Are The Spammers Winning?

Since you mentioned false positives, my experience with Hotmail has been terrible. So many emails that I *wanted* end up in the junk folder -- or they never arrive at all. I have to ask people to resend them to another address, and they come right in. Spam filters are doing more harm than good sometimes.

One trick I use is disposable email addresses eg Spamgourmet and use that on places that are of unknown trust. If trustworthy I can whitelist the sender else after a couple of emails anything further gets "eaten". Also gmail's filter seems pretty good too.

I have to disagree with Anne: based both on the reports I get from people regularly, and on my own direct experience as an admin on a large-ish discussion list, AOL and Hotmail are consistently the worst at delivering email that their customers have actually requested. They're also both horrific to deal with if you're a sender trying to find out why your email isn't getting through. -- Leo Notenboom (http://ask-leo.com)

IMO, GMail is--hands-down--the best at distinguishing spam from legitimate mail. Every now and again, it will fail to filter spam, but it has never put any of my "good" mail in the spam bin.

Spam is the same as "junk snail mail" but the delete button is more handy. Open the mail on line, select all, de-select what you want to read and trash the rest. Then download the ones you want. I want to be able to "train" Gmail & Yahoo to junk the mail that I tell it to so I do not have to do it when it downloads to my computer

Why in God's name would anyone buy something from a spammer? I can't believe they really do make money from this. What to buy a bridge?

EDITOR'S NOTE: You should see some of the fancy houses that spammers live in... Education is key.

I am afraid that as long as bandwidth remains FREE, and the Internet remains fairly unclogged, then the SPAM problem will only become worse and worse.

If somehow the entire Internet backbone could actually charge ISPs some ridiculously low micro-cents per MBs of traffic, then the costs would eventually get passed back to the SPAMmers and this nonsense would fade away. Yeah - it's a real unpopular idea, but don't dismiss it too quickly.

It would also encourage better use of compression techniques for streamed files, etc. by everyone on the web. After all, bandwidth is truly not infinite. If left unchecked then eventually the SPAMmers and Bots and VOIP and Streamers and All COULD someday create complete gridlock.

Rick's suggestion to charge will not work as most spammers use other peoples computers (spambots) so they would not get hit. Only the victims would.

I also disagree about AOL. I use a gmail account for public sites and it handles it well, though I do have to check the junk once in awhile. One issue is that people have been told not to unsubscribe as that was a spammers trick to validate your email address. So instead they mark legitimate newsletters and things as spam. Then spam filters start to block subscriptions, etc.

Blacklists are a terrible idea because many email servers host hundreds of domains. Block the IP address and you block everything. Secondly, the use of spambots means its not even an email server in the first place and the IP address will vary, making it meaningless. I've had a terrible time with some ISPs that use black lists for whole IP ranges from other ISPs, blocking thousands of domains. Dumb idea.

Some ISPs have the nasty habit of simply deleting anything they consider spam. Combine that with a blacklist and you lose mail. If you don't have junk mail access with your ISP, consider what they're doing with it.

In my books, the whole spam problem arose because ISPs didn't consider it their job to deal with spam, until it became an issue for them. They left it to their customers to deal with.

The same thing has since happened with computers. Buy a computer and it typically comes with lame security. The XP firewall does not prevent outgoing so easily allows your computer to be a spybot. Front line defenses like AV are typically 30 day trials that expire. People simply don't get that you HAVE to secure your computer.

As for viewing spam messages online, then deleting them. May save you from downloading them, but as soon as you open the email and the images download from the spammers site, they know they got a view and what IP the file went to. Even text messages sometimes have invisible graphics just for this purpose. If you can avoid it, delete your spam from the subject line. If its not from someone you know...

Finally, if you have an email address on a web site you are inviting spam. Spammers spider the web for email addresses and sell them. Use an image file, script encrypt the email address, but never post it as plain text. Or consider it a throwaway account.

Yahoo is the worst with spam. Google has been the best. I NEVER get spam in my main box with google. I don't know how they do it. But @ Yahoo, I get letters from people wanting to transfer money to me, notices of winning some lottery I never entered, p**n solicitation, etc. EVERYDAY! Delete, delete, delete is my spam guard.

Following up on Laura H's comment on who would buy from a spammer - that question/comment is off-base, sorta like asking who buys from those darn info-commercials..it's about the numbers. For every 10000 spam emails, someone is going to 'bite'. Same for the Nigerian scam, ask enough people and someone will fall for it. The problem comes from sending out millions of emails, just to get a few takers. The more eyeballs viewing/reading - the better the odds of 'sealing the deal'

It just amazes me that the major ISPs have not found a way to stop spam. If, as noted in the article, better than 90% of all email is spam, then by finding a way to prevent it they would be able to save 90% of their handling costs — servers, bandwidth, personnel and the rest.

A good place for spammers to get your email address is from emails your friends send out. They forward an email to everyone in their address book and every one gets a copy of all the addresses the email gets sent to. (Go look at the headers on one of your emails from a friend). I can't get it through to some of my friends to send my emails as a BCC (blind carbon copy) so my address doesn't get sent to everyone in the world so I have 2 emails. One I use for my friends so if they forget to BCC me I get all my spam at that address. The other one I use for other stuff. It's funny - I get almost NO spam at that address but 200 to 300 every day in my friend's email address. Some of my friends don't know how to clean up an email before the forward it ( for the 5th or sixth time). I could cull 50 to 100 address just from one of these emails if I were a spammer.

If you shut down the websites that use spammers, the spammers will have no business. With no business, they will not survive. That is what KnujOn is doing. Please check it out here: http://www.knujon.com/

We should all be forwarding our spam to KnujOn so we can eliminate spammers.