should be reading all of these documents.

If every Linux and Windows machine ran Postfix with CRM114 by default (and with manpages and documentation), this would help. Maybe a new anti-spam Linux distribution is needed. MacOSX ships with Postfix, but not CRM114.

Do you have any idea how many open-relays still exist? Why does SMTP software allow '*' open-relays in the first place? Do you know how many proxy servers are out there on the Internet? How many SOCKS4&5 proxies that just allow any SMTP to be bounced? How many are seemingly closed but available with the CONNECT method? Let's close some of our holes, and prevent software from opening them in the first place.

Also - know your enemy. Why haven't people dissected the software these creeps are using. The majority of spam comes from a program called DarkMailer or DM. Let's reverse engineer this application and figure out how it works, so our defenses can be built around the enemy's weapons and not just generalizations about spam.

Finally, let's set some ethics and procedures about how to deal with spammers. Too many is the case that people just want to beat their heads in with baseball bats or delete all their files on all their computers. This activity is not productive. It's my firm belief that if you take away their tools and educate them, less spam will be out there. You make it a war -- and that's what you'll get. Passion drives creativity and efficiency.