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Spam Levels Lowest Since 2009
wiredmikey writes "Following a two-week dramatic decline in spam levels, spam now accounts for 78.6 percent of all email traffic, the lowest rate since March 2009, when the global spam rate was 75.7 percent of all email traffic, according to Symantec's January 2011 MessageLabs Intelligence Report, released today. The volume of spam in circulation this month was 65.9% lower than for the same period one year ago, in January 2010, when the spam rate was 83.9% of all email traffic."
Frist Sapm
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
I am getting lots of solicitations for "scholarships to for profit colleges".
And "hundreds of girls on facebook" want to date me.
This is why you have different email addresses. My gmail address is for personal stuff only...personal communications, confirmations for bills, that sort of thing. My hotmail address is my "general use" address, used for things like forum signups and such.
Living With a Nerd
Because the email spammers found other, more profitable and efficient methods to spread advertising onto the web?
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Amazon is offering a bulk emailer for businesses via its cloud services arm Amazon Web Services.
Amazon's Simple Email Service - Amazon SES to its friends - allows you to send up to 2,000 emails a day for free, if they come from another Amazon cloud service. The book and services giant says that messages can be sent for as little as 10 cents per thousand.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/25/amazon_email_cloud/
gentlemen, fire up your DNSBL
Man, that makes me feel inadequate. They're still trying to sell me Viagra and penis enlargements kits >.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Spammers no longer need to try to get to you spend money on products when they can just get your credit card info and spend it themselves.
IAnd for spammers who try to get malware on your computer (through email)... they are finding other means of doing so (Facebook, etc.)
In theory, the spammers make money from people who read their messages or click on the links in those messages? Who actually reads this crap, and who the hell clicks on the links? Perhaps we could us this as a test? People who repeatedly open spam emails lose the right to breed, thus increasing the intelligence of society as a whole? I really fail to see why this problem even exists...
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
I would like to be able to report that this dip in spam correlates with a serious of brutal murders that authorities describe as "totally baffling and, y'know, really not worth the trouble of figuring out" rather than the much more mundane "slow increases in the effectiveness of filtering, along with migration to social networking and IM spam"...
You wouldn't know it wading through the journal section...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
News flash! A constantly fluctuating quantity is at the lowest point it's been since a short time ago! Everybody rush to go turn on CNN and hear more about this vital piece of news!
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
There is now so much advertising everywhere that "spam" is starting to become an old, obsolete and minor nuisance.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
I'm guessing this is because spam is simply not getting through email filters in the same quantity as in the past making it pointless to send.
As of a week or two ago, the Usual Internet Pundits were reporting that spam was back up to its Pre-Christmas-Break levels. December and January may still count as low-volume months, because the botnets took two weeks off, but the bots are rested, relaxed, and back at work making the Internets a profitable place for blood-sucking parasites again.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
How is 75.7 65.9% _lower_ than 83.9? Or are they saying that total email traffic has dropped by ~60% over the last year, and that 75.7% of current email traffic is only 28.7% of the volume in January 2010?
Or is the lack of caffiene causing my ALU to malfunction?
Significant digits. I has them.
Actually it's easier to take drugs to boost IQ than that other purpose.
There's some 25 different substances that amp you up. They won't make you *wiser*, but then that wasn't the question.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I've been getting a ton more spam within the last few months.
You even need layers of "internet use" emails. Some categories will send you valid mail, but lots of it. The Indie music sites are noticeable here.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I'm been getting more spam for about the last two weeks than any other time in recent memory. To be fair, that's more spam getting past filters and into my inbox, not total volume. So perhaps total spam volume IS down, but spam's effectiveness is up?
Implicit Evaluation with PHP
In a recession everyone cuts back on their marketing budgets.
We're done here guys. Nothing more to do.
I've heard that wearing boxer shorts and loose fitting pants can help.
"..Just because you put a flag on the moon doesn't make it yours, it just puts a hole in the moon..."
http://xkcd.com/810/
Yeah? Evidently they're just sending it to my Yahoo! accounts then....
www.itjerk.com
Makes you wonder, if botnet operators aren`t spamming at full throttle, what are they assigning the botnets to do?
For example, during the Anonymous e-offensive in defense of Wikileaks, Wikileaks came under attack as well, which coincided with a significant drop in spam levels.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
While I'm sure the amateurs at MessageLabs actually believe that they can measure a distributed, fluctuating, multivariate event such as "spam" to three significant digits, perhaps their efforts would be more effective if they directed them toward stopping the spam that's coming FROM MessageLabs -- the most recent example of which seen here is barely a week old. Of course, "MessageLabs works to stop gaping security hole in their own infrastructure" isn't nearly as catchy a headline.
I get probably a dozen emails delivered to my non-white listed folder every day (ie: through my providers spam filters) that are obviously phishing emails.
Really, any time an email comes in that contains a hyper link, where the content of the link is a URL, and that URL doesn't have the same domain as the src of the link, bounce the damn email as non-deliverable.
Yeah, I'm smart enough to not go to "us.battle.net.gonna.steal.your.password.com" or to "us.brttle.net" but really, why should these emails make it past even the most simple of filters?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I know most people spend more time checking facebook for updates, hasn't email becoming passe?
What sort of spam detection are people using on clients?
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
I have had a domain name since uunet! days. There are only a very few valid account names on it, but starting maybe ten years ago, it started getting email for nonexistent accounts like bill123@. About 5 years ago, it reached 40K messages a day, only 200 or so being legit (from mailing lists) and kept on growing, with a peak sometime last year of typically 600K messages a day, sometimes hitting 1M for a day or two. It's been dropping all last year, and now averages around 50K messages a day. Still only 200 or so legit a day. It dropped down to 20-30K a day during the holidays, which I attribute to so many computers shut down.
Infuriate left and right
BUCE is down, but the aggressive advertising is tightening up in search and FB. Posting FB user pictures is in user ads is just the latest.
...inhaling!
I have an email address that relies on greylisting. http://www.greylisting.org/
Years ago, at first, I would get 3 or 4 spams.
Now I get 150 in 12 hours. Spambots are becoming more RFC compliant and resending after a 5xx or 4xx error. And instead of simply firing off *one* copy, I get 3 or 4. Previously spambots had been all fire-and-forget with no resending. Legitimate mail is dwarfed. And while my filtering on my mail client picks off the spam, I always still have to vgrep the trash for false positives.
So instead of seeing my spam decrease, like this article would have me believe, I have seen the opposite. Indeed, in the last 6 months, the load has quadrupled.
What I want to know is when are we going to start boiling these bastards in pitch?
--
BMO
This can probably be explained by the increasing number of avenues by which spam can be effectively delivered. Twitter and Facebook likely see more eyes more frequently than the average e-mail account.
Pure speculation, but it makes sense to me.
"spam now accounts for 78.6 percent of all email traffic"
"March 2009, when the global spam rate was 75.7 percent of all email traffic"
"January 2010, when the spam rate was 83.9% of all email traffic."
BS. If you carefully define spam, you can get close to those numbers. My server is rejecting 94% of incoming mail outright, either from banned domains and IP ranges, or obvious spams in subjects, or fictitious senders, or redirects that are 100% spam. NO complaints from any of the users that they are missing legitimate email, and my hosts.deny and reject files are getting really big. Blocking .cn, .ro, and .cz is a good start, for you beginners. I don't share my blocks beyond that, some of them get irritated when I call them spammers, even if they are.
Of what passes the initial filtering, 60% of THAT fails Spamassassin tests, and another 10-15% fails blacklists. I'm only one user, but it appears that I get around 15,000 messages a day to my address, with about 900 or so getting to Spamassassin, and I see about 20-30 a day that are not spam, with 10 or so that get through. From 1-3 false positives that are let through to me with lower scores, the same ones all the time, go figure. Jeez, actually it's worse than I thought.
I'm getting around 97% or more spam, and my email domain is unexceptional save for the fact that it's about 15 years old. So it does get a lot of spam from old, old, old lists.
If the spam experts are using younger, stronger addresses as tests, they are just avoiding the truth. If spam were only 83+%, I would be happier. But it's not. Spam is overwhelmingly the vast majority of email volume, worse than even the pessimists declare. Symantec can go pound it.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Symantec Spam has now reached an all time high on ./
My penis is so large now from all these various treatments that I can barely walk.
go on some body building forums
there are a 25^3 substances that beef you up
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
Because the email spammers found other, more profitable and efficient methods to spread advertising onto the web?
You mean it WASN'T because of snipers?
Darn!
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I suspect the spammers may have just moved to a different spamming medium.
Since 2009?! Impressive!
Okay, granted, the internet and all its usage and spam grow like crazy, even in the span of 2 years.
I am not devoid of humor.