12% of E-mail Users Have Responded To Spam

Meshach writes "An article in Ars Technica claims that 12% of internet users have actually responded to spam messages and tried to buy items. Although I find this hard to believe, it does explain why my spam folder is always full." Also in spam news, wjousts links to a Technology Review article about how spammers get your e-mail address, writing "E-mail addresses in comments posted to a website had a high probability of getting spammed, while of the 70 e-mail addresses submitted during registration at various websites, only 4 got spammed."

Comments

Which sites sell addresses to spammers?

[piojo]

I would have liked the article to state which sites sell e-mail addresses to spammers. They would certainly deserve it.

I use unique e-mail addresses for (almost) everything I sign up for, and I've never gotten a spam message from any of those unique accounts. I started getting a lot of spam when I first posted to LKML, which is published online.

Re:Which sites sell addresses to spammers?

[piojo]

Some occasional spot checking on my spam filter has shown no e-mail arriving to any plus addresses.

This may not be completely surefire, because spammers might strip out the +stuff at the end of the address. In practice, it should work for now, because according to research like this article, spammers are lazy.

If in the future your main e-mail address starts to get spam, you could set your account up so that "address+real@gmail.com" goes to your inbox and anything addressed to just address@gmail.com is assumed to be spam. (Obviously, you only give out example+real@gmail.com to those you trust.)

Re:Which sites sell addresses to spammers?

[u38cg]

For sites that reject +-address email addresses through gmail, use dots. It's not quite as clear, but if you don't have to do it very often it works. Gmail sees u38cg@gmail.com and u.38.cg@gmail.com as the same address.

Re:Definition of "Spam?"

[fridaynightsmoke]

Do legitimate businesses send unsolicited email? I have never seen one.

I have, very very often. It seems common in the b2b market in the UK.
And yes, I am talking about real, honest-to-god legitimate businesses, with reputations; as well as the countless spams from others with differing levels of legitimacy (all the way from slightly dodgy telecoms resellers, through SEOs all the way down to the pill peddlers we all know and 'love').

Re:Definition of "Spam?"

[wjousts]

Yes, all the time. One of the worst sites I've seen for it is this. It's actually a pretty useful site with some good information and good tools for searching for a specific part, but when you look at any of the parts from a search, they send your e-mail address to that company and that company often spams you.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

LinkedIn sold my email address

[oman_]

A friend of mine invited me to linkedin by using my personal email address and lo and behold I started getting a ton of spam relating to owning a business.

Never EVER EVER type your (or a friends') email address in to a website no matter how reputable they seem.
They will change their privacy policy the second they decide to make a buck.

And I hope the linkedin people go to hell because now that email address is about useless.

Re:Have you seen some spam nowadays?!

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

I have used it as well, with great success. (I am painfully shy in real life.)
I have put up a couple of ads lately and the email harvesters have found a new technique. They reply to your ad, if you respond to their mail, you are on their list. But they use the same text in the message every time. :) How can they expect anyone to fall for such a message?

"Kind of sucks that it's almost impossible to get dates through Craigslist now, though."
Try http://www.plentyoffish.com/

12%? No, according to research from last year

[Anubis IV]

http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/pubs/networking/2008-ccs-spamalytics.pdf

The idea that 12% have responded and tried to make purchases is ridiculous. Take a look at the paper I just linked. If you scroll towards the end, you can see the results of the experiment they did. Out of about 350,000,000 e-mails they observed being sent out, they only had about 10.5K (0.00303%) actually click on the link, and of those, only 28 (well below 0.00001%) people tried to make a purchase.

Now, granted, the poll included historical data, since they asked if people had ever clicked on a link or else tried to make a purchase before, but come on. 12%? Maybe back when spam was new or something, but as another person said earlier, almost all of us are "not retarded" at this point, or at least not stupid enough to go clicking those links. I wonder what percentage of people have actually clicked on spam links in the last year, as opposed to in their lifetime...

Re:The Best Solution

[david.given]

I use a greylisting SMTP proxy (that I wrote myself). It eliminates about 90% of all spam before I even have to download it. Spamprobe takes care of the rest. It's only on very rare occasions that spam ever makes it to my inbox, and there are practically no fals positives; and I've been using my email address for close to a decade now, on Usenet, on mailing lists, on crappy forums (like this one), and have never bothered to shield it or cloak it. Spam just isn't a problem for me any more.

Of course, that doesn't mean that it's not still annoying, and I think that public stocks should be reintroduced for this sort of abuse-of-the-commons crime...