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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."
and details regarding wow from this web site. Irony abounds.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
... I have an entire domain with a chatchall... that way i can post under [domainI'mRegistering]@[mydomain.com]. then i know exactly where the spam originated from. what was my most recent verified spammer? my bank X_X
Ditto for me. I've been using that gmail plus-addressing feature for awhile now. At least a year. Since then, every site I have gone to either got a custom address, or a separate throwaway or fake address if their address validator was awful enough to reject addresses with +'s in them (probably half of them). Some occasional spot checking on my spam filter has shown no e-mail arriving to any plus addresses.
and that was it. No link, no pictures. My theory is I have a really good friend who goes through a whole lot of effort just to make me smile. Either that, or it's an insult on my manhood designed to make me feel inadequate.
I got this username and email as an experiment. I have only posted it publicly on Slashdot and have not used it for anything else. I don't even check it. I just checked. I have 5,000 messages in my spam folder. And gmail deletes them after a month. So posting my email publicly on Slashdot only is resulting in 5,000 spams a month.
What disturbs me isn't the spam that comes from botnets of infected Windows PCs on residential broadband connections. I expect that. What bothers me is the spam that comes from dedicated servers colocated in actual datacenters, with static IP addresses, domain names, reverse DNS properly configured, and valid SPF records.
For example, these are apparently all owned by one spammer, that I've received spam from in the past few days:
mx5.mit9zinger.com
mx2.finogento.com
mx1.finogento.com
mx4.pinchmir.com
mx1.travel1soe.com
mx2.kintopuzi.com
mx1.petchin.com
mx1.abaganawena.com
mx1.tineraset.com
mx2.kimbolimbo.com
mx2.greenzetrain.com
From a technical standpoint, everything looks legitimate. Because they offer an apparently-working opt-out mechanism (I'm sure it really just marks your address as "confirmed", but you'd have to come up with a way to prove that) and they're not spoofing any headers, they're probably not in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I have two email addresses on yahoo.com. One is a jumble of letters and numbers which I use to for access to things I have no desire to ever see again. Dump things like "we'll email you the download link". That email address, which has been around for 7+ years gets the odd spam here and there.
The other yahoo.com email address is used only to enroll in a number of Yahoo groups and never given out or used for email. (I'm a ham and for whatever reason the ham community has fallen in love with Yahoo groups.) This second email address receives between 100-200 spams per week.
Keeping in mind that the second email address has never been given out, where did the spammers get my email address from? I can only assume that either Yahoo sells email addresses used in groups for "targeted advertising" or that they have a huge security hole through which the leak Yahoo group email address.
In any case... What spam? Use Yahoo Groups!
The sample is skewed.
Responding to spam and responding to phone/internet polls are likely highly correlated traits, thus this sample is not of the general population, but of people who like responding to things.
You would figure with all the crazies on the internet (that we MUST protect our children from), that sooner or later, some hot-head with a gun and enough technical know-how to track down a spammer would start a spammer hunt and start mowing them down.
It's ONLY when we have a spammer-serial-killer that spammers will stop. Suing them doesn't work, there's a guy out there that makes a living just suing spammers in small claims court. Laws and even government crackdowns don't work. It will only be when spammers live in fear for their lives and the lives of their families that they will consider another line of work.
What's annoying is that they've gotten so adept at hiding their identities, they are probably the only people on the internet who don't get spam, furthermore, they are probably the least likely to be targeted by the govt-nannyism of the web.
All in the name of selling snake oil. PT Barnum wouldn't believe how true his law is or that it's grown by a factor of a 1000...
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
When I chaired a society at university I got loads of spam (my address was listed on the university's website as the contact for the society), and so did the society's email address. Most of them would be asking me to spam everyone in the society with offers for summer "charity" work and so on. I usually replied with this, which scared them off:
This is a spam.
Quoting from http://www.ico.gov.uk/what_we_cover/privacy_and_electronic_communications/the_basics.aspx ,----[ Electronic mail ]
| Electronic mail is emails, SMS (text), picture, video and answer-phone
| messages. Electronic mail marketing messages should not be sent to
| individuals without their permission unless all these following criteria
| are met:
|
| 1. The marketer has obtained your details through a sale or negotiations
| for a sale.
| 2. The messages are about similar products or services offered by the
| sender.
| 3. You were given an opportunity to refuse the marketing when your details
| were collected and, if you did not refuse, you were given a simple way to
| opt out in every future communication.
`----
You have met none of these criteria. If I receive another message from you I will report your business as sending spam.
If you RTFA, it says that 12% of people have clicked on a spam message. It then uses the phrase "responded to" to describe what those people did.
Clicking on an email is not the same as responding to it. I've clicked on spam emails. I've never responded to one.
"Choosing to refrain from producing another person demonstrates a profound love for all life" [vhemt.org]
Is the one developed by the hard working folks at the OpenBSD project whom have been studying spam for well over 5 years. They came up with something that is devlishly clever called OpenBSD Spamd. Spamd is basically a fake smtp engine that sets the TCP RWIN to 1. By doing this, it causes the transmission speed to slow to 1 byte per second. This can cause a backlog or even crash the spam spender. Fight back, don't filter! You can even create a serious of spam trap addresses, publish them, and reverse harvest the IP addresses of the spam senders. Check out http://www.openbsd.org/
I had a 'clean' e-mail account I used often for message, signed up on boards, etc. I even posted it on a few message boards, and got little to no spam. I gave the message to a few friends, and started getting those [Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: This is Funny!] messages. My spam box exploded after this.
I submitted a rebate form to MSI. They submitted the address to multiple spam sources.
No, I'm not guessing. I got IP addresses from helpful people at a couple of the companies, and it correlates with the day they found out I was suing them for refusing to honor the rebate. So, that's one way it can happen.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I don't know mate. Spam is a numbers' game and the numbers in the study don't add up.
For a single spam e-mail, the conversion rate sits at about 0.00015%. With millions of e-mails sent, it is still worth it. But from this number to 12% there really is a long way.
The culprit for the aberration in the study is IMHO the methodology. Basically these people used cold calling (a form of spam in itself) to ask about spamming. Next to the 600 people that actually answered the survey, there are probably thousands more that simply answered with fsck off.
Junk science at its best.
right...