Slashdot Mirror
Spammers Choose GMail
EdwardLAN writes "A study by Roaring Penguin has discovered that during the past three weeks, the amount of spam originating from Gmail has risen sharply." My spam has been pretty ridiculously high for the last few weeks, although I have no idea if this is part of it. It really does seem like gmail's spam filters are declining these days.
Maybe they should have just kept the system invite-only, instead of opening it up to everyone -- that would help, the way I see it.
How does spammers creating gmail accounts to send spam from imply that gmail's spam filters for inbound mail are declining? (if that is indeed what the summary is supposed to say).
Half of the spam I get on my gmail account that actually gets past the filter is in some language other than English... in fact its almost always in Cyrillic as well.
Give me a damn drop down that says "I speak English, anything not in English is not to me".
Won't solve their outgoing problem, but adding "this is my language" support would be a big help on the incoming, at least with my spam patterns.
Yeah I've thought the same thing, too. It wouldn't be that hard to filter. You could just select a charset (like Latin-1) and if less than 90% of the characters in a given message aren't representable in your chosen charset, automatically kill it. That wouldn't require figuring out the actual human language it was written in; it's a pretty trivial automatic test.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
It's the outgoing spam from Gmail that's the problem, not the incoming spam, and there's been messages on the Gmail forums about Gmail servers being blocked for spam. If Google doesn't do something about it, then Gmail accounts will end up "read only".
And having Google themselves impose outgoing spam filtering is something else to worry about, if you're a Gmail user.
Google already does that for their ads. I'm an American living in Germany who also has friends in Japan that I coorespond with in Japanese. I get ads in English, German, and Japanese(in fact I get ads in Japanese offering to teach me English and/or German....) so if they can determine the language for the ads, then they should be able to use it for spam.... at least if you get an email in a language that isn't in your outbox it should trigger something..
Monstar L
Blackwater would probably do it.
There's something to be said for this. Many of the major spammers have been identified (see ROKSO). The anti-spam community needs "boots on the ground" to do something about them. There are private companies in that business. Blackwater is one; Kroll is another. Spammers today are part of larger criminal enterprises, which makes them vulnerable to private investigators.