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Spammers Choose GMail

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the my-inbox-it-hurts dept.

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.

12 of 325 comments (clear)

  1. Invite-Only by Anubis_Ascended · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Invite-Only by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 5, Funny

      It's still in beta. Bugs like massive amounts of spam originating from the service are bound to turn in up in beta software.

      --
      Palm trees and 8
  2. Gmail's spam filters by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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).

    1. Re:Gmail's spam filters by HardCase · · Score: 5, Funny

      Now listen, if you've waited this long to complain about Taco's reading comprehension skills, you're way too late to get into the game.

    2. Re:Gmail's spam filters by bds1986 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I love Slashdot. One minute everybody is all pro net-neutrality, and insisting that ISPs shouldn't prioritize or monitor customer traffic because it's none of their business what someone does with their connection. Then somebody mentions the word spam, and all of a sudden the attitude turns completely around and ISPs should be held responsible for customers private communications and behaviour on the internet. Kicking people off the net is fine, as long as you're only breaking spam laws. But kicking people off the net for breaking copyright law is bad, how dare those evil corporations!

      I'm not necessarily expressing an opinion either way, I just think it's interesting.

  3. One thing Google could do about incoming spam... by tgd · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Why not apply spam filters on outgoing messages? by mgkimsal2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Gmail used to be touted as the best spam filtering service. Certainly it's good, but apparently they only feel the need to filtering incoming messages. Why not filter outgoing messages as well? Can't quite be a CPU problem, because outgoing has be be just a small fraction of incoming, right?

    Is it just tradition? People never expect anything they send to ever have anything done to it? Google could set another precedent in webmail by introducing outgoing filters which would block or slow down mail appearing to be 'spammy'.

    --
    creation science book
  5. Re:One thing Google could do about incoming spam.. by tgd · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yeah thats why I mentioned the Cyrillic thing.

    In reality doing it via language matching should be pretty trivial. I'd hazard a guess if you had a list of 30 languages and you pulled out the top 50 most common words in each language you'd probably have near 100% success in detecting the primary language in an e-mail. I'm sure an algorithm either purely based on that word set or based on a larger dictionary choosen based on that matching could be done to determine with a very high confidence what language an e-mail is in and if there's more than one or two languages in it.

    They also know my white list of contacts. In my case I'd bet 90% of my e-mail comes from them so those can be immediately put in the inbox, reducing the number that need to be scanned at all.

  6. Re:No spam for me. by Chrisq · · Score: 5, Funny

    Good I'm safe... It just asked for my credit card number.

  7. Re:One thing Google could do about incoming spam.. by jeiler · · Score: 5, Informative

    CAPTCHA is broken: it's not just various implementations that are compromised, but the entire theory.

    --

    If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.

    Sacred cows make the best hamburger.

  8. Re:One thing Google could do about incoming spam.. by antifoidulus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  9. I wrote the release... by dskoll · · Score: 5, Informative

    Well, I did this study and our results are here.

    We in no way imply that Gmail's inbound spam filtering is bad. It's probably excellent. It's just difficult or impractical for Google to filter outbound mail without either human review or complaints because of false-positives.

    What we're saying is that spammers are trying to evade IP reputation systems by hijacking organizations with good reputations or which would be impractical to block. There will be a CAPTCHA-cracking arms-race, but unfortunately I think the system will reach equilibrium with spammers quickly breaking CAPTCHAs and continuing to abuse free e-mail systems.