Slashdot Mirror
Are Spam Blockers Too Strict?
Myrte writes "Wired.com has a long piece on whether spam blockers are blocking wanted messages." From the article: "For years, e-mail users complained that torrents of unwanted messages clogged their inboxes and crimped their productivity. Now, e-mail users, marketers and mailing list operators are more worried that spam filters are blocking out too many wanted messages. AOL isn't the only company to face charges that it improperly blocks legitimate messages. But, as the world's largest ISP for years, it has long borne the brunt of complaints from mass e-mailers over the problem."
I'd like it if my spam filter could "mod up" non english email.
:) (this probably wouldn't fly at work, but for his personal email it's fine)
most of my email correspondance isn't in english, while most of my spam is in english... I've instructed my dad to delete ANY mail with an english subject if he doesn't know the sender before opening it, and that seems to work out fine, english is his 3rd/4th language and only has 2 contacts using it. If something is important enough, he'll get at call about it
I use spam assassin, and I found it only blocked stuff that was actually spam. I set it to 4, and it still let things like marketing emails from Nintendo and Sony though (I like being on the mailing list), and other newsletters I subscribed to. It rarely if ever blocks anything that I want to see. It's very good at blocking stuff that I didn't want to see. I don't really see a problem with spam blockers. And I had mine set pretty low.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Listen, when you go to your snail-mailbox and get the mail, you can pretty much tell which mail is good and which is junk, right? I mean, it's easy to tell letters and cards from family members and friends from bills and unsolicited junk. It's easy because there's a physical form of recognition taking place.
Email is tougher, because in most cases all you have to go by is a sender's email address/identifier and the subject line. Now I don't knwo if you've looked at those two things closely, but it's usually easy to tell when the email is spam (how many freinds do have named Lemon T. Viceroy?). Now, as reported, phishers are getting more sophisticated and they are making much more convincing emails that are tricking people into believing the email is from their bank. They's be able to save themselves some time and frustration by checking the email address vs. a legit email they've received from the bank.
I think blocking has to start at the user end. You have to put up a wall and say that only these addresses are legit and anything else is suspect. You dump suspect emails into a separate folder and peruse it for emails that are actually legitimate, and add a pass-through for them to your wall. It requires maintenance and vigilance, and cooperation from banks, credit card companies, etc., who have to make sure you know what legitimate addresses they will send emails to you with. Any left over emails you fire back to the senders and alert your ISP
Putting the responsibility for screening mail on the user is problematic, but it's certainly a lot more efficient than having to listen to complaints about legitimate mail getting blocked constantly. I do this very thing constantly with my personal account and by using my ISP's spam filter, I'm doing a pretty good job of screening out the crap. By alerting my ISP of definite frauds, I'm hopefully making things easier for others. Of course, you have to make this system easy to use, or users will get frustrated and it won't work properly.
Maybe snail mail isn't dead yet for a reason.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
The closer spam looks like legitimate email traffic the harder it is to block them without also blocking some legitimate email.
/. a top-tier spammer was aggravated by their efforts and managed to get a list of addresses for those who signed onto bluesecurity. I just checked the "junk box" on my email server and have found that in the past 12 hours there have been about 50 emails entitled "bluesecurity.com" with a body containing the WHOIS record for their domain. Apparently, the spammers are already striking back with a vengeance.
Your argument makes sense but there is more to it than that. Spammers are starting to catch on that their techniques to thwart mail filters can be used to manipulate those filters to block other people's emails. THAT is still pretty inceniary. Let me explain what I mean:
Some time ago I signed onto the "bluesecurity" website as I was intereste in their counter-spam efforts. As we all know here on
Besides annoying the heck out of those unfortunate enough to be on the target list, the thought came to me that this could be a crude attempt to train email filters to block out any (legitimate) correspondence affiliated with bluesecurity.com. I think we're going to see a lot more of this in the future: Spammers for whatever reason select a victim (anti-spam organisations, Microsoft, Symantec, etc) and start sending out massive spams that either repeatedly mention the victim's name, website address domain, etc, or are crafted to look like legitimate correspondence from the victim. The scummy vermin that send out the spam are the same types that go on phishing expeditions so they've had practice imitating others.
Since so many people run email filters, once these filters intercept and mark those messages as spam then legitimate email from their victims are more likely to be blocked as spam. That's all I need is for a spammer to send a few dozen emails that look like Microsoft correspondence, only to have the email filter get trained to filter out REAL email from Microsoft about my MSDN subscription for example.