Are Spammers Giving Up?

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.'"

Comments

Re:Yahoo

[BlueMerle]

I have no other experience with hotmail, but my free webmail experience has consisted of Yahoo! and Gmail. Let me tell you, Yahoo!'s spam rate has not improved. I am not sure if their filter isn't as good, or they are just taking money from the wrong people, but I get at least one spam message make it into my inbox per day, maybe 2-3. Oftentimes, the spamming links back to a geocities.com page. Coincidence? I don't know. With Gmail, I get one spam message per month (maybe) make it into my inbox. They are so rare, its comforting. And since they are so few and far between, I actually use the 'Report Spam' option, because it looks like get this that their filters are actually updated with my input, and I don't see spam of that same type ever again. This is different from Yahoo, I report spam all the time and yet the same exact message types make it past the filters into my inbox. I even report phishing there, but that doesnt' seem to help. Can anyone with internal Yahoo webmail operation shed some light into what they actually do with user input? It would be nice to know that someone, somewhere (or at least a script) is using my button clicking for input.

This is so spot on that I just had to copy again in case someone missed it above! This has been my experience almost word for word!