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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.
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!
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.
"640 spams a day oughta be enough for anybody."
Table-ized A.I.
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).
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
You probably don't get many invoices.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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!
> 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/...
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
All sorts of OS get botted, both physical and virtual. And those bot farms do all sorts of things from bitcoin farming to spamming. But to return to the subject from the fanboi tangent - if the internet fairy waved his magic wand and made bot farms disappear you wouldn't see much difference in the amount of spam being delivered, and shortly thereafter levels would return to "normal".
As long as it pays to send spam it will continue to exist. If people stopped buying shit from spam, and people stopped paying for products sold by spam - the problem would disappear. These are the reasons why an earlier proposition in this story to charge for email is stupid. Creating another ICANN wouldn't work because those that make money from spam can buy favorable justice.
That doesn't mean that the disappearance of bot farms wouldn't be a good thing. And before some dipshit suggests it - a computer drivers license would have no effect (not that it'll stop the pro-certification-for-everythingtards).
Creating more bureaucracy to fix the failure of systems is the triumph of optimism over experience. In both cases: spam; and bot farms - there are existing mechanisms that can solve the problem, they just aren't employed. Fix the system problems - just because they aren't completely successful doesn't make it less unlikely that building new ones to replace them will be more successful (there's an engineering analogy there somewhere).
Hint: most people don't buy as the result of spam, most companies don't employ spammers, most hosting companies won't tolerate spammers - if that changed we'd see a shit load more spam.