Spam is Dead

Vainglorious Coward writes "Two years on from Bill Gates' promise to eradicate spam, an article in The Observer claims that spam has passed its peak and is now declining. Is it just me that hasn't noticed this?" I got almost a third more spam in 05 than 04. I guess I exist outside the bell curve on this one.

Comments

Someone Forgot To Tell The Spammers

[ackthpt]

In the past 72 hours I've got over 300 spam which got past my ISP's spam filters. 98 yesterday alone. When I clean out the spam trap for my mail account it still has thousands piled up in there I need to erase.

Nostadamii these people ain't. A little logic may explain the diminishing amount of spam by their measure, such as changing behaviour on the internet. I find much of it is directly linked to postings on USENET groups, some of which have seen floods of cross-posting trolls. Some newsgroups seem to be dying out, others are flourishing. I expect the spam is quite targeted, as some is obviously tied to the newsgroups I've posted on.

virii, virii, virii! muah ha ha ha haaaa!

Re:Someone Forgot To Tell The Spammers

[pilkul]

Usenet is such an old and well-standardised technology that all the address harvesting programs have support for it. You are opening yourself up to massive spam if you make so much as a single post there. It's not really representative of the state of most of the Internet.

Spam is dead for me.

[dada21]

I've had an e-mail address for over 15 years. My spam in the past 2 months is less than I had 10 years ago.

I post my main address unobfuscated on /. and 25 other public forums. My signal to noise ratio is 100:1. In 5 days I received about 200 real e-mails and 3 spam.

I gave up hosting my own e-mail late last year. I moved all my employees and family to gmail. I'm saving $4000 annually in labor and maybe $4000 in hardware, software and bandwidth.

With giving up my corporate domain name address I'm giving up headaches and spam.

Try it, you'll love it.

Re:Spam is dead for me.

[dada21]

I bet we'll see it.

Set up your MX-record to yourdomain.gmail.com. Set up POP3 & SMTP to the same. Set up A-record for mail.yourdomain.com to some gmail server's IP. Send e-mail to initialize@yourdomain.com. Wait 24 hours or less :)

Google can brand it and stick ads in the AJAX interface.

Re:Spam is dead for me.

[ares284]

Yep, it would be a violation:

  Personal Use Only

The Google Services are made available for your personal, non-commercial use only. You may not use the Google Services to sell a product or service, or to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales. You may not take the results from a Google search and reformat and display them, or mirror the Google home page or results pages on your Web site. You may not "meta-search" Google. If you want to make commercial use of the Google Services, you must enter into an agreement with Google to do so in advance. Please contact us for more information.

http://www.google.com/terms_of_service.html

-Ares

Web 2.0 says no friggin way

[tiltowait]

Anyone with a comment-enabled blog knows that e-mail spam is small worry compared to comment spam, Splogs and the like. Wikis and the like are vulnerable to spambots as well.

Want to stop it?

[SCHecklerX]

Yes, this does take some work, and no it isn't for everybody. But this has totally eliminated all spam to my inbox (mostly due to greylisting, I think)

1. Get a high speed connection
2. Use some dyndns service, or register your domain, or get a business class line.
3. Set up a sendmail server
4. Use mimedefang, spamassassin, and milter-greylist
   • set up the greylist for 5 minutes or so. Spammers don't retry.
   • discard obvious stupidity in your mimedefang filter(no '.' in helo argument, trying to say they are you in the helo, helo is RFC1918, sender is on spamhaus RBL/XBL, etc)
   • set up things like receipt throttling and greet pause in sendmail

I was getting 2-3 flagged by spamass after passing through the mimedefang stuff before implementing greylisting. Post greylisting I've yet to get a single spam in my spam folder (they never made it to my inbox before, but I still had to deal with them.). I have things configured to flag at 2 points, discard at 7. My bayes filters have about 2 years worth of training on them, and I use RBL scoring too.

Re:Maybe not declining, but simply changing

[vertinox]

To me it is like complaining about banner ads. It's just an unavoidable part of the internet ecosystem, like mosquitos.

You know, I don't know about you, but I tend to bring repellant when I go into the jungles we call the internet.

Ad Block

Almost 100% effect and is 100% lethal to banner ads.

Annoyances don't have to be. Well.. If you don't mind the DDT.

Re:I haven't gotten spam for years ...

[Greyfox]

I tried tmda for a while and it worked pretty well. Problem was I was storing a lot of spam on my hard drive and sending out a lot of bounce messages. I find Postgrey blocks a similar amount of spam and doesn't involve having to store messages or bounce mail to nonexistant addresses on a regular basis.

Bad Attitude from Lack of Understanding.

[twitter]

An article praising Bill Gates' infamous attempt to charge everyone for sending email and points to a page that requires Macromedia Flash? Well, it's good to know what the other half thinks, I suppose. This guy lacks a clue about the origin and motivation for spam and clearly does not understand why it's a problem that will grow.

His "Oh, it's not so bad," attitude is unfounded at best and what you might expect from M$ or the DMA as they promote, "legitimate" spam at worst. Spamhaus tells us that there's still a big problem, despite steps that most ISPs have taken. The problem will get worse again as the spammers learn to get around those mostly trivial steps. It won't take much effort to read configuration information on broken Windoze machines and make them point to the ISP's SMTP to send mail like the end user does. In the mean time, the botnet continues spew network clogging spam, and DDOS and we all get to pay the price in slow networks and broken computers. It's not enough to sit smug behind your spam filters while the average user gets creamed. The nasties are strengthened and encouraged by that kind of attitude and they can get still you with a DDoS or Distributed Mailbomb.

Flaws in Microsoft's operating system are what enables the nasties. They have to be corrected or avoided to fix the problem. Until then, the botnet will be both a weapon and profit center at everyone's expense. No, the answer is not "trusted" computing or mail servers that waste your time with MENSA puzzles and collect a penny for Bill. The answer is fixing what's broken. Email works despite it's great abuse by a few idiots.

post-spam filter count

[chroot_james]

I'm sure the reporter was judging this based on spam in their inbox regardless of whether a spam filter caught it. I wonder if they even know about spam filters...

Re:really?

[Nogami_Saeko]

I suppose the amount of spam that I get on my home email account seems to have gone down a bit, but there is still plenty coming in on Gmail - most of it gets caught in the filter, but the occasional one gets through, but even that gets filtered because I usually have my home email client check Gmail through POP3.

For my home system, I use POPFile (http://popfile.sourceforge.net/), which has a nearly perfect (99.34%) accuracy rating after using it for almost three years now.

N.

Re:Maybe not declining, but simply changing

[chriss]

Adblock has a setting that will let you download the ad but not display it so you still support the site.

Regarding the big picture, this does not solve the problem. Websites can finance themselves by placing banner ads because people actually see (and click) those ads and purchase something, giving the ad publisher revenue which he can invest in banner ads. If you make banner ads inefficient by downloading, but never displaying them, there will be no more initiative to place any ads, therefore removing support from the website again. And I honestly do not believe that T-shirts and donations are a business model for more than a very small number of fan sites.

Of course all this only applies in an "if most people act that way" scenario, but this is how economy actually works.

Re:Maybe not declining, but simply changing

[chriss]

So you're saying that I should buy products from companies advertised in banner ads, not because I want them, but because I feel that it is my duty to sustain the market for banners?

No, you should not buy anything you do not want. And its not your duty to sustain the market for banners.

But if you want to buy a product advertised for by a banner you should not NOT buy it because it was advertised on a banner. And it would actually help to sustain the market for banners if you would not decide to ignore all banners by principle.

This is not a question of right or wrong behavior of a single person, its about the average behavior of a large group of people. Its like voting: You are aware that your single vote will most likely not change the complete vote. So in theory it does not matter whether you vote or not. But you know that the whole voting process only works because a lot of people do not think of it in terms of their single vote, but in terms of the votes of all the people.

Banners are similar. Blocking banners will not kill the banner market any more than not voting will disrupt democracy. But this is only true as long as the people blocking ads or not voting are a minority.

Story is true but phishing is on rise

[Ilgaz]

I was checking Spamcop's (my mail provider) parent company Ironport www pages yesterday.

Spam is dieing as you can see at http://www.ironport.com/toc/toc_spam.html

I think phishing by zombies are in rise.

http://www.antiphishing.org/ report available in pdf http://antiphishing.org/reports/apwg_report_Nov200 5_FINAL.pdf

BTW if you report spam, reportphishing@antiphishing.org is a good CC: target.

Re:Oh Please

[joto]

I'm not sure what you're getting at. According to wikipedia, Condoleeza Rice got her PhD in the normal way from U. of Denver in 1981 (age 26). She has since received a number of honorary doctorates, something which should not be confused with either non-accredited PhDs or ordinary doctorates.

Honorary doctorates are something universities give to people for their achievements outside the university. Some universities give them out only for academic achievments , while some give them for other things (such as being famous). Getting an honorary degree is usually more like getting a lifetime-achievement award, then it's like getting a real degree.

Wierdly, CAN-SPAM is working. But not as expected.

[Animats]

Much of the improvement, surprisingly, is due to the CAN-SPAM act. Yes, it "legitimizes spamming". Yes, it's too weak. Yes, it overrides state law.

What CAN-SPAM does do is make it a criminal offense to forge headers. As a result, spam from any "legitimate business" is easily identifiable from the header. So it gets filtered out.

This wasn't what the Direct Marketing Association expected. But that's what happened. As a result, the spams from legitimate businesses don't get delivered. Attempts to get around this "problem", like Bonded Spammer, didn't really catch on. So spam is almost useless to legitimate businesses now.

This leaves the people who forge headers. They're now criminals. So they've been forced out of legitimate web hosting services onto "bulletproof" web servers in marginal countries. They can't send directly any more, or their connection will be pulled or IP addresses blocked.

So now they have to find some illegal way to send spam. Which is getting harder. Most of the open relays have been plugged. They've been reduced to spamming through zombies taken over by viruses. This means they're committing serious felonies, and long jail sentences are a very real possibility.

Spam is now a branch of organized crime, not marketing. And it's highly visible organized crime, which makes it vulnerable. It's not that hard to follow the money. We need to push for more law enforcement priority in this area.

That's why spam is declining.

Re:Oh Please

[tigersha]

Whatever you think of Condi Rices' politics, she is smarter than you are. The woman deserved her PhD, she was the provost of Stanford University until she started serving in the Bush adminstration and she was and probably still is the United States' greatest expert on the Soviet Union.