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

Oh Please

[GmAz]

As soon as 2006 hit, my gmail account started getting spam. I have gotten 7 today alone. Argh.

Re:Oh Please

[MaelstromX]

I even got a PhD through one of my spam emails. (I had the money to blow, and it was for a good R&D turn in job)

Gee, thanks for giving your financial support to spammers. YOU and others like you are the reason the rest of us get 30-something spams a day. Not to mention the unfathomably dumb way you chose to spend your money...

Re:Oh Please

[Anonymous Coward]

That's "Gee, thanks, Doctor" to you, sir.

Re:Oh Please

[joto]

now the PhD is absolutely bogus because the paper it came on was regular wine white, and the seal that shittly done

Oh, so that's why the PhD was bogus! And here I thought it might be bogus because it was from an unaccredited university, because you bought it instead of taking the required courses, doing the thesis, and so on...

Please don't buy things from spammers, you're the reason the rest of us gets spam!

Centralized Email

[(1 -sqrt(5))*(2**-1)]

The problem with the micropayment- or trusted-sender-model seems to be: What stops someone from setting up pop3 cum sendmail and ignoring the illicit contract?

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.)

Re:Centralized Email

[kfg]

Gates and co. would have to have an effective monopoly on email traffic for that to work.

Boy, I bet they never thought of that.

KFG

Re:Centralized Email

[Phat_Tony]

Here's how I assume micro-payments work: You come out with a standardized system for handling micropayments- that is an open, say, xml format so that any micropayment applications can talk to each other. Then any company that wants to handle micropayments (Paypal, Yahoo, Citibank, Fred's Bargain Micropayments, etc.) starts selling them. When you (your email app working automatically, or whatever) buy a micropayment, it comes with a tag saying how much it's for, who sold it, and what it's record number is. These get attached in the standard micropayment format as an attachment to an otherwise normal email record. The recipient computer's email program then goes and establishes a secure connection with the person who sold the micropayment and makes sure it really exists and is for the right amount. Of course, maybe Fred's Bargain Micropayments is an illegitamate vendor who exists only to facilitate spam and will "confirm" payments but never give you the money. This is why your email client will automatically go get lists online of known, valid micropayment vendors.

Who will maintain these lists? Anyone. Google? Consumer Reports? will they be free, or require micropayments or subscription fees to access, or be ad supported? Who cares, markets competition will work it out between vendors and consumers. At any rate, the basic system is sound, and does not necessarily require any sort of vendor lock-in to work.

To the user, all you have to do is set up your email client with the secure server(s) providing lists of valid micro-payment and email-insurance vendors (or use whatever defaults it comes with), and then tell your client how much money you require (reject, or move to SPAM folder, all messages that don't come with a payment or insurance policy of over $0.015) or whatever. Then say you get a piece of marketing mail you don't want insured at $0.02. Your computer checks the micropayment insurance vendor list and finds the vendor specified is valid, then it goes to the vendor and finds that the listed payment is valid, so the message goes in your inbox. You look at it, you decide it's spam, you click the "get insurance payment" button in your email client, and it goes and retrieves the $.02 and puts it in your account. The spammer who sent it will then see that you collected their payment, and either decide it's worth $0.02 to them to get stuff to you, or else take your name off their list so you don't collect any more of their micro-payment insurance policies.

Words Matter

[American AC in Paris]

When you're talking about news sources, an "article" is something substantively different from an "opinion" piece. Articles are (ostensibly) researched and based in demonstrable fact, whereas an opinion piece is just that--opinion, nothing more or less.

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.

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.

Gates Quote

[Animus Howard]

"Nobody will ever get more than 64,000 spams."

Re:Spam is dead for me.

[captain_craptacular]

I did the same and get so little spam it's not even funny. I use both gmail and yahoo and both are excellent at rooting out the spam. The one difference being that I get a small amount (couple times a month) of Yahoo spam on the Yahoo account, which is a small price to pay for free email. I don't remember the last time I considered spam a serious problem.

Hows that for a useless "me too" post?

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.

Oh, ye of little faith!

[Hosiah]

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!

Re:Maybe not declining, but simply changing

[aussie_a]

I vote with my eyes. IGN has lost me as a reader, and other websites will as well if they go to IGN's lengths at advertising. If anyone annoys me with their ads, I leave. I don't block their ads, I simply don't read their website any more. If more people did this, there wouldn't be a need for ad blockers, as intrusive and annoying ads would be down at a minimum.

spam is dead, long live spam

[circletimessquare]

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

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!" ...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

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

Re:spam is dead, long live spam

[misleb]

ighting 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,

The problem with these never ending "wars" is that they keep building up. With this "nor should you think it wil ever end" mentality is that it gets to the point where you are actually making things worse by being so relentless. Take the war on drugs, for example. How many people are hurt because drug use is criminalized rather than treated as a health issue (which it is)? That is what you get when you start waging "war." How much farm land in Columbia is destroyed and people poisoned because the US dumps herbicides all over the place to kill coca crops? Lots. At some point you need to back off theses never ending "wars" and ask youself if the casualties are really worth it.

As for the "war on terror," how much terrorism is CREATED by the war on terror? You go into a country thinking you are going to kill all the terrorists and guess what? You've just pissed off a whole bunch of people who previously didn't feel particularly strongly. Also consider the freedoms that people are willing to give up once "war" declared. "War" is a very powerful term and I think we should reserve it for big things. Pretty soon people will start believing that "war is peace, peace is war."

And back on topic... why is there a "war on spam?" Just install damn filters and be done with it. Any half decent spam/virus filter (and there are many out there) can stop at least 90% of all SPAM. So what is the big deal? Just push your services provider to install better filters and get on with your life.

-matthew

Not quite dead

[Vainglorious Coward]

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.

Here we go...

[ZeldorBlat]

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!

GMail spam increase in 2006

[lumbercartel.ca]

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).

Bill still has over a week to go! Be fair!

[AndroidCat]

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? ;)

Bill Gates, prognosticator

[ConceptJunkie]

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.

Re:Maybe not declining, but simply changing

[chriss]

Ad Block - Almost 100% effect and is 100% lethal to banner ads.

I actually have a problem with ad blocking. I am well aware that a lot of sites depend on income from banner views and clicks. And since they offer their content free to me and I want it to stay that way, I usually do not filter banner ads. This is not a moral question, just a personal decision. I even click on ads if interested. But there is a limit how much annoyance I can bear, so I block pop ups and stopped visiting sites like macosrumors, which seem to try to compensate decline of content by increasing the amount of ads, page reloads, non working links etc.

really?

[Phil Urich]

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.

Re:really?

[kormat]

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

Dude, it's just a junk email, let it go. It's not like it's a family heirloom, you don't have to pass your one junk email down to your children and your children's children.

Steve

Re:Spam is dead for me.

[nwbvt]

"We're switching 3 big companies from Exchange to gmail."

Unless you work for Google (in which case you should have mentioned it before you started this thread) that is almost certainly a violation of their Terms of Use.

Re:Yes, New Year's

[cryptor3]

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!

How Lucky You Are To Get Mail In English

[patio11]

I keep three email boxes -- work (also has my old college address forwarding to it, for business/professional/family use only), gmail (general use, except I give all US-based or English-using websites this address), and yahoo Japan (general use, except I give all Japan-based websites this address). I get zero spam at work in my inbox because the address is non-published, and all of the spam comes to my university address where it gets munched by Spamassassin and spat out by Thunderbird. I've never gotten a single spam at gmail in a year of using it. Yahoo, despite everyone telling me "Their filtering is great, gets almost as much as Google", is *buried* in spam every time I open it, all very sickeningly spammy content in Japanese (can you imagine an email saying, in plain text, "Local girls want to meet you tonight to have SEX! Join our matching site, only $10 a month!" getting through your spam filter in this day and age? Thats what all my spam looks like -- they don't even bother trying to obfuscate.) I can only assume that this is because yahoo and Thunderbird's content analysis breaks down on Japanese... probably for lack of a decent segmenter for languages which aren't written with whitespace. Someday I've got to take a look at Thunderbird's filtering and see if I can't improve it a little bit. I work at a technology incubator in Japan and when they say, "Hey, patio11, got any ideas for what you would do if we gave you a lot of money?" I've got a pretty good idea :

1) Take Spamassassin
2) Make it work in Japanese
3) ???
4) Profit.