Have You Got Anything Without Spam?

Not really much of a joke anymore the New Scientist reports. Citing stats from MessageLabs, the piece calls spam an "epidemic" that was responsible for 63 percent of all email traffic in December.

Even more sobering is the trend. November saw 55 percent of all traffic deemed spam, up from 50 percent in October. A MessageLabs expert warns that email is fast on its way to becoming useless without powerful filtering.

In the November Reason, Wendy Grossman digested the spam epidemic.

And awhile back at Tech Central Station, Reason Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie explained why he loves spam.

Comments

[Matt Shultz]

I've had the same hotmail address for 18 months now, and I have yet to receive a single piece of spam. A friend of mine signed up for a new hotmail address within days of me, and within a week she was getting a large amount of spam. I haven't yet had to resort to filters, and I sign up at all sorts of websites that require my e-mail address. I think the reason this has happened is that my e-mail address is a sort of nonsense string, while hers is one of those semi-common-words_number addresses. My theory is that one way spammers catch you is by taking any given e-mail address ending in a number, and proceeding to run through every other number from 1 to, say, 100, on the theory that, with more people than words, e-mail addresses are bound to repeat. Invent a nonsense word for your address, and a spam-bot won't have the creativity to find it ... at least, not yet. Now, I don't expect this to work for me forever, and I might even be entirely wrong about why it works, but the point is that it has worked, so far. 18 months, no filters, no spam. On hotmail, no less.

[Warren]

Keeping SPAM out of your mailbox only treats the symptoms while the disease festers. Spam is still choking the available bandwidth even if it's being filtered out on the other end. Anti SPAM efforts need to find a solution that prevents it from being sent, not just from clogging your in-box. Until then we are all paying for it.

[Douglas Fletcher]

Spam is weird. I have a yahoo email account that I've never used, which fills up at a rate of about 700 penis ads a week. Another online email account, which I give out everywhere and use for online forms and such, gets almost no spam. And my special, only for friends email address gets about 20 or so spams every week, I suspect mostly from the same sender.

I used a product called Mailwasher for a while but for some reason it kept crashing my computer, though it did detect and delete the spam almost unfailingly. Since I'm using an old computer running windows 98, it might run better with a later model computer and operating system.

[junyo]

http://www.spamgourmet.com
Infinite disposable email addresses.
Next question?

[Andy D.]

"Keeping SPAM out of your mailbox only treats the symptoms while the disease festers."

But at some point, spam filters can decrease the effectiveness of spam to the point that sending it out becomes unprofitable. I know, spam is very cheap to generate, but it's not free.

And I know a few people who simply don't get much, if any, spam.... apparently it has to do with the nature of their addresses, but I don't exactly how it works.

[D. Brunberg]

Unfortunately, ISPs have done little to help with spam, and many of the commercial products out there are hamstrung by their reliance on outdated black- and whitelists that classify e-mail based on pre-decided "spam" words and sender addresses.

One of the problems is that people classify spam in different ways. In order to minimize the possibility that someone's ham is erroneously classified as spam, the one-size-fits-all filters have to have a loose tolerance.

The far better approach is to use a Bayesian filter, which learns the individual's preferences on what constitutes spam by examining the user's "spam box" and "ham box" and calculating the probability that any word (where a word is anything from an actual human language word to a meaningless random string or misspelling placed in the mix by spammers to fool list-based filters) is likely to be found in a spam message. Then the spamminess of a given message is calculated from the individual probabilities of all its constituent words.

The user need take no other action than initially classifying spam and ham in separate locations and moving the (rare) occasional false negative into the spam box.

The Bayesian approach is introduced by Paul Graham (http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html). I personally use a free software product called Spammunition (http://www.upserve.com) since I'm stuck with Outlook at work. Spammunition lets about one out of every 50 spams through each day (98% catch rate)

At home under Linux, I use Spambayes (http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/), an open source product that also, I just found out, has an Outlook plugin. I get approximately 100 spams a day at home, and Spambayes lets through a false negative once every three days or so (99.67% catch rate).

These Bayesian filters allow the user to tell the filter what is spam and what is ham merely by moving a message from the inbox to the spambox. This solution is far better, in my estimation, than most of the proprietary list-based filters, although some of them are catching on and using the statistical approach.

[Dave Straub]

Perhaps the epidemic isn't really hurting me as much as others, but I have a pretty simple method of handling spam.

I use a hotmail account for any application where a website requires an email address. This ends up being the destination of most of the spam I get. My hotmail account has special folders into which all mail from the domains yahoo.com, hotmail.com, and aol.com is filtered. I clear those folders out on a semi-regular basis.

On my primary, "home" account, I use Mozilla mail instead of the usual default of Outlook Express. Mozilla has all sorts of filtering options, and I use a very simple one to deal with spam: Any mail from an address not included in my address book downloads to a folder called "check for spam." Only a very few emails that I *want* to get end up in that folder; the grand majority download to the regular ol' inbox. I may switch to Thunderbird soon, since it's working so nicely for my girlfriend.

I think the key is to make sure that one has a webmail account of some sort, on which one expects to get spam; and to make absolutely sure that one's primary email address NEVER be entered on a website.

[Ayatollah Usoe]

My spam solution has been to abandon my e-mail address every year, and switch to a new one. But this becomes more complicated as I move towards internet financial transactions.

At work, where I can't easily change my e-mail ID, we have a filter that examines the e-mail. Where spam is suspected, adds [High Spam] to the subject line. Simply filtering for "Spam]" deletes around 100 spam messages a day for me.

I still like the idea where ISPs would work together to charge 1? per e-mail recipient for each send. But I want that penny to go with the e-mail to the recipient. So by receiving spam, I will become slightly richer, perhaps enough to pay my monthly ISP bill. If my outgoing e-mails roughly equal my incoming e-mails, I'm break-even. But a spammer would have to pay to play, and that alone should cut down on the amount of spam sent.

Perhaps a little off tangent, but under the US-CAN SPAM Act, do we have to recycle that can?

[D. Brunberg]

The problems with "making sure that one's primary email address NEVER be entered on a website" include: you have to trust everyone who knows your email address to NEVER enter your email address for you (e.g., in a "Send this page to a friend" box on a web page -- that's how I first started getting spam at home); and you can never ever send an email to a mailing list that has any chance of being archived on the web.

[Dave Straub]

Brunberg: Quite true, and I suspect that much of the spam I do get on my primary account is generated that way.

[Ron Hardin]

Spam is just test signals making sure the net is working. The senders and the filters will always be more or less matched; it's not as if the work is done manually.

Next crisis please.

[Andy D.]

Is it just me, or have other people seen a recent decline in the amount of spam they get? I get to see all my spam, since I just set my Hotmail inbox to only receive from an approved list, and all the rest goes to a junk mail folder, which I peruse and clean. It used to be that I'd get like 20 a day, but now I average maybe 3 or 4. Have other people not seen any drop-offs? Maybe I just happen to have been taken off some lists or something.

[Garth]

Andy D.

I think you are on to something. My spam intake is way down on all of my email accounts (and I am on more than one provider). I am unaware of any new policy having been enacted by my ISPs/email providors so maybe some spammers are giving up?

[Dave Straub]

Andy: I too have seen a decline in spam on my hotmail account. I was getting anywhere up to 50 messages a day, and now I'm down to 5 to 10.

[Andy D.]

I guess it could be that certain providers (Hotmail among them) have started filtering out obvious Spam email before it gets to us? Or maybe the collective hatred of Spam has diminished its effectiveness to the point that it's not worth it to send out quite so much anymore. Or maybe the few new anti-Spam laws are having an effect. I'm happy to see that others are experiencing the same decline as I am.

[Xrlq]

I've found 0spam to be reasonably good. The only trouble with whitelisting services like that one is you have to remember to manually whitelist all the mail lists you've actually subscribed to, as non-human senders will not be able to whitelist themselves. Failure to do so can start an infinite loop of list emails vs. challenge-response emails.

[AJMB]

I only started receiving spam about three months ago. I access through my terminal at work. I never knew there were so many people concerned about the length, and stamina of my penis. I am truly touched, so to speak. Thanks to everyone who wrote, but only successful solicitations will be contacted.