

Global spam e-mail levels suddenly fall - baha_man
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12126880

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kijinbear
Maybe a lot of people bought new PCs for the holiday season, crippling the
botnets that used to rely on older (less secure) versions of Windows?

~~~
Waywocket
It's not as sudden as that.

For reference, I admin a mail server for a small charitable organisation, and
our mail graph for the last year looks like this:

<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4957647/mailstats/mail.png>

<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4957647/mailstats/rejected.png>

Where the grey is spam filtered by spamassassin and the red is obviously spam
rejected outright due to an invalid recipient or an impossible sender or
whatever.

The previous year's trend looked sort of similar - I think 2007 or 2008 was
the peak in terms of spam we receive and it's been declining on average since
then.

~~~
eru
Thanks for showing some actual data.

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mootothemax
I have noticed an absolutely huge decrease in the amount of spam arriving at
my main domain. Right now I'm receiving 15-20 spams a day, which is a tenfold
reduction. My domain's hosted by Google, and the decrease has been so
noticeable that I have an entry on my to-do list to start hunting through
GMail's help and blogs to see if they've implemented something new. It looks
like I've found my answer!

~~~
camiller
Yeah, I noticed the same, not on my own domain but on my gmail account. Since
old spam is auto deleted from the spam folder at 60 days age the counter next
to the folder is a good proxy of a 60-day moving average. A couple years ago
mine was close to 10,000 spams for 60 days, currently it is at 1,444 (which is
up from a week or two ago when it was at 1,310).

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tomjen3
Any chance that someone has started to terminate the botnet owners, rather
than the botnets themselves?

~~~
asolove
This would explain the "Became a Gmail Ninja" marketing:
www.google.com/mail/help/tips.html

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tomrod
Because the resources are now dedicated to SEO?

~~~
stcredzero
What people don't like to admit about spam, is that it created value for
somebody. This is why some people clicked on the ads and why others profited.

SEO Spam creates value. Unfortunately, it also degrades value for a great many
others. There is opportunity here. Google or some other search engine needs to
figure out how to capture the value in SEO spam. (Perhaps by finding a way to
identify "original pages" like those on StackOverflow and then act to enforce
their terms of service?)

~~~
derleth
> What people don't like to admit about spam, is that it created value for
> somebody. This is why some people clicked on the ads and why others
> profited.

By this same logic, you can justify the heroin trade, the slave trade, and the
child pornography trade.

~~~
tomrod
Yaye for libertarianism! Oh wait, these things are a net-negative for society
and those involved. Never mind, argument is null.

~~~
jokermatt999
Obvious trolling, but the slave trade and child pornography probably wouldn't
be down with most libertarian principles. The core I've seen from most
libertarian folks is "Do what you want to yourself, but don't harm other
people." Slavery and child pornography are fairly obviously harming others.
Heroin is trickier.

~~~
tomrod
Agreed

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vijaykotari
Perhaps, the Daemon(<http://thedaemon.com>) has been activated?

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pmichaud
Weird, I've started getting more spam in my inbox than ever before. My gmail
used to be entirely clean, and now I get a few messages daily that sneak past
the filter.

~~~
DarthShrine
I've noticed this too, with spam that doesn't look too different from the
usual.

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misterbwong
I wonder if the rise of gmail's (and other) spam filtering has made the
practice of email spamming less lucrative and thus less popular among the
spamming folks.

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mkramlich
Could also be a side effect of government efforts to close any security holes
that have been or might be used by Wikileaks. Wouldn't have to be limited to
US govt, could be others too. All speculation until more evidence comes to
light.

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dedward
Looking at some mailserver spam filtering log.... spam levels have
dramatically dropped, but they also dramatically rose before that. At this
point what I'm looking at is only slightly lower than things were in early
december.

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ez77
Once enough people have switched to Facebook as their main means of digital
communication, the spammers will finally give the rest of us a break.

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AlexC04
Is it a sure sign of the effect hacker news has had on me that my first
thought was "ooo... a hole in the market, I wonder if I could write something
to fill that niche"

Meh - spam email has too many legal headaches. I'm sure you can make money
doing it, but I tend to think it's a bit more trouble than it's worth.

