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See the original image at news.bbc.co.uk

Spam blights e-mail 15 years on

news.bbc.co.uk — "I don't think it's realistic to believe we will never receive spam"

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  • missingnoh4x, on 03/31/2008, -0/+18I have to wonder who the hell actually looks at spam, as somehow these ***** are still in business. I wince every time a single spam message gets past my Gmail filter.
    • tehbored, on 03/31/2008, -1/+2I think in the two years I've had gmail, I've gotten one spam message.
    • Matty007, on 03/31/2008, -0/+2If you consider how many millions of spam are sent everyday, if only 1 out of every thousand people actually look at the spam, their going to make a decent profit.
      • proverbs17, on 04/01/2008, -0/+0True, but you would think that, that one person who ordered V1agra over the internet would eventually have enough so that they would stop, or they would go broke after investing in a pump and dump scheme.
    • grumpyrain, on 04/01/2008, -0/+2You need to be careful though. I accidentally emptied my spam folder and lost a legitimate message, a business offer in fact. Luckily that nice Nigerian Prince sent it again a week later, or I could have missed out on the opportunity of a lifetime. Now excuse me while I wait for the postman.
  • TNicholson, on 03/31/2008, -2/+7Well it just so happens that I DO want to get my DICK FORTY-FOUR INCHES BIGG3R!!!!!11!!!one
  • Ksg89, on 03/31/2008, -1/+5Gmail FTW!
    • scy1192, on 03/31/2008, -0/+4I still get spam on my gmail
      • Daniel591992, on 03/31/2008, -0/+2I've been getting some Japanese spam. What a waste...
  • 55mph, on 03/31/2008, -3/+5how did this story make it to the first page with 2 comments and 35 diggs?
  • XTCinOvaltine, on 03/31/2008, -1/+8In the words of Monty Python:
    Waitress: Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam; spam bacon sausage and spam; spam egg spam spam bacon and spam; spam sausage spam spam bacon spam tomato and spam;
    Vikings: Spam spam spam spam...
    Waitress: ...spam spam spam egg and spam; spam spam spam spam spam spam baked beans spam spam spam...
    Vikings: Spam! Lovely spam! Lovely spam!
    Waitress: ...or Lobster Thermidor a Crevette with a mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on top and spam.
    Wife: Have you got anything without spam?
    Waitress: Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
  • bingobongony, on 03/31/2008, -3/+1Of course, Whne Bill gates said that, he was referring to what might happen had Microsoft's proposal been implemented. It wasn't.

    It is ***** stupid to try to use that line against Bill Gates since what he was proposing to prevent it was never implemented.

    Nice try though. YOU came out looking stupid though. Not Bill Gates.
  • KaiUno, on 03/31/2008, -0/+2For some reason, Google's Gmail has eliminated my spam problem for 99%. The only spam that does get through is the occasional advertisement from webstores I've used. And that's no hassle at all.

    I do still receive it, but I never have to look at it. And that, to me, is a good enough solution.
    • GiJoeBob, on 04/02/2008, -0/+1Except that it clogs up and slows down the Intertubes. My COD4 can't take much more of this.
  • mrgoat, on 03/31/2008, -0/+2They wanna talk to Dvorak's spam guy.
  • pauldy, on 03/31/2008, -0/+6I belive in the death penalty for spammers.
    • missingnoh4x, on 03/31/2008, -0/+5Lock them up with a cell mate who has used vi @g.r4, enlarged their penis, and is looking for a new relationship.
  • marv0, on 03/31/2008, -0/+4Would you like to increase size and stamina! CLICK HERE!
    • Amadeus2490, on 03/31/2008, -0/+2I clicked and nothing happened.
    • bluesatin, on 03/31/2008, -0/+1I presume you mean for my clicking finger right?
  • varunb007, on 03/31/2008, -0/+13Dear Digg User,

    I am sorry to disturb you, but I am in dire need of your assistance. My associate, who is a wealthy Nigerian business man, was forced to flee the country and seek refuge. He cannot directly access his funds so there is need for a third party to be involved to mediate the transfer. The sum of 35 million US Dollars ($35,000,000) will be transferred to a predetermined bank account upon your approval. Naturally, your services will be generously compensated for in the amount of 2.5 million US Dollars ($2,500,000). In order to facilitate this transfer, you will have to transfer 10 thousand US Dollars ($10,000) to this bank account as a good will gesture.

    Please contact me soon as this is a very urgent matter.

    Regards,

    Noias Richards
    • scy1192, on 03/31/2008, -1/+4okay, but whats your SS number?
      • XTCinOvaltine, on 03/31/2008, -0/+509 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
        I swear that's my SS number!
  • kipmartin, on 03/31/2008, -0/+2I'd bet spam would go away if suspicion of spamming was punishable by death and everyone had a government-issue computer license with controlled and monitored sign-on restrictions and a state-registered computer or gateway.

    hey, it could happen!
    • CrossedBearings, on 04/01/2008, -0/+1The world is bigger than one government, i.e. your US one. Moron.
  • tehbored, on 03/31/2008, -0/+3They made an entire Futurama movie about spam.
  • and303, on 03/31/2008, -0/+2Remember the proposal for email tax?
    Everyone heard the word "tax" and flipped out without ever reading it and immediately voted it out of question.
    Basically the average person would have to pay $2.00 a year and the average spammer would have to pay around $50,000,000,000 a year.
    Obviously nobody can afford that so spammers would = tax evaders and would be promptly put behind bars. Perhaps some Digg users can benefit from that lesson about reading things before forming an opinion on it. :-)
    • HydrogenY, on 04/01/2008, -0/+1Yeah I agree that it sounds like a good idea on the surface, but the flaw in that tax is that the spammers wouldn't stamp their mail with their own information and would pay $0 per year. The government isn't smart enough to catch them, they're only slightly smarter than Grandma Noobie and would waste all their efforts prosecuting her. Innocent people would be charged a high tax when the spammers used their address or vulnerable server and then go through hell trying to prove their innocence. Plus we all know once a tax is introduced, it will never go away again, it'll just get bigger every year.
      • proverbs17, on 04/01/2008, -0/+1I totally disagree with you! Grandma Noobie is Far smarter then the government! Your statement was very offensive Grandma's everywhere!
    • grumpyrain, on 04/01/2008, -0/+2That actually may well work, because as we all know, spam is only sent from the spammers computer, not some malware infected botnet.
  • noogiewoo, on 03/31/2008, -0/+1just noticed BBC have a nice new layout :)
    • tba2287, on 04/01/2008, -0/+1Yeah. It looks a lot less cluttered and is much wider :)
  • xtekian, on 03/31/2008, -0/+1It's pretty simple... outsource your spam filter to India.
    • tba2287, on 04/01/2008, -0/+1Or hijack random computers across the globe without consent of their owners.
  • IronDonut, on 03/31/2008, -0/+197% of our inbound mail stream is spam. But with a good filter it's a non-problem.

    We sell a Barracuda filtered managed email hosting product and a pure spam filtering service that would be a much harder market if it weren't for spammers. Ironically spammers have created demand for our stuff. So I kinda like them.
  • microchp, on 04/01/2008, -0/+3A while back I implemented a change to our postfix config and about 97%+ of the spam went away immediately. This is a company of 1000+ people that had email wide open for 9 years (only using SpamAssassin). All I did was implement the S25R postfix filter methodology and all the spam bots were kicked to the curb. The employees and management are quite happy that all that crap is gone. Unlike anti-spam which has to guess if something is spam, this method gets rid of most of the real spammers. The email storage has less crap written to it as well which means wasting less money on shelves of storage.

    The only false positives have been small "businesses" that were set up by someone that had no idea how email and DNS worked. Those I resolve by whitelisting their IP until they fix their DNS, thus stopping a problem from propagating like anti-spam companies want to continue for their profits. You see, the anti-spam companies want you to rely on checking what is in the envelope and as everyone knows, that is easy to forge. By going back to basics (following the RFC's) and making use of standards that just about every ISP world wide have adopted since 2003, I have been able to spot the bots, easy.

    Anyway... just google for "S25R postfix spam". I will post some real world examples soon, as the developer of this concept was focused on email in Japan. It doesn't matter though because his concepts rock solid. I use a hybrid approach which combines S25R+RBL+iptables+traffic shaping, all of which are extremely easy to do. My mail servers (4 dual xeon boxes behind load balancers in 2 datacenters) used to have a run queue of 6.8 on average. They now have a run queue of 0.05. My average CPU utilization is slightly higher, but email delivery is much faster now. SA no longer has to work nearly as hard which means I can have more complex SpamAssassin rules from the SARE project. The tiny bit of spam that gets past postfix is easily caught and tagged by SA. This also eliminated almost all viri issues and thus the centralized mail server anti-virus has hardly anything to do. I have had this in place for 5 months and it has kicked some serious spammer butt!

    For the executive summary: Almost no viri/spam, less storage used, faster email delivery, vastly improved hardware scalability, easier to meet audit requirements, happy employees.

    For the spammers: No way around this one as I have proven this to work in a worst-case financial company scenario.
    • CrossedBearings, on 04/01/2008, -2/+1Anti-spam spam !
      • microchp, on 04/01/2008, -0/+1I do hope you are kidding, right? :-)

        I just gave people a pointer to a method to block all of their spam without using a single commercial product. S25R is a concept/methodology, not a product.
        • CrossedBearings, on 04/01/2008, -0/+1Yeah ok, fair enough you were talking to a standard not to a product. Appologies. Its rare on Digg that anyone writes such long and technical comment...
  • zigziggityzoo, on 04/01/2008, -1/+1NARF! Poit!
  • CrossedBearings, on 04/01/2008, -0/+1I think we all got over being indignant about spam 10 years ago.
    Now, what slips through the cracks in the filters is just background noise like TV ads that are just tuned subconsciously tuned out.
    It exists as background hiss. Get over it.
  • DryMaltExtract, on 04/01/2008, -0/+0There would be no spam if there was no money in it. Unfortunately wave after wave of stupid ***** are allowed on the internet and they buy into this crap.
  • pauldy, on 04/01/2008, -0/+1Burried for wrong topic, I'm betting the OP is/was a Ron Paul supporter they never seemed to understand what the topics are for.
  • Edley, on 04/01/2008, -1/+0mmm. i dont get any spam. yay for me! double underscores are AWSOME!
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