What is Digg?109 Comments
- strangerzero, on 10/12/2007, -1/+48It is pathetic what has happened to the wonderful technology of email. It's a sorry comment on human nature.
- flag564, on 10/12/2007, -4/+47Buried. Spam.
- trghpy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+40yea, i miss the good old days of email...
Remember the days when email arrived within seconds of sending it and the only spam was from your aunt forwarding chain letters. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+26Agreed. HTML mail is also crap. Why don't people stick to plain text ?!??
/end rant - ewhac, on 10/12/2007, -0/+24> I blame the email protocol, which was written by hippies with rose-colored glasses
> who believed nobody would ever lie about who they were.
As it happens, the reality is rather more complex than that.
Back in the mists of ancient time, all the technology was in place for source-spoofed, mass-targeted email. The difference was that most systems capable of exchanging email were multi-user systems, with competent sysadmins looking after them. If you tried a mass spam, the sysadmin would notice within seconds, kill your process, then walk over to the terminal where you were sitting and give you a very public chewing out. Thus chastened, that person usually never spammed again. (If they did, their computer access was permanently revoked.) As a consequence, mass spams were very rare, and usually one-time-only affairs that were rapidly corrected.
There were two major things that changed that. One was the personal computer (obviously), and the other was the mainstream media. There were two sociopathic ***** named Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel who, through their dialup account, mass-spammed USENET with an ad for their "services" as lawyers (the "Green Card Spam"). The whole world quickly noticed what was going on, and their ISP immediately shut down their account and deleted all their email.
Normally, that would have been the end of it. However, these were sociopathic *****. So they went to the news media with the story, "We've found a wonderful new way to make money on the Internet." The media uncritically ran with it, giving them tons of face time. All the voices yelling, "Uh, no, they broke the rules," were kept firmly off camera.
The meme was planted, and the spam began to sprout forth, thereby screwing millions of Internet users for years to come.
In all probability, spam would have been invented eventually. But there was no need to accelerate its spread by giving a forum to its creators. - FlyboyP, on 10/12/2007, -4/+27I blame the email protocol, which was written by hippies with rose-colored glasses who believed nobody would ever lie about who they were.
- ToyYoda, on 10/12/2007, -3/+17wait... I'm not actually getting a free ipod?
- randomvictim, on 10/12/2007, -2/+15Ever since I've moved to Gmail, I haven't received(noticed) any spam. Maybe it is because I don't go around inserting my email into no-name sites claiming I can get some free stuff. Use some common sense people, you too can live spam free.
- jamison18, on 10/12/2007, -6/+19LordSnooze: if it was that easy, i think that a multi-hundred-billion dollar industry would have figured it out by now.
- drgnpaladin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12http://www.10minutemail.com is definitely a start to a life without spam
- undersky, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11Paranoia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia
Conspiracy Theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory
Moron: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moron_%28psychology%29
People spent too much time reading wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wikipedia_nerd_FlyboyP - AriaStar, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12@ ChewMyFootOff:
You clearly have no idea how much companies DO spend on anti-spam/anti-fraud, do you. Statement, not a question. It's insane how much they put out each month to pay people like me to combat it. But spam mail evolves so quickly, and the latest is this stupid image spam with confetti backgrounds that make it virtually impossible at present time to match new messages to the ones saved in the database. Some places, like GMail, outright block most messages with images from people who aren't on someone's safe list or in someone's address book. But you run the risk of losing a legit message that way.
It's a tough job figuring out how to automate the process of determining what is spam and what it's when it's changing on an hourly basis. We can save URLs and text and the HTML of known spam sites/generic spam messages, but URLs go down so quickly and new ones pop up, a few sentences of the text can change, the HTML has a lot of variants.... We assign values to certain keywords, phrases, thing like whether or not the HTML shows words to be written in white against a while background, etc..
Companies can give us more money, but there's only so much we can do in any given day. Even when we're as caught up as can be, there's always a new trend or wave in spam about to be launched that we must spend time in identifying, and it's when the new wave is launched that people get the spam. We can't stop it until it's been unleashed and we get it too. We don't get mail before you do. We get it at the same time and hope that our filters can catch enough of the traits of known spam and phishing messages.
Yeah, most of the spam in this world comes from the same 200 or so sources, but with many of those sources in countries where they are safe from prosecution, we can do little about stopping them to begin with. The sources are safe, which leaves it up to us in the industry. - cramd, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10Think of the amount of spam that Google must filter out to keep your spam count down to the two or three per day that you are getting. I spent several years as a sales engineer for a major anti-spam organization and was, and still am, blown away by the amount of spam that a medium to large organization must filter.
The home brew "build it on linux" solutions work well for our home servers, and even for some small companies, but when you start looking at a situation like a university email server that can have upwards of 20,000 accounts it becomes a major task. What is even more critical then getting rid of the spam is ensuring that you are not getting rid of the legitimate email.
My job now requires that I do not lose a single piece of email. If I miss a correspondence from a prospect client, or even worse a purchase order it is not just my company that looses money, but I do as well.
There are so many "ideas" out there on how to stop spam, and some of them are very solid. The problem is that trying to get the major corporate bodies to all decide on a technique is key. This is due to the huge sums of money that each stand to lose if "their" solution is not acceptedly.
Where did SPF go? Is it even being used still? This was a great stepping stone to stopping the spam, and it just did not catch on as the people who build the anti-spam solutions wanted to wait until it was a proven technology. By sitting on the sidelines these companies just helped increase the volume of spam we see today.
Again, the problem is not the spam we get as individuals, it is the spam that has to be filtered before we see it.
I can't wait for the day when I can fire up Thunderbird and don't see my junk folder expanding. - sunnyd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+90.01% reply to spam. When you're sending out millions and get that kind of response rate, there's money to be made. That's why they keep trying.
- somnus, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10Rounding error ;)
- shreveyboy, on 10/12/2007, -9/+16And thanks to Gmail, I hardly notice any of this so-called 'spam.'
- dominasian, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9i haven't received any spam in about 7 months. instead of being happy, after reading this i feel like im not cool enough for them.
- armbar, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Yup, Gmail's spam filter is awesome.
Spam in spam folder: 5,464
Spam in inbox: 0
Life's good. - AndrewDB, on 01/10/2008, -1/+7Is anyone else having a problem with Yahoo Mail spam lately? I'm getting a ***** of a lot more of it even WITH my spam filters on.. :(
- tb0n3r, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6SMTP (the protocol) is crap. Unfortunately, we'll won't get away from it for a long, long time. Once something is so embedded in the inter-tubes, it's nearly impossible to replace with anything better.
- mark1372, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Oh, you get it; you just don't see it. Just because Gmail has amazing filters doesn't mean that the spam doesn't exist or it's not a massive problem that needs to be fixed, yet still gets ignored by toothless, ignorant legislators -- the only people who can stop it at this point.
- ramaz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Botnets are a thundering stampede now - it's disheartening.
- aflury, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Gmail doesn't have any excuse *not* to have good spam filters. They have millions of users constantly clicking "spam/not-spam" on emails that are difficult to classify. That results in a huge corpus of emails that they're classifying incorrectly. Granted, some percentage of users will incorrectly classify emails, but there are ways to get around that, such as correlating submissions from multiple users regarding similar emails and building up a trustworthiness reputation for each user, and as a last resort, having a team of people manually investigating the really tough ones. Once they have that fairly trustworthy corpus, there are tons of automated (bayesian, automatic pattern generation, etc.) methods of fine-tuning their system. And that "last resort" team can manually write rules for the most difficult-to-classify emails.
Any anti-spam company would kill to have the amount of user feedback that Gmail (and Yahoo!/Hotmail) receive. - AriaStar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5"What is even more critical then getting rid of the spam is ensuring that you are not getting rid of the legitimate email. "
This is absolutely correct. Some filters are so strict that legit messages are indeed thrown out. The trick is finding the balance. For some of my company's clients, losing a single e-mail they need could make or break them. But we don't apply different standards to each client. We simply can't. But this also runs the risk of a few spam messages getting through. It sucks, and we know that some messages are just going to make it to the inbox. We *could* increase our strictness to that of Google, but people don't know what they are losing because they don't see it, and, for some, a message they vitally need could be one that's lost.
The measure of a filter's success isn't only how much spam is thrown out, but in how many *legit* messages are let it. - MrFoof82, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Eh, some of the problem is the hosting companies not giving a damn.
I hosted my domain with a small place in California for nearly 10 years. Small shop, maybe 10 people work there, tops. You can call and they'd remember you based on your domain name. Picked up the phone on the third ring. They were awesome.
Well, in an attempt to save some money (about $120/yr) I switched to Yahoo!'s e-mail hosting earlier this month. Giant mistake.
Now, I use Thunderbird to filter out my mail, but within HOURS of switching to Yahoo! hosting (DNS changes being complete), my spam volume increased by over 800%. And it's remained there since (it's been 3 weeks). Someone's poking at Yahoo's servers to add these newly hosted domains and addresses so they can immediately smack'em with a spamload and sell them to list providers, and after spending a bit of time with Yahoo! on the phone (eventually got a callback from an engineer after 2 days), they don't seem to care. They know it happens, and they won't stop it.
I could go back to my old host, but it doesn't really matter. My e-mail address has been dug up, added to lists, and will now be sold on more lists. I've gone from 5 to 6 spams a day (being 99.8% filtered) to about 50 a day. In the scheme of things, that's not much (typically I see 1,000,000 spams per year per 20 people in most companies I've worked for), but the fact that the big hosts aren't doing everything they could be to limit this crap is a joke. - Hellman109, on 10/12/2007, -4/+8This wouldnt include email within the same mail server though.
EG I would send 50 internal emails to every external one.
If 6% is a rounding error, everyone uses Windows and every other OS is a rounding error, snap :} - antdude, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7muslix64: Because people like pretty graphics and layouts.
- kalpol, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4It's not the responding that makes money. There is always some guy trying to get rick quick who pays a spammer to send his message out - no one may buy a single thing and the guy gives up, but the spammer still gets paid and there's always someone else with a new scheme. I am specifically excluding stock schemes from this since from what I've heard they do indeed make the pumpers a little money.
- randomvictim, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I actually have that site bookmarked, and use it to sign up on forums to which I don't trust.
- kevinmotel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3i agree. gmail has been pretty good to me to with regard to spam. to quote dvorak: "I get no spam"
- Wonderkind, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Thunderbird. No spam in months.
- gargantuan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3sorry ewhac, I meant to aim that at Flyboy. My bad. Your comment was very informative.
- surfing, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4what's your email address?
You can get to 99% easy - sukimashita, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Simply, E-Mail 2 must be invented. It's design should aim to make it impossible or at least economically/legally not valueable to create spam (clear sender identification, intelligent MTAs, ...).
I think a whole load of companies would jump on track if they could use something spam-free. - AriaStar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Google also tosses out a lot of messages that aren't spam. Mail from people on your safe list and in your address book get through, but much of the rest is thrown out, meaning you may actually be missing messages that you want.
- AriaStar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Insider estimates place the response rate at between 3% and 7% of e-mail users at some point or another respond to spam. (I work in the anti-spam industry.) With as easy as it is to set up an automation to scour for e-mail addresses and send out millions of spam messages, responses to even a fraction of a percent of those messages is very lucrative business. Most serious spammers are actually millionaires.
- humby, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2ISPs should be responsible. If a users machine is spamming, block that port and tell them they have to use web based email.
- Tetraca, on 10/12/2007, -0/+294% of my email is spam. I wonder where all the things I was promised from that discount drug mailing list I subscribed to a few weeks ago went...
- maninblac1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Killing botnets = reinstalling windows.......a whole lot.
- Me0wmix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Hotmail sucks, most of my good emails were sent to the Spam folder. Gmail for life.
- undersky, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2your sense of humor is admirable, cheers!
- stevenb, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Does anyone remember blue frog?
It's forces that were up against them that we're all up against... The spammers that killed blue frog took an entire country off line cause they were digging into their profit margin.
Spammers aren't to be underestimated.. and speaking from experience.. ***** with their botnets.. is a no-no... they're really serious about that now-a-days and with the mafia supporting alot of this stuff... eek. - shaggypaul, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@DDRRE: if by "you" you mean Postini, then they can tell you by taking a very *large* sample of "all" email and analyzing it for what they statistically find to be spam vs. ham. They certainly would be able to depict it within an accuracy of 1%.
- zoom1928, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2
Only 99%? Because Network Solutions(now operates under the alias VeriSign) has supported spammers for over a decade by assisting them in generating lists of valid e-mail addresses by abusing their government-granted monopoly over domain names, most of the addresses on our site receive around 100,000 spams for every real message. Whoever came-up with the 6% figure is a complete moron. It sounds like they're using a brand new address they picked at random then pushing their pro-spam agenda with the lie that spam isn't that bad. It is that bad. Those of us that actually use the Internet know the 6% figure is a lie. Your 1% is still an order of magnitude too far pro-spam. - kfilip, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2It's not about filtering spam away from your inbox to a spam folder, because it has already traveled across the net.
It's about the enormous amounts of SMTP traffic (spam) that gets sent / received by ISPs, e-mail hosting companies, DNS servers etc. You shouldn't be happy seeing for example 75398 messages in your spam folder even if you never saw one in your inbox folder. - byronm, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I do better with yahoo than gmail. Gmail everyonce in a while likes to forget all my blocked addresses. Plus my spam folder in gmail is 100 times worse than my yahoo folder and i've had my yahoo mail for 7 years and my gmail for what, 3 years?
- geofffox, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2If you are using Thunderbird and you've trained the junk filter, it's time to tighten the filtering.
By default mail.adaptivefilters.junk_threshold is set very loose. I have turned mine down to 15, with hardly any false positives and nearly no spam! Without this change, the Thunderbird filter was ineffective. Actually, the technical term is, it sucks. I have seen little documentation about this parameter, but it does make a huge difference. - DigDugDigDug, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I'm surprised so many people get spam... I never seem too! Oops, I gotta run and get the door, my penis enlargement pills should be arriving!
- grumpyrain, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Buried as innacurate.
There is no way legitimate emails make up as much as 6%. - bglodde, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I get a lot of spam (approx 200k/annually), all filtered out by Qurb.
I'm not sure why they keep trying - does anyone actually respond to spam? -
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