Taking action on spam...

[CyberHippie]

I'm sure other people are getting sick of spam too, but it's really getting out of hand these days. I'm getting so much that it's getting too hard to sort my email, and there is a lot of potential to miss important stuff.

So... I just created a gmail account. Now I have all my email accounts forward to my gmail account, and then pull it down from there to my outlook. Gmail is supposed to have a pretty good spam filtering process, so I'm hoping this will scrub out all the crap and make email usuable again.

Anyone else try anything like this? I'm pretty optimistic that it'll work out better.

[CyberHippie]

It's trapping spam already!

Excellent!

[faoy]

What were you using before gmail? I've been using hotmail for 8 years now and get maybe one unwanted email a day. Really not that bad and they just upped my capacity to 1,000MB which will do me fine for the foreseeable future. However I do like gmail.

I use a separate account for newsletters, porn, etc., and that account gets loads of spam.

[djmelbatoast]

Is anyone hear interested in buying some wonder drugs to please your woman?

If so there is this guy who e-mails me eight times a day that just might be able to hook you up.

[CyberHippie]

My world of email is a bit tricky. But I have a few domains that I own, email to all my domains gets forwarded to my rogers accounts and gets downloaded to my outlook. I guess Rogers is the weak link there.

Looks like my gmail filter is really going to do the trick. The spam folder is already filling up.

[Esau.]

I do the same thing CH, I forward three emails to one gmail account. I only have to remember to not reply using the email they get forwarded to, unless its a friend. Gmail works pretty well with spam, I don't get any on two of my emails, only my music trading email gets spammed. Luckily.

[questcequecest?]

an article in today's K-W Record

[h1]Spam, spam, spam, spam[/h1]

The scourge they can't stop

NEW YORK (Dec 6, 2006)

Hearing from a lot of new friends lately? You know, the ones that write "It's me, Esmeralda," and tip you off to an obscure stock that is "poised to explode" or a great deal on prescription drugs.

You're not the only one. Spam is back -- in e-mail in-boxes and on everyone's minds. In the last six months, the problem has gotten measurably worse. Worldwide spam volumes have doubled from last year, according to Ironport, a spam filtering firm, and unsolicited junk mail now accounts for more than nine out of every 10 e-mail messages sent over the Internet.

Much of that flood is made up of a nettlesome new breed of junk e-mail called image spam, in which the words of the advertisement are part of a picture, often fooling traditional spam detectors that look for telltale phrases. Image spam increased fourfold from last year and now represents 25 per cent to 45 per cent of all junk e-mail, depending on the day, Ironport says.

The antispam industry is struggling to keep up with the surge.

It is adding computer power and developing new techniques in an effort to avoid losing the battle with the most sophisticated spammers.

It wasn't supposed to turn out this way.

Three years ago, Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairperson, made an audacious prediction: The problem of junk e-mail, he said, "will be solved by 2006."

And for a time, there were signs that he was going to be proven right.

Antispam software for companies and individuals became increasingly effective, and the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, which required spam senders to allow recipients to opt out of receiving future messages and prescribed prison terms for violators, gave many hope. According to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the volume of spam actually declined in the first eight months of last year.

But as many technology administrators will testify, the respite was short-lived.

Antispam companies fought the scourge successfully, for a time, with a blend of three filtering strategies. Their software scanned each e-mail and looked at whom the message was coming from, what words it contained and which websites it linked to. The new breed of spam -- call it Spam 2.0 -- poses a serious challenge to each of those three approaches.

Spammers have effectively foiled the first strategy -- analyzing the reputation of the sender -- by conscripting vast networks of computers belonging to users who unknowingly downloaded viruses and other rogue programs. The infected computers begin sending out spam without the knowledge of their owners. Secure Computing, an antispam company in San Jose, Calif., reports that 250,000 new computers are captured and added to these spam "botnets" each day.

The sudden appearance of new sources of spam makes it more difficult for companies to rely on blacklists of known junk e-mail distributors. Also, by using other people's computers to scatter their e-mail across the Internet, spammers vastly increase the number of messages they can send out, without having to pay for the data traffic they generate.

"Because they are stealing other people's computers to send out the bad stuff, their marginal costs are zero," said Daniel Drucker, a vice-president at the antispam company Postini. "The scary part is that the economics are now tilted in their favour."

The use of botnets to send spam wouldn't matter as much if e-mail filters could still make effective use of the second spam-fighting strategy: analyzing the content of an incoming message. Traditional antispam software examines the words in a text message and, using statistical techniques, determines if the words are more likely to make up a legitimate or spam message.

The explosion of image spam this year has largely thwarted that approach. Spammers have used images in their messages for years, in most cases to offer a peek at a pornographic website, or to illustrate the effectiveness of their miracle drugs. But as more of their text-based messages started getting blocked, spammers searched for new methods and realized that putting their words inside the image could frustrate text filtering. The use of other people's computers to send their bandwidth-hogging e-mail made the tactic practical.

"They moved their message into our blind spot," said Paul Judge, chief technology officer of Secure Computing.

Antispam firms spotted the skyrocketing amount of image spam this summer. A technology arms-race ensued. The filtering companies adopted an approach called optical character recognition, which scans the images in an e-mail and attempts to recognize any letters or words. Spammers responded in turn by littering their images with speckles, polka dots and background bouquets of colour, which mean nothing to human eyes but trip up the computer scanners.

Spammers have also figured out ways to elude another common antispam technique: identifying and blocking multiple copies of the same message. Pioneering antispam companies like San Francisco-based Brightmail, which was bought two years ago year by the software giant Symantec, achieved early victories against spam by recognizing unwanted e-mail as soon as it hit the Internet, noting its "fingerprint" and stopping every subsequent copy. Spammers have defied that technique by writing software that automatically changes a few pixels in each image.

"Imagine an archvillain who has a new thumbprint every time he puts his thumb down," said Patrick Peterson, vice-president of technology at Ironport. "They have taken away so many of the hooks we can use to look for spam."

But don't spammers still have to link to the incriminating websites where they sell their disreputable wares? Well, not anymore. Many of the messages in the latest spam wave tout penny stocks -- part of a scheme that antispam researchers call the "pump and dump." Spammers buy the inexpensive stock of an obscure company and send out messages hyping it. They sell their shares when the gullible masses respond and snap up the stock. No links to websites are needed in the messages.

Though the scam sounds obvious, a joint study by researchers at Purdue University and Oxford University this summer found that spam stock cons work. Enough recipients buy the stock that spammers can make a five to six per cent return in two days, the study concluded.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has brought dozens of cases against such fraudsters over the years. But as a result of the CAN-SPAM Act, which forced domestic e-mail marketers to either give up the practice or risk jail, most active spammers now operate beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement. Antispam researchers say the current spam hot spots are in Russia, Eastern Europe and Asia.

Some antispam veterans are not optimistic about the future of the spam battle. "As an industry I think we are losing," said Peterson of Ironport.

[StoneMtn]

The solution (as unpleasant as it might sound) is simple and will eventually be implemented.

Only invitees will be able to email you. We will eventually use software that will require someone to first request that they be added to your "safe" list before being able to email you. It will be cumbersome, because humans will have to physically allow access to certain people, and it will be annoying because old friends won't be able to suddenly show up in your Inbox unannounced, but that is the way the tides are turning. (I think.)

[mattm]

I had to turn on the contacts only option in hotmail because I was getting way too much spam. I then switched to gmail but now it's getting a bunch. Now I've made a new gmail that I use for everything public and it can soak up as much spam as it wants.

One good tip is that you can avoid the people that just make up email addresses based on words and names by putting tricky things in your email address (matt_marion instead of mattmarion) so that it's tougher to randomly generate it.

I hate spam

[backbacon]

Marion... ha! Here's a new avatar for you, Marion.

(sorry, just feeling silly... marion!)

Oh, and I use hotmail and don't get any spam barely. I've had the same account for almost eight years and it gets bad for spam once a year maybe and then not bad at all again.

[mattm]

oh you, making fun of my last name eh

[backbacon]

yeah . I went for a much needed nap after that..