MSNBC: Offices Remain Spam Free Zones 310
Makarand writes "Thanks to a good job done by the tech staff and filtering software, office
workers in the US are not bothered by spam mail and the value of email
communications has not eroded. A survey conducted by Pew Internet & American
Life Project, whose findings are reported in this article by MSNBC.com, found that spam is certainly a problem for personal email accounts but not
for company provided email accounts. This is contrary to the
perception that American workers are wasting too much time battling spam." YMMV.
I Disagree. (Score:3, Redundant)
Re:I Disagree. (Score:2)
Too bad I cant use mailwasher on exchange.
Re:I Disagree. (Score:5, Informative)
Prove it using sneakemail [sneakemail.com]. It's too late for you to do anything about netop now, but using sneakemail can save you a lot of aggravation since you set up an e-mail address PER mailing list. If you get spam at one of them, you know who sold your address.
Also, don't use your real e-mail address for anything related to comdex!!!!! You will drown under the spam.
Re:I Disagree. (Score:5, Informative)
Use the method I use: Get your own domain name -- they're cheap and worth it for the control you get -- and set the email so that mail sent to undefined addresses forwards to you. Use an external account to read this email, and do *not* give this address to *anybody*. Then, when you sign up for a list at a place like Netop, give them netop@yourdomain.com as your address. Then, any spam you get as a result of them selling your address will be addressed to netop@ your domain, which is quite easy to detect.
This method has other advantages; it makes managing the email lists you are subscribed to easier, for instance. As far as places I have detected mining/address selling, Slashdot is mined quite often (as if it shouldn't be obvious). But the main advantages of this method are that it's easy to set up, requires no effort at all after you get it set up, and if an address at your domain starts getting spam, you can shut it down.
Re:I Disagree. (Score:4, Informative)
As an added bonus, you get to receive 3-4 additional publisher's clearinghouse sweepstakes entries based on the different names.
Re:I Disagree. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I Disagree. (Score:3, Informative)
Wow. That got modded as funny. Funny, yea, I guess, but this happens almost everyday. Not just about lunch. Even true work stuff. What person needs permissions to what project, for instance. It has to go through a couple bosses (Office Space style...) in my company for me to be 'allowed' to re-permission a project (for good reason, sort of, but...), but all I need to know is 3 things:
1) Who
2) What project
3) When
That's it. But 10 or so people feel I need to see every damn mail talking about one tiny aspect of the companies day-to-day operations. Then there's all the "P.S." and "oh by the way" conversations in the mails. I've got to read every damn one incase there's a "something I was thinking about is..." applies to me or not...
Re:I Disagree. (Score:2)
If I could count the number of times I get a useless email from the northern-midwest office about some damned share on a server that causes every one of my users in my office to call me and ask if it affect them (it doesn't.. it doesnt affect anyone but a tiny handful of people...)
the biggest abusers of the cc: or the broadcast groups are the IT people! too lazy to build their own maillists and they dont care if they cause 3 hours of work for every other IT person in the company nation wide.
I agree (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that home users don't have the resources, know-how, or time to work out an effective anti-spam system.
I can't even find a good IMAP spam filter!
Re:I agree (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I agree (Score:5, Informative)
If you have access to the IMAP server, like I do, I recommend using Spamprobe [sourceforge.net]. It's a Bayesian filter and, along with a few procmail filters to weed out Asian spam, my inbox remains pretty clean.
Now, if someone would make a half-decent IMAP *client*
Re:I agree (Score:4, Informative)
I am the reason people here at the office don't have to deal with spam, and I certainly DO spend quite a bit of time fighting it.
On an average day, we accept about 15k e-mails and reject about 20k.
It certainly isn't a matter of the spammers leaving the workplace alone.
YMMV ? (Score:3, Funny)
Simon.
Re:YMMV ? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:YMMV ? (Score:2)
Then, The Jargon Lexicon [tuxedo.org] is for you !
Re:I shall have to report you... (Score:4, Funny)
I don't approve of their methods, so I am a member of the Anti American Association Against Acronym Abuse Alliance Activists (not to be confused with the Anti-American Association Against Acronym Abuse Alliance Activists, some group of Albanians).
Oh great (Score:5, Funny)
--Signature Spam [tilegarden.com]
Or just lack of exposure? (Score:4, Interesting)
In part, certainly, but I wonder how much of the difference is due to the fact that spammers have a harder time getting work addresses. They're a lot less likely to be on public web pages, they're not used in chat rooms and they're much harder to generate by brute force.
Re:Or just lack of exposure? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Or just lack of exposure? (Score:2, Interesting)
Not being a spammer, my reasoning may be wildly off on this, but -- they're trivially guessable in the sense that given an employee name and an employer you can generate the likely email address. If you're a spammer, though, trying to generate a million addresses with a high likelihood of validity, it's a lot easier to iterate from a@aol.com to 9999999@aol.com than it is to permute lists of first names, last names and corporate domains. What's the probability that there's really a franklin.deveraux@tgifridays.com?
That's my reasoning, anyhow...
Re:Or just lack of exposure? (Score:5, Funny)
Finally I just cc'ed mdell@dell.com, and had a phone call within the hour.
Re:Or just lack of exposure? (Score:2, Informative)
I agree with everything else but this.
Most companies I know of use a very simply firstname.lastname@company.com pattern for email addresses. Combine this with relatively easy to get listing of employees, and you have a spammers delight.
Lol, that's how I got the son of Ford! (Score:2, Troll)
It's real easy to tell to because you get
b.ford@ford.com (undeliverable)
bill.ford@ford.com (undeliverable)
william.ford@ford.com (undeliverable)
bford@ford.com (no auto reply so it hit something).
He was real nice though, forwarded my questions to the head of marketing. I was inquiring as to why they don't make a Cobra 2 seater instead of the faster standard mustang body style.
Ford kicks Chevy's ass. GM sucks.
Ford/Jaguar/Volvo/Lincoln/Mazda
Re:Or just lack of exposure? (Score:2)
Lets all post work address books on the *.test newsgroups. Make sure you get those CEO's and VP's too, I bet some nice SPAM laws are passed.
Too bad we cant bounce all those SPAM emails to the *.gov email addresses too.
Re:Or just lack of exposure? (Score:2)
Re:Or just lack of exposure? (Score:2)
Re:Or just lack of exposure? (Score:4, Interesting)
For the most part, I believe Business addresses are easier and more 'enticing' to collect. Every individual has different browsing habits, but for the most part - businesses in particular sectors tend to list themselves in very specific databases, are more likely to have the receptionist or researcher that signs up for mailing lists, and business domains are easier to identify. Some spiders look specifically for "INC." in the whois database - just as google does.
With the companies I am personally involved with, we do not receive Nigerian Scam Emails until we are listed in a business directory - but how can you avoid the publicity business directories offer? It's not easy. Online businesses start receiving resumes around the same time. We received resumes before our home page was complete - people didn't even know what we did as a company, and that's the only way we knew they hadn't, "Been following the progress of our company for some time and [felt] very enthusiastic about working for us". I mean, these are just job-seekers with an automated resume distribution. Imagine if they made money simply by finding us.
I don't want to get into too many details on business address collection techniques - let the spammers brainstorm them all over again. But I am certain the very fact that a business is a business - makes them more enticing to a wider range of higher-priced products and services. The collection of addresses, no matter the problems will be overcome, and in my experience have been overcome.
Spam not a problem... (Score:5, Funny)
Spamassassin at work? (Score:4, Interesting)
I know the reason... (Score:3)
Of course, we all know what this report means: spammers still have left some rocks unturned, and thus there is room to grow even if internet usage stagnates.
Rejoice!
We have no real problem either... (Score:4, Interesting)
At work I use a product which allows me to filter on multiple levels:
1. Allow. If it's on the domain list, IP list, or if the message contains any of the keywords in the list, it's allowed through.
2. IP blacklisting. IP address matches? Delete it.
3. Domain name blacklisting. Domain name matches? Delete it.
4. Content filtering. Meets any of the content filters? Quarantine it.
5. Attachment blocking.
Virus infections in the past year? 0 workstations, 0 servers. Number of spams/day before companywide? Averaged about 800 for 25 users. Now? About 20 for 25 users.
Cost of the product? $1500 for the server license for both products. I'm happy.
-----
Re:We have no real problem either... (Score:5, Interesting)
One more element that is necessary for big companies (not necessarily your 25 user network) is to block off hotmail, yahoo mail, etc. The company I used to work at had more than one thousand people on the corporate network and most of them weren't very smart about how to be safe when using computers. (And because of corporate policy we were forced to use Outlook + MSIE, which is not exactly safe either.)
When your network gets sufficiently big, you WILL have lamers that will infect the whole place from infections they got through hotmail. It doesn't matter how good your filtering is in that case.
When the corporate IT people finally closed off the popular webmail providers, we went from one unleashed virus every 2 weeks to one every 4 months.
$1500? (Score:2)
I'm wondering because that's all stuff that I'm doing currently, but it cost me $0 - all free software, obviously.
Re:We have no real problem either... (Score:2)
Doesnt matter how many spams you get, what about the legitimate emails that you dont get? Whats the signal to noise ratio of deleted emails?
Re:We have no real problem either... (Score:3, Informative)
The only reason we decided to purchase it is because doing something like this ourselves for Exchange was a royal pain in the arse to write. If we ran qmail or something, I'm sure I would've written a collection of scripts to do it.
-----
Too bad for my users! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Too bad for my users! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Too bad for my users! (Score:5, Informative)
If you find that you have a large number of posts that you need removed, I wrote a PHP script called NukePost [shat.net] which will remove huge batches from the Google archive at once. The script simulates a browser session and makes all the required, repetative form posts at Google's controller site for you. All you need are the Message-IDs of the offending posts. I may write a groups.google spider to retrieve those in the future.
In situations where it's obvious that you made the post but you can't qualify for automatic removal, an email to groups-support {at} google should get you taken care of. You need to include a few things in your message, details are here [google.com].
I've heard rumors that Google maintains a separate usenet archive for paying customers (i.e. governments, corporations) to browse, which does not honor the removal requests or the X-No-Archive header - though I have absolutely nothing to back that up with - so it's possible that nuking posts is a futile effort. It should keep the cheap spammers away, at least.
Shaun
PHPLabs Supersite [phplabs.com]
Is it really the filters? (Score:5, Insightful)
Contrariwise, I wouldn't be surprised if there are people who get tons of e-mail at the office.
--Jim
No problem at work for me. (Score:2)
Hotmail accounts on the other hand, my username is not easily guessable, but I received 47 spams and 1 legitmate message in the past 24 hours in my inbox while 9 spams were redirected to the junk mail folder along with 2 legitimate messages.
I wonder if the filters that are used by corporate America could be used by Hotmail, actually I wonder why they are not.
Re:No problem at work for me. (Score:3, Interesting)
I ditched Hotmail shortly after that.
I wonder if the filters that are used by corporate America could be used by Hotmail, actually I wonder why they are not.
Because Microsoft caters to internet advertising companies. Internet Explorer alone can tell you that. I wouldn't be surprised if MS left Hotmail open to spam on purpose, while pocketing a few extra bucks from spam kings.
Ok... (Score:5, Insightful)
I work for a major computer manufacturer (I'll give you a hint, we are again number one in personal PC sales), and I never see spam at work.
But how much money does my company pay a year for me to not see spam?
Re:Ok... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Ok... (Score:2)
Casio? [casio.com]
How much does your company pay? Why didn't this survey ask? You could poll 99 office workers and one IT peon to produce the impression that only 1% of workers have any signicant problem with spam.
Re:Ok... (Score:2)
Re:Ok... (Score:2)
I keep thinking if I say certain ridiculous things, no one could possibly think I'm that stupid. However, given some people here, perhaps they could.
Do ask the guardians of your gate to the internet whether they are filtering. Companies vary a lot on this.
Spam proportional to public postings... (Score:2)
Spam is still a problem at work... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because of the domains. (Score:2)
At work, I get a different kind of SPAM (Score:5, Funny)
DILBERT:
Panel 1:
To: All Users
From: Network Admin
Please refrain from frivolous E-mail. It bogs down
the network.
Panel 2:
To: Network Admin
From: Dilbert
cc: All Users
I agree.
Panel 3:
Dilbert says, "Have you noticed there's too much
communication in the world, Dogbert?"
Dogbert says, "Yeah, every day at about this time."
Work misuse? (Score:2)
At home, hey, we live closer to the edge. But I object to the stereotype of home users just not knowing how to deal with spam, like it's their fault. Perhasps they should be more careful, but nothing about being carelss makes one "deserve" spam (or fill in crime of your choice). It takes nontrivial sophistication to filter, and anyway stuff gets through. The filters are getting smarter, which is like building stronger locks to keep burglars out, rather than stopping the burglars from trying. Not that spam is anything but wonderful (someone here will say it is); how dare I imply it should be illegal.
Besides, spam can only grow -- it's not going away on its own.
i disagree (Score:5, Funny)
Re:i disagree (Score:4, Funny)
My experience (Score:4, Interesting)
Similarly, I currently have an email account with my university, but I use it almost exclusively for academic-related communications, and I've not received one spam email at that address in over a year now. And, I doubt the university has invested much money in spam filters for student email accounts.
ms? (Score:2)
It's getting worse.... (Score:2)
Could have fooled me (Score:2)
My home machine running spam assasin on the other hand never fails to recognize spam.
Re:Could have fooled me (Score:2)
Damn, a 50% kill rate is not good enough to qualify your spam filtering as competent! Blame your IT people!
Get rid of spam free and easy : use POPFILE (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Get rid of spam free and easy : use POPFILE (Score:3, Informative)
Also, I caught it marking two messages from my ISP as spam, but they were both advertisements; so I'm not concerned, in a sense it got it right.
Incidentally, my ISP has spam filtering as well, since I've switched it on a few weeks ago, it has only caught 2 spam message out of several hundred that were caught by popfile(!)
I don't know what's worse.... (Score:3, Insightful)
In addition, far too many people where I work will email a subject to death. Coupled with a large CC: to population along with the "reply to all button" some subjects just won't die the undignified death they deserve. And, you have to read every one because of the odd one that may contain useful information.
I swear, what once took a 1 minute phone call to resolve now results in 20-30 emails back and forth. The only good thing I see is the CYA factor. I've saved my butt a couple of times being able to forward a message that I sent long ago, that apparently was never read. Why wasn't it read? Must have been deleted with along with the spam!
Seriously though, I spend far too much time wading through needless email at work than I do spam.
Home users simply don't care (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Home users simply don't care (Score:2)
There may be no chance of not receiving the good stuff, but once you start getting a substantial spam load, there'll be an appreciable chance that you'll accidentally delete something you want. If you're getting 50 spams a day, you get in the habit of hitting the DEL key really quickly -- and some of those things you delete wouldn't really be spam.
There aren't any perfect filters, not even your own eyeballs.
how do they get hotmail addresses? (Score:2)
Re:how do they get hotmail addresses? (Score:3, Insightful)
Does hotmail sell lists?"
I wouldn't put it past them.
"Or are there people and bots that just put together random strings of possible user names?"
For sure. There are enough usernames on hotmail to make it worthwhile.
"Does hotmail try to filter these"
Unlikely. This spam makes you more likely to either leave or pay for a bigger inbox so your messages are not auto-deleted to make room for more spam. Either way, MSFT makes money.
Re:how do they get hotmail addresses? (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree though, I get spam on the hotmail, although I have only given to a few friends(7) and never used it any where else, total email from friends is like 1 msg/month or less, because most send it to my yahoo account. Now yahoo, I have an account that I haven't really used that my friends now and it gets no spam messages.
Course right now biggest problem with hotmail is that I can't use my unaltered last name with it, "Glasscock", tells me to use a different one or something... ("Glassc0ck" works but it bugs me that their filter on words won't let me use it unaltered. Anybody else with real names that hotmail doesn't like?)
spamcop.net is pretty good (Score:5, Informative)
Unless a company makes a best effort to protect people from exposure to offensive material (as defined by them, within reason), the company could be sued by the employee for creating a hostile workplace. While I haven't heard of cases of this yet, it's only a matter of time. (I hope I didn't give anyone any ideas here...)
We've been experimenting with spamassassin [spamassassin.org], and it's roughly as good as spamcop (as to how much spam gets through to the end user), but it's free. Note: spamcop and spamassassin have to completely different approaches to determining what is spam.
Easier fix (Score:4, Interesting)
The obvious solution would be to not use an HTML "enabled" mail reader...
Don't you mean easy out? (Score:2)
Re:Easier fix (Score:2, Informative)
Blowing the curve again! (Score:2)
Over the course of this weekend, my work email will have received over 50.
A quick googling shows my personal email address showing up twice as often as my work address.
Why, then, do I get so much less spam at home than work? Because the ISP I use is very aggressive about filtering spam, while the IT department at work is deeply fearful that "We might accidently filter a million dollar order" (yah, like anybody ordering a million bucks of stuff will do it SOLELY through email).
True, the above is nothing but a datum, not refutation, but still, the idea that "work gets less spam than home" is not ALWAYS true.
I disagree, also (Score:2)
Also, don't forget the cost, albeit small, associated with missed mail that was flagged as a false postive.
All @ company (Score:2)
There's still a cost (Score:4, Insightful)
These are just a few of the obvious costs related to keeping spam out of user mailboxes. It would probably boggle the mind to know the actual cost of keeping spam out of Suzy or Sammy Secretary's mailbox.
Can't get too much spam if nobody can USE it.. (Score:2)
Personal emails at work were *STRONGLY* discouraged, and it was made clear that the company would read our emails if they ever felt like it.
I never used my work email address for anything. I'd say that 90% of the email I *did* get was company related stuff anyway, which went right into the trash can.
Re:Can't get too much spam if nobody can USE it.. (Score:2)
The previous employer has a stock symbol of AWE - take a look.
That has nothing to do with mail filtering (Score:2)
I have lots of friends who post messages on the Usenet using their corporate email accounts. Guess the result? Lots and lots of SPAM.
YHGTBK! (Score:2)
It's all my work's fault, of course. They inadvertently left an open relay in place long enough for us to get blacklisted by the good guys and primelisted by all the bad guys. It's fixed now, but damn! I get about 50 to 100 a day.
losing legit email because of spam filtering s/w?? (Score:5, Informative)
what i really wonder though is how many legitimate (non-spams) emails i never receive because of filtering software! i frequently get email or calls from people who claim they sent email that i never received. i also frequently get mailing list bounce warning emails (primarily from securityfocus lists though) claiming that emails sent to me are bouncing. hrm
Re:losing legit email because of spam filtering s/ (Score:2)
That is how the spam war will end: The spammers will become sophisticated enough that no matter what we do, any filter we try to use will result in too many false positives (falsely labelled "spam") to be of any use.
(False positives, of the four possible outcomes, are by far the worst, if you think about it.)
Spam is only going to get worse.
Re:losing legit email because of spam filtering s/ (Score:3, Interesting)
At this point people will most probably switch to whitelists or somesort, however I had a horrible thought once when thinking about this.
<horrible_thought>
Another approach other than a whitelist is to include a signature like PGP in the email. This could be placed in the headers of the mail and attached by the mail client. Mail servers could have an option to check these signatures automatically, or the signature can be checked by the recieving mail client at the expense of a bit more bandwidth. Once the clients can transparently sign and verify messages this means that a user can choose to only to accept signed messages (i.e. I don't add you to a whitelist but you need a valid key). These keys need to be managed by some central authority which revokes keys if they are found to be used by spam, therefy causing all the messages sent to be useless.
My horrible thought is that MS is in the best position to offer this becasue of the Outlook/Hotmail dominance. They would call it their spam inititive and ship all updates to outlook with this feature, the next update when the feature is widespread would auto-enable the feature. This would block out most mail to and from non MS agents in the name of fighting SPAM.
</horrible_thought>
Re:losing legit email because of spam filtering s/ (Score:2)
No spam filtering in terms of what most people mean, but it turns out that unless you have a lot of people emailing you out of the blue (tech support, maybe an Open Source project lead), this means that around 90%-95% of the stuff that *isn't* filtered into a folder is spam, and the percentage is going up every week. That's for my personal account, which is less focused then the average work account, where I think your numbers would hold.
This can't be perfect, but it also can't be fooled or defeated in the general case. It's a hell of a lot less sexy then the latest Bayesian filters, but in another six months, the whitelists will work better.
spamassassin, and a responsible email client. (Score:2)
It depends (Score:2)
Re:It depends (Score:2)
Spam costs the company ALOT more than the software and the 3 fulltime people when all the other stuff is added up...
It's spam, spam, spam, spam and spam for me (Score:2)
Fortunately, I use filters which catch 90% of the 25 or so daily spams.
As comparative data points, my home email (freely used in Usenet, etc) gets about 50+ spam per day, but as I use POBox.com [pobox.com], they kill 75% at the server, and another 20% gets forwarded with a spam tag, to get binned at my home PC.
Oh, and my Hotmail address (an obvious [firstname]_[lastname]) gets almost zero spam, filtered or unfiltered - I think I get more messages from M$ than junk (well, non-M$ junk anyway!)
This article is way off (Score:2, Insightful)
But virus emails more than make up for that (Score:2, Insightful)
We get our share of "You've been accepted!" but more common by far is "Japanese lass' sexy pictures" and "A very powful tool" - you know the drill. Our IT people's idea of security is forbidding accessing personal email accounts on the Web.
I'd trade virus emails (which crash Outlook even when you're running VirusScan or similar) for spam any day.
Not my mileage unfortunately ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Somehow, people don't seem to get the message.
While these occurrences are not common, they generate a huge amount of email.
They also generate a large number of clueless replies from people, asking to be taken off internal mailing lists that have been spammed, or back to the person whose addressbook has been compromised asking them to stop sending messages!
It all comes back to education in my opinion
Sendmail + Trend Micro VirusWall + Trend eManager! (Score:4, Informative)
1) Ingress spam & virus filtration;
2) LDAP directory integration;
3) Message address rewriting on ingress & egress.
See, I was tasked with this when our company merged with 3 other ones, so we had a mess of Exchange and Notes servers out there. The idea was for me (your friendly local Unix sysadmin) to build a single ingress/egress point (my boxes) while the NT admins rebuilt all the exchange & notes servers into one coherent infrastructure. (That's a lot of work with ~40,000 employees!)
Anywho, the way I did it was to install a pair of Sun boxes in our DMZ with Trend Micro VirusWall on it, as well as their eManager product. That handles our ingress spam & virus filtration. That product proxies an inbound connection on port 25 to another pair of Sun boxen that run Sendmail gateways, which, thanks to some custom rules, do the LDAP lookups & address translations.
So we have multiple levels of SPAM & virus filtration -- the Trend stuff is very simplistic, crappy, relatively undocumented code, and works exactly as designed. As much as it looks amateurish to me, I can't help but to recommend it because it Just Freakin' Works. Also, if you're a big enough fish, the folks at Trend are incredibly friendly & helpful -- several of our suggestions made it into the product.
Someone high-up in our organization decided after Nimda and Code Red that all inbound messages with attachments should be quarantined for an hour, because Trend promised virus pattern updates within an hour after a virus outbreak. We were able to graft that on using some shell scripts. Works just peachy.
Between Trend Micro & Sendmail, we've got a GREAT solution that gives us plenty of filters. We have all the spam & anti-virus filters using Trend, and can block or redirect by domain using a mailertable with Sendmail. Also, the LDAP support in Sendmail wasn't very good when we started integrating that (8.10 was the first usable LDAP release), but by 8.12, it works great. We redirect the message internal to the company based on what's in LDAP, and it works flawlessly for ~1 million messages/day.
Tastes great, less filling. And mostly free software (Sendmail was free, as was the Directory Server, since that license comes with Solaris.) All we paid for was the Trend Micro stuff, which we had a site license for anyway since we use it on the Exchange servers as well.
So yeah, I'd have to agree that SPAM isn't NEARLY the problem at work that it is at home. Also, since we got the Exchange servers out of the SMTP business and "just" for mailboxes, we haven't had a virus outbreak since. Lovely!
--NBVB
Re:big fish (Score:5, Interesting)
I get all of my spams on my corporate account. I've had it for 6 years, so there's been time for the spammers to find it. Not to mention the marketing folks sign me up for all sorts of trade shows and I get targeted spams.
I've pointed our IT folks to SpamAssasin (which, coincidentally, was written by one of the former IT guys at my company!) but they won't use it as is because they're afraid there's a chance we could lose a single valid email. So I just run an individual version from DeerSoft in my Outlook client.
Interestingly about 90% of my spams are to an email address which has never even been VALID for me at the company, but when we switched to Exchange they entered about 40 different email addresses for me consisting of all sorts of permutations of my name and initials and lots of THOSE get spam. I need to configure my spam blocker to block the one offending recipient... gotta remember next time I'm in the office.
Re:big fish (Score:2, Informative)
Though we might not care about what trouble other countries are in, but consider them as part of the commerce sector, and consider spam servers are mostly located in other countries.
Re:big fish (Score:2)
Don't worry. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Our Company (Score:2)
Or, perhaps, their work-related purposes include having their email address posted publicly to a web page or newsgroup. Or perhaps their email addresses are just easier for the spambots to guess.
Re:Yea, yea... (Score:5, Informative)
Deersoft.com [deersoft.com]
Re:ironic isn't it (Score:2)
Stanley Feinbaum, professional journalist. I have no tolerance for bad journalism!
Isn't there a principle in good journalism which states that you should report a story without regard for your personal biasses?
I won't try to claim that slashdot is good journalism, but it seems rather peculiar that someone who claims in his
Re:spam / snail spam debate (Score:2)
Snail mail spam is paid for by the sender. The content of snail mail spam is regulated by the FTC under certain guidelines. The postoffice is getting paid to deliver it.
Re:spam / snail spam debate (Score:3, Insightful)
Get real man. Show me how many of the spam whiners are paying per byte. Show me how the cost of their email account or internet service would be less because of spam.
Re:Wow. (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally, I loathe advertising. Spam is just another form of that. Filtering out all that trash bothers me a *lot*.
And yes, it is expensive. My parents live in South Africa, downloading their email through a little 56K modem (which rarely hits over 9600, thanks to the lousy ISP). They pay per KB and per minute. Think they don't mind "just pressing delete"?
I'm lucky - I sit in Germany with an unlimited DSL line - and it *still* bothers me. Spam is on the verge of making my accounts unusable.
Bah. You sound a little like that idiot I read who called himself "all-american free-speech spammer".
Ciao,
Klaus