Spam and Fighting It...
The question many ask: What does spam need to flourish?
Email is one of the most valuable tools of the day due to its simplicity and relative cheapness. Anyone can use it, and anyone can send mail to anyone else with no problems whatsoever.
These reasons are some of many that spam now flourishes in today's world. Spammers can also set up a pretty elaborate "spamming station" for a small amount of money ? at least considering the rewards they can reap from mass-spamming.
So should we be thinking about a new way of thinking about email, and hence a new way of writing to each other in such a way that email is as simple as it is today, yet not vulnerable to spamming tactics? i.e. Take a step forward, and close and lock the door behind you ? a brand new electronic mail protocol.
PGP exists, but is this foolproof, or is something else entirely different yet still the same in functionality in need? For example, the new way of thinking of computing when GUIs came into use 20 years ago, after typing at a prompt... m.
Email is one of the most valuable tools of the day due to its simplicity and relative cheapness. Anyone can use it, and anyone can send mail to anyone else with no problems whatsoever.
These reasons are some of many that spam now flourishes in today's world. Spammers can also set up a pretty elaborate "spamming station" for a small amount of money ? at least considering the rewards they can reap from mass-spamming.
So should we be thinking about a new way of thinking about email, and hence a new way of writing to each other in such a way that email is as simple as it is today, yet not vulnerable to spamming tactics? i.e. Take a step forward, and close and lock the door behind you ? a brand new electronic mail protocol.
PGP exists, but is this foolproof, or is something else entirely different yet still the same in functionality in need? For example, the new way of thinking of computing when GUIs came into use 20 years ago, after typing at a prompt... m.
Comments
Originally posted by segovius
Obviously some people do. Millions of people. If it didn't work then the Spammers wouldn't do it.
And it's these people along with the spammers who ruin it for everyone else. Curssse them! m.
dammit!
p.s. it was one of those god-awful "delivery-status failure notification" emails, where you think it might be an email you sent getting bounced, but when you open it, it turns out to be spam for viagra.
How spammers get your address...
1: Chat rooms (AOL etc.) spammers look for lists of chatters names and add @aol.com etc. to all names.
2: Questionares, mailing lists, address data bases etc.
3: Spammers have software that scans Websites for e-mail addresses.
Ways to avoid spam...
1: Never reply to spam, don't buy anything they offer and don't click through to any link in the text of the e-mail you receive from them.
2: Use an alias or open a secondary, free Hotmail/Yahoo account to use when replying to companies, questionares etc.
3: If you have a Web site, don't post your primary e-mail address to it.
Originally posted by rok
i got my first ever piece of spam to my .mac email account yesterday. no idea how anyone got that address, as i only give out my address to supposedly secure third parties and always say "do not sell my address." which means either someone changed a service agreement on me without telling me, or someone lied to me.
Not necessarily. The domain "mac.com" is well known, and there are spam programs that will patiently generate millions of permutations of names, attach known domains, and not care one bit about all of the bad, undeliverable mail generated so long as a few messages get through.
There are other possible explanations as well, such as having your e-mail address harvested by some sort of trojan horse program stealing addresses from a computer belonging to someone you've done business with.
I'm not saying that someone wasn't dishonest with you about keeping your e-mail private -- there's a good chance of that too -- just that it's not the only explanation.
Originally posted by MiMac
Ways to avoid spam...
1: Never reply to spam, don't buy anything they offer and don't click through to any link in the text of the e-mail you receive from them.
2: Use an alias or open a secondary, free Hotmail/Yahoo account to use when replying to companies, questionares etc.
3: If you have a Web site, don't post your primary e-mail address to it.
Also, if your e-mail program has the option, turn off the viewing of pictures and other embedded HTML objects. (In Mail.app, Mail->Preferences->Viewing->uncheck "Display images and embedded objects in HTML messages"
Why is this a problem? Consider this basic HTML for showing a picture:
<img src="http://www.foo.com/bar.jpg">;
To show this picture, your computer has to contact a remote server to get the picture content. In other words, there's a clear signal that the e-mail is being viewed. Modify the above HTML like this:
<img src="http://www.foo.com/bar.jpg?id=dg4ad43122d">;
...and now, along with the request for the image, a code is sent to the remote server which tells that server who is viewing the e-mail. The code is associated with the e-mail address that was used to spam you, and once you've viewed the image, the spammer knows that the e-mail address he used to reach you worked, and that he got you to look at his message.
So, merely seeing a message in a preview pane, never having replied to it or clicked on any links, is enough to encourage more spam.
Originally posted by segovius
Surely it flourishes because it works. Why it works God only knows - 99% of the Spam I get I wouldn't touch the company even if I wanted what they were selling. No way.
it works the same way outlook viruses work... there's one idiot in your company who thinks that one of his friends sent him a naked picture of anna kournikova, and that opening it on his work computer is a good idea.
spammers just play the odds that there is at least one really stupid person in every company or household.