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A Welcome Shift: Spam Now Constitutes Less Than Half of All Email
An anonymous reader writes: According to Symantec's latest Intelligence Report, spam has fallen to less than 50% of all email in June – a number we haven't seen in over a decade. Of all emails received by Symantec clients in June, junk emails only accounts for 49.7% down from 52.1% in April which shows a huge drop. Year over year, spam has decreased as well due to internet providers doing a better job at filtering and shutting down spam bots.
It's still too much, it has to be stopped, and the penalties for junk mail and online fraud are way too mild.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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Is there such a thing as a spam filter for regular (paper) junk mail?
It's like some perverse life cycle - my paper recycling gets picked up, made into paper, which is then made into junk mail, which is then delivered, and unceremoniously dumped into my paper recycling without being read.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Our mail server received nearly 100 million messages in March (last time I went through the logs), and over 95 million of those ended-up in the spam folder. Of course, we've had the same domain name since late 1995 and use a lot of email addresses that are common names so it's an extreme example, but in my experience more than 95% of the email is spam.
This sounds like Bill Gates a few years ago when he claimed spam wasn't a problem. That was when he had two people full time at Microsoft filtering his email for him. Of course, it wasn't a problem for *him*.
That news makes me so happy, I'm gonna send a check to that Nigerian Prince needing help getting his money out of a foreign bank.
Table-ized A.I.
Maybe nobody emails them specifically? I still get ~7,000 junk emails per month (caught by spam filters), compared to maybe 200-500 legit messages.
One half? High standards! That's like saying a car "only bursts into flames on Tuesdays now". It's a fucked up system; it just went from being mega-fucked down to hyper-fucked. I guess if you are used to being mega-fucked, then hyper-fucked seems better.
Table-ized A.I.
Living in the era of the borderless world wide web, I really hate to remind some Slashdot readers that there are many many places on earth where it is NOT feiday night right now.
most "legitimate" emails wouldn't look like and have lower content density than spam.
As in, lern 2 rite rite, peepl.
I'd be interested to know if this has anything to do with the lack of XP machines still kicking around. ISP's don't give two shits about their subscribers being infected, unless it generates them a lot of abuse@ emails.
I'm not gay and I'm not into Vikings.
"Serionsly, it's Feiday night! Why are you reading this?"
It may surprise you to learn that not everybody works 9 to 5 Monday to Friday
The Symantec report quotes numbers - not reasons. The referenced "story" just quotes a summary of figures from the Report.
The biggest changes to email in the last year have not been arrests or deaths of spammers - but the implementation of SPF, DKIM and DMARC by email providers.
Especially in my experience, has greatly increased the amount of email rejected for delivery (so sorry, the claimed source is clearly spoofed, now filed in the big round grey folder). The "direct"/email marketing forums are full of "entrepreneurs" complaining about it (boo-fucking-hoo).
Primarily it stops forged From headers with providers that reject failures or missing authentication (e.g. Yahoo), Secondly it (DMARC) increases spam reports by providers that use the data, resulting in faster and more accurate spam filters from the suppliers.
Next year will be hell on spammers as many email providers follow Yahoo's lead and change their DMARC policy to "p=reject". Maybe then we'll see mailing list providers stop whining about the policy and work-around it (instead of continuing to do things the way they've always done things in a changing world), and they'll see a reduction in the amount of spam they are resending. Anecdotal evidence is that they've all seen an increase in spam as spammers target mail providers that don't enforce SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
Sure the full implementation will piss off some that aren't actually spammers (*cough*MailChimp*cough) but it'll also make phishing a lot harder. Eventually it may even shut up those who don't understand it, well, maybe. It isn't perfect, though it's not a bad as clueless Seltzer claims. In a perfect world people would deploy DNSSEC on their email servers so better sender authentication methods could be used - and all email senders and recipients would use and understand PGP (fat chance of that happening).
I find it mildly amusing that a drunken guy has nothing better to do on his Feiday night than get on Slashdot and try to shoo away others. He needs to get aaway from his omputer.
Control Theory is applied mainly to electronic systems, but it's equally applicable to all systems everywhere, with no exception. That includes networking, and it even governs human systems.
It's a truism in Control Theory that a system without negative feedback is a system that is out of control. All non-trivial systems without negative feedback head towards an uncontrolled state on the slightest perturbation of initial conditions.
Email is one such system. It was designed without negative feedback back in the early days of the academic Internet before malicious actors appeared on the scene. Because there is no "cost" associated with sending an email, the system went out of control --- the primary effect of that is spam. (This "cost" has nothing to do with money.)
In Control Theory terms, "cost" is any control metric that tracks an undesired effect and reduces that effect when applied to its cause. One of the most universal undesired effects is resource consumption, and that's directly applicable to the email problem because many kinds of resources are used up by spam when it arrives at MTAs and at end-user mailboxes --- examples are CPU time, storage space, network bandwidth, end-user time, and many other things. They're all resources, and spam is the direct result of the spammer feeling no "cost" when he consumes other people's resources. There is no negative feedback being applied to his posting of spam.
"Cost" in the control theoretical sense could be many things when applied to email, for example a slowdown in the spammer's ability to post his next email proportional to the rate of sending and to the number of recipients. There are dozens of possible ways to make a spammer feel a "cost" as negative feedback for his actions, many of them leaving normal mail users entirely undisturbed by the negative feedback. Unfortunately email has none of these control methods available, and it probably never will because it's too late in the day.
One day however, a new asynchronous communication protocol will be designed to replace SMTP. It must be designed with a mechanism for negative feedback integral to the protocol and non-optional, or else the spam problem will appear again, sure as night follows day.
Note that we have many other systems out of control in computer networking, it's not just email. For example, there is no negative feedback applied to rampant abuse of user-side scripting by web pages. Web developers feel no cost regardless of how much end-user CPU, storage, or network bandwidth they employ, and since there is no negative feedback applied to their over-use, browsers typically have their CPUs pegged at 100% and the Web has turned to molasses. As techies we try to control the Web excesses with NoScript (for example) just as we try to control spam with SpamAssassin, but these are just fighting symptoms. You can't cure a disease by fighting symptoms.
This is a universal truth. No negative feedback spells trouble ahead.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
My email is unfiltered. I've been getting much more spam over the last couple of weeks. Around 300 spam messages for each valid message.
The idea that op posted, requiring a token payment to send a message would work but I'm certain it could not be implemented. It would be easier to make everyone hand in their guns than collect a fee for every email, and if there was any loophole in the obligation to pay then spammers would find a way to exploit that loophole.
Yay, we're down to 50%! that means spam is down, right?
Nope. Sorry. Spam is alive and well as it always was. But more and more companies are switching to mail for sending their bills. What you used to get as a dead tree edition, you now get via bits. Your ISP sends his invoice via email, so do Amazon, EBay, PayPal and pretty much any online trader.
Spam mail isn't down. Legitimate (for varying definitions of legitimate) mail is up. That's all.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
LOL. I'll bite 72442. I'm drinking, too, but somehow manged to tpe ths. Cheers!
Slashdot has always been an American site. Funny how people who complain never seem to start their own sites. It just happens again and again.
Try living in America and not being in the Eastern time zone. They will happily schedule events at 8am when it is far too early in the rest of the country to even be awake. Mountain time zone? The red-headed stepchild of them all.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Dear Sirs;
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eaten by army ants. but I have wonderfull news for you, I have the winning powerball lottery ticket worth many millions of USD $$$. I bought this ticket on my way to the plane at the airport. I would share this with you gladlly. But I need you to send me $2500 to get me free of the laundry, I owe them room and board. This money will get me to the US embassy where I can get a new passport and call my bank to get a plane ticket. Please send the money as soon as possible.
Include your full details so I can share the big money with you.
Chuck M Jones
What's Up Ducks !
> Unsubscribe from LinkedIn
> Delete email account
> Sell house, live in woods
> Find bottle in river
> Has note inside
> It's from LinkedIn
Source: https://twitter.com/darylginn/...
The spammers turned on a fire hose of spam in the past week. I haven't seen this level of spam so far this year. So I think it's probably premature to celebrate.
There are still a couple of hundred million XP machines running. As that number declines so does the amount of spam, but there's a long way to go.
I still get some everyday, but its typically from the same sources. Viagra/Cialis, or some phishing email, or those inherited schemes that tell you they have been looking for me to give me a million dollars. I just need to send them a thousand dollars for paperwork. I do think you can eliminate a lot of it by being careful about who you give your email too. Lot's of places tend to sell your information out for profit. Yea they say they won't share with inappropriate channels. But you sometimes questioned who exactly they deem inappropriate? I now setup a dedicated email for some of these questionable sites. At least I can keep the spam in my primary email account down to a trickle.
Maybe I'm an anomaly but i get wayyyyyy more spam versus legitimate e-mail. If anything, I would say spam has gotten more sophisticated. Lately someone(s) unknown to me has been signing me up for mailing lists at an alarming rate.
The majority of spam I receive is coming from Linux servers.
But keep Slashturbating like it's 1999, while never updating your fucking CMS or properly fucking configuring sendmail, you cunts.
Actually, what you are advocating makes spam worse. LinkedIn does this for their InMail system: you can message anybody on the network, and it's pretty expensive (something like a dollar). Now, as CTO I have a job title that sounds interesting to spammers (big title in a little company but they don't seem to know that). For a period last year, I was getting at least three spam messages in my inbox a day, and I have never gotten less than 3 a week. My inbox, mind you, not a spam box.
By way of comparison, we run a website that has a very small, niche audience of government workers and policy wonks. Our advertisers happily pay us up to 7 EUR per click, so InMail is a great deal in comparison. Also by way of comparison, I see at most two spam message a week in my GMail inbox, despite the fact that the address is plastered all over the internet.
What you are advocating is essentially turning email into InMail. Sorry, pal, I will stick to my imperfect spam filtered email rather than your system where advertisers can pay to guarantee that they hit my inbox.
Lawsuits against companies for illegal spam also reduces spam.
in 2003, I filed a spam lawsuit against a drug spammer in Florida. Shortly after I settled, the amount of spam I received went down by about 50%.
I filed several spam lawsuits between 2013 and 2014. The e-mail load on my mail server went down by 75%.
Between May 27 2013 and Sat Jul 18 2015 (782 days) my server processed 4,801,196 e-mails (6,1397/day).
In 2012, my server typically processed between 20k-22k e-mails per day.
Between Aug 11 2008 and Nov 29 2008 (110 days) my served processed 1,419,128 e-mails. (12,901/day) But In 2011 I more than doubled the number of e-mail users.
When you sue the advertisers, they may terminate some of the spammer and the advertisers get some of the money from the spam networks that they use. At the very least, spam lawsuits get you on the spammer's suppression lists.
Fight Spammers!
This appears to be a survey of spam that is caught by Symantec software. There is plenty of spam that is caught in hardware filters, ISP filters, and filters that are run by various free email services. The Symantec software is often filtering pretty late in the game.
Furthermore, no sane person should ever be patting themselves on the back if they are only addressing the problem with filters, as they will never resolve the spam problem completely. Spam is an economic problem, and only economic solutions will make it go away. Filters completely ignore that component and just encourage spammers to send out more spam and do more to make the FP and FN rates unfavorable for users.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The new spam is sponsored content. This humble message was bought to you by BoA - "You can bank on it"
The amount of SPAM hasn't dropped, the amount being DELIVERED has. I get the reports from my SPAM Filter provider, and basically they show that the amount of SPAM hitting all the hosted domains we have is doing way UP not DOWN. Just the amount of that that is getting delivered is going down. The Symantec report is not clear as to what they are actually basing their numbers on, but it is probably just on their install base, and the amount of SPAM REACHING the install base is lower as more providers have things in place to block SPAM before it gets to the servers. So NO the amount of actual SPAM is still rising.Just the amount being delivered to the Inbox is lower. These are not equivalent.
"Brrr, it's a titty bit nipple out(BLUSH) err, I mean a little bit nippy out."--ME walking w/ some coeds on a cold day.
Significant amount of the rest is just Linux kernel patches.
Reqire email headers to include a string that when appended to the header and body creates a hash with certain properties (similar to bitcoin proof of work). It is trivial for the receiver to verify, and the strength of the property requirement can be used to determine the likelihood of spam.
It seems that spam gangs moved to more profitable activities. The raise of ransomwares and point of sale hacking may be a hint at why we get less spam.