Are Spammers Giving Up?

sfjoe writes "Are spammers giving up the game? Google seems to think so. In an article at Wired, Google, '... says that spam attempts, as a percentage of e-mail that's transmitted through its Gmail system, have waned over the last year'. They think their own filters are so good that spammers aren't even trying anymore. 'Other experts disagree with Google, pointing out that overall spam attempts continue to rise. By most estimates, tens of billions of spam messages are sent daily. Yet for most users, the amount of spam arriving in their inboxes has remained relatively flat, thanks to improved filtering.'"

For Serious?

[mashade (912744)]

All one has to do is glance at a mail log to see that no, in fact, spammers are not giving up. This one does not require reading tfa.

Re:For Serious?

[explosivejared (1186049)]

I wouldn't be so sure. I did feel the ground get a bit cooler. As if something just froze over. However, it could just be my imagination. ... Oh yeah, It's just my imagination!

If they give up

[Jeremiah Cornelius (137)]

will she still love you more than any other guy? Or will your short and flaccid member be the shame you bear?

Re:

[Kozar_The_Malignant (738483)]

Lacking mod points today, I can't counteract the -1 Flamebait mod. However, I would like to point out that the parent was intended to be a humourous [wikipedia.org] or satirical [wikipedia.org] parody [wikipedia.org] of a common form of spam. Get a grip folks, or is your member to flaccid to grip at all? Sheesh!

Re:If they give up

[Dishevel (1105119)]

So...You Read the spam you get?

Re:For Serious?

[coldmist (154493)]

Like anyone on Slashdot reads tfa... ;)

Re:For Serious?

[timeOday (582209)]

Wrong, because the issue is not whether all spammers have quit (they haven't), but whether there is a decrease.

Re:For Serious?

[MenTaLguY (5483)]

What I've heard from other sources is that there isn't a decrease, either. It may be that spammers are avoiding gmail specifically.

Re:For Serious?

[Dan Ost (415913)]

In that case, expect to see more people using gmail in the future.

Re:For Serious?

[TubeSteak (669689)]

A closer reading of TFA suggests another interpretation.

spam attempts, as a percentage of e-mail that's transmitted through its Gmail system, have waned over the last year.

If the volume of legitimate mail increases more than spam mail, you'll see a "decrease" in spam as a percentage.

If the volume of spam grew at X.2% compared to last year's growth of X.9%, that doesn't mean the volume of spam is going down. Hell, one way or another, the volume of spam as a percentage has to go down. It's hard to keep up a healthy growth rate once you've 10 billion a year.

Lies, damn lies and statistics.

Re:For Serious?

[Mike Buddha (10734)]

I moved my email domain to Google Mail for Domains a few years back. I've notice a great reduction in the amount of Spam I get now, anecdotally. When I first moved my domain over there, I was averaging 900-1000 spam in the folder on a regular basis. I'm now getting roughly half that. It's amusing because now the only spam that gets through to my inbox is so convoluted that I can't tell what it is they're trying to sell.

Official Google Blog

[freastro (1103067)]

According to the Official Google Blog [blogspot.com], there has been little decrease in spam, except for the amount in users' inboxes.

Re:Hmm, the spammers still like me.

[phoenix321 (734987)]

Google may do all kinds of malicious things, but disclosing your email adress to anyone is not on that list, ever. It would be trivial as you point out to prove that Google sells this kind of information, so it's almost guaranteed it's going to be publicized. And then the public would burn Google at the stake, as slow and painful as possible.

No, I don't think spammers are doing that. First, it's probably been guessed by dictionary attacks. Botnets should have the CPU time they need to exhaust the search space up to a dozen characters. (Remember: email is case insensitive and restricted to standard english alphanumeric characters plus a handful others. This is no NSA-safe keyspace.) And second, they probably obtained a list from somewhere. Some inbox on some PC that was rootkitted or an entry in a not-negative list that some other spammer sold them. (Remember: all adresses that do not bounce are valid mailboxes.)

Re:gmail spam

[HTH NE1 (675604)]

Some spammers will stoop to signing up for shell accounts at ISPs to harvest e-mail addresses. A lot of information can be learned just with that access. Not just compiling the results of ls ~/.. to a host name, but also harvesting cat ~/../*/.forward. The contents of a .forward file can also be disclosed via finger if your host still allows outside access.

It could also be that a relay between your mail server and gmail may be snooping on e-mail packets looking for active addresses @gmail and selling them to spammers.

Hopefully they're finally getting...

[by Anonymous Coward]

...all that cancer I've wished upon them.

My Experience

[bizitch (546406)]

Gmail completely rocks!

Spam detection has got to be something like 99.999% accurate

I sometimes get the occasional Nigerian scam letters - but thats it

Re:

[edwardpickman (965122)]

Spam detection has got to be something like 99.999% accurate

So given the volume of spam what do you get, 200 or 300 a day?

Re:

[[e-mail] (18794)]

Gmail freaking sucks. I get several spams TO MY INBOX every day. Frequently in some foreign language. There are 25 messages in my spam folder, and 5 in my inbox which are clearly spam just since midnight.

Google is wrong both about spammers giving up and about the awsomeness of their filters.

I'm not sure what my company uses, but Google should invest in that product... My corporate email has been listed on the interwebs for 10 years, and I MAY get a spam once a week, and usually that only gets to the blac

Re:

[cmseagle (1195671)]

Subscribing to too many free porn websites are we?

Re:

[gvc (167165)]

"Spam detection has got to be something like 99.999% accurate"

Nonsense. 99.999% is one error in 100,000 emails. Have you even received 100,000 emails? Have you checked every one to see if the filter made at most one mistake? Have you repeated the measurement several dozen times, as would be necessary to make such a claim? Of course not.

I would be surprised if the filter you are using (including Gmail) is 99% accurate.

Here are some accuracy figures under ideal conditions [nist.gov]. From side-by-side comparisons

Re:My Experience

[nuzak (959558)]

Hormel has been very cool about the whole "spam" label. I know, if they were to fight it now, they'd lose, but they didn't fight it even when there were commercial "Anti-Spam" products just hitting the market.

All they ask is one thing: that you not spell it in ALL-CAPS when referencing the email variety of spam. That's still their trademark. And I don't think it's too much to ask.

Re:My Experience

[nuzak (959558)]

I suspect they're doing it to be cute, and it's probably just recipes contributed by google employees. Here's the link to Hormel's take on it: http://www.spam.com/legal/spam/ [spam.com]

I've noticed...

[coldmist (154493)]

that over the past few months, I've been getting a lot more spam mail through my ISP's filter, *and* through Thunderbird's filter. Those random words sprinkled throughout the message is even getting it past the Bayesian filtering now.

It seems that have it figured out pretty good to me.

Re:

[TimeTraveler1884 (832874)]

Those random words sprinkled throughout the message is even getting it past the Bayesian filtering now.

It's a tactic called Bayesian Poisoning [wikipedia.org].

Re:

[fredklein (532096)]

My question is: Why are spammers doing things like that? I mean, here you have a person who obviously does not want spam, and has specifically set up a filter that will not just filter out spam, but will actually LEARN about new types of spam in order to filter then out, too.

Does this sound like a person who will buy your crap? Why try so hard to get around filters in order to reach people who are obviously not going to buy anything from you?

Re:

[Skim123 (3322)]

They are not trying to sneak around the Bayesian Filter you have installed on your machine, because, like you said, someone who has gone that far is clearly not going to get lured by spam. They are targeting the ISP's spam filters, so that the spam gets past their filters and into your grandma's Inbox.

Re:I've noticed...

[Skim123 (3322)]

But, again, it's obvious that 'granny' doesn't want the spam if she specifically signed up with an ISP that uses Bayesian Filters.

How do you know that granny chose one ISP over another based on their spam filtering policies. Perhaps she chose the ISP that was listed first in the Yellow Pages, or the one that Carlos, the Cuban pool boy, recommended. And maybe those 'm@k3 Ur M3mBer B1gg3r' spams do catch granny's eye, and she forwards them on to Carlos.

Yahoo

[tmarthal (998456)]

I have no other experience with hotmail, but my free webmail experience has consisted of Yahoo! and Gmail.

Let me tell you, Yahoo!'s spam rate has not improved. I am not sure if their filter isn't as good, or they are just taking money from the wrong people, but I get at least one spam message make it into my inbox per day, maybe 2-3. Oftentimes, the spamming links back to a geocities.com page. Coincidence? I don't know.

With Gmail, I get one spam message per month (maybe) make it into my inbox. They are so rare, its comforting. And since they are so few and far between, I actually use the 'Report Spam' option, because it looks like get this that their filters are actually updated with my input, and I don't see spam of that same type ever again.

This is different from Yahoo, I report spam all the time and yet the same exact message types make it past the filters into my inbox. I even report phishing there, but that doesnt' seem to help.

Can anyone with internal Yahoo webmail operation shed some light into what they actually do with user input? It would be nice to know that someone, somewhere (or at least a script) is using my button clicking for input.

Re:

[KillerBob (217953)]

Last time I used a free webmail was back before Microsoft owned Hotmail... that said, I do operate a mail server with webmail services for my users. I have a very low spam rate. Most don't make it into my inbox... maybe one or two a week that are false negatives and it's been over a month since my last false positive. Here's how I do it:

Rule #1: Every user has the ability to set their own antispam sensitivity. Mine is set to 1.5 on SpamAssassin.
Rule #2: Every user has two folders: "Spam-Bin" and "False-Posi

Spammers give up? Not likely

[damn_registrars (1103043)]

They won't give up as long as there's a monetary incentive for them to send out spam. As long as they can sell something through spam, they will continue to send it out. We can talk about how wonderful filter ABC is, and compare it endlessly for false positives against filter XYZ. But in the end, its just a matter of time until the spammers defeat both of them, and we're on to filter ABC version 2.

So no, in the end, nothing that most people are doing will do squat to bring about the end of spam. You can filter until you're blue in the face, and spam will still be sent. You can shut down all your mailboxes and open a new gmail address every week, and you'll still get spammed.

Spam is sent because spammers can make money by sending it. Period.

Re:

[CodeBuster (516420)]

But in the end, its just a matter of time until the spammers defeat both of them, and we're on to filter ABC version 2.

Among the many useful techniques which have been brought to bear against spam from the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the notion of spam as an adversarial game between an intelligent agent (i.e. the filter) and the spammer(s). When this is combined with other AI techniques, such as Bayesian [slashdot.org] or Neural [wikipedia.org] network machine learning type algorithms, the filters become very powerful in

I have certainly seen less

[sgeye (757198)]

I manage the spam firewall where I work, and I have seen a significant drop this month vs last month. In October we processed 20,000-30,000 emails a day, averaging near 25,000. In the month of November, we have only exceeded 20,000 in a day once, with most days falling short of 15,000. This months average is closer to what it was during the summer, we had seen the increase to around 25,000/day during August/September.

I have NOT seen less

[Pontiac (135778)]

I manage the spam firewalls where I work and track spam statistics every week,

2 months ago we received 20 million messages pr week and passed about 800,000 as legitimate mail

Last week we saw 41 million and the same 800,000 passed as legitimate messages.. that's 98% spam!!!

to break it down more..
41 million recieved
32 million rejections on RBL lists
9 million passed onto the spam filters.. 10% of that gets through.
This is for 1 week.

We keep seeing spam double every 2 months.. It's gota stop growing at some point right??

not likely

[untorqued (957628)]

It's hard to imagine that spam filters have gotten to the point where spamming doesn't make economic sense. After all, the business model is something like

1. Send an email to 10,000 random people
2. Get money from one of those people
3. Profit

Even adding a couple zeroes to the recipient number (which improved spam filters should be doing) doesn't make much of a dent in the total expenses, if I understand correctly. Lawsuits under the CAN SPAM law, however, could make it too costly to get past step 1. Unfortunately, it seems like the judicial system still needs a little help here [slashdot.org].

Of course they've given up

[Billosaur (927319)]

Spammer 1: We can't get anything past Google's filter.

Spammer 2: Agreed. [sighs]

Spammer 1: I guess we'll have to give up spamming.

Spammer 2: Seems that way.

Spammer 1: Unless...

Spammer 2: You have an idea?

Spammer 1: Why don't we keep spamming everyone else!

Spammer 2: Rapture! You're so smart!

Quality over Quantity?

[olddotter (638430)]

Perhaps spammers are focusing on how to get a smaller number of messages through the filters rather that upping the number of messages sent.

In Gmail, false positives = whole threads junked

[poliopteragriseoapte (973295)]

In Gmail, the problem is false positives: when Gmail labels a message as junk, it moves *the whole thread* to the junk folder. So if you have a thread with 20 messages, and the 21st is incorrectly classified as spam, poof, also all the other previous 20, that you had confidently filed away, silently go into the spam folder, where they are silently deleted after 30 days. This is a consequence of how Gmail deals with threads, or "conversations". I reported this bug to the Gmail team long ago, but they haven't fixed it yet as far as I know.

So if you want someone using Gmail to delete an email exchange they had with you, send them an additional message in the same thread offering to sell them Viagra. They will never see the message, but the whole thread will be deleted in one month. Disclaimer: I have not tried this (but I have lost email due to the above problem, and I know I did, as I keep a separate backup of my mail via pop, where the missing messages were still present).

Some are giving up

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves (236787)]

Some spammers are giving up. Mainly because they realize that running botnets is a better way of making money.

Note to spammers

[jimlintott (317783)]

Spammers, please take note that I actually have a large penis. Your assistance and concern, while appreciated, is simply not required.

They ought to give up

[Lucas123 (935744)]

I suppose someone must be responding to them, but for the life of me, I can't imagine who. They're just an annoying part of working online that I've come to accept unfortunately. I'm still waiting for a law similar to the National Do Not Call List [https://www.donotcall.gov/] that will provide some relief to my inbox. Of course, you've got to deal with the international aspect of spam, but considering that ISP's can control what comes in, that shouldn't be an insurmountable problem.

I agree

[pkulak (815640)]

My personal experience backs this up. The amount of spam my hosted personal account gets is about half what it was 6 months ago. I was wondering the same thing myself.

Two Different Truths, But Not In Conflict

[Crypto Gnome (651401)]

In an article at Wired, Google, '... says that spam attempts, as a percentage of e-mail that's transmitted through its Gmail system, have waned over the last year'.

and

Other experts disagree with Google, pointing out that overall spam attempts continue to rise.

Well yes, they can easily both be true.

If, for example, spammers are learning that sending spam to @gmail addresses is a pointless exercise in futility. So they further concentrate their efforts on non-gmail addresses.

Google sees a significant drop of spam arriving at gmail (though via accounts which POP3 mail from external addresses, there'll always be some spam).

Everyone else (not Google) sees their inbound spam increasing/strong.

Why give up?

[OnlyHalfEvil (1112299)]

Let's even imagine that spam filters were 99.99% accurate, what would be the benefit of not spamming anymore? It costs them nothing, so if they send out millions of spams per day and only get a few bites, they're still making a profit.

There's no incentive to stop spamming unless it becomes arduous to do so. Nether technology nor litigation are close enough to make that happen.

Bandwidth

[The_Craigster (906389)]

How much extra bandwidth would the internet have, if there was no spam bouncing around. I say we shut off port 25 on every router for just 6 hours and watch the bit torrents just scream :). Have a moment of email silence.

Re:Well..... Not really.

[s20451 (410424)]

You remember when Bill Gates said spam would be over by 2006? Boy was he right -- I haven't had spam in my inbox in weeks. Thanks, Google.

Re:Well..... Not really.

[Tom (822)]

If Bill would be hit on the head each time one of his prophecies was completelly off - he'd be long dead with a bashed-in skull.

Seriously, betting on the opposite of whatever he says has been a fairly profitable route for at least 10 years.

But that isn't "giving up".

[khasim (1285)]

The spammers are still sending the spam. They aren't giving up.

But the filters are getting good enough to filter most of it so the users do not have to see it.

But the spammers are still sending it.

Re:Not giving up, just more Macs and Linux

[wattrlz (1162603)]

Mod parent +2 Optimistic Lovely sentiment, but that's kind of like saying, "It snowed this weekend because I installed compact flourescent lightbulbs in my house".

Re:

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

Actually, the grandparent almost has a point. People are not so much switching from Windows as switching from Outlook Express and ISP-provided email to webmail. Most webmail providers have fairly aggressive virus scanning making email much less of a vector for generating new spam zombies.

Re:Silly question

[JRHelgeson (576325)]

The way they're making money today with SPAM is through pump-n-dump schemes.

Permit me to break it down for you:
The Phishers will phish usernames and passwords for brokerage accounts, or they will collect the information from personal users by means of a trojan. The criminals log into these accounts and schedule sell orders for whatever stocks they are holding, and schedule buy orders for the penny stock they are going to pump-n-dump. Then they walk away.

They execute the spam, eager traders read the spam, look at the account and see that volume of shares purchased have been bought up in the past n-hours and they jump in. The pumpers have bought their stock before hand and once the volume peaks, they dump. The account holders whose accounts were compromised are left holding the pumped-dumped stock...

The criminals are getting GOOD! They don't need to worry about transferring money out of the compromised brokerage accounts, they are stealing the money and laundering it all in the same step.

And it should be no big surprise that the criminal organizations behind the whole operations is the Russians.

Welcome to professional bank robbery in the 21st century.