Slashdot Mirror
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"."
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.
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.
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
hey, this was a joke (ok - a bad one)
The point is that information is not always shared in the way we think it will be shared - whenever there is a human contact in the process, then there is the chance that your details will be made public. It might a postman, your ex-wife, a workmate, etc.
You never really know when your details are made available to the spammers, but more often than not it is a 'harmless' passing on of details, that does the damage.
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
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
I wonder why they think its a good idea to market "Viagra soft tabs". Seems like soft is the last thing they'd want associated with Viagra.
Neither will most friends or family.
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.
Strangely I've never seen one bit of spam on my abuse@ account...
Maybe that could be a solution, use a sub domain as the actual mail address, and just prepend abuse@ as the address, so instead of spam-me-not@domain.com you'd use abuse@spam-me-not.domain.com.
Those buggers won't be able to figure out which addresses are 'safe' to spam, and which ones may quite likely bring down hell upon their little minds.
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
Spammers don't spam abuse and postmaster addresses mostly because they're far less likely to go to users who are likely marks. If that starts to change....
PS: JavaBear... I'm shocked that someone with such an old account is someone I've never heard of before. Drop me a line sometime.
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.
NO, you're completely wrong. I get lots of spam addressed to names close alphabetically to mine at my ISP, which is not GMail.
There may be one name in the "To:" header, and hundreds of similar ones were in the "BCC:" header, which is not transmitted along with the message. However each of the "BCC" addresses generates a new message at the mail server which has the name attached to the "envelope" of the message, which is dropped when it's delivered to your mailbox.
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.