View Full Version : SPAM. Do You Think It Has Got Better or Worse....?
Hi all. With every company/ISP under the sun 'doing' spam and pop up blockers, do you think spam has reduced or is still a massive problem?
Reason I ask is my hotmail only gets about one or two a day now and I never get any to my BT accounts either.(thank you Mailwasher)
I was wondering just how effective these measures the companies have taken are any good, or are the spammers bottling it with the threat of a long prison sentence if caught, if you get what I mean!
Cheers. :)
joe2812
8th May 2005, 15:37
My hotmail still gets 5-8 a week I think on average. AOL has been drastically reduced, can't remember getting any in the last few months!
Pop ups however are getting worse, wish something could be done about those!
Rupert S
8th May 2005, 15:44
Pop ups however are getting worse, wish something could be done about those!
Loads of browsers can block them. I use Mozilla which works nicely.
rustle
8th May 2005, 15:47
Gosh, Rupert, even Internet Explorer can block them natively :cool:
I'm getting a lot at the moment, but it's almost all penny-stock pump'n'dump. Offers of herbal V1@gr@ and H0t T33ns seem to have vanished. I guess it's some blocking upstream, because AFAIK the global problem is as bad as it ever was.
Conan the Librarian
8th May 2005, 15:53
Quite by accident, I stumbled on a really good way of slicing SPAM out of my email. My old and original email addy was beginning to get polluted by cr@p and being at that time, young and innocent, couldn't resist replying to an email promising that my penis would grow three inches in two weeks. I replied, pointing out that I could do the job in about thirty seconds or so. From that moment on, my mailbox started filling ominously and didn't stop - so I created another email address (this one) and just used the old primary as a SpamTrap. It has worked wonderfully for many years now.
The Microsoft Anti Spam software is working a treat for me and keeping my system free of spyware and adware too. I would give it a thumbs up if anyone is thinking of trying it.
By the way, when it comes to replying to SPAM, I am a bit wiser and quite possibly a lot more sober than I was at the time.
regards to all,
CTL
SPAM is still a huge problem for some people but decent filtering means it isn't a problem for everybody. It's a problem for novice users who don't know how to set up spam filtering software and whose ISP doesn't do it for them. And it is problem for the ISP who has to filter it all out in the first place - we still pay for the bandwidth over which it arrives, we still have to let it take up mail server resources and we have to spend yet more time applying filters to figure out if it is spam (and some of these filters are quite costly in computational terms). The trouble is that SMTP just wasn't designed with spam in mind.
Ancidotally there is as much as of it about as there ever was.
And I can't see how CTL's approach helps. By all means have a spam trap which attracts spam, but how is that going to stop you getting spam to another account (not withstanding assuming everything received to the spam trap is spam and using that as a seed to some learning filter on the other account, which somehow I doubt is what he was suggesting)?
I've found that the AOl spam filter works very well.
It has a custom word list, so you can add things like V1agra, viaggraa etc.
I've just received a couple of spams, selling viagra that have slipped through. They spell viagra correctly, but there is an apostrophe over the letter a.
Does anyone know if this is achieved with a foreign keyboard, and if there is any way to type it out on a UK keyboard.
Thanks
Conan the Librarian
8th May 2005, 22:56
In response to Drauk, what appears to happen is that the only email address on my account that seems to be collected or "farmed", is the old original "prime" account address. Although I no longer use it, all of the spam seems to go there rather than the address that I am using to access Pprune now. (But yes, I do still have to empty the cesspit every week or two) It did confuse me why this should be so, but it does work and I ain't knocking it :-)
best regards to all,
CTL.
Speedpig
9th May 2005, 04:12
419 Try insert symbols to enter ..... do you mean an accent rather than an apostrophe?
Does anyone know if this is achieved with a foreigh keyboard, and if there is any way to type it out on a UK keyboard.
[Alt Gr] + a gives you "á"
ááííéé.
That's the one. (Alt Gr + ?) Thanks for the help.
419
BEagle
9th May 2005, 10:53
There seems to have been a recent upsurge of spam coincident with that spammer in the US being caught. Perhaps when one of these nerds is caught, the rest of his loathsome kind act in revenge?
I was using a mail service that didn't provide a spam filter and I got swamped by between 10-20 spam mails / day.
Thought bugger that and joined Gmail. Been using them now for 6months or so and havn't had a single spam mail. Yet......
AOL has been drastically reduced, can't remember getting any in the last few months!
Same here, well done AOL!
joe2812
9th May 2005, 13:21
Well done AOL!
Done something well at least!
As an aside, if you're on BB mate, have you had to proposed free upgrade recently?
Mine was apparently in April, and as April came and went AOL conveniently 'lost' all details about my areas upgrade!
Funny how it coincides with my renewal... :suspect:
80% of your spam appears to come from only 200 or so sources, many based in South Florida (the Spam capital of the world (http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-sbspammain08may08,0,7702631.story?coll=sfla-home-headlines)). When the hurricanes hit last year there was a measurable drop in spam worldwide.
There's quite an interesting article (http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,57613,00.html) about what happens if you reply to spam. One in six were blatent scams, roughly the same fraction that turned out to be from people actually prepared to sell goods. However, just over half of their replies got no response, but just got the email address added to spam lists which were then sold on to other spammers.
These days my personal filter dumps pretty much everything not from the major US/UK top level domains (.uk, .com, .net, .org, etc.). Most of the stuff that gets dumped is US-spam, but with a faked email origin - at the moment I get plenty of spam that appears to come from Vanatu (!) which makes it quite easy to filter out. In the past I did some more filtering dumping everything with an extended character set (to get rid of all the Korean, Russian etc. spam that I couldn't read if I wanted to) but that seems to be filtered upstream these days.