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."
dah ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course most of it is spam. That's not Hotmail's fault.
Most spam is the result of an account owner's own actions (direct and indirect).
Other spam is just broad coverage, i.e. people sending to aaaaa1@hot/mail.com aaaaa2@hot/mail.com aaaaa1hot/mail.com and so forth.
I hardly have any spam on Hotmail, the spam I do get I mostly get from auto-forwarded e-mails to an address I had 2 years ago.
My first reaction (Score:5, Interesting)
Still, there is promised security of the MS passport system etc. In this case it looks like more like a spam enhancement system. since this is supposed to be something to verify your login across the net. This means that most email addresses there have been preverified by MS as being valid.
a gift to spammers everywhere.
Yay. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, we all know that email is a "powerful new marketing tool", but few have written about how much negative impact it has to the economy and our everyday lives.
I have an email address that I've never given out, and 90% of the messages I receive are spam. The email address on this posting ONLY receives spam... mostly in some funky character set that I can't bother to being to read. This address gets about 40 a day (and likely more after this posting).
So, industry self-regulation? Well that doesn't seem to work - and it didn't work with Enron (or WoldCom or Andersen or
So I think it's time that we hit them where it hurts. Pass -strong- laws. Pass laws that permit individuals to sue in certain circumstances.
They passed laws to control the misuse of FAX machines... and although not perfect, they do help. Then again, how many people do you know that have a fax machine at home? Betcha most people have unplugged theirs due to FAX Spam.
Of Course It Is (Score:3, Interesting)
Serious question (Score:2, Interesting)
For instance, I've got a nice spam-free email account w/ my ISP, but all my friends have accounts with shady-web-based-email-company.com. If I send them (or if they send me) messages, is my pristine address now at risk because it's now in their in/out boxes? Technically, this type of collection would seem trivial to implement.
I'm not sure if the big guys (Hotmail, Yahoo) sell even their registered addresses (I could be wrong), but does anyone have a report of a web-based email service engaging in this kind of practice?
Laws won't reduce spam (Score:3, Interesting)
Now if only all the mail server admins (corporate and private) of the world get their collective brains together and start blocking all the spame using any combination and permutation of RBL possible, spam might not make it into our mailboxes.
SPEWS blocks ISPs. I like that. I don't receive crap from certain domains anymore since using SPEWS. I also don't accept mail from hotmai, yahoo, lycos, and many other free web-based email services except from whitelisted users.
At work I get about 15-20 spam emails daily from an old work email address when the company changed named two years ago. If only the HMFIC of email would block off that domain i'd receive none. Laws won't help in this case because the email server is located in another country. Only a technical solution.
I'm so sick of spam I run my own mail servers and filter the crap out of all mail. I receive on average 1 spam per week in my inbox. All the rest gets rejected or filtered into a spam filter that i oly perue occasionally, but I don't see it in my inbox.
Keep going SPEWS - it's a great system.
Well (Score:5, Interesting)
Granted, a lot of spam gets through on guesswork (such as every common permutation of John Smith @ hotmail.com) but you have to wonder if something odd is going within the company when (as a test) you register ibtgsrq at hotmail dot com and within two weeks it starts receiving the usual fake degrees, penis enlargment and general porn stuff.
subnote: ibtgsrq stands for I Bet This Gets Spam Real Quick - and it did.
Spam techniques (Score:5, Interesting)
8 - diane@domain.com
2 - diane1@domain.com
2 - diane2@domain.com
2 - diane3@domain.com
2 - diane4@domain.com
2 - diane5@domain.com
And also, such classics as jsmith@domain.com (and all numbers attached.)
Obviously, they can't afford to do this all of the time, but do it once, and use web bugs to track who opens the message, and boom. Instant verified email addresses.
Re:impssible account names (Score:5, Interesting)
There were of the form (slightly changed to protect the poor accounts)
qris9.4food772a@hotmail.com and
3metre3e4w.pa7@hotmail.com
not the kind of addresses a script could guess by incrementing numbers. I carefully un-checked all the "please let M$ partners spam me" boxes as well. For the first 2 weeks after creating these accounts, not a single message came in. Then they both started getting occasional spam, obviously targeted.
A couple of weeks ago I handed out the first address to a number of people while in Spain, and then checked it regularly from cybercafes around Portugal. Within days it was getting 3-10 portuguese language spams per day. Now it gets about 20 spams per day in various languages, but the second account is still only getting 2-3 per day.
Strange.
the AC
Throwing the baby out ... (Score:3, Interesting)
I use Mail Washer as a pre-processor for my email accounts. It has now turned out to take more time to weed out legitimate messages.
More and more of my legitimate email from distro lists I have subscribed to from cNet, Woody's Windows Watch and even obscure lists such as Amusing Facts Daily now show up in the ORBD and other spam lists it consults.
For instance, just coming back from vacation I had 1200 messages across five accounts. 70% were tagged as spam from a spam list. 20% of those were legitimate distro lists.
The independent spam lists do a good job of catching most of the spam, but it also catches too many legitimate lists. I try to send an email to the list admin letting them know, but typically they respond that it's not worth the effort trying to get off the lists.
I've gone through a something just like it where I was Mudrered Electronically [compunotes.com] by my ISP.
This site [dotcomeon.com] talks about what happens when a legitimate company gets on the list.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm suriprised no one mentions Greg Egan. (Score:5, Interesting)
In one of his short stories, he mentions having a setup where a whitelist of people you know are allowed to send you email for free, and anything else requires a minimum payment (which can be set from 0 to as high as you want). Tired of spam? I wouldn't be, for 25 cents a spam. That'd pad my bank account nicely.
How could it be done? There are already proposed extentsions to the SMTP command set so that clients and servers could agree on an amount and pass a token to each other (be sure you're using a TLS aware MTA, like Postfix [postfix.org]), and it could be verified by both sides with the 3rd-party escrow server (which manages the money). Paypal is the only current online money system with enough momentum to make this work well for everyone, but maybe another one will come up
Either way, it makes it easy to stop spam by removing the one thing that spammers like -- the cheapness. Only people who want spam (haha), or people who don't live in the 21st-century (MTA wise) will have to deal with the 20th century scourge known as spam.
Re:Social and technical measures - automatic fines (Score:2, Interesting)
I would suggest an alternative. I would think a large deposit from any bulk emailers would be in order. For customer who will only send out say 20 emails an hour with at most 10 addresses on each email, a no deposit account would be available. Software will enforce limits. If the customer wants to send more emails to more addresses, then the ISP can have a sliding scale deposit, which will be forfeited if the emails violate the terms of service. Again, I don't know if implementing such a scheme would cost more than makes, but it might stop some spammers. Of course, most ISPs would have to have such a policy for this to be effective.
Re:impssible account names (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: I agree with the original poster (Score:3, Interesting)
How much of the spam in there is actually Hotmail's own fault? Who knows.... We don't really care either. She just deletes everything in it, each time she signs on, after retreiving anything of value buried in all the junk.
Re:Bill Gates - I have the answer! (Score:4, Interesting)
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=ad.law10 .hotmail.com [netcraft.com]
Same for ad.pav0.hotmail.com, law2-ad.hotmail.com, and many others.
Don't fix, what ain't broken - maybe Microsoft understood this rule.
Re:Er... (Score:2, Interesting)
Unlike with snail mail or junk phone calls/faxes where the incremental cost means there is at least some attempt on the senders part to restrict who they send their stuff to. You don't generally get junk telephone calls from half way around the world in an incomprehensible language
My 2 year old HM account is spam free (Score:3, Interesting)
Why is this? Simply because my Hotmail account is the address I give to people and sites I trust (this one for example) that I'm sure won't share it with spammers. My Yahoo acccounts serve the opposite purpose. Whenever I register to some shady looking website that just seems to want to collect names it goes to the Yahoo accounts.
I've said this before: People that sign up for Hotmail and get barraged with spam are either 1) using an easy to guess address or 2) using a numbered extension suggested to them by Hotmail eg Cindy1234567@hotmail.com. It goes to figured that every numbered extension before that is a valid address. Do you think spammers don't realize this?
Anyway, I know that