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Spam Back Up To 94% of All Email
Thelasko writes "A NYTimes blog reports that the volume of spam has returned to its previous levels, as seen before the McColo was shut down. Here is the report on Google's enterprise blog. Adam Swidler, of Postini Services, says: 'It's unlikely we are going to see another event like McColo where taking out an ISP has that kind of dramatic impact on global spam volumes,' because the spammers' control systems are evolving. This is sad news for us all."
I don't have a gmail account, but the people I know who do seem to agree with you; also, to their credit, Google is quite proactive about dealing with spamming involving gmail accounts as a destination.
Anyway, if you ever administer mail systems for various companies (lets say you are a sysadmin consultant: filesharing, email, and web access are the big three of network oriented stuff -- order may vary), you'll have to deal with spam to some extent, just to have samples of spam to train stuff with, and any false positives which you ought to feed as "ham" to your Bayesian classifier (ie, gmail, SpamAssassin, bogofilter, others). But first, you should try to do cheaper things like MTA HELO-time checking (greylisting, RBLs, policy checking [ie, stuff like policyd-weight, amavisd]) first, then virus-scanning, and finally Bayesian scoring.
"The human race's favorite method for being in control of the facts is to ignore them." -Celia Green
You can go to your post office and request a form to have spam snail mail stopped. There was a story several years ago about a postal working got fired for telling people about the form. I would have given him a raise.
affect
I work for a university, and for many of my students, Facebook is the only way to send messages, unless you count text messaging.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
I know it's illegal, by the TCPA from 1991, although the amendments from 2005 turned it into a nightmare (political and prior business association exemptions). It just seems they loophole around or ignore court orders/judgements because they are out of state, out of jurisdiction:
http://www.junkfax.org/_vti_bin/shtml.exe/fax/action/stop.html
Like email spammers, they just find ways around every discovered solution. One day, a version 2.0 has to come out and they have to be addressed on a technological level, perhaps protocol. I know that someone probably wants to reply with "Your solution will not work because..." list, but all it requires is critical mass on the part of companies tired of spending money and resources on this crap. Even a legislative solution of no caller id blocking would help tremendously (if you're going to communicate with the person, what's the legitimate use of hiding the number right up to the call/fax?)
Selling animals on Craigslist is against their terms of service.
You don't google much do you. Try it and sign up for things like the Direct Marketing Association opt out, etc. Then try to be happy, it is not all bad out there.