Slashdot Mirror
People are More Accepting of Spam
twitter writes "Many news organizations are reflecting the opinion of Pew Internet and American Life Project staffer Deborah Fallows that '...email users say they are receiving slightly more spam in their inboxes than before, but they are minding it less.' I think that's an odd conclusion to draw. You would expect the number of people using email less because of spam to decrease to zero quickly when 25% of the population say they avoid email! To their credit, they point out that CAN-SPAM has done nothing to help." The Reuters blurb about this study has a syopsis of their findings.
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Nothing to see here
Spam has been around long enough that the latest demographic group to join the Net have always known spam. To them, it is a natural thing.
The article is playing on the stereotype that all spammers live extremely well off their activities, although this may have been true up until recently, and there are still people making huge amounts of money from it - the reason phising and stuff is becoming more common is because the profits from spam are becoming lower.
You can't just pick up a mailing software, buy a list and sit back and watch the money roll in anymore, so the new kids wanting to be millionaires have to result to more devious tactics.
Given the number of posters who recommended the death penalty for the guy who received 9 years for his contribution to society (spam), I'd say that the persons who participated in this study are not Slashdot readers.
Appeasement never works. See World War 2.
Jan
Jan
Perhaps part of the reason is that many e-mail clients have better filtering mechanisms in them now than in previous years. With clients like Apple's Mail and Thunderbird, spam filtering can get quite accurate. I get as much spam as ever (if not more), but I rarely see any of it. The filters appear to do their job quite nicely.
We may not be getting less spam, but the tools to help deal with it have been improving, and are being made available to more and more e-mail users.
Yaz.
I get spam now that have about 2-3 paragraphs of text that are mostly plagurized poetry, then all of the words that trigger spam filters are in the graphics included in the HTML email. It's a smart tactic (albeit annoying). It really throws off the spam filters. Does anyone else get a lot of these? Anyway to filter them out?
They change the bogus names and email addresses, of course, but the ads clearly are coming from the same source.
I don't find this very strange. People adapt, and their expectations change.
Most people learn to spot spam at a glance, so even though total amount may have increased even those without spamfilters probably use less and less time deleting it. That doesn't mean we accept it more though, it just mean we aren't as bothered by it as we used to.
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
And so the problem dissolves.
Personally, I get 150 Spam per day. 1 or 2 of them appear in my inbox and are quickly deleted. SPAM isn't much of an issue for me.
One of the causes of this behavior could be that there are a lot of people who started using email not too long ago.
Therefore, spam was there when they started emailing, and they don't complain about it because it is no change.
A simile here would be people who always lived near an airport tend to complain less about the airport than the people who just moved to that region. Thus, a change in the behavior of a user environment is more likely to be a cause for complaints than something that has always been there.
We do not complain about the high death toll caused by traffic anymore, do we? they did in the past!
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
She had some cheerful business cards. Turns out she'd gotten them "free" from a web site she heard about in an email. Of course, the shipping for the 250 "free" cards cost about $7, so she ended up paying about what should would have if she'd gone to a reputable business card maker. My wife and I looked at each other sadly and decided it wasn't likely to be worth trying to educate her...
they are receiving slightly more spam in their inboxes than before, but they are minding it less.
Of course I mind less, but I do because a good reason: the server I pop my mail from uses paid-for spam filtering (nothing revolutionary, but quite good), then my Thunderbird also squeezes them quite a bit. What I get at the end is below my getting-angry-about-it threshold. But, I have to tell that overall I get quite more spam than let's say this time last year. The reason I don't mind is that the number of spam I get after double filtering is _not_ higher than before.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Checking your email via web or pop now takes seconds not minutes for your email to download (as it used to for dialup).
So people are less annoyed (than they used to be) about waiting for 50 messages to download and most of them being spam.
Filtering has got a lot better too, I have not recieved a single spam with my gmail account.
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything" -- Josef Stalin
It's not always obvious, but people can get used to just about anything. One day, except for some old curmudgeons, most people won't think twice about using a Bayesian algorithm to fish one or two relevant messages out of a sea of millions of spam messages. That is, if the present trends continue unabated...
It's pretty messed up. I remember the days when everyone was worried about this whole "online purchasing" thing. Everyone thought that it was just some sham to take peoples credit card numbers. Now people will buy products from companies that advertise in a sketchy manner and don't even spell things correctly? It's definitely a bit frightening.
I never sign up for stupid marketing things. Life is good.
While 63% of email users now say they have received porn spam, down 8 percentage points from a year ago, 29% of those email users say they are now getting less porn spam, compared to 16% who said they are getting more.
Nothing to see here
"You would expect the number of people using email less because of spam to decrease to zero quickly when 25% of the population say they avoid email! "
/. editors put up stories with the most butchered grammar in the entire universe?
Read that careful. Since when have
Yeah, label me as a troll if you want, I don't care.
I noticed that a lot of spam coming through my Yahoo account had been tagged with the header "X-YahooFilteredBulk". I added this to my Exim system filter and I've gone from 20+ spams a day in my inbox to 2 in a week. Thank you Yahoo!
Unfortunately, a lot anti-spam measures (including Exim 3's system filters) only take place after a message has been accepted for delivery. For me, this results in a lot of bounce messages frozen in the queue as they cannot be returned (Hotmail mailbox full, etc). I've switched on features like verifying the sender and the headers, but this doesn't catch them all, and in some cases might even stop some legitimate spam (one of my mailing lists uses incorrect syntax for the "RCPT TO:").
More effective anti-spam systems need to filter before the message has been accepted. If you wait until then, it is already too late and it is on your system. No, refusing accept delivery is much effective IMHO, and forces the MTA's further up the chain to deal with it. They shouldn't have accepted it in the first place! When you get spam, return 550 (or whatever the code is) and let the SMTP client deal with it. In an ideal world, ever provider (ISP, or free service like Yahoo) will implement stricter MTA's. If the spam rejection can be pushed far enough up the chain, life for everyone will easier.
BTW, according to Philip Hazel (a message I recieved to a question I posed on the Exim mailing list), Exim 4 will offer much more functionality along these lines, including the invocation of C funtions after the DATA phase of the SMTP input. I guess this would be the spot to plug in Vipul's Razor, although I don't know what kind performance hit that would lead to. Mr. Hazel also pointed out that some stupid clients are in contravention of the RFC and will continue to try and delivery a message if they recieved 5xx after the DATA phase... oh well: they'll be using my bandwidth but they won't be putting any crap on my server.
Honestly, I'm quite thankful for spam, for two reasons:
I'll never be shy in the locker room again, and the ladies love me!
Now, if only I could shut that lady who keeps saying mean things about my dikky up, I'd be fine. Personally, I have no idea what her standards are.
I guess I now have two groups of people I don't like.
First, it was just the people who responded to spam, making it profitable to spamers.
Now I guess I really don't like people who have grown tolerent of it.
When I first got an Internet email address in 1992, it took me all of 2 unsolicted emails in my inbox before I started hating spam, and I still hate it.
The only good news out of this study is that people don't trust email. That's good. If you didn't ask for a company to send you an email, I mean, if you didn't explicitly ask them (sorry, clicking 'I agree' to an EULA that has a 'we will send you spam' statement buried deep inside does not mean you want to get it), the company that sends it to you is unethical and you shouldn't do business with it.
Period.
Spam pisses me off. It should piss other people off too.
The Internet is generally stupid
Email's don't bother me, because they're quite easy to filter & delete. The tree-killing paper stuffed in my mailboxes each day is far more of an inconvenience.
2 years ago 3 or 4 spams a day were very annoying. You had to delete them, and to delete them you had to click on them, and that would show nasty stuff in the preview window, ect...
But nowaday? The spams pop up for a second in the incoming folder of thunderbird and promptly dissapear to where they belong to after that. The felt exposure of spam is less than ever. The only thing is that its 200 or 300K traffic per day, but thats less than some flash adds have, neglectable.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
It could just be that more and more people have resigned themselves to the fact that spam is here to stay. Whether you could (or should) attribute that to the spam having diminished impact on these people is questionable.
I get so much spam nowadays (which is thankfully filtered by SpamAssassin) that I no longer have time to sift through my spam folders looking for potential false positives, so using this articles logic you could argue I was more "accepting" of it, when really I have just resigned myself to forever receiving spam.
They are right about one thing though - CAN-SPAM has proven to be virtually useless.
I have a Gmail account I use for spammy stuff (posting on websites, joining forums (forae?), signing up for mailing lists) and I read it using Thunderbird and Gmail POP3
Considering what I use it for, I get astonishingly little spam through the gmail filter, and Thunderbird picks out the rest and moves it to my junk mail folder for periodic review. Twin filtering is the way to go...
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
You didn't need to mention that you didn't RTFA, since it wasn't from a legitimate news source. It was a joke.
;-)
Unless you were replying to the main article, and not your parent
seriously, I'm so used to seeing some regularly that if a few hours pass, and I don't get any, (and this is AFTER all my filtering, that's how bad it is) I test mail my server to make sure it's all good.
5 years ago if I sent an email to someone, I was virtually assured they got it. Now, I am forced to follow up almost *EVERY* email I get with a "Got it, thanks" or a if I dont hear from someone in a few days -- a phone call. Not a big deal, but not exactly the modern marvel of technology we were looking for?
I've heard about VOIP spam becoming the next big thing -- I really weep for the future. What am I going to follow up PHONE calls with? Certified Letters?
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
For instance some people at my workplace have terrible difficulty finding out which emails require immediate attention and which are garbage (not even spam).
They are slow in recognizing spam, and some get so overwhelmed with the amount of crap in their inboxes (which for some users only means 20 or 30% of their emails are spam) that they want to abandon email all together.
Of course somebody could put a better filter in place on the server and/or clients, but some people just can't handle email much yet. (it's the same people who you see opening windows explorer and stare at the screen for 2 minutes trying to figure out where their files are again, or those who double click links on internet pages because to open things you need to double click, right?)
Sample this!
Given that the survey was carried out by telephone, doesn't it stand to reason that someone who accepts an unsolicited call from a canvasser/surveyor/telemarketer would also be less inclined to be bothered by spam?
...in catching spam, orders of magnitude better than Outlook. It has 99.9% accuracy. The only time I need to click on an e-mail to de-characterise it as junk is when I received one from someone I knew but I had not received e-mail for quite a long time...but then I never needed to do anything else.
And this is not a troll against commercial software, just my experience. It may be the simple reason that people don't mind spam: the spam-catching software has greatly improved.
Thunderbird is utterly ineffective against the foreign junk I keep getting.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
You would expect the number of people using email less because of spam to decrease to zero quickly when 25% of the population say they avoid email!
I would expect the number of people understanding this statement less because of mangled syntax to decrease to zero quickly when 75% of the Slashdot population say they favor stricter editing standards.
Silly be not.
People are getting numb to spam like they're numb to postal junk mail.
the last time there was an article on spam?
If not, my Dejavu-ometer need recalibrating.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
Personally, I'd say I'm more "resigned to" spam, than "accepting of" spam. I'd be willing to bet a lot of people feel the same way.
Join moola.com, play games to earn money.
I have Outlook 2000 on Exchange, so no spam-filters for me. The best I found is a rule which sais everything from yahoo,msm,hotmail directly to trash unless the sender adress is in my adres book. Works perfectly!!!
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Spam is a part of internet life as is commercials on television and telemarketers on the telephone.
Difference--I can pay for premium cable channels and have commercial free viewing. I can put my name on the "no call" list (and yes it works) and not be bothered by telemarketers. But there is no escape from spam. It eats the bandwidth I pay to use. It consumes the space I pay to have. It's a pox on the face of the Internet.
"Haven't you got anything without spam?"
"Well, there is spam spam spam spam green eggs and spam--that doesn't have much spam in it."
Maybe it's time for something completely different.
Better than they used to be that is. I don't get irritating spam anymore.
Using my gmail a rarely get any spam anymore.
I'm justwondering how many spam email needs to be deleted before read until spammer just give up and go back to stuffing snail-mail-boxes.
I think it's Earthlink that has a system that let's a user reject all mail that comes from unknown addresses and returns a mail to the sender that explains the email didn't reach the addressed person. You can then request to be whitelisted by clicking a link in the returned email, and the user will get a please add me request.
I find that a pretty good way for personal email accounts.
Sample this!
If anything, you just illustrate why spam is a problem.
/. kind of off-topic posts just to show that you know some obscure detail better than the poster. The "woo, I'm better than you because I know better about some irrelevant detail" or "you suck, because you misspelled a word" posts. Taking that kind of thing to email was actually considered the proper thing to do. (Mind you, I'm not saying that everyone stuck to doing the proper thing.)
Let me tell you a story. Back before SPAM, giving your email address to people was _not_ considered some "unwise use" of it. It was the _whole_ idea of email.
E.g., I put my email address in all my newsgroup posts. _Not_ because of being "SOOO important", but because some conversations that ensued were really just between two people. No point spamming the whole newsgroup with stuff that really didn't concern everyone else on that newsgroup.
Especially since it would be often off-topic for that newsgroup anyway. E.g., if I made the ISO standard dumb comparison to a car in a hardware newsgroup, I would fully expect that anyone going on a non-hardware-related car tangent (e.g., "actually, the <car model> doesn't have a diesel option") would do so in email.
If anything "e-penis" would have been the exact opposite: the
Or, yes, when I wrote a game walkthrough, I did put both my email addresses in it. Not out of a sense of being "SOOO important", but simply because I _didn't_ consider it to be the alpha and omega of gaming walkthroughs. I figured that there _is_ plenty of stuff I had ommited, so email seemed like a good way to, you know, _communicate_ about that. Let people send me corrections, or ask additional questions.
It may no longer seem that obvious any more, but some of us actually used email to _communicate_ with people. Even strangers. That was the whole idea, in fact. (Family members already knew my telephone number, after all.)
Email was _not_ supposed to be some top secret, jealously kept secret even from idiot acquaintances who might leak it when they get virused. It was, in fact, _supposed_ to be usable for even perfect strangers to contact you, should they need to do that.
And that we've got at the point where all that got turned right on its head, well, you've just illustrated the damage that spam did. What should have been a valuable communication resource, got turned into something top secret and where a message from a stranger would more likely be deleted than read.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I used to forward my catchall domain to an IMAP I read using Mail.App that consistently misdiagnosed stuff, but I did not really see the volume till I switched the forwarding to Gmail last night and this morning found it had caught all 170 spams sent overnight.
Even though it has caught a few falsely, I find it easier to check this in Gmail for some reason.
Our department recently started using SPF, SID and grey-listing. The amount of SPAM I received went down from 40-50 mails a day to 4-5 a day, which are all dealt with by thunderbird.
:-) Within a day, that spam stopped coming in.
I got rid of Nintendo advertisement spam by reporting it to Nintendo saying it damages their reputation. The 300 pound gorilla did not seem to like that practice
SpamBayes is a good filter that works with outlook 2000 on exchange.
:(:(:(
When I get spam I think, "well at least someone cares!" For that brief moment when I open pine and see all those
N
N
N
N
down the side, to the point where i realize that noone is actually writing me about "RE: h3yehh1| harley@! ci@l+s makes tH3 M1LF WANG!!!" i feel special. That matters.
brb off to update LJ
People make out spam to be a bigger problem than it is. Sure it can be quite serious from an admin perspective if your basically getting DoS'd but from an inbox perspective its really not that big of a deal unless for some reason your poor address has been hit with hundreds of spams a day. Most filters are pretty good, web-based email like gmail is absolutely excellent and there _are_ ways to solve the problem, theres no need for one 'final solution' but things like challenge-response servers and micro-payment providers (the micro-payment should go to the recipient) will probably become popular and the web as a whole will decide which is the best solution. Obviously education is key here as well - people need to understand the basic fact: if anyone you don't actually know personally calls you up or emails you, theres no way of telling who they are, if they are legit or not, and where your credit card number will end up if you're retarded enough to give it to them, if anyone has been educated and yet still responds to spam and looses all their money i have no sympathy for them, in fact i think of them as scum, almost as bad as the spammer because they are the only reason spam/telemarketing is a viable business.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Spam filters!
But Officer, I DID read the f**king article!
Dear sir,
After thoughtful consideration, we are delighted to offer you a full-time job with salary starting at $75K. Please see attachment for details.
Sincerely,
Éric Desrosiers
Human resources
Big Corp Inc.
P.S. 1618 applications were submitted for this job! (Most were incomplete which caused the applicant to be permanently removed from consideration.)
I happily accept spam into my Thunderbird Junk folder, so as to provide the filter with more examples of SPAM. A quick 'select all Junk' and look for any non-junk suffices before moving the sample junk messages to my Junk folder. If I'm short of space, then I may delete some. Certainly I'll never read it, but yes I am more accepting of spam, as most probably are many others. In short, rejecting spam didn't work, so people have found other ways around the problem. But it is still a problem.
John_Chalisque
...I keep hoping to hear on the internet news, the news paper or TV one day "Man goes on anti-spam rampage" telling a story of someone who, fed up with spam, goes on a killing spree starting with the spamhaus hitlist.
Spam is decreasing for me... don't know if it's improved blocking or what. But it kinda depends on which email account we're talking about anyway. One particular email accounts seems to be the target of some ridiculous bot(s) out there sending all these windows files. As a Linux user, I'm not worried but annoyed.
Is it a natural conclusion that people would become more accepting of spam emails? Well, I suppose it's possible. After all, the original draw of cable TV was "hey look! no commercials!" and now cable TV is just as polluted as over the air TV. (Over the air TV signal strength has now been tapered back to make cable more attractive.)
Oh well. Another Monday morning I guess... and I'll concede that I may never read the story I've been waiting to read for the past 5 years.
Those removal phrases result in a shed load of false positives for many people. Please don't advocate that people use them, because you will just make their email less reliable.
He did the same thing with a comment about the woman who bought business cards from spam.
trying to wrap my brain around this sentence:
"You would expect the number of people using email less because of spam to decrease to zero quickly when 25% of the population say they avoid email!"
which is very spamlike in its grammar
but they are minding it less
... as well as the spammers themselves. It really shouldn't be that hard.
or is someone else minding it for them? Most ISPs and most users have some level of anti-spam software running. So are they minding it less because they are seeing less spam in their inbox?
Spam will continue as long as it is profitable for those the benefit from spam. I say find a way to go after those that employ spammers
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
... I'm more tolerant of spam, I'm running thunderbird and I don't see it... so I don't mind. :)
On the otherhand, I'd be a homicidal maniac if I actaully saw all the spam I got, the 5-6 that slip past the filters per day annoy me... I'm up to close to 1500/day across 6 accounts.
Shadus
I'm always skeptical of studies based on pollings that report something like "use of email has dropped 22 percent due to spam...".
That's an assessment based on the subjective impressions of the people who were polled. People typically do not measure the amount of time spent using email. Time spent in email could rise dramatically, in fact, at the same time total number of messages read dropped dramatically if the user began generating more outgoing messages.
These studies also tend to ignore the differences between email users. A stay-at-home parent is going to interact with a different volume of email than a white-collar minion who lives inside Outlook or Notes.
Personally, I've seen little change in the amount of spam I receive over the last several months. I have 3 accounts: A Yahoo account that is a spam trap; a Gmail account that see little usage yet; and a primary account with a commercial IMAP provider running its own spam filters. I see about 200 spams a week in Yahoo, and 0-5 spams per week in the Gmail and commercial accounts.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Seldom mentioned in discussions about spam is damage to people who own domains, compounded by over-zealous anti-spam efforts. We own several domains, and have recently had to give up having a "catch-all" email address. If you had a domain like .mydomain.com, it was nice to tell someone they could send email to anything@mydomain.com and it would get there. When we told our hosting provider to drop all the unmatched email addresses in a black hole, our daily spams went from over 500 to about 50.
Even worse is when someone fakes your domain in spams. This is roughly the same as a "joe-job" attack, and now you not only get bounced messages from bad addresses on some spammer's list, but also complaints from anti-spammers who think the email headers have not been forged. I used to report spammers, until it got too hard and there were too many of them, and tracking down the actual spammer is quite a skill.
Since aol put their "report this as spam" button right next to something else on the browser toolbar, you can be totally innocent and get threats from your provider for spamming. Thanks, AOL. It's giving mailing list providers fits, too.
Yeah, ask ME if I tolerate spam more than I used to. The frustration is feeling so powerless to do anything about it.
The way I avoid spam is to have my mail client screen out any email which contains any of these phrases:
to be removed
to be permanently removed
to get removed
to get off the list
to get off this list
to be taken off
to remove yourself
removal instructions
remove in subject line
"remove" in subject line
remove in the subject
"remove" in the subject
'remove' in the subject
How will any of those help? All the spam I see these days has an obfuscated line like "Had enough? (link)" or "No more: (link)".
X-Virus-Scanned
X-Virus-Status
X-Spam-Flag: (YES or NO)
X-Spam-Status: Yes, score=9.3 required=5.0
X-Spam-Report
X-Spam-Level
/dev/nulling the bounced spam). The spam I am receiving includes spam that originates from open relays, and is on one or more rbl lists, etc. So my ISP is apparently only bouncing spam that has such a high rating in spamassasin that it is very unlikely that any false positives are resulting. Hopefully my ISP's mail server is capable of setting individual settings for email accounts in spamassassin, so that I can ask him to bounce on lower ratings. I don't know if spamassassin or the mail server he is using or others out there are capable of individual bounce thresholds or not, and if so, if he is willing to set it lower on an individual basis.
With the above, I can set up my mail client, Kmail, to filter incoming mail and to take certain actions depending on the results. Also, my ISP appears to be blocking some spam outright, as I occasionally receive bounce messages (not frequent, once a month or so with one mailing list, a few times a month with some others, I suspect other lists are catching a single bounce and not sending warnings, just
Anyway, I made some kmail filters that look for:
certain words related to investments
certain other words related to investments
if the words SEXUALLY EXPLICIT are anywhere in the header, subject or body
If the letters ADV: are in the subject line
If the X-Spam-Flag is yes
If any header contains a spam assassin rating below my isp setting of 5, one filter catches all those at 4.0 to 4.9, another catches any at 3.0 to 3.9
Then if any of the above filters catches a spam, it takes the following actions for all of them:
files them into a spam folder
sets their identity to my mailing list email account, an email account I can afford to burn that doesn't identify me
forwards a copy to uce@ftc.gov
marks the email as spam
I'm on quite a few mailing lists. So I get a lot of email daily. Several others in my family also use the account for mailing lists as well. After some posting to a few of the not so popular ones for tech help, the spammers went wild. So now a lot of spam comes in. It was frustrating for a while (still is to a certain extent), so I used to bounce them in the begging (till I learned that was counter-productive), then I used to complain to the isps, then I used to complain to the isps hosting the dns servers, then I used to complain to hotmail, yahoo, msn and a few other anonymous email hosters because of the fraudulent whois data on the sites featured in some of the spam. And then I used to manually forward the spam to the FTC. But that got boring very quickly.
The filtering described above is recent. Now, when the spam gets filtered as spam, I simply take a look at the spam folder and if I see there are unread messages, I check to see that each one is also in the outbox. Kmail puts the spam to forward on filtering in the outbox instead of sending right away. So as I match up each one, I am able to view and copy the full headers from the spam mail contained in the spam folder, and paste the header of the received spam into the body of the spam that I'm fowarding to the FTC. So if they need details on a particular spam or spammer, they can see where the spam originated from, not my and my isp's details that show in the forwarded email's headers.
Will this cut the spam I'm receiving? I doubt it. Will it result in arrests? Maybe not. But I have a tab open to a nice picture of
I minded the 10 spams a day I received some 8 years ago. I became enraged when I received over 100 spams a day. These days my spamfilter blocks over 20.000 spams and lets through "just" a few hundred spams each day. If I would have minded that, I would have had to commit suicide by now; the only solution is to stop caring about spam.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Apathy rising, urge to complain falling....
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Instead of turning apoplectic, I just mutter " spammers!"
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
A good number of mail admins now block or totally ignore SpamCop messages. Some even consider SpamCop messages themselves Spam and take active measures to get the messages bounced or droped by their upstream provider.
This is the same distortion that applies to unemployment statistics, which fails to take into account those whose case has become so hopeless they've dropped out completely. Republicans have a different place to count these people: criminal lay-abouts. But let's not get into that.
What the authors of this study might have concluded instead is that those who continue using e-mail are willing to inflict upon themselves fewer ulcers than before by channeling constant annoyance toward a situation unlikely to change anytime soon.
Let's not forget who invented this protocol that has since been so successfully hacked by the lowest form of life. We did. Or rather, those of us who formed the early slashdot community and later realized it was mostly a waste of time (and returned to our coding). Me, I guess I'm a slow learner. Anyone else here more embarrassed than annoyed? Just thought I'd ask for once.
I use filtering as much as everyone else I know, but I guess I still find it insulting that I should have to. That I'm able to filter email on my end doesn't change:
the fact that some of it still gets through to annoy me and waste my time.
the fact that I'm likely to occasionally miss important emails because filters occasionally get false positives.
the fact that dealing with spam is still using resources on my connection and ultimately costing me money for traffic charges.
the fact that the vast clogginess of spam creates major problems for my ISP upstream, causing my monthly Internet bill to be substantially higher than it might be otherwise.
the fact that a small portion of morons out there are making millions of dollars off my inconvenience.
Filters are getting better, but as long as it's still possible for spammers to keep fighting them, and as long as they keep diverting attention from the realisation that we wouldn't need an imperfect filter solution if we didn't have a spammer problem, I'm not personally going to be happy about how things are going.
...because we all know that a slightly shallower rate of decline actually means more!
I couldn't have trusted email less than I did two years ago when a naive colleague posted my main email address on a public website, and after Outlook viruses scattered everyone's contact list to the four winds.
'Nuff said.
You would expect the number of people using email less because of spam to decrease to zero quickly when 25% of the population say they avoid email!
Why are 25% avoiding e-mail? Because of spam, or is there a large percentage who just don't want to use e-mail because they do not want to learn, or take up another impersonal form of communications? I know many people who do not want to use e-mail --- and spam has zero to do with it.
Though I am sure some people are more "accepting" of spam - they are probably more "accepting" of it and say something along the lines of "It's just a part of doing e-mail. A necessary evil." No they are not happier about spam, but they sorta just gave up. Sort of like retail stores saying "shoplifting is a part of doing business". While they try and curb it, they realize it is a futile effort to bitch.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
there is absolutely no reason why that one fella should have gotten 9 years in jail. 9 days is more appropriate. i get more junk mail in my real mailbox than i get spam, i don't see people suing the pants off of credit card companies for sending us all this shit.
The fact that you or I miss an email at home, yeah, it's annoying enough. But for a business to miss an important request from their largest customer, that can be _deadly_. Think the story (urban legend or not) about how DOS ended up the IBM PC operating system instead of CPM. It didn't involve email, but same idea: you fail to take some business opportunity, you could kick yourself for the rest of your days.
For example, as a business you can't just filter out every email that contains "to remove yourself", because that would also nuke all legitimate mailing lists or notifications from the clients' B2B e-commerce sites. Or you can't just set a draconic rule that filters out all emails from China, because you might actually do business with Chinese companies.
Which just makes the rest worse.
- Spam to business accounts wastes a _lot_ of people's time.
- Spam to usiness accounts costs more money than just the ISP bill. It also costs the salaries for all those people.
- The "clogginess of spam" is something a business has to deal with personally, usually in the form of more admin time, servers, etc.
- A small portion of morons make a small loss by causing you and the other businesses a _bigger_ loss.
Incidentally, I'd say that also means more people won't be shielded from spam anyway. I have coleagues whose inboxes at work are clogged by hundreds of messages a day. Even if they had God's own filter and rules at home, they still have to wade through that crap at work.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Set up a honeypot on your website if you have one. I noticed that people were requesting /cgi-bin/formmail.pl about once a day, so I wrote a cgi-script that logged these requests. All the requests were probes that tried to see whether it would forward mails to any address. So I pasted the mail text into an email to this address: wnacyiplay@aol.com so that the spammer believed that it was a working gateway.
It's 10 days later now. The honeypot has absorbed 185 mails addressed to a total of 28,000 recipients. It feels good to know that I have prevented 28 thousand spam mails from being sent. You'd think that the spammer had noticed by now that the mails never arrive, but no...
As a side effect, the honeypot also generates IP addresses of compromised computers all over the world. I'm not sure what to do with those, though.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
I use a whitelist. Hey, if I don't know you I sure as fuck don't want to hear from you. Whatever you have to say isn't important enough to allow you to pollute my inbox on a whim. If you aren't on the list, you don't have any business sending me email in the first place.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
I doubt people are receiving more spam than ever... in their inboxes. More spam than ever is probably being SENT. That doesn't mean it's reaching the recipients. My two ISPs for example have been doing a fantastic job of filtering out spam before it even reaches my inbox.
People don't mind spam that much anymore is because they've finally realised that it's just another way of comparing prices of much needed essential goods online. In much the same way as froogle or dealtime, spam brings you the best deals without you even having to remember the name of the product! We are now in the era of psychic marketing! - as long you happen to be wanting viagra... and let's face it that's what we're online for http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/07/09/p45s_for_p orn_surfers/
This finding isn't that surprising. It's akin to saying that I'm not going to read my USPS mail because there's too much junk mail. Like anything else, people just got used to it.
There are oodles of spam filters for Exchange servers. SpamBayes is one that should work client-side, and for the server side, pretty much every single commercial vendor has an Exchange solution.
Contrived.
I've never gotten an offer through email. They always call.
Oh, except for so-called contracts, which are invariably just spam anyway.
That and Gmail, people want to get any kind of mail to try and fill up their 2.1Gb capacity
Mens et Manus
Well, if the results are to believed, then let me be the first to say that lonely housewives are waiting for you. I have the web address here somewhere...
If you doubt this, talk to your self about your frustrations over spam, then talk to a rape victim over their frustrations regarding rape.
I talked to a murder victim today,
But she didn't have much to say.
While zombie boxes' voices inside my head
Wanted spammers tortured, hung and dead.
When you have an archive of spam stretching back to 1998 like I do, it's trivial. Just feed it to the DSpam when you set it up, and be ready for 5-6 9s of accuracy in spam detection. That, and some fairly zealous Postfix correctness (IE: we don't accept not RFC822 messages + RBL checks) dropped my system from a few hundred spams a day to a few hundred spams every couple of weeks, with a rate of them actually reaching my inbox of around 1-2 per month peak.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
What the 'right' rules are depends on who you are.
.nl works just fine. She speaks only one language anyway, and it is not English.
For me -- as a 'foreigner' from your perspective -- filtering all english email messages from senders not in my address book would get rid of over 90% of spam, but being unreachable from Anglosaxon countries is not an option in my line of work.
For my mother filtering anything from senders whose email address does not end in
From your filtering rules I deduce that the US is still as tolerant as it always has been towards foreigners who want to keep their original family name, including those characters that are not directly available on your keyboard.
Wouldn't cutting the cables though the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean be more effective? You will find a lot of supporters of that idea on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.
Things like Spamcop are misguided. They will list any foreign message they don't understand as spam and are regularly abused here by people who want interfere with the email communication of others. Subscribing to a government information mailing list and then reporting it as spam is becoming a common tactic.
I work for an ISP and we filter spam at the mail server. When that spam filter isn't working, or isn't working properly, then we get all sorts of calls from people complaining about it. Our customers hate spam. And this is because they *aren't* desensitized by it.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
First off, the story reeks of being subjective and bogus as well as misleading. That notwithstanding, if someone took a dump on top of your desk, and there was seemingly nothing you could do about it, and this happened 10-100 times a day, each and every day, at some point you wouldn't even smell the shit any more. That in no way proves that you now tolerate someone taking a dump on your desk.
If you really want to find out how well people tolerate spam, I recommend this simple experiment: Place a small box with a button on it in front of someone. Explain to them that if they press this button, they will no longer get any spam. The button will cause the spammer to be rounded up, have his skin slowly peeled off with a pair of rusty pliers, be dipped in salt, and left to slowly die...
There would not be a single button un-pressed. That I guarantee.
Well, that's rather odd and useless. Many english words contain those accented characters.
Oh wait, you mean you speak ameriglish, the poor, illiterate cousin of english. Even then, rather stupid rules.
Can somebody parse this sentence for me? Thanks.
Restated, it sounds like,
When 25% of the population say they avoid email, you would expect the number of people who use email less because of spam to decrease to zero quickly.
Which still makes no sense.
Currently hooked on AMP
The questionnaire, or email announcing the questionnaire was probably trapped by lots of people's spam filters!
More and more people are using some kind of spam filtering. If it's not through their email client (eg. Thunderbird), then their ISP is almost certaintly doing some kind of filtering.
ISP's are implementing DNS blocklists, installing & improving their Spam filters (DSpam and/or SpamAssassin), dealing with open relays, and implementing greylisting technologies.
XW
Second, some of my friends run confirmed opt-in mailing lists to distribute weekly newsletters. Their bane is idiots who report those newsletters as spam, even though they explicitly went out of their way to subscribe to it in the first place. The last thing we need is a program to take a human out of the loop by automatically reporting messages it mistrusts. I see that SpamBouncer claims to have temporarily disabled this feature, but the fact that it's listed as a feature and not as a stochastic denial-of-service system speaks volumes about the authors.
Always reject - never bounce. You'll have the gratitude of thousands of forgery victims and legitimate list managers.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Guess what, chum: Some of us *are* "SOOOO important" that we must make our email address public. Otherwise it is hard as hell for readers to send Letters to the Editor, subscription address changes, etc.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
I wrote up exactly such a system, although it's centered around Postfix and not Exim (but the concepts should be portable).
<plug type="shameless">
I also worked those instructions into an article, "Filtering spam with Postfix" in last month's issue of Free Software Magazine.
</plug>
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
"In a perfect world... spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many men who have enlarged their penisses, taken Viagra and are looking for a new relationship."
i personally don't much mind spam, as much as i did wheb i would be gettig 5 within an hour. now, i rarely get more than 3 a day. and they just get filtered into the jumk folder.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I don't have any friends. So getting lots of spam makes me feel like at least someone loves me.
A certain amount of people find spam so bad they stop using e-mail. These people are then not counted.
I know a number of people who find spam so bad they've stopped using e-mail. This means that they are no longer counted as having an opinion. However, they DO still have an opinion. There opinion is that e-mail is so bad, it's not worth using.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It's the ISPs who should be annoyed at the amount of spam coming through their pipes. After all, they are the ones that have to pay for the bandwidth... at least until they get smart and start charging everyone based on in/out bandwidth usage.
There is a web-based email service that actually pays (by way of sharing small fractions of its ad revenue) its users to open and delete...any emails received, including... spam. I don't fight spam, I just make a couple extra bucks a month for opening and deleting it. No, I don't buy from it unless it's *fully* CAN-SPAM compliant (subj. line starts with ADV:, etc...,) The way some slashdotters act, you'd think they were completely powerless (read:"clueless") about how to cope with this stuff. Really: What harm has it done you?
Take the 90-Day Challenge! http://rwmurker.bodybyvi.com/
I don't give a damn what the survey says. I'm not seeing much if any more spam because my filters are smarter than the spammers. And I do not tolerate spam at all. Period.
How can they expect CAN-SPAM to be a deterrent? If they wanted to discourage spamming they should have called it CAN'T-SPAM!
Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk!
Surely you're not claiming you have an alternative to spam which involves still having an email account.
How about having an e-mail account, looking for the following criteria:
and filtering messages that do not match at least one? In my experience, no spammer has ever PGP-signed a message, correctly forged a family member's from address, or used the keyword of a legit mailing list that I get.
I am beginning to sour on Vipul's Razor. I used to think the human element would keep it free of false positives but that's just not the case.
1) My sister's emails are frequently tagged as spam. These aren't forwards of jokes or web pages. These are person to person, written from scratch. Something is not right in Razor's hash generation/checking.
2) Many of the people submitting to Razor don't seem to know what spam is. I have a mailbox where I keep all communication with commerical entities. There is absolutely no spam in there. I use tagged addresses to ensure that. Razor-check thinks it is throughly infested, if not majority spam. It looks to me like the majority of Razor users can not be trusted to distinguish between spam and legitimate, pre-existing business relations.
On an unrelated note, I'm not to crazy about filter before accept either. Filters fail. When they do, I want the option to dig the message out of my spam folder.
I use regular expressions based on those and other phrase which will not match the phrase, but will match l33t versions of the phrase and also words like remove, order, quit, no more, and other words with symbols tossed between each character. It works very well.
As a bonus, it also filters out people who aren't spammers, but use lots of l33t-speak.
The plain version of those phrases is not a good search filter, because if you have subscribed to any legitimate mailing lists, they are almost certain to have those phrases. But you've already added thos to your preprocessor whitelist, right?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
...just not the people recieving the spam! There is a certain irony to the name - it really says it all.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
I don't get a lot of spam, but still report every one to SpamCop. Also joined this because spam targeted at domain owners really offends me. Spam should be entirely eliminated, but until that 1% quits buying the goods, it will remain profitable to those miscreants.
Then, after a few months of nothing important making its way there... I selected the "delete it" option.
So, statistically, I may very well be getting more spam than ever, but since I don't see most of it, I am cool with what I get.
I prolly don't spend more than a few seconds deleting emails with obviously bogus subject and/or "To:" lines.
Oddly, the ones that are getting thru lately are heavily weighted towards the "phishing" variety, rather than the "straight spam" type. Mostly for Banks I don't have accounts at.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
This idea of subject-based filtering isn't new or unique. I picked up the idea from some other big name sites. It works surprisingly well.
The amount of spam containing sexually explicit pictures within the message body increases...
and a study finds people don't seem to mind spam as much lately...
After all, what besides spam would give you an excuse to be looking at porn at work or in front of the wife?
I work for an organisation with 4000 people. somehow I don't think "they" will allow me to install a spam filter on "their" server.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
First off, no one should buy anything from a spammer, no matter what. If spammers loose money, they will go out of business. The media making all this fuss about people being more accepting of spam is a farce. I'm no more accepting of it than before. I'm worn down over it, amazed how high technology has failed to solve this problem. I'd still like to see a spammer get all of his/her messages sent back, of course this won't happen since the return addresses are faked.
My anger over spam has gradually faded into resignation that it's just a part of life for the time being. ISP's like mine use spamassassin, inserting headers that make filtering very easy. Lots of my friends are also embracing mail preview/filtering/erase on server type software like Mailwasher on Windows and SaveMyModem on Linux. While not a cure for spam, they are at least a good painkiller.
Does anyone know a few more programs like this for linux?
-- Howto: Get +5 (1) Whine about M$ (2) Namedrop Gentoo (3) Casually Abuse Mods (4) Namedrop Early Computer Model
I'm posting this so that you (the moderator) have some context to consider twitter and not mod him up whenever he posts his filler preformatted rants about installing Knoppix or Mepis or whatever that unfortunately get him karma every single time and allow him to continue posting his trademark toxic crap (read on) day in and day out. You may consider this a troll - I consider it community service. And I ain't kidding.
If you're a /. subscriber, I invite you to look through some of his posting history. I guarantee that you'll be hard pressed to find someone that is more "out there" than twitter. You'll also probably notice he's got quite an AC following. Don't just read his posts, make sure you go through the replies.
To get an idea of what I'm talking about, check this post out. This is an article about email disclaimers. The parent of the post is complaining about the ads in the linked page and so on, and twitter actually goes off on a rant to blame it on Microsoft and recommend Lynx, because "is teh free".
Here's another. In this post twitter not only calls the OP a troll but attempts to "tell it like it is" while making some vague argument about "GNU". Yes, if you're confused, you're not alone. The reply (modded +4) proceeds to simply destroy his bogus argument. You will notice he did not reply. This is what some people call "drive-by advocacy". A sort of I'll just leave you with my thoughts here and move on to the next flamebait kind of deal. In fact, he almost never replies because he knows that his fanatical arguments simply do not hold up to any sort of discussion. It's not that he's chosen the wrong cause - he's just going at it in a completely wrong way.
Here's that drive-by advocacy and FUD in motion: twitter goes on about some topic and then drops the usual "oh and M$ is teh evil" because "WMP phones home" or some such. Called on his FUD, he then claims that WMP stores every song and movie you've ever played in a file, somewhere. Pressed further, he just sort of slithers out of sight, his FUD-spreading complete. This is not about some Microsoft technology that nobody likes anyway; it's about lying for the sake of lying. Way too many of his posts are exactly like this one.
More? Just read though this post and the subsequent replies. I guess this stands on its own. Or these two. Or this one. Or this one.
Still not convinced? This is what twitter considers "humour" while going about his daily "M$" routine.
M