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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."
I'm posting as an anonymous coward, so they don't spam my e-mail address.
and details regarding wow from this web site. Irony abounds.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
How else are they going to win the Nigerian lottery? You can't win if you don't enter.
Thought thinks itself.
12%?
Really? I honestly thought it would be much higher...just basing that off of some of my daily interactions with people. It's a good thing breathing is an involuntary action, cause there are a lot of people out there who'd forget to.
Sent from your iPad.
The entire premise of this article depends on the definition of "spam." One could mark a legitimate business' unsolicited email as spam, but that doesn't mean that purchasing a product because of the material in one of those emails is newsworthy.
Nigerian princes in peril are another matter, though.
Terrify people into compliance!
"Hey, y'know gramma - I heard answering junk email funds the terrorists." ...
"Yep, that's right - that email you've got right there advertising cheap knob-expanders? That came straight from Osama bin Laden's laptop, uh huh."
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.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
The data may be skewed: users may consider offers from genuine mailing lists 'spam' whether they've signed up to it intentionally or not, when completing a survey. This more relevant stuff is more likely click-worthy. The survey doesn't necessarily make this distinction and account for it.
Otherwise, it is somewhat believable as many individuals new to the internet learn many lessons the hard way.
Mind you, "but another 13 percent said they simply had no idea why they did it; they just did." explains why I still receive 'send this to 10 people or you will has bad luck' from otherwise intelligent and educated people.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Hey! I got a great deal on penis enlargement, breast enhancement, and this greasy stuff you rub all over your body to increase your sexual desirability scent! Works great! Now if I could only get the dog to stop sniffing me, all the women would be barking at my door!
Sad to say, one of the places that I buy "generic viagra" from would not return my money when it did not work as well as the "super size me" products... I will just have to wait for my money from the deal I made in Nigeria to counter that loss.
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
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That was my thought too. People responding to 12% of all spam is quite a bit different than 12% of people having every responded to a spam email. A 12% response rate for an email marketing campaign is enough to make any marketers nipples hard enough to cut glass.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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!
We've known for quite some time that spammers pick up email addresses by trolling the internet. With spam so insanely cheap - and highly profitable - to send out, there is no incentive for the spammers to select for email addresses that are known to be read regularly (or ever).
If they can harvest 1,000 new addresses in a few minutes of bot-crawling the internet, versus a few dozen by buying them from someone with a form somewhere, the choice is pretty simple.
The take-home message of this is something we've known for quite some time - don't let your email address out on public pages.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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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.
Have you seen the bell curve? In this case average IS median.
Free Martian Whores!
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.
Rats would be more funny if they could fart.
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]
I have used it as well, with great success. (I am painfully shy in real life.) :) How can they expect anyone to fall for such a message?
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.
"Kind of sucks that it's almost impossible to get dates through Craigslist now, though."
Try http://www.plentyoffish.com/
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
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...
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 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/
What could possibly go wrong?