spam has doubled?

[kitchin]

Any new thoughts out there on spam? The Washington Post ran a front page story on it yesterday, focusing on the cost to business. This paragraph caught my attention:

Roughly 40 percent of all e-mail traffic in the United States is spam, up from 8 percent in late 2001 and nearly doubling in the past six months, according to Brightmail Inc., a major vendor of anti-spam software. By the end of this year, industry experts predict, fully half of all e-mail will be unsolicited. (About 40 percent of U.S. Postal Service mail is business marketing.)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Mar12.html

Half! Those folks are lucky!

I've seen an big increase in the last six months. SpamAssassin's heuristics are starting to get outgunned. And I still have to look through the redirected SA mail, because I've had a few false positives as high as 8.3. The false positives are such things as domain renewals and software registrations .

My latest bump up in the amount of spam I receive was after I transferred a bunch of domains from NetSol and Register.com to Dotster, for whatever reason.

I think the solution is to build in some responsibility to the SMTP system. But I don't think the government is going to be our friend in this area, since it would go heavy handed and try to tag individuals. And the SpamCop sort of systems are too prone to misreporting. I've heard a lot of blame going to a few large telcoms for not being responsible, but I wouldn't count on that changing. Maybe the porn industry will fund a solution! They have lots of money.

I suppose the next thing for the individual to try is Baysian filtering, but I don't think it ever could be shrink-wrapped solution, since you have to train the software. In any case, I'm more worried about the internet remaining useful for non-technical users than about my particular wasted time deleting spam.

[frankc]

Originally posted by kitchin:
Any new thoughts out there on spam?

Nope, it still stinks, HUGELY.

I've seen an big increase in the last six months. SpamAssassin's heuristics are starting to get outgunned.

I agree, just another good reason not to blackhole SA-tagged spam.

Still, since FQ installed SA, it's correctly tagged >3000 spams on about 3 hosting accounts here.

I too am very interested in the Bayesian filtering programs, but we're still a bit away from mature, easy-to-install/set up programs and plugins. The reports on POPfile and K9 are quite impressive; STILL, their 98-99% accuracy rate prevents anyone from automatically assuming that anything tagged as spam is *absolutely* spam. I'll take a swipe at them when they're out of "beta" status; my biz emails are too important to test beta software on.

[dank]

Still, since FQ installed SA, it's correctly tagged >3000 spams on about 3 hosting accounts here.

Dang, that's about 2 week's worth of spam on one of my accounts.

The past few weeks have been the biggest jump in spam that I've noticed. I have Outlook Express set to check for new mail every 2 minutes, and some days hardly a single check goes by without downloading a couple spams... Gets rather depressing after a while. I fondly remember when I used to actually look forward to reading my email...

At least I finally got around to setting up some mail rules in OE, so now I don't have to see the tagged spams until I care to go into the specified folder and double check that there weren't any incorrectly tagged ones before deleting them.

Dan

[Jarrod]

An alternative I'm using to tagging of spam is to move it to a quarantine account. I've then cron'd a perl script to read the pop account on a daily basis and send me a single email with the title, date and from of each of the emails in the account. Then if the sent date is more than 7 days ago, the email gets deleted.

If anybody is interested they are welcome to the script, although please bear in mind that I've hacked this together to satisfy my requirement and this might not match yours

Jarrod

[Randall]

Originally posted by kitchin:
I think the solution is to build in some responsibility to the SMTP system.

My sentiments exactly -- anything else is just a band-aid, unless we can make spamming more expensive.

Randall

[kitchin]

SpamAssassin is still tagging 80 to 90% of my spam, so it has made my life much easier. I just sort the mail by subject and barely glance at the stuff over 8.5 before deleting it.