Spam...

[Boerseun]

So you register at some dodgy website for something, or you want to download some tunes or apps or whatever - and you simply have to enter a valid email address. Only halfwits and secondhand car salesmen will give out their actual email addys, because 99.999% of those sites build mail lists which they eventually sell to spammers.

 

I have a sacrifical Yahoo! address that I use for these kind of registrations, and it's getting nuked with spam (quite predictably).

 

So how much do you get?

 

I just browsed through my Yahoo! bulk email folder, and the datestamp on the first one (since I last cleaned out) is 2nd January 2007. That was more than 1,500 mails ago!!! So I got 1,500 spams in 25 days, or, 60 spam emails per day. Luckily, that's not my production account, it's simply 'the sacrificial lamb', that I've had since 1997. Ten years! Gosh, that account must be registered with EVERY SINGLE SPAMMER on the planet, by this time. Or maybe I'm one of the lucky ones, getting relatively few spam emails, I don't know if 60 per day is a little or a lot.

 

How much spam do you sit with, and what strategy do you employ for not getting spammed?

[Tormod]

On the worst days I get 1000+ spam e-mails. I think I average about 400 or so per day. (Not counting my job e-mail, which harvests a few hundred per day as well!)

 

I use Thunderbird as my email client at home. It zaps about 75% of the spam. Since a lot has already been caught by Spamassassin on the server, I don't really wade through too much spam. But it does take up it's share of my time. :naughty:

[Jay-qu]

I used to sign up for everything with a hotmail account that I couldnt care less about, eventually I was getting 200+ emails per day and it was useless for anything but a dummy account.

 

That is about the same time I got introduced to gmail - I now sign up for everything with my gmail account, lo and behold I think I can only count 3 occasions that spam has made it to my inbox in the year and a half I have been using it!

[GAHD]

My hotmail is Spamless.

I have no sacrificial addys.

What is my secret?

Unsubscribe from, and block the baddies.

[C1ay]

10MinuteMail.com

[Buffy]

One of my clients has a public e-mail address that's been published in her books and its on every spam list in creation. I don't even know how many total spams it gets per day (its probably about 1000/day based on a few tests), but the server spam filters which currently are totally sucky--SmarterMail if you want to know, the new version has SpamAssassin integrated with it (which I love, more below)--still seems to get about 80% of the spam, leaving (estmate here) average about 200 spams per day getting marked as "questionable". I've got content filters that I actively monitor (worth it because I can copy them to a bunch of customers to keep their spam down), that handle about 70% of what's left, still resulting in about 30 per day that need to be looked at. But virtually all of these are the CAPTCHA/stock-pump-n-dump spam mails that are really just about impossible to filter. This for an address that gets one legitimate--but valuable--e-mail per *month*.

 

SpamAssassin is really good, and the accounts I have that use it get almost no spam any more, although by coincidence, these are the addresses that are for some reason *not* on the CAPTCHA/stockscam lists, so I don't know how well it works on those.

 

I'll admit to being a dinosaur on mail client: I'm still using Outlook 2000 (ducks flames from alexander).... I do recommend Thunderbird to everyone though...

 

What continues to amaze me is that the stockscam thing actually seems to work: its not just the evidence that they still send the spam, its kind of fun to watch what happens to these penny stocks that *skyrocket* after the spam goes out. I guess some people think they can beat the "surge" on the way up...

 

Advocates death penalty for spammers,

Buffy

[alexander]

there are better spam management programs out there, the best one that comes to mind is postini but there are definitely better alternativest then spamassasin...

 

i get a few spam emails a day on average, my manager gets something along the lines of 400+ a day, and this woman i know gets something along the lines of a 1000+ a day on average, but then she gets paid to go through it and spends most of her day doing just that...

[Mercedes Benzene]

Believe it or not, I use my regular email address when I register for anything... and guess how much spam I get?

On an average day, I usually get 1 spam email address. This is almost always for some sort of perscription drug.... usually Viagra.

I also get about 10 emails from various colleges every day. I suppose you could count that as spam, but they aren't trying to sell me anything.... expect their teaching. :beer: This is my fault anyway. That's what happens when you register with The College Board, which is necessary anyway to take the SATs.

[InfiniteNow]

Believe it or not, I use my regular email address when I register for anything... and guess how much spam I get?

On an average day, I usually get 1 spam email address. This is almost always for some sort of perscription drug.... usually Viagra.

I also get about 10 emails from various colleges every day. I suppose you could count that as spam, but they aren't trying to sell me anything.... expect their teaching. :beer: This is my fault anyway. That's what happens when you register with The College Board, which is necessary anyway to take the SATs.

 

Ah, young jedi, as you age, the number of areas to which you submit your email addy increases, and so does the spam resulting from said registration... exponentially. I bought a house, and submitted my email for some various online functionality. Not a day goes by I'm not offered countless loans, home improvement contractors, tax reliefs, and furniture. That's on top of the viagra and penis size enhancement promisory spams. This is with gmail's well designed system as well.

 

Two accounts. One for friends, one for other. It's your best option. :beer:

[Boerseun]

Two accounts. One for friends, one for other. It's your best option. :)

That's the best way to do it, as far as I'm concerned. I've seen quite a lot of Spam traps removing genuine emails for me to be totally trusting it.

 

What I do find amazing, though, is that there are people out there who still see Spamming as a fruitful and productive sales tool. I don't even read the headers - I just delete. But every now and then one catches my eye and I have to laugh. They come up with the funniest spellings sometimes to get past the filters!

 

I wonder, Buffy, you're a marketing guru, what's the yield on spamming? It must be incredibly low, I guess? Is it worth it?

[Buffy]

Mass scam-spam, I don't know. I do know we just did a targetted mailing to only 400 e-mails and got a 5% response rate. Average for direct mail these days is 1-3%. I have another customer with a list of about 2000 solely gathered from visitors to their site, and they get a bump of a dozen sales every newsletter that goes out monthly.

 

So, bottom line, yeah, it works....Barnum was right....

 

Ink cartridges!

Buffy

[Jay-qu]

This is with gmail's well designed system as well.

 

Two accounts. One for friends, one for other. It's your best option. :doh:

 

perhaps you do not know gmails 'system' as well as you think young padawan!

 

Gmail has an interesting quirk where you can add a plus sign (+) after your Gmail address, and it'll still get to your inbox. It's called plus-addressing, and it essentially gives you an unlimited number of e-mail addresses to play with. Here's how it works: say your address is [email protected], and you want to automatically label all work e-mails. Add a plus sign and a phrase to make it [email protected] and set up a filter to label it work (to access your filters go to Settings->Filters and create a filter for messages addressed to [email protected]. Then add the label work).

 

More real world examples:

 

Find out who is spamming you: Be sure to use plus-addressing for every form you fill out online and give each site a different plus address.

 

Example: You could use

[email protected] for nytimes.com

[email protected] for freestuff.com

Then you can tell which site has given your e-mail address to spammers, and automatically send them to the trash.

 

Automatically label your incoming mail: I've talked about that above.

 

Archive your mail: If you receive periodic updates about your bank account balance or are subscribed to a lot of mailing lists that you don't check often, then you can send that sort of mail to the archives and bypass your Inbox.

 

Example: For the mailing list, you could give [email protected] as your address, and assign a filter that will archive mail to that address automatically. Then you can just check in once in a while on the archive if you want to catch up.

 

:)

[Michaelangelica]

I have found gmail a very effective spam filter

 

But then, while you have Hypography (not accepted by spell check!) moderators promoting breast enlargement schemes what can you expect? :doh: :)

Post 30-31 'Fragrance and perfume' thread

[InfiniteNow]

So, if we assume a 1% response rate, let's come up with some hypotheticals on this "fishing with a net" concept.

 

Small ad firm of 10 employees. Each employee sends 2,000 spam messages a day (with access to lists, this number is incredibly conservative, and could be in the hundreds of thousands). So that means this one small ad firm sends 20,000 spam messages a day. Let's assume a 7-day week, since our keyboard stroking friends can do this from home... resulting in approximately 140,000 spam messages sent by this one small ad firm. Let's assume 46 weeks in the year to allow for holiday and illness, so this small ad firm sends annually six and a half million spam messages.

 

1% of 6.5 million (taking the conservative estimate discussed above) will result in a response rate of 65,000. Ewww... no wonder there are so many of them. :beer:

 

Even if my estimates are off by three factors of 10, there are enough people clicking and visiting to cover the expense and put cash in pockets.

 

However, the response rate itself is subject to the law of diminishing returns, which itself will be accelerated due to 1) increased effectiveness of filter technology, and 2) people's increased frustration with advertising boogers.

 

 

BTW MA, lavender just smells nice. :lol:

[Michaelangelica]

So, if we assume a 1% response rate, let's come up with some hypotheticals on this "fishing with a net" concept.

 

 

BTW MA, lavender just smells nice. :lol:

Yes but US spammers spam to Australia all the time for services that cannot be purchased from here. (Is that just a example of lousy US geography knowledge or Arrogant World Hegemony?) It is very annoying. Dozens of stockbroker tips, Viagra etc. Who would buy from such annoying twits?

Have you ever tried to reply to a spammer? (To tell them to go away)

Most often you can't, so what is the point!

Perhaps they believe the 1% response thing, which is probably mailing-list owner's advertising hype.

 

BTW IN

I don't like the smell of lavender, then again, maybe it depends where it is being put and who is doing the putting.:beer:

[Jay-qu]

Id say the most common type of spammer is a computer.. sif you would pay people to spam email when you can feed a list of emails to a computer hit enter and walk off, I bet i could go find a program to do this.

[Buffy]

Yes but US spammers spam to Australia all the time for services that cannot be purchased from here. (Is that just a example of lousy US geography knowledge or Arrogant World Hegemony?)

Actually, probably about 20% of my upstream filtered spam these days is in Russian! Do they think the rest of us know how to read it?

 

Have you ever tried to reply to a spammer?

Don't. At least some still use replies to build "premium" spam lists that they can charge more money for because they can guarantee the stuff is getting through. This used to be generally true, but the vast majority of spam today uses the same "To" lists to generate "From" addresses, which is why you should never *bounce* e-mail or put up "I'm out of the office" replies, because it can result in your address being added to spam filters as a spam source!

1% of 6.5 million (taking the conservative estimate discussed above) will result in a response rate of 65,000. Ewww... no wonder there are so many of them.

1% response rate is probably at least a couple of orders of magnitude too high for mass-spam, but as you say Now, that still pays the bills....

 

Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and :spam: ,

Buffy