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

Men worried as pr0n spam drops

[amigoro]

A growing number of men have been unable to go perpendicular despite Hitachi's best efforts due to the decrease in pornographic spam emails as reported by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

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Desensitized

[ishmalius]

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.

Re:Desensitized

[DarkHelmet]

It's kind of like growing up in a country without rights.

After a while, the next generation of people are accustomed to it. Because of the lack of outrage, the system stays in place.

It applies here perfectly too. Nothing will be done about spam as long as most of the people out there will put up with it, and some of the people out there even go so far as support it.

Re:Desensitized

[selderrr]

this is probably an argument that most slashdotters will dismiss blindly, but I dare say that the quality of spam has changed as well : while we still do get a whole lot of G3T R1CH F4ST crap, there is a marginal increase in 'reasonable' spam for products that do exist and might perhaps be interesting to a small percentage of the population. A bit like dead tree spam : I skip trhough it in a glimpse, but once in a while something interesting catches my attention.

Maybe the percentage the article talks about, is just that small increase in quality ?

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.

Re:Desensitized

[anthony_dipierro]

Spam isn't a system, though. In fact, spam is more nearly the lack of a system.

The cost of elminating spam would be very high. If you took the legal approach, you'd have to create a global police state over every email that anyone sends. Even then you're likely not to get full cooperation, so you'd lose whole countries full of people from the internet. If you took the technical approach, then you'd lose the ability to send an email to anyone, from anywhere, without any passwords or keys, and without even necessarily telling the truth about who you are.

The third solution is a partial one - filtering. It sucks in that it allows some spam to get through and more importantly it runs the risk of having legitimate mail dropped, but it seems for most it's the most acceptable of the possible solutions.

So, if you call filtering nothing, then I'd guess that nothing will be done about spam as long as there is still e-mail.

Re:Desensitized

[frostman]

A friend of mine who gets about 500 spams a day (and has plenty of room for that on the mail server) has an interesting non-techie workaround.

He tells all his friends a secret nonsensical code word starting with "Z" to include as the first word of the subject line. The he sorts his webmail inbox by subject and ignores everything that doesn't start with that word.

He's not a big net user, so he doesn't need throw-away accounts or anything like that. For him, it's quite enough to be able to see what's from friends and ignore the rest.

Obviously, a more tech-savvy person could just set up a simple procmail script to send all the non-friend mails to /dev/null and make life easier, but the principle would still be the same.

This isn't a universally applicable idea, but for someone who just needs personal e-mail from people he knows I think it's a pretty interesting solution.

Re:Desensitized

[anthony_dipierro]

Eliminating spam could be free, if it weren't for the 2 idiots out of 1 million who actually buy the spammers products.

And I'd be able to fly, if it weren't for that damn gravitational force.

And while we're talking about the high cost of eliminating spam, what about the high cost of maintaing the e-mail system, of which 60% of so is used only for sending spam, according to a recent slashdot article.

High cost? E-mail is virtually free. In fact, it's so close to free that companies are competing to give it away.

The cost of all of that infrastructure increases our taxes, and the price of consumer goods and services.

Once you've got the infrastructure in place, the additional costs are slim to none.

Therefore, I contend that filtering is not a solution, since it only eliminates the end-user inconvenience, not the cost of the infrastructure used to convey the spam.

That's the problem with spam, the end-user inconvenience. In comparison to the inconvenience costs the other costs are negligible.

Typical Spammer Stereotype

[redswinglinestapler]

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.

Obviously they don't read Slashdot

[NitsujTPU]

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.

Re:Obviously they don't read Slashdot

[eofpi]

You must've missed yesterday's User Friendly.

Re:Obviously they don't read Slashdot

[Taladar]

You are right. Spam is not comparable to rape or murder. But that doesn't mean 9 years for a spammer is too long. It means rapists and murderers get sentences far below what they should get.

hhhmmm...

[irchs]

Appeasement never works. See World War 2.

Jan

Re:hhhmmm...

[DenDave]

What? You wanna wait till they spam pearl harbour before you do anything about it??

Better filters?

[Yaztromo]

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.

Re:Better filters?

[Lars Arvestad]

Yeah, but if actual users are saying the get more spam, it is likely that they see the spam themselves, I would say. So I would guess that people are getting increasingly used to spam. Sad.

Personally, I have no idea about my spam rates since I filter out spam myself in Thunderbird, plus that the organizations I belong to seem to do a good job of keeping some of the spam out using SpamAssasin and other tricks.

Re:Better filters?

[NicolaiBSD]

Perhaps part of the reason is that many e-mail clients have better filtering mechanisms in them .. Apple's Mail .. Thunderbird

At best that's a very minor part of the reason as only 1 in 100 people use those. We're talking people here, not /.-ers.

Re:Better filters?

[Matt2k]

Are you doing anything to customize your spam filters?

I get about 400 spam messages a day, Thunderbird without fail catches about 75% of them. Every few minutes while working I'm distracted by the 'new mail' icon and out of habit I stop what I'm doing and go check. It's always some piece of spam.

I can't count the number of hours I waste each week task switching my thought process like that, I have a hard time staying concentrated anyway, and this is usually a prelude to `Time to check the news sites anyway' or some other waste of time.

It's to the point where I simply have to force myself to not leave e-mail open in the background, and only check it a few times a day.

Re:Better filters?

[Yaztromo]

When you get back from holiday to find "Downloading email 5 of 4702, 106 minutes remaining", client-side filters just don't help any more.

Just to clear something up, as I think a few people are potentially confused: I'm not claiming that spam isn't a problem anymore because filters are getting better. I'm merely claiming that better filters may be part of the reason why this survey shows that people are becoming more tolerant of it.

We're getting to a point in time where a very large number of e-mail users aren't running an e-mail client, but who are using Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, or a similar service. Indeed, it seems these days whenever I run into an Internet user who isn't terribly technically-savvy, that person has a Hotmail or Yahoo Mail account. In cases such as these, they don't even have to sit around and download the spam messages.

Now personally I'm with you: I run an e-mail client that connects to POP3/IMAP servers to get my messages. Due to business use we're probably still in the majority, but a lot of "average consumers" these days are using web mail, many of which provide automatic filtering AND which don't require you to download a pile of messages.

Yaz.

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...

Re:Spam with trigger words in the pictures

[traabil]

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.

Yeah, where are those copyright zealots when we actually could use them? Have the rights users sue them for using works of art in mischievous activities.

'but they are minding it less.'

[hyfe]

but they are minding it less.'

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.

People get educated and axquire tools

[phooka.de]

The conclusion should be simple: People get used to it. They learn how to hdeal with it. They deploy SPAM-filters and don't get to see the SPAM anymore.

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 possible cause

[toQDuj]

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.

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.

Broadband

[L0k11]

Without even RTFA I'd say it has a lot to do with broadband uptake.

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.

Re:Broadband

[surferbill]

I also find that increased storage space, especially on webmail accounts, means I'm not so bothered by it. I've had spam to my gmail account (despite never giving out the email address, just using it for testing the interface), but it was all filed correctly in the spam folder.

Re:Broadband

[Mr_Silver]

Filtering has got a lot better too, I have not recieved a single spam with my gmail account.

I've only received one or two. However gmail is completely useless at tagging phishing emails as spam.

I've just removed 6 ebay, 2 paypal and 1 wells fargo that have appeared over the weekend. It would be nice if their spam filter did this automatically for me.

One of the ebay ones managed to get around gmails phishing checks and so the links were still active.

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: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.

Buying from spam okay, buying online not okay

[redswinglinestapler]

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.

Re:Buying from spam okay, buying online not okay

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

I guess that's because the net population has diluted in terms of technical know-how.

And given that people are generally happy with services like Amazon, eBay and PayPal, they see no reason why services like Amaz0n, eBäy and PayPa1 should be any different.

Differing interpretation

[Overcoat]

From the Reuters article:

Fifty-three percent of adult e-mail users in the United States now say they trust e-mail less because of spam, down from 62 percent a year ago and about the same as a June 2003 Pew survey.

Note the reference to "e-mail users". Thus the decline in e-mail users who say they trust e-mail less because of spam may be the result of people getting fed up with spam and ceasing to use e-mail.

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.

I'm thankful for spam

[NitsujTPU]

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.

Re:I'm thankful for spam

[StuffJustHappens]

Glad you are no longer shy in the locker room. A word of caution though - if you now have a large dikky, take care when slamming your locker door.

Re:I'm thankful for spam

[Koiu Lpoi]

Now, all we need are pills to make you stop calling it your 'dikky'.

tolerance

[interstellar_donkey]

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.

Re:tolerance

[anthony_dipierro]

people accept the state, because they do not know about any alternatives

Alternatives to spam? Surely you're not claiming you have an alternative to spam which involves still having an email account.

What we have to do is to educate people, teach them not to click "yes" to everything they see

Agreed.

and to filter as much spam as possible.

Filter it? Why do we have to teach people to filter spam? What do you care if I filter spam or not? Why does it make me stupid to tolerate the spam I receive?

There are alternatives to spam, but they don't involve email. The way email is designed makes spam inevitable. The alternatives are instant messaging, phone calls, faxes, and sometimes even good old snail mail.

When spammers (and phisers) stop getting money, maybe they will stop.

Spam will never completely stop. Not as long as email remains a free, global, unauthenticated medium, anyway. There are a lot of idiots in the world, not just on the receiving end of spam but also on the sending side. Hopefully the studies that say that most spam comes from a small number of spammers is true, but cutting an exponentially growing phenomenon by a factor of even 10 isn't going to accomplish very much.

Statistics are misleading

[Durzel]

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.

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...

spam lets me know my mail is working.

[artifex2004]

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.

Re:spam lets me know my mail is working.

[kyojin the clown]

i have been having loads of problems with this. we recently went from symantec's mail filter (haaaa hahahahaha) to ASSP (its brilliant) and now i am having to stay logged in to hotmail all day, so i can send people test email. they are so used to getting all the spam, now that it has gone away they constantly think the mail server is broken

here is a link for ASSP, if you like it give them money. http://assp.sourceforge.net/

Spam has destroyed the medium

[Monkelectric]

and the medium is no longer the message.

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?

Re:Spam has destroyed the medium

[Koiu Lpoi]

What can a lone geek do?

Vigilantie justice, my friend. Start to get outraged, get other people outraged, and make the spammers pay.

Of course, that may be illegal, but I can't think of anything within the law to fight back, honestly.

Re:Spam has destroyed the medium

[Matt2k]

Yes this is exactly the problem I encounter as well. I deal with many clients using free e-mail services and about five percent of the time, I am _simply unable_ to communicate with them.

They purchase a product from me then I e-mail them the software in return; Those people that never receive my delivery will start firing off e-mails, which I do receive quite perfectly, upset that I seem to be swindling them. I am completely unable to respond in any manner!

Sometimes I can play around with the return receipt and priority settings. I don't know if that helps the mail get through, or just helps it get noticed, but sometimes that helps. For those especially stubborn instances, I've had to resort to signing up for an account at whatever freemail site they're using to communicate a response. As a result I now have e-mail accounts at all of the major sites: hotmail, yahoo, gmail, and even a few of the more esoteric ones.

i don't care about spam but others do

[Dr.Opveter]

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?)

The survey could be misleading...

[Eyeball97]

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?

Re:I actually don't get spam.

[Malenfrant]

I agree. I get maybe one or two spam mails a year. I'm not sure what I do that others don't, I just use common sense, and if I have to give out my email to someone I don't trust, I'll set up a temporary free one, use it once, and then forget about it

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

[Ziviyr]

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

Answer is easy...

[rdean400]

People are getting numb to spam like they're numb to postal junk mail.

Didn't you post the exact same thing

[3.5 stripes]

the last time there was an article on spam?

If not, my Dejavu-ometer need recalibrating.

All in the wording...

[Beolach]

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.

Heh. Riiight. Now get off the high horse.

[Moraelin]

If anything, you just illustrate why spam is a problem.

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 /. 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.)

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.

Re:Heh. Riiight. Now get off the high horse.

[Yaro]

I think spam isn't the sole reason to be blamed, actually. A few years ago, the net had a huge appeal and was still quite a quiet place to be in.

The very first time I got myself into an online Diablo game, I almost went to the moon when I saw there were _strangers_ from some foreign countries _playing along_ with me. It was also exciting to get involved in some emerging communities, use ICQ and talk with complete strangers that live on the opposite side of Earth, and so on.

I think all this changed for two reasons :
- we got used to it, no more magic involved. The net has become a daily life tool.
- it opened itself to the mainstream. No more a quiet place there, nor people who behave themselves, but a sample of your everyday life humans, including all the annoying bunches.

Re:Heh. Riiight. Now get off the high horse.

[Moraelin]

Well, that's a very insightful observation.

Still, I don't know... there's quite a difference between "the magic is gone" and the outright avoiding email that we're seeing today. I think people still like to talk to other people, especially people sharing some common hobby/interest/whatever. It's no longer something new and fascinating, that's true, but we're still human and still noone's 100% introverted.

After all, you're reading Slashdot and actively taking part in the discussion at that. Obviously not minding all that much the possibility that some people (myself included) could be immature at times. You could have just as well gotten a bunch of "lol, you suck" answers, and I'm thinking you knew that, but that didn't stop you from posting.

So the magic may be gone, but the usefulness is IMHO still there.

And the fact that we've turned into a bunch of online hermits who'd rather hide from everyone, and would rather delete a message from a stranger than read it, is IMHO just diminishing that usefulness.

Gmail takes care of mine now

[tcoady]

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.

People accept most things..

[t_allardyce]

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.

Re:Tips for fighting spam

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

My dreams dashed away...

[erroneus]

...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.

Re:I met a spam customer once

[jcr]

Why didn't you just slap her silly?

-jcr

Re:I met a spam customer once

[somegeekgirl]

I know that the cards you get from those places are cheap-looking, but I'd love to know where you're getting 250 cards for $7 from a regular business. If I recall correctly, last time I checked at the UPS store, they wanted $25-30 for 50 cards. Not saying that buying from the cheapo site is a good idea, just pointing that out.

Spam damages domain holders too

[linuxbz]

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.

Apathy not all bad

[MECC]

Apathy rising, urge to complain falling....

I mind spam less....

[OhHellWithIt]

Instead of turning apoplectic, I just mutter " spammers!"

I still don't like it

[jesterzog]

Perhaps part of the reason is that many e-mail clients have better filtering mechanisms in them now than in previous years.

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.

Catch spam by creating honeypots

[hankwang]

What can a lone geek do?

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.

Re:Tips for fighting spam

[dajak]

What the 'right' rules are depends on who you are.

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 .nl works just fine. She speaks only one language anyway, and it is not English.

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.

desensitization

[mabu]

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.

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.