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Canadian Spam Levels - Up? Down? You Be the Judge
spamfighter writes "Survey firm Ipsos-Reid has taken the interesting stance that spam to Canadians has been attenuated by 20% because of the federal privacy law PIPEDA which is so fearsome in nature that is scares off even the biggest- baddest spammers in other countries. CAUCE Canada has their doubts."
While numbers can be deceiving, I do believe tougher law will prevent crimes.
I remember reading a Chinese story about an emperor visiting a village with a very deep well. He asked one of the villagers if anyone had fallen into the well. The answer was no, because the well is so deep and everybody knows that, so no one has ever been careless enough to fall into it.
And back to the reality, one of the games that I'm involved in has recently introduced a "crime in the city" feature, and many players have been attacked as a result. However, as soon as the first criminal was arrested and mourned about the harsh punishment of being caught (lost points, jail time and whatnot), crime rate drops almost instantly.
Having said all these, sometimes I think the law is not tough enough because we do not yet know how to effectively identify and prosecute the offenders.
By the way, the easter egg that I mentioned here few weeks ago still has not been discovered...
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
As news reached their frozen ears that for the first time, someone somewhere was afraid of something Canadian. "Eh?" said one Canadian.
The old russian model springs to mind, where certain kinds of criminals where rewarded with extended action-oriented vacations in beautiful Siberia. Canada has large expanses of very simular real estate.
What keeps me going is my inertia.
They also contribute the decrease to an increased use of spam filters by individuals and businesses: "New privacy laws and the use of spam filters by individuals and Internet providers helped lower the amount of unsolicited e-mail to 49 per cent of all electronic mail, down from 68 per cent in 2003." So, there might be just as much spam being sent...Canadians just aren't seeing as much because they are using filters.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
Speaking solely as a Canadian citizen, I get more spam today than I ever have in the past. This has nothing to do with the propagation (or lack thereof) of any law, but more the fact that my email address (or one of my email addresses, many of which forward) has been out on the Internet in lists and such for years now.
While the lists propagate, so will the spam. One of these days, whatever list(s) I am on may stop circulating, but I'm not holding my breath.
Green's Law of Debate: Anything is possible if you don't know what you're talking about.
I have found a grammatical error in your not-so-excellent post.
Please keep in mind that Canadian privacy laws are very different than those in both US and EU, so I recommend reding PrivacyInfo.ca by Professor Michael Geist (University of Ottawa's Faculty of Law). Knowing the most important differences is essential to fully understand the issues in question so you will save a lot of time if you read about both Federal Privacy Legislation and Provincial Privacy Legislation first. The article linked in this story makes much less sense without appropriate background.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
I work in the IT field for a large Canadian company. The amount of spam we get is slowly but steady increasing. Currently somewhere around 98% of all the mail we get is "Junk" (spam, invalid recipients, improper smtp protocol, etc). Looking at our mail server graphs shows a definite upward trend in both overall "Junk" and confirmed spam.
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All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
A free iPod in the US is actually $15.43 in Canada at the current exchange rate.
Considering that Canadians, like anybody else, can have e-mail addresses that don't end in .ca, there's no way for spammers to know that they're not spamming Canadians. If Canadian laws were having an impact on spam, it would seem that the rest of us would experience a decrease in spam as well.
I am an American living in Canada and I need to deal with some US ISPs. For example, my father uses AOL for email. I use Shaw -- I am not sure there actually is another cable service provider in Canada -- and when I first moved here I was unable to send or recieve email from or to my father.
I later found out that some of my Japanese friends that use AOL accounts couldnt get my email and I couldnt get theirs.
This has since changed, and I can now get email from them and they can recieve mine. I found this to be really annoying at the time, but I did get much less spam on my canadian email accounts than on my US accounts.
A final note is that there is a difference between the amount of spam I get on University accounts in the US and Canada. I have 3 accounts at US univeristies and 1 in Canada. The accounts in the US get more than 50 spams a day. The Canadian one has never even recieved 1!!! This seems impressive, however, I think that someone is just stealing the outlook domain listings at US universities and selling them, this doesnt seem to be a problem yet here. Either that or they have the best spam filter I have ever seen. Cant figure it out.
I Am Canadian, and I can report that my spam at work has decreased significantly. The amount of spam I received peaked at about 200 per day a couple months ago, and then over a period of about 4 weeks dropped to to less than 100 per day.
I don't know why. It's not being blocked by our servers because the spam filter at work only tags spam, it doesn't block it.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
I think it was last week or two weeks ago, I opened one of the many emails in my inbox at work, which was about the spam problem.
Long story short, from what I read, I think that when spam reaches the point where it's impossible for the government to effectively use the current email infrastructure, someone somewhere is going to call in the Mounties, no doot aboot it, eh.
I have an e-mail address that ends in .ac.uk (UK academic), and still most of my spam is for offers that only apply to the US (pills from Canadian pharmacies being the most popular at the moment, it seems). That, and a lot of offers of a degree, which I really wouldn't expect if these were targetted (nearly everyone with a .ac.uk address either has a degree, or is working on getting a real degree).
As such, I find it very hard to believe they're avoiding spamming Canadians.
A law is due soon, and given the number of zombies, it should make ISPs liable if they do not disconnect trojaned customers in due time.
There is no excuse for letting a trojaned computer on the Internet, it is a major nuisance. Punitive disconnection ought to be a good way of clueing-in john Q. Bozo in properly running a computer.
Vidéoétron is notoriously clueless when it comes to zombie, making it's networks one of the filthiest cesspools. By contrast, Stupidico blocked port 25 a long time ago, so almost no spam emanates from their network.
I run several servers with a few businesses etc hosting their email across the board I probably have 400 users give or take 20. In recent months the spam problem was getting worse and worse. I have had spamassassin and other software running on the system to mark the messages as spam but the over all problem wasnt resolved and it kept getting worse. I have since changed the way that our servers operate by using RBL firewalls across the board with several different RBLs including spamhaus, sorbs, spamcop and dsbl. Since taking that action the spam has dropped from just under a million emails marked as spam a month to around 34000. That is a huge drop in spam. I also log all connections that are refused because of RBLs so that I can see if there are any bad entries if anyone complains about failed email delivery. All in all the amount of emails being rejected has also been falling as the "spammers" and other "bulk email" providers that are listed on the RBLs and have users emails remove the emails from the lists they are using.
Its not a perfect solution but it has reduced it to such an extent that the servers are now performing much better. Customers are more happy, spammers get screwed and everyone lives happily ever after.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Well, I certainly have seen less spam about hockey and Tim Hortons... so yeah, I guess there has been a decrease. :P
Disclaimer: I am Canadian.
Disclaimer's Disclaimer: I am not advocating that crappy beer.
No mod points today, huh?
I did read the article, and I don't see how it makes any difference with respect to my earlier comment whether the law applies to brokering in e-mail addresses or sending spam to them. People can't say with any certainty whether an e-mail address belongs to a Canadian or not. If Canadian laws were having an impact, then spammers would be less likely to swap *or* spam e-mail addresses in general, and all of us regardless of nationality could expect our inboxes to be less abused.
In fact, the assertion discussed/refuted by the OP was that Canadian laws were having an effect on spamming, whether direct or indirect. Seems reasonable to me that even if PIPEDA is designed only to restrict brokering in e-mail addresses, the difference really isn't relevant since the assertion is plainly about the receipt of spam.
I don't claim to be an expert on this, but I'd have to say there's a few good reasons for this.
.com, .net, .org. Instead they use .ca and I would guess the .de (Germans) folks get comparable amounts of spam when compared to the US for the same reason.
1. Canadians Internet users, on average, are probably a bit more tech-savvy than USians, meaning they have a lower response rate than Americans. (See NOTE, below)
2. Canadians with email addresses don't always use
3. Canadians probably don't report spam as often. Basically, they may receive the same amounts, but they aren't surveyed as often as USians on how much they hate spam.
NOTE: I don't want to offend anyone by saying Canadians are smarter on average (esp. since I'm not Canadian myself!), but you have to keep in mind the sheer number of USians that have email addresses compared to those in Canada.
In the US, everyone and their dog has an email address and webpage. In Canada, I find it hard to believe that Ma and Pa Smith have email addresses, or, if they do, at no higher a rate than Ma and Pa Smith in the US Midwest.
Maybe "average" isn't as good a word as "median", too.
Your guess is as good as mine whether this data is worth anything, but daily mail volume for these stats is about 1,000 emails daily. The spam "level" is an index computed by our mail server.
July, 2004....21.7
Aug, 2004.....24.5
Sept, 2004....23.2
Oct, 2004.....27.1
Nov, 2004.....24.2
Dec, 2004.....29.6
Jan, 2005.....26.1
Feb, 2005.....29.6