Slashdot Mirror
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.
As soon as 2006 hit, my gmail account started getting spam. I have gotten 7 today alone. Argh.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
Gates and co. would have to have an effective monopoly on email traffic for that to work. (Which might have been conceivable before the advent of Gmail, by the way.)
My spam peaked early 2004 with about 30,000 mails per stuffing not only my inbox, but also my DSL connection. I had a "catch all" option on several dozen domains and most of the spam I received was addressed to non existing mail boxes. Due to my local spam filters very efficient handling of the problem I only started to worry about the situation when downloading all the spam started to take hours and my provider complained about the daily traffic.
The problem with the non existent mail addresses became a large one sometimes in 2003, when enough people had some kind of spam filtering that deflected most of the usual spam. I guess that sometime in 2004 even the last catch all rules have been disabled, so that today simply guessing email addresses will gain nothing for the spammer.
So maybe spam has not really peaked, but there are simply different waves of spam techniques. Some of them rely on mass, others on tricking the filters. We may simply be in a "smart spam phase". A lot of the spam that reaches me today shows the message as a picture instead of text and I have not yet figured out why thunderbird will display those pictures, since I disabled this.
But the article is right in spam becoming something like a background noise. I still have to manually mark about 100 mails per day as spam, but I got very fast in recognizing it and it only takes a few seconds. I'm always astonished if I meet friends whose email address have not been public for more than a decade and who are very annoyed if one or to mails per week pass their spam filter. To me it is like complaining about banner ads. It's just an unavoidable part of the internet ecosystem, like mosquitos.
Chriss
--
memomo.net - brush up your German, French, Spanish or Italian - online and free
memomo: free web based language trainer DE-EN-ES-FR-IT
As it stands, this is simply an opinion piece, and is labeled as such on the Observer's website. Apart from a loose reference to remembered statistics on the website of a company that sells spam-filtering software, there's nothing in the way of solid evidence to support this guy's claims. What's more, he asserts that things like phishing mails and penny stock solicitations somehow fall outside the realm of "spam". He further goes on to claim that the "new wave" of spam won't actually last, because things like penny-stock spam "rely on credulousness"; he basically asserts that common sense will prevail against the "new" spam where it failed previously. I seriously doubt that the same caliber of individual who falls for the Nigerian e-mail scam will somehow be immune to the siren call of the "penny stock" scam--which, incidentally, has been around for years.
While the author has some valid points, I think he's drawing conclusions on bad assumptions and gut reactions, not hard data.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
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!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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
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.
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.
For marketing purposes no one receives 'spam' anymore, now they receive 'supper surprise funmail!' it tests much better focus groups.
Someone big says something big will stop soon.
Something big begins to slow down.
Invalid conclusion: the two are associated.
Useful thought: maybe it would have slowed down by itself.
(I think spam must eventually tail off, because it operates on the basis of effort vs profit; as spam increases, I suspect the value of an individual spam decreases; it's not a stable system. In the end, the volume of spam should therefore level off, entirely without outside intervention.)
"Nobody will ever get more than 64,000 spams."
You're totally right, I should have written "piece", not "article".
/me lashes self
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
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.
Think again! Much of what you think is "spam" is actually legitimate. Contrary to popular belief, Nigeria really *is* filled with millionaires. Of all of these, the most prominent seems to be Esenam Ayele.
Why are you all so prejudiced against these great offers? I myself have bought many of these products *nudge nudge* and, although I haven't seen any results yet, I have great faith.
The real crux of this problem is that spam is a social problem. Although many people treat it as a problem that can be solved by purely technical means, in the long run the problem will always be there because:
0. There will always be a criminal element determined to make "a quick buck" without regard for others as long as there are people willing to do business with this criminal element (in this case, the spammers).
1. Many people use the internet who aren't computer specialists, thus are easily fooled by eMails which are designed to imitate messages normally generated by a trusted internet site (usually in an attempt to gain access to confidential information).
2. The up-front costs for the spammers are very low (and quite high for their victims, society, etc.), and there are no serious penalties thus the risks associated with getting caught are minimal (if there are any at all).
3. Marketers stubbornly and vehemently hate (in general) the idea that everyone has a right to "consent." Confirmed opt-in is key because "opt-in" alone isn't enough due to forgery.
There are many ideas for solutions, but unfortunately one of the big challenges societies face today is international differences when it comes to law & order, moral, ethical, and other standards. The internet, by its design, completely ignores international borders, and spammers are enjoying free reign as a result.
So far a combination of DNSBLs (DNS-based Block Lists) and various filters seems to work well for many ISPs, but spammers continue to find ways around these things, hence the fact that it is a social problem.
Education is key, but so far has proven to be impractical. Does anyone have any ideas for solutions (violence works, but is illegal in most civilized nations, so we need to be creative in a different way)?
P.S.: Challenge/Response systems are not the answer because they are, essentially, fighting abuse with abuse.
The Lumber Cartel, local 42 (Canadian branch)
British Columbia, Canada
You're only still getting SPAY-UM because you LACK FAITH in the HEALING POWER of the Almighty Bill! BLEY-ESSED be his AH-HOLY NAY-UM! Yeah, he hath only to extend HIS HAND and take your blemishes away from your inbox! Now holds hands and UH-PAR-UYUH, PAR-AY with me brothers and sisters, that in this hour these doubting unbelievers will yet turn their hearts to the ONE TRUE FAITH, that they might be YET SAY-UVED from their hour of darkness!
fighting spam, much like "the war on terror" or "the war on drugs" or fighting pedophilia, is mostly a policing activity. that is, it never ends, nor will it ever end, nor should you think it will ever end, if you really understand the nature of the problem
...no: there is no technological fix to ingenious asocial behavior. a bored teenager is always smarter than your protocol, and always more craven then the good intention of those who create the protocols. it's the tragedy of the commons. so those who see email spam going away with a technological fix are missing the larger point: you don't destroy the behavior, you just move it around: IM spam, blog spam, etc
spam/ drugs/ terror/ pedophilia/ etc. will always require personnel and effort to prevent, forever. it's just a cost of civilization. for to not fight these things allows them to proliferate and spread. it's a maintenance issue, just like taking out the trash to the curb every thursday. it's not like you take the trash out one day, and you never have to take it out again. no, trash constantly accumulates, and it always will. if you think terror, or hard drug use (really only hard highly addictive drugs are a problem), or spam, or pedophilia, or other problems like these, is something you can oppose or (even worse) accept, and the problems just go away, you simply don't understand what these problems are really like
every generation, there will be some group of idiots who think bombing the feberal building in oklahoma city or flying airplanes into office towers is a wise move. likewise, every generation some group of a**holes will see smuggling heroin and cocaine as a good business move (it is, but its the social byproducts of the business itself that is the problem). and, every generation, someone will think "hey, i can just send out a million emails." nothing you will ever do will stop such people from constantly being reborn anew in every generation, forever
these thinks, just like spam, must always be fought, for all time. yes, you can change protocols, but there is no technological fix to human ingeniousness and cravenness: someone will always try to game the system for their benefit, despite all of the suffering it creates for the rest of us. a lot of slashdot types would be thinking "technological fix!" "technological fix!"
true wisdom on the issue of spam and other social ills like it are ones of acceptance of the problem, and constant vigilance of the problem, at the same time. it's not like you can accept the behavior as OK, and its not like you can fight it and kill it once and for all. what is needed is more people understanding the true nature of social ills like spam/ terror/ hard drugs/ etc and understanding that, by their nature, they are mundane criminal policing issues like burglary and vandalism: always with us, but always unacceptable, all at the same time
this is wisdom on these issues. beware anyone who says you can accept these things, and the problems go away, or people who say you can fight these things, and kill them once and for all. such people don't know what they are talking about
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You may not be seeing it, but it's still taking up gobs of bandwidth, disk and CPU, and *somebody* has to pay for all that. I think that the costs to transfer, store and process spam outweigh the cost of individuals' time spent reading/deleting it.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
This article advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
(x) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
(x) Blacklists suck
(x) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
I get 4500 spam mails a month filtered through gmail each month since last year. Then again some asshole freshman thought it'd be funny to submit my email address along with my name and my school's telephone number to a few popup ads. Before last year I received 1 or 2 spam mails a day. So from 04-05 my spam mail increased 4500%. No decrease for me.
Some of those spammers must've just come back from their holidays at the garbage dump (I just can't bring myself to describe their usual hang-outs -- it would be a complete waste of SlashDot's resources).
The Lumber Cartel, local 42 (Canadian branch)
British Columbia, Canada
...been right in anything else than his financial predictions for MS ?
Why should we trust him in his spam prediction ?
...oh and btw. mr. Gates my hotmail mailbox is beeing spammed with worthless info from MS...
--
Where is \ on a Mac ?
Hello, I represent some dead person in Nigeria, and would like to smuggle 6 billion dollars out of the country. Also, I would like to marry you. Please help me. I am a man or a woman, whichever you prefer.
-Everyone has already enlarged their penis.
-Britany Spears has had a baby, so nobody wants to see her new sex video.
What else am I missing?
I find that spam is still doing a decent job of destroying email, the amount of email that gets picked off by spam filters is incredibly high and oftentimes I've had legitimate messages filtered by spam filters, meaning I have missed out on important information. Due to spam, email is now no longer a reliable means of transportation, which I think is worse than having to delete a few spam messages every day.
Currently my account gets absolutely no spam, I have a second email account I use to sign up for stuff and funnily enough it gets no spam either. Spam filters may be getting rid of most spam but unfortunately sometimes they stop needed messages too. And the truth is so long as one person in a million responds to the spam messages then it's still worth it for the spammers
being vague is almost as cool as doing that other thing...
Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market-place, and cried incessantly: "I am looking for Spam! I am looking for Spam!" As many of those who did not believe in Spam were standing together there, he excited considerable laughter. Have you lost it, then? said one. Did spam lose his way like a child? said another. Or is spam hiding? Is it afraid of us? Has it gone on a voyage? or emigrated? Thus they shouted and laughed. The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances. "Where has Spam gone?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed it - you and I. We are Spam's murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying Spam? Do we not smell anything yet of Spam's decomposition? Preserved meats too decompose. Spam is dead. Spam remains dead. And we have killed him.
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.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
He made that statement Friday, January 23rd, 2004 so he still has 11 days to pull it off. So he can still slack off for ten days and pull an all-nighter of something. (Maybe he could offer each spammer 2 million dollars to go away? For less than billion, problem solved .. right? ;)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
So Gates declared war on spam 2 years ago. Well, he declared war on Windows security problems 5 years ago.
Given this track record, I expect he will next claim that he will eliminate corruption in Congress.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
"Spam Is Dead"
Let me guess, some sort of pun related to the fact that most of the spam comes from zombie pc-s and can't be stopped.
So he's not really getting any less spam at all, it's just getting hit on the head before it gets to his inbox.
I wonder if by "amount" he means "proportion"? With many more users getting on the internet now than "a few years ago" it's not surprising that the proportion of spam may have dropped a little (overall), but I'd be very surprised if there's actually less spam being generated.
In the last three years I think I've received one spam and two eBay phishing e-mails. I run my own mail domain, so when I register an e-mail address for anywhere I use nospam-[their domain]@[my domain]. This makes things very easy to trace and would seem to have some discouraging effect on places selling their address lists. The phishing e-mails were due to a hardware supplier whose customer database had been comprimised, for example.
With Gmail, and I think most of the other webmail services (Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.), roughly all spam is sent to the spam folder, and I never have to look at it. So how is spam doing any significant "damage" to email? The average person probably wouldn't be annoyed by having a spam filter.
I make websites and stuff. Buy one.
I didn't even notice that TFA had ads. My Mozilla AdBlock filters are pretty minimal, too:
*.falkag.net/*
http://adserver./
*.atdmt.com/*
*.indieclick.com/*
http://adsrvr./
*.burstnet.com/*
*.tribalfusion.*
*.doubleclick.net*
*.loanweb.com*
*/ad.asp?*
*/ads/*
*/sponsors.*
*/advertise/*
*/adimage.php?*
*googlesyndication.com*
*personals.yahoo.com*
*/banners/*
http://ads./
*.valueclick.com/*
*.chitika.net/*
*/bannerads/*
*/marketing/*
*.adrevolver.com/*
*&adspace=*
24 filters, and I don't see more than 10 or 15 ads a DAY. I can't beat Yahoo, though, because they store their ads right in with the pictures for news articles and stuff. Keenspot uses the same dirty trick; I can't read some Keenspot comics without having to see Keenspot ads.
My own gmail account remains Free and Clear; I actually got one spam message ever on it, and I've had it for quite awhile now (and get quite a few e-mails and even subscribe to a few yahoo groups via it). And it's not like my e-mail address is that obscure, just my own first name followed by two other letters (and then the @gmail.com, naturally). The same could be said of my ISP e-mail address, or my university e-mail, or my hotmail/msn address, or even better my yahoo mail address which I fling around willy-nilly to sign up for things or whatnot whenver they require an e-mail address. And yet none of those e-mail addresses, all of which (except for my Uni one) I use astonishingly frequently and throw around all over the place, get any spam. Whatsoever. None. Except for that one gmail one (which ruined my perfect record, grr).
Note, also, that I turned off spam protection in hotmail, turned it off in yahoo mail, have none for my ISP one or my Uni one (both would only mark e-mail as spam instead of blocking it anyways, so I would know), and etc. Considering how high the signal-to-noise ration is, the possibility for false-positives understandibly outweighs the miniscule spam concerns I would have.
So what the hell am I doing right that most people seem to be doing wrong?
First off, none of my addresses are entirely intuitive or plain. No numbers even, nothing other than pure letters, but nothing that would show up unmodified in a wordlist or namelist (not even with good ol' "two random letters at the end of the string"). My sister has a gmail address of the same length as mine, but gets literally hundreds of spam messages every single day. The difference is that hers is her last name, while mine is my first name with two letters from my last; so hers is likely to show up in wordlists. That seems to be the kicker.
Meanwhile, my yahoo address seems to attest to the idea that signing up for things online won't get you spam, BUT the things I sign up for are message boards at places like BeyondUnreal.com or the official The Trews webboard or maybe to view some newpaper online (for those amnesiac days that I don't remember about BugMeNot). So nothing particularily sketchy.
In other words, as long as a person is relatively smart about how they handle their e-mail, they should be fine, 'tis my theory. This theory is not without major flaws, though, I'll admit. And furthermore, sometimes a person just wants a specific e-mail address, and it sucks then that it might just doom them to spam.
And further going down the questionable route of using my own personal experience as a scientific study, seeing as I had no spam until that one message, it would look something like this, starting arbitrarily in 2000:
2000 - 0%
2001 - 0%
2002 - 0%
2003 - 0%
2004 - 0%
2005 - 100% OMFG 2005 IS TEH SPAM APOCALYPSE
2006 - 0% (so far...)
So, in other words, I can prove anyone right. Parent? Sure, spam has
increased DRAMATICALLY in the last while. Naysayers? Bah, spam isn't
a problem! Etc. Ah, subjectivity.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
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.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
God, BSD, and now spam?
spam gone in two year i wish, but then again that prediction is comming from a guy who said 640kb is all the ram u'll ever need.
...no: there is no technological fix to ingenious asocial behavior.
Yes there is. It is called a gun.
And its application is a bullet to the head of the anti-social person given by the governmental authorities of the day. The anti-social person can no longer affect society and can no longer by pass any methods intended to keep him in check.
But of course there is a major moral problem with my suggestion and should never be taken as advice.
I'm just stating the theoretical situation in which technology trumps social behavior. Obviously, its an extreme and we don't want to be going around shooting spammers (even though I'm sure some of you want to) but eventually given enough technology you can prevent everything.
Or rather what I am saying is that all social and political problems can be solved with technology. It just depends on your application of the technology and how far you are willing to go with the application. I'll take a bit of annoyance with my freedoms though.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
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...
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
This couldn't be handled at the client's end reliably because that would defeat the whole purpose (not to mention being a target of all those SpyWare vendors) -- in order to prevent bandwidth waste, it would have to be handled by the server.
For this to work, servers would have to indicate the going rate for messages (either by size, number of recipients, number of messages, etc.), and then the sending system would have to either accept it and actually transfer funds before sending the message, or just abort the transaction. The sender could choose how much they want to pay for this "ePostage" before sending it, and then the server could handle it automatically.
The main problems I forsee with such a system are eMail lists (as someone else already pointed out), and automatically generated eMails from other services (free or otherwise) that the user has signed up for. Why should Google AdSense or PayPal or eBay have to pay to notify me that my contact information is invalid, for example (I'm sure a skilled con-artist can see obvious ways to exploit something like this)? And do the users also deserve a share of this income, or just the ISP?
In addition to that, a few technical matters will need to be resolved before anyone can start thinking about even implementing such a system:
0. A new protocol to replace SMTP will be needed (it's not appropriate in my view to add this to SMTP, which is based on a trusted model rather than a costed/financial model). The protocol could be exactly the same as SMTP, but with one additional step inserted immediately after the "HELO/EHLO" stage in order to reduce development overhead for everyone.
1. Automated micropayment transfer protocols will need to be available to these new mail servers, and high-volume servers will need to be set up by the various providers of these financial services. Features will need to be able to handle currency exchange in a simple manner. Dispute procedures will need to be very, VERY well thought out.
2. The potential for criminals to launder large amounts of money by setting high rates or just claiming high volume when it doesn't exist (and both sides indicating this to be correct) in order to facilitate transfers between one another would be of great concern to government and military organizations aiming to impede the funding of so-claimed enemies (e.g., mafia, terrorist groups, trade blocked nations, etc.).
3. Micropayment service providers will likely compete on such things as percentages (e.g., they keep 0.05% of each micropayment to help cover their costs), various service charges (including fees for dispute resolution), usage fees, monthly service fees, etc. Banks are well-known for these types of tactics, and these micropayment providers will likely earn the same notariety.
In the end it will all just end up being very expensive and time-consuming, and I suspect that people will simply abandon it in favour or reverting to SMTP again in order to save money.
It's an interesting pipe dream, but I don't see how it will catch on in our current global economic climate given the current costs of doing business.
The Lumber Cartel, local 42 (Canadian branch)
British Columbia, Canada
Spam has been going down recently. I've noticed it. Problem ain't solved, but it isn't as bad as it once was. I chalk it up to the following:
* A few major spam court cases. Suddenly, there might be a downside to being a spammer.
* Filtering has made spam less effective with fewer people replying.
* People are more use to email and are less likely to respond to spam.
* Last, but not least: There is a self-regulatory process here. When there's too much spam, people, each individual piece of spam becomes less likely to be noticed. What are your chances of selling your junk if 10 other people have packed that mailbox with the same ad? Spammers drop out. This is where we are right now. Unfortunately, this tread won't last. Fewer spams means each piece of spam is more likely to get noticed and generate a response. Fewer spams means more people are starting to use their email. This makes spamming more effective which will attract more spammers.
I predict that we'll go through several waves of spam over the next few years as the amount of spam reaches its "optimal" level.
> ... At least spell it as "cvm", this is for your own good.
If you do that, the non-*nix crowd (yeah, yeah, deny it all you like) might assume it's a Unix command rather than a Latin word.
The Lumber Cartel, local 42 (Canadian branch)
British Columbia, Canada
Me too. I think that on New Year's Day, at least seven spammers emailed me to wish me a more fulfilling and enlarged new year!
At first I assumed he was only couting spam that made it past the spam blocking softwares, but as it appears his theory is proven based on a different set of assumptions and facts.
His entire article bases on the fact that the % of spams from all emails caught has dropped. This can mean one or more of many things which only follows his theory.
1. Spam has actually decreased
2. Spam has found ways to avoid being detected
3. The volume of email has gone up, with more actual email while spam increased at a slower rate
Honestly, I'd like to see more statistics and figures to decide how spam has changed in these past few years. Just by looking at #s from one company and what percentage they've stopped isn't enough to say much in my opinion.
HD Trailers
spam has passed its peak and is now declining.
For me the peak was two weeks ago when I received 30 emails a day from the FBI and the CIA telling me I visit illegal websites.
you can't solve a problem by just accepting the problem
Apparenly you don't solve it by going to "war" with it either. I'm not talking about acceptance. I am talking about doing what you can, but at a certain point recognize that you can only do so much before you are doing more harm than good.
there will always be malcontents who seek violence, and unconstrained access to highly addictive substances just results in a lot of addicts. do you deny either observation? then you don't understand what terrorism/ hard drug use really is
I understand that the magnitude of such problems are influenced by certain social and cultural conditions. There are conditions that tend to lead to drug addiction and terrorism. They dont' just come out of thin air for no reason. Sure, there are SOME people who are just "anti-social" and tehre are SOME people who who are just prone to drug addiction, but a significant portion get involved with these things for reasons that can be addressed without going to war with them.
simply put, every single negative you can demonstrate about the war on drugs/ war on terror i accept and acknowledge. except that the negatives of not fighting these things is worse. that's really about the entire argument we can possibly have on the issue,
Look, I'm not saying we shouldn't address theproblems. I'm just saying that "fighting" them isn't necessarily the answer. It is not difficult to see that many of the problems with drugs are CAUSED by our "war" attitude towards them. Do you understand the implication of the word "war?"
therefore, you wage war on heroin, meth, cocaine (the highly addictive drugs ONLY... marijuana, lsd, nonaddictive drugs: these should be legal), and you wage war on terror (bush invading iraq might be called part of "the war on terror", but again, the specifics of a flawed policiy don't matter to me, it's the PRINCIPAL of opposing terrorism that matters to me: you have to take out the trash, or it just accumulates and stinks up the place)
Sure, you have to take out the trash. But starting a "war on trash" would be ridiculous. Just take it out. No need to turn it into a battle between you and a bag of rubbish.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Based upon my logs and those of two other machines that I do mail admin for, I'm not seeing that at all. If anything, there are more infected Winboxen out there than ever before, spewing tons of trash, and it's usually the Russians, Soloway, or some mysterious spammer hosted in a block of Chinese servers, all sending via these compromised Winboxen. If anything, my numbers are down at home, though that's because I can be a bit more restrictive about my firewall rules. Spamassassin is doing a very good job at filtering a large majority of this drek.
1) Take Spamassassin
2) Make it work in Japanese
3) ???
4) Profit.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I was checking Spamcop's (my mail provider) parent company Ironport www pages yesterday.
0 5_FINAL.pdf
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_Nov20
BTW if you report spam, reportphishing@antiphishing.org is a good CC: target.
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.
I have been system administrating several large scale email servers with around 50,000 users or so in total. During the "spam peak" we would have over 400 spam emails a minute being marked which was around 60% of the total email volume through that period. Now we are seeing around 60 emails a minute with more users and domain names on the system than before. However statistics are not everything. If we look more closely at the stats we see that while we would have an average of 400 emails per minute as spam it would peak up to several thousand a minute at times and sometimes it would be less than 20-30 spam emails a minute. While now we are almost flat lining at around 55-65 spam messages which means its not as big a drop as would have originally expected but it is still a drop. One of the issues we also note is that many of the cable providers are now blocking port 25 which was traditionally a large percentage of the traffic spam on our service.