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What's With All This Spam?
coondoggie writes to mention a Network World article about soaring spam levels, confirmed now by researchers, IT managers, and security vendors. So, indeed, it's not just you: October was a spammy month. From the article: "Levine's assumption is this spike in spam levels is a result of a new generation of viruses and zombies that can infect PCs more quickly and are harder to get rid of. In its October report, messaging security vendor MessageLabs says the spike is largely due to two Trojan programs, Warezov and SpamThru. Others say a new breed of spam messages called image spam -- messages with text embedded in an image file that evade spam filters, which can't recognize the words inside the image -- is responsible." A note: I have no interest in penny stocks.
What spam? I get maybe 1 or 2 spam emails in my actual inbox each week.
Oh, my spam folder? Over a hundred a day, but as I recall, Gmail has miscategorized maybe 2 or 3 messages as spam during the entire time I have used it. Unless I am expecting something, I rarly check the spam folder at all.
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I use SpamAssassin and train it regularly against obvious spam. I've heard that this new crop of spam GIFs accompanying seemingly-normal text is mean to get through or even de-train Bayesian filters, but wouldn't SpamAssassin be able to recognize that one common thing about all these messages is an attached image file, and so consider that a spam marker? I read my mail as plain text in Gnus, and most people I correspond with avoid HTML mail and image attachments, so it wouldn't be a problem for me if GIFs or PNGs went straight to /dev/null.
Many of these stock spams have been going to people who have accounts at Ameritrade. It is likely that their email list has been stolen. See http://www.billkatz.com/node/77 for details.
Domain owners: Set up SPF NOW!!!
I set up SPF on my domains and the number of bounces from spoofed SPAM dropped dramatically.
Do not wait any longer, do your duty to the internet community: Set up SPF NOW!!!
No, I will not work for your startup
I barely get any spam either, but my ISP's mail servers are so choked with the stuff that real emails are being delayed by as much as two and a half days. So all of you who say "What spam?" need to be aware that, unless you only send messages to yourself, it's a real problem for everyone.
I used to work for a spam company. They would buy 10 domains a week at $5/domain (reseller license). I setup SPF records for all of those domains because it would reduce the spam score at some ISP's if mail came from a domain with a valid spf record. We were making $20k/day, so the cost of buying a domain was minimal. SPF records aren't quite used the way they should be.
It's called "Bayesian Poisoning". Wiki here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_poisoning