80% Of Incoming E-mail At Hotmail Is Spam 422
The Llama King writes: "According to this AP story at The Houston Chronicle, 80 percent of the e-mail that makes its way into Hotmail's user inboxes is spam. And that does not include the UCE caught by Hotmail's filters. This is the first of a three-part series the Associated Press is doing on spam."
Forgeries (Score:3, Informative)
No, spam does not have to work because there's so much of it. What does work is selling harvested email addresses to assholes.
Well filter better ... (Score:3, Informative)
All these things are pretty standard these days, but webmail providers (not just hotmail) don't actually seem to bother. Remember, the more times you check your inbox, the more ads they have viewed.
Social and technical measures - automatic fines (Score:4, Informative)
One of the better articles I've seen on how to stop spam covers Social and technical measures (Google cache) [216.239.37.100], by Richard Jones - using Google because that site isn't reachable right now. It doesn't have all the answers, but has some very good ideas. Most importantly, they can be implemented by ISPs without legislation, important though that is in the medium term.
I think a combination of strong filtering, strong terms of service (e.g. take credit card numbers of those who sign up for email service, and have an automatic and substantial fine for abuse), and legislation could really help. Spammers moving offshore actually makes filtering easier, for those people who don't do a lot of business with China at any rate...
One key point is that spam-filtering should be controllable by the individual, to allow people to make sure they receive email that might look like spam (e.g. most commercial newsletters) and server-based so that nobody needs to download spam over slow dialup or mobile wireless connections. SpamAssassin is the best tool I've found so far.
If you use hotmail (Score:2, Informative)
And block as many domains as you can in the block sender list. Every time you receive a new piece of junk add its domain to the blocked list if possible.
I just tried this recently and the spam I had to review went down from a 100 per day to about 10 per day which is much more manageable.
Of course the spammers will probably get more sophisticated and we'll just have to think of something else.
Re:Bill Gates - I have the answer! (Score:3, Informative)
In fact, amavisd-new (or is it -ng?) supports spamassassin/razor now, so you get 3 milters for the price of one
Re:Spam goes both ways (Score:3, Informative)
> outgoing email at hotmail is spam.
If you read the message headers, you'll probably discover that most of this spam isn't actually *from* hotmail. It just shows a hotmail address in the "From:" line. The "From:" line is no more accurate than a return address written in the top left-hand corner of a letter you'd get in the mail. In other words, it can say whatever you want it to say.
And as someone who has more than one e-mail account, bring able to change "From:" without trouble is a *good* thing
Re:Bill Gates - I have the answer! (Score:3, Informative)
Spamassin also is very bad at deciding attachments are spam because any large image will have enough 4 letter regex hiding that it hits. I figure it false positives at least 5% of time.
myrealbox, Free and Spam Free (Score:2, Informative)
From the Myrealbox [myrealbox.com] No Spam Policy:
"Spam is no good.
Don't do it.
It causes bad karma and cancer (and perhaps some other diseases).
Yes, this is true.
No, it's not a joke.
Oh, and spammers rot in hell."
"For each violation of the no spam policy, users will be fined ten dollars ($10 USD) for EACH E-mail sent. This damages provision does not preclude Novell from seeking other damages as well."
They give you IMAP, POP in addition to a nice webmail interface. I'm assuming they'll start charging for at some point but this is a good example of how it is possible to block spam if the service provider is committed.
Re:dah ? (Score:1, Informative)
I just checked the account after a week or two and have 56 new messages in my inbox, 81 in my junk mail folder.... all of which are spam.
From my experience with Hotmail, my conclusion is that your post is, to be kind, somewhat less than truthful.
Re:dah ? (Score:3, Informative)
The funny thing is, once I registered the new domain, I started getting four and five spams a day at Yahoo! (probably from address harvesters crawling thru whois entries), but since I now only check the account to make sure I don't miss any mail from senders who don't have the new address yet, it doesn't concern me much.
Re: spam ratio too high? (Score:3, Informative)
Additionally, for major providers like AT&T, Hotmail, etc, they'll take every single username that they know of at hotmail, and try it at AT&T, and see what bounces.
Add to this the fact that they often do these tests while bouncing through 500 open relays that they don't control, and you have an extremely hard to detect, hard to control wardialer.
Surprise? Public Emails Are Spamtraps (Score:2, Informative)
Here's my strategy. My ISP: 1 email account; personal use (friends and associates). Mail(.com): identifying myself in public commentary
Thus, my ISP email is utterly clean of spam. My Mail(.com) account gets a couple pieces of spam a week, with some replies from journalists, webmasters and programmers; I logon to Mail(.com) once a week to delete some spam and find some replies. My Hotmail account is a windswept and dusty wasteland of spam, getting 2-6 pieces of spam a day, and has some notices from the sites I subscribe to; I logon to Hotmail every 1 to 4 weeks to delete essentially everything, which is dozens of spam mails. The Go and Excite accounts are still being evaluated for their usefulness; I just login once a month to keep 'em active.
So, thank you Microsoft for providing me a spam filter. Go ahead and even sell the list of your Hotmail clients
Re:impssible account names (Score:4, Informative)
It saves a lot of tedious filling out of Hotmail accounts and attracts a surprisingly small amount of spam. (And you get to find out who spammed you...)