Slashdot Mirror
CAN-SPAM One Year Later?
BigPoppaT asks: "Computerworld has an article reviewing the effectiveness of CAN-SPAM one year after it passed. In the article several anti-spam companies cite spam as a huge (and increasing) percentage of the total e-mail load. Most state that it is more than 50%, and some are saying as much as 75%. (This matches what I see in other articles on the subject.) Are these figures reasonable? I do not work for an ISP or maintain a mail server, but speaking as an end-user, I do not have anywhere near this much spam - more like 5 to 10 items a week (out of a few hundred messages). This is in my personal email - I do not recall ever receiving any spam in my work inbox. If the numbers above are reasonable, I wonder why I get so little spam? I am on a number of mailing lists, and have purchased things online, so it is not as if I have gone too far out of the way to hide my email address. I am not complaining, mind you, I just think it would be useful for the Slashdot readers who deal with this in an administrative capacity to explain it to the rest of us. Are the spam numbers being inflated by these anti-spam groups as a marketing tool? (This is not a rhetorical question - I really am not in a position to evaluate this, so those who know, please fill the rest of us in.)"
Have you ever registered a domain? Nearly all the spam I get is to an address I only use for registering domains. I'm careful with my primary addresses, and receive nearly nothing on them.
A lot of spam that hits the system you'll never see as well. A big chunk of spam lists have bad or nonexistent addresses in them. There's usually some poor schmuck (here, that's me) that has to check and see if an Important Business Contact just can't type, or if all those emails to betty1@example.com, betty2@example.com, etc. are aimed at insecure men.
Other popular targets for spam are sales@, info@, support@....etc. so unless you're responsible for one of those, that's more spam you won't see.
Lucky bastard.
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
I'm the mail admin at a company with a little more than 500 active mail accounts. We get about 110,000 Internet messages per week, and about 80% of those are spam. We're using SpamAssassin to detect it, and running a script against syslog to get those numbers.
Our SpamAssassin server correctly detects over 99% of the spam, and rejects about 92% of it outright at our Internet gateway. The 8% least-spammy-looking-spam is tagged and allowed through to allow for false positives, though none have yet been reported.
include $sig;
1;
... 2795 spams in my GMail, to which I redirect three or four other addresses. Last delete was on Dec 1st (logically).
So I get roughly 100 spams per day, of which gmail will let one, maybe two through every fifth day or so. pretty good. I now use my gmail account pretty much exclusively.
Thinking back, my spam volumes appear to have gone UP since CAN-SPAM went into effect. As for my work address, 3 a day or so, but we run a lot of spam filtering here, and I don't have access to the figures blocked. I've certainly not seen any marked effect of recent legislation on the amount of crap I get in my inbox.
Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
I've had email addresses rendered useless by the sheer volume of spam. 50-100 spams per day, with maybe 10 legitimate emails hidden among the noise.
/etc/aliases file. Whenever one of these aliases starts receiving spam, I delete the alias. Problem solved.
Thanks to MS-Outlook worms, even internal corporate email lists started receiving some really offensive porno-spam.
Today I get only a few spams per month, but to achieve this I ended up abandoning my old domain and setting up a system of aliases whereby I give a different email address to every person or organization that asks me for one. I now have several hundred entries in my
Yes, I even give aliases to my family members, since they'll inevitably divulge my address to e-card companies and so on.