

Has the Spam War Been Won? - yarapavan
http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/78121-has-the-spam-war-been-won/fulltext

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pg
Unfortunately I think spam must still work, or spammers would have stopped
sending it. They're pretty pragmatic. It wouldn't take more than a couple
months of making no money before they switched to some other racket.

~~~
Niten
Sure, but I think the salient point here is this: we've gotten good enough at
filtering spam that looking through your email inbox is no longer a major
headache. That's how I frame the war on spam, anyway, and in that sense I'd
say we're definitely winning. Maybe not won, but winning.

~~~
pg
I worry that while this is true for us GMail users, it may not be true for
everyone.

Plus GMail is a bit strict. I still get lots of false positives.

~~~
vog
I think the problem is "solved" for non-GMail users, too.

Nowadays, setting up a good spam-protected mail server isn't very
sophisticated anymore.

In our company, I'm running a plain Exim mail server with a SpamAssassin in
almost default configuration and some standard RBLs. Although I have a quite
burned email address, I'm getting just around 5 spam emails per day and false
positives are rare (less than 1 per month, I guess).

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Tichy
I still receive too much spam. Still relying on Thunderbird.

I wonder if Thunderbird's filter has been improved at all lately. Some
possible improvements come to mind. For example it could take into
consideration who is already in my address book. If somebody sends me an email
with only an image and no text, and that someone is not in my address book, it
seems safe to consider it spam.

It should also remember whom I actually sent mails to, and filter all "Unknown
Recipient" mails that I never triggered.

Also, how can emails with "VIAGRA" in the subject pass by the spam filter? It
must have had thousands of opportunities to learn that VIAGRA in emails equals
spam.

Guess I should go find Thunderbird's bug tracker.

~~~
jgrahamc
Viagra != Spam. Ask a pharmacist. And I'm not making that up. Yesterday a
pharmacist's son told me of his father's spam filtering woes.

~~~
Tichy
I took care to write "VIAGRA in emails equals spam", to exclude the case of
real Viagra as being sold in pharmacies. Of course I didn't add "in emails to
me".

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jacquesm
If it's been won and I still receive tons of spam does that mean it has been
won by the spammers?

~~~
prawn
I hear you. Running different filters on each of three accounts and still
received 200 spam that got through in one day.

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beej71
My spam counts for the last couple days (that spamassassin caught), working
backward from today:

554, 481, 489, 901, 1192, 932

So the last couple days have been good, but it's been running about 1K per day
for as long as I can remember.

We have about 55 accounts on this machine. Let's assume most legit mail
doesn't bounce (i.e. human mistakes and misspellings are rare). Grepping for
"user unknown" in the mail log gives about 100,000 matches per day.

In short, the bastards are still hard at work.

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datums
I think it's far from won. While we work on better ways to detect spam and
faster reactive methods. Spammers are doing the same. Writing better virus,
testing better social engineering techniques. It's still very profitable.

"Analysis reveals a surge in spam levels in February to 89.4 percent, an
increase of 5.5 percent since January mostly due to an increase in spam
emanating from the Grum and Rustock botnets. Over the past year, Grum has
experienced relatively little change in spam volumes, but from February 5,
Grum’s output increased by 51 percent making it responsible for 26 percent of
all spam, up from its usual 17 percent.
<http://www.messagelabs.com/resources/press/45666>

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Rauchg
A pretty poor article, considering it's from an acm.org blog. It's 2010, and
his blog post is based only on two studies, one from 2005 and the other from
2008. To explain the two years for which he has no information, he quotes "his
personal experience".

Just a few days ago we read here on HN how _one_ nigerian spammer was netting
40M… (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1174235>). And as it was said in
other comments, if spammers are still sending spam, there has to be a reason.

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jgrahamc
The "I don't see spam in my inbox" argument misses the real great cost of
spam: false positives. Beating spam actually makes the problem worse because
the better filters are the more spammers spam, and the more spam there is in
my spam folder the harder it is to find false positives.

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skalpelis
Aside from your squeaky clean inboxes there is another front in the spam war -
the botnets in which your, your relatives, friends, and colleagues' infected
computers may be participating unknowingly - and in this aspect the situation
is worse than ever.

~~~
loup-vaillant
There is a very easy solution for that: make the ISP block the outbound SMTP
port. This will force spammers to use web-mail, where the mail provider is
better armed to detect spammy accounts. Unfortunately, this would (and does)
tend to centralize the internet further, which is not acceptable.

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Dobbs
I know most people can't use it due to needing email to be instant, but at
least for my personal mail I've found greylisting to work wonders.

What it does is tell the sender that it is busy/something is wrong and to call
back later. It then makes a note of this. When the person calls back it will
then accept the mail and add the address to a whitelist.

This works because most spammers don't use a rfc complaint mail server and
don't care to call back. It is cheaper to just move onto the next target.

~~~
Tichy
I use it and it helped somewhat, but spam still gets through. Also, it can at
best be a temporary solution. It wouldn't be that hard for spammers to upgrade
their mail servers. Meanwhile, I have to live with a delay in receiving emails
caused by greylisting.

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motters
If not won, the advancing spam offensive has at least been held in check and
reduced to a trench warfare activity.

