Sad state of affairs

[dood]

Our company's email stat's for this month-

Valid Ct - 27905
Valid Size - 3.25 GB
Spam Ct- 2836868
Spam Size- 7.35 GB
Virus Ct- 2068
Virus Size- 7.97 MB
Total Ct- 2866841
Spam Percentage- 98.95
Virus Percentage- 0.07

This is outside filtering, so the only emails that even came in to our email server were the valid ones. Saves us a lot in bandwidth costs...

[pentium]

Re: Sad state of affairs

Wow!
That's a lot of spam.

[Topcat]

Re: Sad state of affairs

There should be a worldwide law:
Spammers are to be burned at the stake in a public setting. To make it even more fun, spectators can throw gasoline filled water balloons at them. I mean really... Are there really people out there stupid enough to believe that if you order some wonder drug from a rogue email, you'll really live forever or get a bigger dick?! Obviously there are people that do, or spamming wouldn't be such a problem.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Sad state of affairs

.
I did a little research on SPAM a few months ago.
If you look at:
-The estimated cost of SPAM to businesses in the US...
- [Man hours deleting, bandwidth costs, anti-spam equipment and software.]
- [Realizing that 100% of that cost is passed to consumers in one way or another....]
- Then look at the total taxable income for all people in the US.
----------

If you live in the US the cost of SPAM is approximately 1.1% of your income.

- And you don't even have to own a computer.
- You pay by the higher cost of everything you buy.
[Business's overhead passes down to all consumers.]

.

[willawake]

Re: Sad state of affairs

Are there really people out there stupid enough to believe that if you order some wonder drug from a rogue email, you'll really live forever or get a bigger dick?!

its all about audience size.......say conversion rate 0.01% (idiot factor). emails sent 1,000,000. That would be 100 people.

more worrying is the fraud emails (password to your online bank account interface). they have definitely increased greatly in recent months. the chances of getting caught are probably quite low considering the actual location of these fraudsters although there have been quite a few caught here in Greece.

[bgavin]

Re: Sad state of affairs

Are there really people out there stupid enough to believe that if you order some wonder drug from a rogue email, you'll really live forever or get a bigger dick?!

Yes.

I wrote an article for a publication, and the research showed me that South America is the highest response rate: 20%. One in every five recipients responds to spam.

Spam is big businesses. Like any business, ROI is king. If the money source was not getting return on investment, they would cut it off. Spam is never cut off, so ROI must be working.

I saw some press on a spammer in Texas who is pulling down $200k monthly. They can't nail him (yet) because he pays all his taxes, but they can't catch him stealing time from servers. Evidently he spams for a major insurance company who is doing "arms length" advertising with this guy, so they have "plausible deniability". The article says he gets paid $7 per application. That means a 3% response rate on a million spams.

[willawake]

Re: Sad state of affairs

email spam is one thing but having a business website brings many spam telephone calls from investment companies and even hong kong tailors lol. some or probably most of the investment companies are boiler rooms offering pure fraud. thanks to skype and voip, spam telephone calls are very cheap.

even the bona fide industry advertising, events and publications salespeople are pretty annoying also.

personally i would prefer spam to the phone calls.

the internet has also enabled global visibility for companies which is for their benefit and not. we have quite good ranking in google so we get quite a lot of utter time wasters. people who are just collecting quotations either in order to prepare the required comparison between quotations for their bosses or otherwise people who are just making feasibility studies for themselves or other people. unfortunately every enquiry has to be dealt with properly otherwise the good ones will get lost.

easy for those people though to fire off RFQs (request for quotation) to many people via email.

the sad thing though about email is that it is reducing personal contact by replacing telephone calls etc. i dont receive telephone calls that often these days, because i know how to make sure the client knows everything is under control (receive enquiry, reply that we are dealing with it, send daily reports until its done)

we dont deliver stuff anymore cos its all pdf reporting now. i think its important to try to break with that and find some excuse to call and go to peoples offices. hard to convey emotion over the email, speaking is required for that. important for clients to think you are their friend. thats how we build relationships where we work together cross-company and have a synergy

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Sad state of affairs

There's the other side too.
I've sent off legit RFQ's that have been ignored because they think I'm trolling for information instead of looking for parts I need.

I own several dot coms that I haven't used yet.
I get phone calls and I get loads of letter mail about them.
- These things aren't even sites yet. All these are is a NAME at is point.
I used one of them for a couple months to experiment with some software.
My front page said something to the effect "this site is fake, experimental, a test".
I had CC companies offering be CC's under that dot com name for my 'business'.
- I've had sites on-off since 1998 and that never used to happen.


Back to what bgavin said,
(I've forgotten exact number so this is for the idea, not exact numbers.)
(And I'm not referring to scam/phishing emails, just spam ads.)
-
SPAM gets something like 1/10th the response rate of legit/legal email ads.
But it costs the advertiser something like 1/1000th as much to send.
So, for the same dollar spent they get around 100x more return.


According to the US FTC (Federal Trade Commission) 85% of spam is sent by only 200 big time spammers. (With people working for them in a number of different countries.) It's big business and big money.
They also estimate that at any given time there are only around 2000 small time spammers. (They come and go but their are only around 2000 active at any given time.)

The only way spam is going away is for it to become unprofitable.
There are a number of ways to do that:
-
- The advertising market could change.
--- That would have to happen on it's own and may not.
-
- Reduce it's effectiveness / return rate:
--- This is what spam blockers and filters really do. If they don't get there they won't get relied to and the response rate goes down. (On a personal level, just don't read them. - DELETE!)
-
- Raise the cost of sending it:
--- This is what fines are about. This is also what reporting it properly is about. If you report it to the right place and in the right way their ISP, email host, or server host will shut them down. Yeah, they'll be back in a few days with a new service(s) but they were not doing business during that down time. (If they paid for that server in advance for a year or two the host usually isn't going to give a refund for breaking the law, they just cut them off and the spammer has eat the expense.) As to local services like ISP's, at some point they may run out of services that will give them a new account. (Which means they'd have to move somewhere else to stay in the spam business.)
--- What can people do? - Given that there are only around 2000-3000 spammers at any given time if say even just 10% of people that use email reported only one spam a day (properly) that would mean 1,000's of complaints against each spammer daily. - A service provider is not going to ignore 1000 complaints.

I learned how to report spam the right way about two years ago. I then took one of my emails (old account that's registered in places I don't even remember) that was getting over 3000 spams a day. On average, over the last two years, I've reported 30 a week (properly), that account now only gets around 300 spams a week. - From 3000 a day to 300 a week. It works, but it's slow, and it's something you have to keep doing as a program like updating your anti-virus.
-
- Now if EVERYONE reported say one a day.
(Or do 5 or 10 on Sunday's, or something like that.)
- Millions of complaints against only 3000 spammers DAILY.

But most people are lazy and would rather just bitch about it.
- And suck up that hidden 1.1% SPAM Tax (effectively) on their income.
( BTW: It's expected to double in the next two/three years.)

.

[willawake]

Re: Sad state of affairs

lol....."proximity marketing" aka bluetooth mobile spam
up to 30km range
http://www.aircable.net/server-xr.html

[hardwareguy]

Re: Sad state of affairs

What I hate even more is junk faxes...those get EXPENSIVE.

Either burn them at the stake or string them up buy the nuts with old fiberglass covered Cat 5 taken out of the ceiling last summer during the upgrade!

"Old Sparky" remains an option in my book...... What voltage/current combo shall we use? AC or DC..... if AC, what waveform?

[stretch0069]

Re: Sad state of affairs

if AC, what waveform?

modulated with some Ozzy.....

[bgavin]

Re: Sad state of affairs

It is always interesting when the spam filter goes away... my ancient Netware box running NIMS (novell mail) was attacked by some clod in Asia.

The inbound SMTP system failed somehow and stopped working. This box has been running since the 1990's, and I've forgotten how to fix it. NIMS provides almost nothing for tools, so I would have to reinstall Netware, NIMS, etc. Time to punt.

I had to get mail working again, so I popped in Win Server 2003 R2 and used the built-in Mail role. This provides basic SMTP and POP, but zero for spam filtering or hooks for SpamAssassin, etc.

I'd forgotten how much spam I get on a daily basis. Wow...

I'd like to get QMail running as an SMTP forwarder, so I can hook SpamAssassin into QMail before it forwards to the Windows box. But... linux is not an every-day familiar platform for me, so it is still a struggle.

[kc8adu]

Re: Sad state of affairs

modulated with some Ozzy.....

you bring the spammer and the ozzy cd.
i have the gates bc-1 warmed up.
its modded to go on 160m so choose the spammer most likely to be a good dummy load.
i dont want to violate part 97.
will be interesting to see what glows brighter.
the spammer or the pair of 833's!

[willawake]

Re: Sad state of affairs

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7067962.stm

[willawake]

Re: Sad state of affairs

has anyone got a good recent spamasassin config file?
its getting ridiculous here

[zandrax]

Re: Sad state of affairs

Config file: do you mean dns blacklists, willa?

Big italian news server use these:

zen.spamhaus.org
list.dsbl.org
combined.njabl.org
bhnc.njabl.org
dul.dnsbl.sorbs.net
bl.spamcop.net (reintegrated last year, see http://www.dnsbl.com/2007/05/spamcop...-accurate.html)

They are reputed updated and quite accurate (sometimes spam does leak, but near zero false positives): keep in mind that addresses may change without notice (zen.spamhaus.org was previously sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org) so check them periodically.

Zandrax

[willawake]

Re: Sad state of affairs

no i did not mean blacklists. they are often poorly implemented by mail admins. really the reliable ones should be only another point on the spam score, not a 100% as several set it to.

spamassasin is a linux spam detector. i would like to have a more effective config file for this. the one i made a few years ago is not very effective anymore.