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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,"
One-third of e-mail is spam? But nine out of ten of my e-mails are spam... Nobody loves me. :~(
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.
Then who is getting the other 66.6% of my email?
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Support Indy Music. Buy
From the logs of our anti-spam appliance, over the last six weeks or so:
That's right, about 96% of our email is spam, viruses, or otherwise ungood.I'd be delighted if the spam dropped off so it were only 32% of our mail. Think of all the things I could do with that extra bandwidth...
In fairness, the study says they were looking at businesses, and this is at a small ISP, mostly residential customers. But it's a good number to chew on nonetheless.
spam really needs to catch up. I know that over half the snail-mail I get is junk mail...
... another 2/3 to go then our job is done.
Sanford Wallace
I've had the same domain name for around ten years with a catch all email acount. 1 in 3 is nothing, for me its closer to 99 out of 100.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
It's about time it started going down.
"After I received 80,730 different emails trying to sell viagra, I started to wonder: How many different ways are there to spell Viagra?"
http://cockeyed.com/lessons/viagra/viagra.html
I think that they goofed. 1/3 of it is virus infected, another 1/3 is spam, and the remaining 1/3 are jokes from people that you barely know that are not that funny.
I get about 2500 spams a week to my work address, and I can't change my work email. It's on my business cards, and as a DB geek they won't get me new ones :(
Because of the extreme amount of spam that I get, my Bayesian spam filters are pretty strict. I lose valid email all the time!!!
Why just this morning, I came in and was going through my spam folder, and found that my good friend Gooshot Moneyface has been trying to get in touch with me! I was wondering why I hadn't heard from her for so long.
Why should I argue rationally with someone being irrational? I'll just mock them instead.
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.
So things are better than the last time slashdot ran this story?
I doubt it.
-Colin
I heard about it here on /. and installed it the same day. At first it marked ALL my mail as spam because I'm on a few list servers, but the adaptive learning function of it is getting much better. After I "unlearned" my list mails as spam, it'd still let about 60% of spam through. Now it gets about 40 out of the 42 spams I get a day. I don't mind deleting two (or hitting "j" for junk), and recent searches through the junk folder show no false positives.
Check it out...
Filtering doesn't mitigate the problem.
So what if I don't have to see the mail? That doesn't mean my mailserver isn't using cycles to talk to some originating server, transfer, store and eventually delete that spam. The only saving grace is I don't have to pay for bandwidth on a usage basis (cable modem is still, happily, "flat rate").
But what happens if that volume gets to be high enough that it starts to affect my ability to use the bandwidth for other things?
What we have available are basically work-arounds; we need a concrete solution that addresses the basic problem.
So what is the problem? People soliciting without you opting in? Deceitful mail designed to make you open it thinking it is from a friend? The sheer volume?
The real problem is we haven't found an effective way to trace this crap back to the people supposedly "making money" with these schemes.
Solve *that* issue... put a name, address, and bank account to that spam, and we'll clean this stuff up in a hurry!
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
Funny, here 98% of spam comes FROM our CEO. :)
Deletes every third email. No mess, no fuss.
Stick a mail proxy between the internet and Exchange, that way he still gets to keep using Exchange, and you have a simple proxying machine that can do arbitary scanning and filtering.
You can scan all incoming mail with spamassissin and clamav before it reaches exchange, bounce or drop bad mail and forward "passed" mail into the Exchange server
You could also hookup a challenge response script there too.
I do the same thing for a company mail server running Lotus Notes.
anyone know how these stats compare with standard mail?
Pretty well. I get nearly 100% spam in my snail mail box. Marked with things like 'Past Due', 'Gomer's Collection Agency', 'We Know Where You Live'. I just chuck it all in the trash.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
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:
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.
And one third of Slashdot posts are First Post
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
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.
IPv4 allocations for hobbyists? join the ipalloc-l mailing-list! www.operations.net/mailman/listinfo/ipalloc-l
One day I'll simply snap and actually contact a spammer with the following order:
From: my@email.com
To: spammer@email.com
Subject: Order req'uest for >X<@n4x and V1agro! fxfj aspll cps
Dea'r Si:rs,
I w.ould l1ke t0 pl@ce 4n 0rder for tw0 p.ortions of Xa:n:aX' and v_i_a_g_r_a. P13aS.e sh1p im:medi`ate1y, 1 h@ve an><1ety and ne:ed a -bo-ner-
Y0urs s.incerel'y
S@vvy 1nvest0r
akdf k- dfks. dfk v9iew casoji ropdfk hork
aso, ckdo ofgkf opwerk- mmos odkaok s
w eofk, eoro gksod bz o-