Good News: A Sustained Drop In Spam Levels 75
Orome1 writes "Industry and government efforts have dealt a significant blow to spam, according to a Commtouch report that is compiled based on an analysis of more than 10 billion transactions handled on a daily basis. The sustained decrease in spam over the last year can be attributed to many factors, including: Botnet takedowns, increased prosecution of spammers and the source industries such as fake pharmaceuticals and replicas. However, spam is still four times the level of legitimate email and cybercriminals are increasing their revenues from other avenues, such as banking fraud malware."
Re:Better Email Blocking (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry, I have to disagree. My oldest _working_ e-mail address is 16 years old. I (obviously) never changed it. Yes, a lot of spam arrives. No, I see no spam there. There have always been ways for geeks to handle spam (more or less) efficiently.
That is so not true. I couldn't even handle it effectively at the enterprise level with the best tools around at one point. Things didn't get better until services like Brightmail came along using dummy addresses and active NOC actively adding rules, etc. Without services like that (in the past) you were screwed. Today, there's enough intelligence built in to handle most of it automatically, but that was so not always the case. It was a huge problem for the (huge) business I was in.
Re:I still get a lot of spam (Score:5, Informative)
What I have found is that after clicking the "unsubscribe me" button on letters I end up getting even more spam from other places. I think they use that as a way to confirm its a real email address to spam you with other junk.
Well, the unsubscribe button works quite well if the email is something you actually subscribed to or it's a company that you purchased something from in the past. For example, Zag sends me about two or three emails a week. I have no problem using the "unsubscribe" button because I actually bought something from them. ProFlowers.com is a notorious spammer if you've ever purchased anything from them. I hit unsubscribe on their emails because I bought something from them. They know my email address is legit. The unsubscribe works in these cases.
However, when someone sends me a viagra or other obvious spam, I simply ignore and delete. Since these people do not know who I am and I did not give them my email address, clicking the unsubscribe button will simply confirm your email address. They are simply throwing stuff against a wall to see what sticks. Don't be that sticky thing.