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Some Ways To Avoid Spam On Gmail
jafo writes "In general, Gmail has been extremely spam-free. More recently, however, it's gotten dramatically worse. I've written up some thoughts on Gmail spam and keeping the spam down. Want less spam on Gmail (and likely others)? Try generating an account name using "apg -M L -t"."
My postman is such a putz - ever since I subscribed to the 'slashdot postal catalogue', he has [rather cunningly] worked out that I read slashdot.
... then he drives off laughing like an idiot - it is very annoying and I would like it to stop - can anyone give me some advice?
Now, since that my address is 1 Aardvark Avenue, Australia; I am the first person that gets his mail delivered off the truck.
So just as I go out the door on my way to work, he drives up - delivers my mail (very dramatically) and yells "FIRST POST"
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
and then you end up with an email address that you have to keep written on a post-it stuck to your monitor so you can remember it.
Sure, it's "tiasi54ffcb44334bcvxw53ezz3wr@gmail.com," that is t as in this, r as in really, i as in is, a, s as in stupid, i as in idea...
I have absolutely NO spam on my gmail account. Why? Because my email address is l1OO0100lO1l100lO1l01@gmail.com. Or 1O00100lO1l1O0lO110l@gmail.com. Or 100O100lOl11O0lO110l@gmail.com... I forget which. But that's an implementation detail; the important point is that I get absolutely no spam!
I have a couple gmail acounts. The spam they get, and its not alot so far, seems to be guess the name type. The name in the "to" field is close but not exactly my address. I think gmail just delivers it but marks it instantly as spam so the spammers don't know which are "live" addresses and which are non existant ones.
just my experience..
Its going to get worse though. As more people use it and when it goes out of beta and some spammers can start getting accounts and testing...
Heck I have a domain with one email addess (which is a catch all). I've never ever given out the address, yet I get spam there... Lots of it.
Its making email so much less usefull
Just don't use 'effin Gmail! GAH! Just because everyone and their cat has 50 gmail invites to give out doesn't mean that you have to use it.
SpamAssassin is catching nearly 100% of the spam bound for my regular personal email account. I don't need Google's help with that.
The subject always starts with my user as well... e.g. cmdr_taco4 have a Rolex, where cmdr_taco is my user (which it isn't). Wonder why, it can't just be personalisation; because it's obviously not intended for me; adding a number after the user doesn't help...
I was curious about how much spam gets auto generated. I have a fairly common name so I used one of my gmail invites with my normal gmail account to make an account with my firstname.lastname@gmail.com.
I havn't used or given it out to anbody, the spam folder gets about 25 messages a day. Luckly google has done a perfect job with marking them all spam.
I receive some spam every day on my GMail account and, looking at the headers, it seems that the spammers are randomly generating the email addresses and my address, eventually, gets generated and receives spam. Fortunately, the GMail spam filter has successfully caught all of the spam.
my address is ~[caps lock]{{}>>>@@gmail.com&$#((::>> seems to keep everything out of my inbox
a troll account on Slashdot, and it has about 2 pages of spam now. From one /. account. Not used anywhere else. More proof of OSDN's true leanings
gmail is the best free-email-spam-catcher that i ever used.
I signed up for gmail, and after logging into the account about four times, and having sent all of maybe a dozen emails, all of which went to personal friends, started receiving spam messages. Currently it's a trickle, something under 1 spam message per day, and they've all been caught by gmail's spam filter, but for some reason I still find it annoying to see ANY spam. I don't get spam at all on my fastmail accounts, and have been using them as my everyday mail account for better than a year now.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
It's a well written article, but I don't feel it brings anything new to the discussion. Yes, spammers were eventually going to target GMail because of it's popularity, but there isn't really any detailed information in the article as to how Google is defending itself, merely a lot of (interesting) specualtion.
And while the same techniques are used to try and stop spammers from finding your account, there aren't any gmail specific ideas, which is what I hoped I would find int he article.
I'm not stressed. I'm just terribly, terribly alert.
"Want less spam on Gmail (and likely others)? Try generating an account name using apg -M L -t""."
This helps to get less email from your friends as well.
For an account name, apg is fine. For passwords, I've created a far more flexible system which I distribute with documentation describing password generation from my site.
The key to good password generation is allowing the user to describe how it's to be done. This increases the ability to memorize passwords and makes it harder for an attacker to guess.
To that end, I have created a sort of reverse regular expression syntax where you describe the password to the program using general patterns. Try it out.
I have two gmail accounts. One is myl33tusername@gmail - the other is firstname.lastname@gmail. Guess what - the latter is now swamped with spam. Granted, gmail properly files them all in the spam folder, but it shows that the spammers are already firing off massive dictionary attacks on gmail.
Underholdning.info
The evidence is empirical. The conclusions are common sense. I'm surprised the article doesn't talk about False Positives, the bane of spam filtering. I usually sign up for a few mailing lists, and then create filters to automatically archive them. Recently, a lot of my mailing list traffic has been marked as Spam, even though my filter specifically says to archive all mail from the list.
AnimeNEXT anime convention
Get an email address from here:
m nopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk.com/
http://www.abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijkl
most spammers won't think you're serious.
Is apg digitally signed?
I think by nature, spam gets more and more like real messages. This means that eventually all spam filtering becomes ineffective. Someone could probably make a research paper out of this.
Every other week GMail marks a email from a friend as spam. On the brighter side it does mark all spam as spam. To me Yahoo!'s spam filter does a better job than GMail.
First of all, I'll say that none of the messages which were marked as spam were legitimate messages. However, I'm not using these accounts very heavily yet. All of them have received under 10 legitimate messages since I set them up. So far, Gmail is doing a good job of classifying the spam.
Your homebrew setup is no better off than a stock GMail account. And I don't have to maintain my own SpamAssassin, GMail does it for me.
I keep getting the same spam over and over which starts "TOP SOFTWARE...". It's mostly the only one I see and GMail recognises it as spam, but the same message keeps coming to my spambox several times a day. I wish they'd just ban it.
my email is billgates@gmail.com
...and gmail's inteligent spam filters couldn't even filter ONE.. :S
Maby try eProvisia LLC ?
they claim removing 100% of spam, leaving legit mail alone
http://eprovisia.coredump.cx/
It was some weeks before I noticed I even had spam in my Gmail account. It has thus far filtered spam with one hundred percent precision. Best I've seen anywhere.
- IP
Seems to be a lot of that going around here these days. Another run-of-the-mill blogger thinks he's discovered something new and interesting and all of a sudden it's big news on /.
Listen, spammers use dictionary attacks. They'll send their turdlets to any number of common names and words and variations thereof. It's the same for any email domiain. The phenomena certainly isn't unique to Gmail. You see it taking place on just about every ISPs mail servers. And God knows it's no big revelation that if your email address is hard to guess then you'll get less spam. For Pete's sake! I can't believe how lame this is. This is one of the lamest stories on slashdot I've seen in quite some time.
This brings up an interesting point. It seems that Gmail is trying to make a "best guess" as to who should receive these messages.
For example, (actual account names changed) say I had a Gmail account of "user.name@gmail.com" I would receive spam to "used.names@gmail.com". The interesting thing is that when I click on "Show Original", there are zero references to "user.name@gmail.com".
So why is this email getting routed to the "valid" address? Why is it not just bouncing? Is Gmail just making a "best guess"?
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
I'm getting about 5 a day now. I have a sinking feeling I accidentally put my real email instead of a throw away one into some online something or other.
On the other hand, Gmail marks every last one of them correctly.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
This can be paired with using your real name as a password, for extra security.
Username: sds#SFD#4sdv_sd
password: johnsmith
That is gonna screw those crackers!
Spamcop reports as originally being from a "ajicccln.info" address. They're using a nameguessing system, too. I wonder why Google doesn't just block their IPs totally?
Well I got a GMail account especially so I can use it to sign up to bulletin boards, forums and to use when I order stuff over the web etc. etc.
That way all the spam I get should start going to my GMail account thereby leaving my real email account (hosted on my home server) free for me to use with friends and family etc. (It's been 100% spam free in the nine months I've been using it)
Previously I'd been using a "throwaway" domain name I bought specially for this (which gets redirected to a real account) but it's due for expiry soon and, now I have a GMail account, it can go ! So my top tip of the week is get several free web mail accounts and use them for everything but your private stuff.
And on this note I'd never use my GMail account for any private stuff as, fer fecks sake, they're a SEARCH company. How long do you think it'll be before their new corporate shareholder overlords start doing some real intensive data mining on all your GMails ?
"But dude, their motto is do no evil" I hear you squeak. Sorry, they're a publically listed company and will do whatever "the market" tells them to do...
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
the Google weenies get off their butts and fix the annoying issues I'm experiencing with my account (incorrect # of msgs, not being able to open spam/trash folders, etc.), Spam is the farthest thing from my mind. FIX IT damn you!
Try generating an account name using "apg -M L -t"."
You should never use a password as an account name!
Something I'd like to know (and this isn't stated in the article) is: which of his accounts has been published somewhere on the net (or available to the public in any harvesting kind of way).
Doesn't matter if your account is simply garbage, as long as someone can spider it on the web. All honor to the dictionary attack, but as we all know, it doesn't take very long before someone finds your account on the web. Also, there are ways to prevent this.
I never have my mailto clickable, and I use combinations of images to display it.
I don't know about you, but suggesting people selecting rheyghyab@gmail as their email address seems pretty stupid to me. Granted, spammers will have a hard time guessing it, but everybody else will have a hard time remembering it.
Underholdning.info
I use Jetable.org (time expiring email relay addressess) to when signing up or doing something that I might suspect might get me on a spam list. This way email get's sent to my gmail (or any other account) for a limited time and if the spammer gets a hold of the jetable email address, it just expires after a set time period. VERY useful!
And it's totally free!
http://www.jetable.org/en/index
I don't know if this is related but my spam on gmail exploded after I've used it as my primary ebay account email.
But your email worths nothing if noone knows it, and if enough people knows it in a way or another, at the very least some will be infected by worms or be part of botnets that will share your hard-to-guess email address with spammers, and will not matter how complex or simple is your mail address.
Of course, measures can be taken to lower the probability to have spam, i.e. not have your email address in a clear way in web pages or participating in very public mailing lists with your mail without some obfuscation, and things like that, but the way proposed by the article only would work for, well, alternate mails for special uses, i.e. the backing up of data named in the article.
The solution is not have a hard, meaningless email address, that can be forgotten. mispelled, etc by the people that makes sense to have an email address, is to have a good spam filter, at least as good as the gmail one.
presuming you are getting email free from Google ?
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
You could try admin.(your name)@gmail.com or abuse.(your name)@gmail.com . Those are generally filtered out by spam companies, you could get less spam, but it still probably wouldn't stop it completely.
Don't have a gmail address ( I guess I'm the only one left on /. that doesn't - dilbyswig@hotmail.com if you want to send an invite)
This post patent pending.
I use my Gmail account for friends & family only. I have a yahoo account for my online subscriptions (including /.) and therefore don't really have a spam problem.
That is, unless, your referring to the 3-4 spam messages my Gmail account gets per week.
thelikesofwhich.com
If you are looking for an invite, check out http://www.freegmailinvites.com/. It DOES actually work. That is where I got my gmail account. I just donated 10 new invites to the site.
www.DIYTVAntennas.com
I wish you could set gmail to mark it automatically as "read" so you don't have that bolded Spam (1) in your menu... For anal-retentive bastards like myself, it will drive you nuts!
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
Dramatically worse? I've had my account fro almost six months now - not one spam yet.
The fantastic thing about Gmail is its filters. I kept getting spam with un*su*bs*cr*ib*e in it. I just set a filter that would send it straight to the trash (skipping a step). So far, not one piece of spam has hit my Inbox, only the spambox.
Just don't use 'effin regular personal email account! GAH! Just because everyone and their cat has 50 gmail invites to give out doesn't mean that you have to use it.
Gmail is catching nearly 100% of the spam bound for my Gmail account. I don't need SpamAssassin's help with that.
I wonder if the spammers caught it yet. Gmail supposedly supports syntax of youraccountname+arbitrarytext@gmail.com and the email still gets delivered, plus can be filtered. If spammers don't get the idea tp cut the +...@ part off, you may easily post you+webpage001@gmail.com on your webpage and once harvested by spammers, change to you+webpage002, while blocking all emails with 001, etc. Same with "temporary stuff", like, say, logins to "suspect" sites, ebay auctions etc. Whenever it's not needed anymore, filter it off.
Of course sooner or later spammers will learn to remove the + part. Then still putting periods at arbitrary places of your gmail u.s.ern.ame remains
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Not to troll, but WTF ?
"I get spam in my spam filter" - really don't see it as a problem when brute-force spam gets routed to my spam filter.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
For one thing, I suspect that the spammers could probably figure out what the base username is, and then just hammer your account with spam.
Secondly, I've been noticing this week in the spam folder, that I'm getting a lot of copies of the exact same message, sent to myusernameXX where XX are just two random numbers.
So now, instead of getting one copy of any given spam consuming my storage, I'm getting multiple copies sent to invalid addresses that just happen to start with my username.
Gmails spam-filter works well, just wish there was a way to filter out languages... send($language) to spam-folder. I don't give out my gmail address, i use a domain that is re-directed to the account, but i keep getting spam in russian, addressed to the gmail addy.
For temp & signup emails i use http://www.mailinator.com/, it seems to be down at the moment - because of the silly amounts of spam they recieve. It's a great service when it works, get a temp inbox with any addy you want. The box is deleted after a couple of hours, nothing to trace it back to you!
There is never, ever, any need for MS Comic Sans
I like using this site to give my invites away. About five minutes after I donate an invite someone gets it: http://isnoop.net/gmailomatic.php
I created a gmail account and within 1 day I have 6 spam messages. THe email address was not sent to anyone. THe name was however a common name and it appears the spam I am getting is just bulk sent to common names.
Just create some sort of auto-reply which asks the sender to identify a generated picture and send the answer back. Then will the suspected spam message move to your inbox.
The initial version doesn't even need a generated picture, a simple email like: "Your mail is clasified as spam, could you please resend this message by replying to this message.".
Technically this will work along-side normal spam-filtering-tools, because you do not want to irritate people you frequently send mails to. So basically only auto-spam-reply's are sent to messages which are clasified as spam (or only for messages which might not be spam). Of course the system should sent some smart id with every outgoing mail (including with the auto-anti-spam-reply's) so that every genuine reply wont be clasified as spam.
Bounced auto-reply messages should of course be ignored (you should not see them).
You could also add an other way for people to prevent these irritating messages. The instructions will be displayed in the auto-spam-reply's:
"Want to prevent these kind of anti-spam reply's? Then install iamnospammer software from iamnospammer.org".
And people who buy things via spam should be beaten to death.
Don't use any random string generator for generating account names. I used one and look at what I got!
If you think from spammer perspective alone, not bouncing messages for a wrong address is a good idea, but is it always oaky. What about the genuine cases. I make a mistake in typing the address and I do not get a bounce, so I will assume that the other person received the mail. I know I'll probably branded unworthy to be a /.'er for typing an address by hand. But is that a trivial problem - not knowing when a message has not been delivered?
I'm much more funny, interesting and insightful than the moderators think
or was it just the fact that all the email addresses on it are so new that they hadn't gotten propagated around on spam-lists.
or is it that now that there are so many email addresses @ gmail, any random 6-8 character string @ gmail.com is likely to match up with *somebody*, so just flooding the system will get some through.
gmail, like hotmail, will become a victim of its own success very quickly.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Man, that was quite clever of you...you crack the joke, and then cash in on it with the +5 insightful for the mod points. Now all you need is some jackass to point it out, in hopes that he can get a +5 insightful out of it too...oh wait...
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
It might change in the future but right now Gmail's spam filter is amazing.
Out of curiousity I decided to forward all of my university accounts to Gmail (these accounts get 100+ spam emails a day). Gmail has correctly flagged EVERY single spam message and dropped it into the spam folder and I havent seen any false positives.
As long as I never have to look at it I really don't care what people send me.
Yahoo! Mail lets you auto-delete any SPAM. It would be nice for Gmail to give you that option. That way you wouldn't even notice the SPAM that get's sent and correctly classified as such.
it all goes into the spam folder. I have a quick review of that folder before nuking. I don't open any of it.
Once something is flagged as spam it appears to flag it for everyone (least it looks like what it is doing). As spam dealing goes, Gmail has to be one of the best.
I forward my long standing email address to my gmail and it gets lots of spam; 900 in last 20 days. That address seems to be on all teh spammers' lists.
If I read my gmail early in the morning I see plenty of spam. If I don't check until later in the day I see dramatically less. Here's how it seems to work.
If I wait and let others mark their morning batch of spam it helps gmail recognize and folder most if not all of my spam. If I log in earlier I mark my spam so gmail can folder them away for everyone else.
It seems that once I see the spam in my index, it does not get foldered. But if I don't check my gmail until later, usually *all* spam has been moved to the spam folder.
I've been saving all of my spam from 4 domains. Figured the more I have for Thunderbird to work on, the better it will do at filtering. I wondered what difference it would make if I avoided spam-attracting behaviors vs trying to attract as much spam as I could. I use my gmail account for that- I sign up for whatever mailing lists I find on google, and I respond to as many of the spam messages as I have the patience for. Playing with the 419ers is always entertaining. My goal is to see if I can get the rate of incoming spam to my gmail account to exceed that of the 4 domains. Hasn't happened yet, but it looks like it's getting closer and closer. If nothing else, i'll have a raft of extra spam for Thunderbird to chew on.
I never recieved any spam on my gmail account, until I published my PGP key for it. Now the bastard spammers even put my name in the emails they send me.
I get as much spam in GMAIL as I get anywhere else. The fact that I use my GMAIL account to post to Google Groups makes this certain. I previously used my YaHoo account, and the same thing is true there.
But you know what? Both GMAIL and YaHoo filter out nearly 100% of the spam into my spambox.
The real question is how good is GMAILS spam logic? I've seen about 3 of 50 spams make it past GMAIL in the last month. About the same percent at YaHoo (more spam, more false negatives.)
I didn't receive ANY spam until I accidentally posted to NNTP using my GMAIL account. I didn't realize that the new Google Groups shared my e-mail login.
I've had my gmail account since almost the day gmail came available to the public, and never once did I have a single SPAM email until around 2 or 3 weeks ago when I registered a domain with planetdomain.com and then I had about 30 spam emails about how I should use my domain to 'earn millions' and how I could 'get 25 million hits to your site... if you do this' type of emails. Luckily gmail has done a very good job of identifying these emails as SPAM.
"Rheyghyab"? Pfffft! Who isn't going to be able toremember the capital of Cabanastan?
Someone you trust is one of us.
What I'd like is for Google to stop sending my 'good' mail into the spam box, I seem to be getting a tremendous amount of false positives the more I use the account. One would think the opposite would happen as it click the 'not spam' button, but It's beginning to get frustrating and emails to Google meet with no response.
Got sushi? The Sushi FAQ
All the spammed messahes all has titles like (something similar to my username) Popular software at low low prices and (something similar to my username) Extinguish pain with codeine. About 50% is for discount software, 40% drugs, 10% replica watches.
In my limited experience, Gmail sends incoming e-mail that has a similar-appearing but nonexistent address into your box. Let's say there's an cyburbia at gmail d0t com. You may get mail for cyburban, cyburb or syburbia at gmail d0t com, even when those addresses don't exist.
Even though I own my own domain, I have a few gmail accounts, just in case. Today, in my d[mylastname] at gmail d0t com account, I recieved a bunch baby pictures from someone I don't know; they were addressed to [my last name]s at gmail dot com, and my address is nowhere to be seen in the headers.
to send out their email, so gmail can't just block an IP address. Apparently, 70% of spam is generated by botnets.
PimpMyMazda.com - Crazy mods to a 2002 Mazda Protege DX.
This is all very interesting. . . but it doesn't seem to explain the spam I've gotten on Gmail: my gmail user name isn't a name or dictionary word, so could not be discovered via that kind of attack. I've never used the account except to send test messages to and from my own mail server, and I've only given out two invites, to family members. Nonetheless, I've been getting several spam messages per week--how is that possible? And yes, they are correctly classified by Gmail as spam, but that's not the point--how could I be receiving any in the first place? The only thing I can think of is that either some spammer has hacked into Gmail's database, or as happened to AOL some time ago, someone on the inside of Gmail has sold a copy of their account list to spammers. I've tried contacting Gmail to ask about this, but they just keep sending me automated replies directing me to their standard page of anti-spam suggestions.
No it hasn't & no it isn't. If you are using a publicly accessible browser you still have to log into, sort, log out and remember to scrub the browsers cache & history just like you would with any other web-mail service.
The only significant difference is that you can archive dump-loads of messages on their servers instead of yours and use the Google search engine to weed through all your crap.
Also, I know for a fact that some of my "archived" messages have disappeared with out me marking them for deletion, but since I have no access what-so-ever to the server, I have absolutely no way to recover them.
Gmail is nice and all, but it certainly hasn't changed the whole web-mail world for me.
gmail's spam filter works a treat for me...
Just don't go near a computer and you'll never get spam!!
This sounds good. Another way is to use sneakemail.com. There a person can create a alias to their email account. The alias email address is the public email address. I create a new address each time I need one to give out. The system is easy to use and manage all the alias email addresses. That way if a person starts spamming that address or that address is sold to a spammer, I delete the address. This kills the spam email. Also, I know who sold the address to the spammer. For the name of the email address, I use the site and date like amazon.com.2004.12.21. This system works great and is easy to use.
I simply have to say "NO". My email address is the SAME one I've had since 1988 or 1989 when it was setup originally (by me). In those days it was fed through a UUCP connection and has gone through various providers and types of feeds over the years.
.COM version of the domain, but for political reasons have since shifted to the .US flavor. My email is still the same though.
:). The key in this mix is the lack of ... Windows. :) The problem is the virus infected Windows users out there.
Of course today it's directly on the Internet fed with a 10Mbit wireless uplink in the 5Ghz range which is solid enough to have over taken my phone service (now VoIP based). My email is still the same.
I still accept email to the
I have done some very specific tests over the years, ranging from using address' on USENET, to posting on the web. And yes, I have specifically setup a Windows box, added one address to the Outlook address book, and watched closely as the system was infected, time and again, with it sitting on a DMZ'd type IP address. Ultimately your email _will_ be harvested and used as soon as somebody you know is infected. Not if, but when (today). Making it difficult to remember/type is a futile effort.
I still run into old friends (usually from college days) that attempt to find me at my old email address -- and they do. Even though I may see 1-2 spams in front of me [inbox] every week. Behind the scenes the Mac is properly flagging/filing the junk that does make it with the Linux server eating that junk mail and blocking ~1,500 attempts daily with another 100 or so being dealt with through spam-trap address' along with it find ~200 (still daily) through its own means (hint: it talks a lot with the Mac
And my email is still the same. ~17 years now.
to avoid spam on gmail. Keep the gmail address private and use a disposable email address service such as (shameless plug alert) e4ward.com to forward mail to it.
http://www.e4ward.com
I trusted Google to eventually get it right. There have been a few ups and downs but for me gmail is filtering my spam 99% correctly - it has been several weeks since a false positive and maybe one or two spams make it into the inbox each week.
It would be nice to have one-click whitelists.
The volume of spam has gone WAY WAY up. I'd say it's doubled since a month ago. It's coming to my "regular" email address though, not directly to gmail.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
A small, 14-seat plane is circling for a landing in Atlanta. It's totally fogged in, zero visibility, and suddenly there's a small electrical fire in the cockpit which disables all of the instruments and the radio. The pilot continues circling, totally lost, when suddenly he finds himself flying next to a tall office building.
He rolls down the window (this particular airplane happens to have roll-down windows) and yells to a person inside the building, "Where are we?" The person responds "In an airplane!"
The pilot then banks sharply to the right, circles twice, and makes a perfect landing at Atlanta International.
As the passengers emerge, shaken but unhurt, one of them says to the pilot, "I'm certainly glad you were able to land safely, but I don't understand how the response you got was any use."
"Simple," responded the pilot. "I got an answer that was completely accurate and totally irrelevant to my problem, so I knew it had to be the IBM building."
(From math funnies, feel free to modify the company and the location for maximum hilarity.)
Its going to get worse though. As more people use it and when it goes out of beta and some spammers can start getting accounts and testing...
So then when a particular spam starts infesting gmail, Google admins can search through all the gmail accounts, find the earliest occurrence of the offending message, and bust the spammer?
I'd hope they are eventually confident enough with their spam filters to simply delete the message rather than putting into a special folder. I know this option might not be reasonable for some accounts or even potentially touch on free speech issues, but I'd wager the vast majority of people would simply rather have the spam auto-deleted. This could be an opt-in feature.
My experience has been that the spam filter rarely generates false positives, although it might miss a message here or there. I say, just go ahead and delete those messages!
Sometimes e-mail annoucements to friends of mine get shoved into their spam folder. I've had numerous legitimate business e-mails put into my spam folder.
The problem is that alot of people don't bother ever looking in their spam folder, because they assume the system is wisely only putting spam there. "Oh but I didnt get your e-mail" is something I hear alot, when its been falsely spam-positived.
Weirdly enough, sometimes identical e-mails from nearly identical sources will have one marked as spam sometimes, and the other not.
Getting spam is bad. Having non-spam marked as spam and dealt with accordingly is worse.
I be sure and click the "not spam" button in gmail, in the hopes that actually does something akin to training the filter... but who knows if it really does.
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i want a gmail account :(
google ads are running a highly dubious ad that typically catches you with something like this:
"Test a Nintendo DS unit and keep it!"
or
"Test an iPod and keep it!"
I fell into the trap and went through it.
This is how the trap is setup: you punch in all your personal information: name, address, email, phone number and even birthday. You have to type that in first, then go through a survey, and then, here's the scam: you have to sign up with or puchase from six advertisers in order to get the "Nintendo DS" and they range from getting a new credit card to Vonage service to CDs and DVDs from Columbia House, etc. Don't fall into this trap (sadly I did) and sign away your soul for nothing.
The reason they set it up like this is because they know that once you punch in your information, that's all they need and they'll then stack the odds against you from ever receiving the iPod, Segway, DS, PS2, or whatever they say they're giving away. So the old adage applies onces again -- if it sounds too good to be true, then it is.
Once they have your email and address, you'll get not only the spam rolling in, but the occasional junk mail, or maybe even worse (who knows).
Linux at home
gMail happily detects this spam and puts it in the spam folder.
Thats all it ever intended to do.
You must realise that gMail could stop all spam so you would never see it (they would just delete it rather than putting it in the spam folder) but they elect to give you the opportunity to view it just in case their detection algorithm messes up. So whats the problem - just don't visit the spam folder.
If you have received actual spam in your inbox folder, not your spam one then you might have something to complain about.
or, you can "just" do what David Mazieres does, and have an email address that looks like a message ID:
<12297.830286027.1@cs.nyu.edu> (just an example, not his actual address)
More spammers have to filter those, or else they cull too many (?) bogus addresses.
While I was studying abroad in Japan I met a few people with really bizarre (cell) email addresses. I asked why and they said to prevent receiving spam mail. Only problem was, I couldn't email them from my Hotmail or Yahoo accounts, I guess because of the strings of periods (i.e. ........@docomo.net). Anyways, I've also started getting a good amount of spam on my Gmail account after a couple months of nothing at all. Too bad.
... according to a SpamCop scan. Here's the header of a typical Gmail spam: X-Gmail-Received: aa86efbb260d53672e5caa7bd305096b1dc98674 Delivered-To: me@gmail.com Received: by 10.54.48.62 with SMTP id v62cs1134wrv; Tue, 21 Dec 2004 01:57:20 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.38.96.68 with SMTP id t68mr104874rnb; Tue, 21 Dec 2004 01:57:20 -0800 (PST) Return-Path: Received: from 64.233.171.27 ([219.252.70.103]) by mx.gmail.com with SMTP id 70si1117986rnb; Tue, 21 Dec 2004 01:57:20 -0800 (PST) Received-SPF: neutral (gmail.com: 219.252.70.103 is neither permitted nor denied by domain of KJ@yahoo.com) X-Message-Info: PP145WS311Iirc0rTQBmjTUE079TWV1wspAdJO5 Received: from 96.142.247.15 by ip-171-112-38-54.ock.KJ@yahoo.com (AppleMailServer 03.6.9.3) id 77325056016 via NDR; Tue, 21 Dec 2004 15:57:10 +0600 Reply-To: "Roy Montoya" From: "Roy Montoya" To: "Someone else" Subject: Someone else Office XP - $60 Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 11:53:10 +0200 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="--874591855832788" REPORT SPAM TO: spamcop@kisa.or.kr;abuse@sknetworks.co.kr;postmast er@sknetworks.co.kr (219.252.70.103), SpamCop says.
Korea. Spam. Where have I seen that before?
I mean, what other options have been tried that have worked? I guarantee you dead spammers won't be sending more email, and coming along behind ten guys who ended their life at the point of a machete isn't appealing for the kind of uncertain return spam provides. We need to make it so it's safer to deal drugs than it is to send spam email.
But that's just my opinion.
You forgot about the undocumented plussing feature in Gmail...
:(.
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Gmail supports "plus" addressing, which means that if your address is maryhadda@gmail.com, you can receive e-mail at maryhadda+littlelamb@gmail.com or maryhadda+longaddress@gmail.com, etc. Why is this useful? Well, Mary (or you!) could use one, er, I'll call it a "plussing," for mailing lists ("maryhadda+lists"), and another for shopping online ("maryhadda+shopping") and so on, and then create filters to put useful labels on the different types of mail.
Some have suggested that this could also be a useful spam deterrent (e.g., using maryhadda+2004q2 and then discarding e-mail sent to this address the following quarter), but I think this suffers from two key flaws:
1) Spammers are probably smart enough to start stripping off the plussing
2) After a while, you'd have to create a LOT of filters, and -- at least for the moment -- we only get an allotment of 20 filters total. It'd be a shame to use those all up in a (likely futile) attempt to thwart spamjerks.
Social engineering - people tend to use the same email ID for multiple email accounts... just as they ignore basic security procedures and use the same password on every account...
All the spammers do is to use the email ID from known valid targets and append major freemail domains... so if [mysupersekritid]@myispname.com gets on a spam list, they try [mysupersekritid]@aol.com, @hotmail.com, @msn.com, etc... and now @gmail.com
So they probably aren't random dictionary attacks at all - the article did pick up on the connection, but didn't see the obvious conclusion.
Final 2006 "Proof of Global Warming" US Hurricane Count -> 0
the real villains aren't the spammers.. it's those idiots who actually buy stuff from spammers, or click the links in the e-mail. If no one ever paid attention to spam or bought stuff through it, it wouldn't eliminate spam (cos it's not like it requires a huge investment to spam) but i'm sure it would make a difference.
it reminds me of the nyc subway. If no one ever threw trash onto the tracks, there would be no rats. but there's always one idiot who does, and then some other idiot comes along and spits, and it snowballs into the disgusting state things are in now, where every other station has rodent warnings posted up.
"human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so" - Adams
On Gmail you can have many email addresses using "plus addressing": if your Gmail address is aaa@gmail.com then you can use addresses like aaa+whatever@gmail.com. You can share with different people different addresses and you can easily block ones that are found by spammers (perhaps block for everyone except the people you gave the address to). That way losing an address to spammers is not a big problem, and you don't have to forever hate your friend that stupidly compromised your precious secret email address! One problem with this might be the limit on the number of filters a user can have(perhaps it is possile to block many addresses with an "or" operation?) Using randomly generated addresses would require a lot of work to maintain, so I think a better way is to decide on a naming scheme that would allow addresses to be grouped for filtering. Then perhaps one can filter on groups of addresses by matching substrings. Has anyone here tried to employ such a naming scheme?
The same thing can be done with other services, such as fastmail.fm that has a more flexible filtering system, or with addresses in one's own domain.
One problem with using this approach is that after many addresses that deliver to your account are found by spammers, a lot of spam is directed at them, and even if you don't get to see the spam because it's automatically erased, it might load your system too much. this depends on the stage at which the filter blocks: before or after email is received. Tools for blocking before an email is received are more limited.
Using randomly generated addresses is not very useful if you have to manually maintain them (they have to be written down on paper or to a file. They are useful if they are recorded an organized automatically such as in sneakemail.com. But if one wants to use multiple disposable addresses in one's own domain, or in one's subdomain provided by one's email provider, or just using plus-addressing, a naming scheme is needed. I have my own domain but I still use addresses supplied by sneakemail.com or spamgourmet.com because I cannot come up with a reasonabe naming scheme for addresses in subdomains of my own domain that would be flexible enough to allow many years of use despite many of them being lost to spammers. Does anyone have ideas for such naming schemes? (in spamgourmet I have a simple naming schemes prducing addresses like slashdot22dec04.post.hadaso@spamgourmet.com. But then on spamgourmet addresses self destruct so I don't worry too much about how to filter them in the future. The date part is just to ensure old addresses are not reused).
How would one actually go about getting spammed, if one wanted to? Would it be as easy as posting your email in some public forums? -Chase (spam@bullhorn.com)