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Are Spammers Giving Up?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the only-in-our-dreams dept.

sfjoe writes "Are spammers giving up the game? Google seems to think so. In an article at Wired, Google, '... says that spam attempts, as a percentage of e-mail that's transmitted through its Gmail system, have waned over the last year'. They think their own filters are so good that spammers aren't even trying anymore. 'Other experts disagree with Google, pointing out that overall spam attempts continue to rise. By most estimates, tens of billions of spam messages are sent daily. Yet for most users, the amount of spam arriving in their inboxes has remained relatively flat, thanks to improved filtering.'"

3 of 327 comments (clear)

  1. I have certainly seen less by sgeye · · Score: 5, Informative

    I manage the spam firewall where I work, and I have seen a significant drop this month vs last month. In October we processed 20,000-30,000 emails a day, averaging near 25,000. In the month of November, we have only exceeded 20,000 in a day once, with most days falling short of 15,000. This months average is closer to what it was during the summer, we had seen the increase to around 25,000/day during August/September.

  2. In Gmail, false positives = whole threads junked by poliopteragriseoapte · · Score: 4, Informative

    In Gmail, the problem is false positives: when Gmail labels a message as junk, it moves *the whole thread* to the junk folder. So if you have a thread with 20 messages, and the 21st is incorrectly classified as spam, poof, also all the other previous 20, that you had confidently filed away, silently go into the spam folder, where they are silently deleted after 30 days. This is a consequence of how Gmail deals with threads, or "conversations". I reported this bug to the Gmail team long ago, but they haven't fixed it yet as far as I know.

    So if you want someone using Gmail to delete an email exchange they had with you, send them an additional message in the same thread offering to sell them Viagra. They will never see the message, but the whole thread will be deleted in one month. Disclaimer: I have not tried this (but I have lost email due to the above problem, and I know I did, as I keep a separate backup of my mail via pop, where the missing messages were still present).

  3. Official Google Blog by freastro · · Score: 5, Informative

    According to the Official Google Blog, there has been little decrease in spam, except for the amount in users' inboxes.