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

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.

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.

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: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.