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.

Comments

Spam with trigger words in the pictures

[redswinglinestapler]

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.

Re:Spam with trigger words in the pictures

[erikkemperman]

all of the words that trigger spam filters are in the graphics included in the HTML email

Depends which client you use, I guess. My Thunderbird never downloads images unless I request them manually.

Apart from the problem you describe, this also inhibit "beacon" images to function (you know, embed a single-pixel image from some webserver so you can look at the logs as a kind of spam delivery notification.)

Re:Spam with trigger words in the pictures

[Bwian_of_Nazareth]

The filter works with the fact that there is an image, not with what is the image itself. If it is an external image, then the URL is fed to the filter. Bayesian filters can do a whole lot of preprossesing before doing the actual weighting. Second thing is that unless you get a lot of poetry in your regular emails, then you should be able to teach your filter to recognise this spam.

Re:Spam with trigger words in the pictures

[CdBee]

Blacklisting certain top-level domains does it quite well...

of course I mind less, 4 a reason

[l3v1]

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.

X-YahooFilteredBulk

[redswinglinestapler]

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.

Re:X-YahooFilteredBulk

[Anonymous Coward]

This comment looks awful familiar.

Perhaps it's because it's been posted before On 12/1/2001?

Karma whore...

Gmail + Thunderbird Bayesian filters = :-)

[CdBee]

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...

Re:Broadband

[tehshen]

However gmail is completely useless at tagging phishing emails as spam.

From my experience with it, it does do this, and it does it well. It puts a big "This message may not be from who it seems to be from" message at the top of the screen, and doesn't load any images.

Then again, I've only had two eBay phishing spams, and they were both obvious.

Re:Desensitized

[tehshen]

Although I agree spam has increased in quality over time, I think there is one thing making it not quite so credible - people get loads of it.

I have received a few spams that really do look genuine, "I tried sending this to you before" sort of thing, that could fool quite a few people. However, the trouble is that I get this same spam five or six times a day. People are more likely to respond to a one-day 'offer' spam than when they're being drowned in them.

And if spammers are being paid by the number of spams sent, rather than spams replied to, this shouldn't change soon, thankfully.

I don't mind because Thunderbird is excellent...

[master_p]

...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.

Re:I don't mind because Thunderbird is excellent..

[Ziviyr]

Thunderbird is utterly ineffective against the foreign junk I keep getting.

Re:Broadband

[Mr_Silver]

From my experience with it, it does do this, and it does it well. It puts a big "This message may not be from who it seems to be from" message at the top of the screen, and doesn't load any images.

Agreed, it does do this (and pretty well, only today did I see one manage to evade having it's links stripped) - however I would prefer it if they moved them to the spam folder automatically.

Otherwise they just clutter up the inbox.

He's a comment reposter

[Anonymous Coward]

He did the same thing with a comment about the woman who bought business cards from spam.

Re:I met a spam customer once

[Wakka15]

I noticed this too, and dumped the text into google.

http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=143527&cid= 12031312

Word for word duplicate.

Pertinent, yes, but definitely rehashed.