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.)"

Comments

75 % accurate

[Red_Winestain]

I'm a faculty member at a large university, and about 75% of my email is spam. (This is based on the number of emails in my spam folder versus the number of emails in my inbox.) My email is on multiple web pages, on every syllabus I hand out, and in various directories.

By playing around with permutations of my email address, I find that a large chunk comes from infected colleagues' and students' computers. Relatively little comes from web crawlers. I also get a burst at around 8:00-8:15 when the staff members turn their machines on, and another burst a little later as faculty drift in. During the holidays, the rate goes way down.

Admins and generic addresses get it worst

[eddy the lip]

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.

Accurate figures

[crisco]

Accurate figures are difficult to come by. But some of us do get those kinds of volumes of spam. One of my mailboxes averages almost 10 an hour. A few others approach that rate, I'm not really sure as I've got several layers of spam filtering in place now. Other accounts that have not been as well exposed online get much less spam.

You may have successfully protected your email address and have ordered from businesses with some degree of integrity. You may also have a spam filter in place somewhere.

Time to amend CAN-SPAM

[BMcWilliams]

The "expert" estimates on spam percentages do vary. But one thing seems pretty clear. CAN-SPAM hasn't perceptibly reduced the flow of junk email since it went into effect 1/1/2004. That's why I have suggested that Congress seize a simple way to put some teeth into the law. Give U.S. citizens a right to private action. Why save the privilege of suing spammers just for ISPs, attorneys general, and the FTC?

Yup, it's that bad

[Linux_ho]

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.

There are currently...

[Atrax]

... 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.