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Despite Gates' Prediction, Spam Far From a Thing of the Past
Slatterz writes "Bill Gates declared in 2004 at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland that spam would be 'a thing of the past' within five years. However, Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, has written in a blog post that 'with the prophecy's five-year anniversary approaching, spam continues to cause a headache for companies and home users.'"
I would contend that for the average user, spam is essentially a non-issue nowadays. IT departments still have to do quite a bit of work, but all that work means that the average amount of spam a user sees is nearing zero.
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Most of this spam comes from bot-nets made of Windows computers that have been taken over.
Where there is an financial incentive to spam (there are those dumb people that click on the v1@9r@ ads, believe it or not), there will be spam.
Spam is the reason I have a gmail account. When I first got an e-mail address I was using a small ISP and spam didn't even exist. After 12 years of using the same e-mail address that thing is about 90% spam. I couldn't find an e-mail client capable of cleaning it and my ISPs filters were useless. Finally I caved and just started consolidating it all in gmail and letting gmail do the filtering for me. So, yes, spam is still a huge problem if you're not using gmail or a work e-mail where all the work is being done for you.
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Our Barracuda gateway, in about two years of use, processed about 10 million messages. Of which just under 3.8 percent are deemed real. This is for an office of about 50 active users at any point in time. Of the messages that funnel through the 'Cuda, I get about two dozen annually that are daft enough to fool the gateway's checks. Conversely, I get no false positives. So the 'Cuda does its job well, but end users have no idea what goes on to make their mail client less encumbered and full of their personal junk. Spam blows. As does any prediction Mr. Gates may ever front...
I've gotten 2 spam mails since i switched to gmail a few years ago.
The summary is so negative, spam is pretty much gone, gates wasn't far off the mark at all.
What has been done over the past 5 years to prevent spam from being sent? Nothing, really.
As I've said before, spam is an economic problem. It won't go away until you remove the economic incentive to send it. Spam is sent out because people can make money by sending it, plain and simple. If something meaningful was done to remove the incentive to send spam, then it would go away.
But never before then. And you can forget about filters. We have seen ever since the first bayesian filters that spammers will keep finding ways to outsmart filters; you are only starting a game of whack-a-mole with that strategy. On top of that, filtered spam still has real costs in internet traffic and server storage space.
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If those people would simply find a decent email provider, the spammers' market would dry up and spam might become a "thing of the past" once and for all. But for now there's no reason you can't switch to a decent email provider and forget about spam today.
The only way for the spammers' market to dry up would be if THEY STOPPED GETTING REPLIES to the messages they send out now. They still get replies to some (single digit percent?) of the messages they send out, and that makes them money. So they keep fighting (successfully!) against the majority of the Internet population and sending out new spam messages and keep trying to defeat anti-spam measures.
The spammers aren't the problem, the people who reply to spam are the problem.
It all depends on how you look at it. As an end-user of email, you're right. Almost no spam gets into the inbox on my gmail account. Some gets through the filters on my POP3 accounts, though, but most of that gets caught by the filters in Thunderbird. However, I'd bet that the people running and maintaining mail servers at ISPs wouldn't agree with you because spam is probably wasting at least as much of their bandwidth as ever. We don't see it because their filters have gotten pretty good, but then, the time, CPU cycles, memory and disk space needed for those programs adds, slightly, to the cost of business of every provider, as does that bandwidth I mentioned above. I'd bet that if spam were to "softly and silently vanish away, and never be seen again," our monthly ISP fees would drop.
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If you read Bill Gates' original prediction, he said that spam would be killed through the electronic equivalent of a stamp, also known as "payment at risk". This means that if an email gets marked as spam, then the sender will be billed for a cost whenever they send a spam email. He didn't say that users would not have to deal with spam, he said that spam would simply not exist altogether. This most certainly did not happen, so he was completely wrong in his prediction.
In addition to your suggestions,
a) Set up some honeypot addresses, like aardvark@yourdomain.com and zzyxyzark@yourdomain.com, that will not be used for any legitimate purposes.
b) if you have some old unused e-mail addresses (i.e. people no longer with a company), monitor them to make sure that they only receive spam and notify legitimate correspondents that they are obsolete and, once they've only received spam for 6 months or so, then start using them as honeypot addresses as well
c) seed the honeypot addresses into various locations where spammer automated address collectors will be likely to pick them up (web pages, news groups, replying to obvious address trollers, etc.) - try to get it into as many spammer lists as possible.
d) take any e-mails that come in to those addresses and feed them into the learning mode of
i) a hash signature-based recognizer if it's graphical spam
ii) a bayesian recognizer if it's text or HTML spam.
e) use the resulting trained recognizers to filter out the same spam messages from your legitimate mail addresses.
A bit the same idea as noise-cancelling headphones.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
The only problem is that the spammers are hijacking other people/companies systems, and who will end up paying?
Yeah, and the linux kernel mailing list would be bankrupt in 15 minutes. Nice try.
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...who will end up paying?
The people who refuse to secure their PCs. So far, I don't see a problem.