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.'"

I have certainly seen less

[sgeye]

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.

In Gmail, false positives = whole threads junked

[poliopteragriseoapte]

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).

I agree

[pkulak]

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.

Re:Yahoo

[KillerBob]

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-Positives". SA learns them every day at 3am. If you get a spam, just move it to that folder. If you have a false positive, move it to the right folder.
Rule #3: GREYLISTING. Implementing Greylisting cut the daily spam hits from over 15,000 to less than 1,000. That's more than 90% reduction in spam, simply by using the "service temporarily unavailable" feature in the SMTP protocol.

I don't know what's wrong with Yahoo's filters. Or what it is that makes GMail filters work. But I can tell you that having a competent sysadmin makes a *huge* difference in how effective the spam filters are. I can also tell you from the logs that spam is going up, not down, lately.

Official Google Blog

[freastro]

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

Re:I've noticed...

[TimeTraveler1884]

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:In Gmail, false positives = whole threads junke

[PunkTiger]

That's odd. I have a Gmail account, and once in a great while, I'll get a good message tagged as Spam in the Spam folder that's part of an ongoing thread. But I've never had the whole thread move into the spam folder. I press the "not spam" button and the message is moved back into the thread where it came from.

Maybe I've been lucky.

Perhaps in email...

[zykhou]

What TFA fails to realize is that spam comes in many more forms than simply emails. My local lan group runs a PHPBB forum, which kept getting rather mysterious "people" registering with advertising in their "web site" profile field. Granted, we've ramped up our security, but from time to time bots still register. Likewise, if you look at many youtube videos nowadays, tons of comments are just obvious spam and other automated messages. Not as directly targeted as email per se, but still spam nonetheless. Spam isn't dead, the spammers have simply realized that there is a whole demographic of people (generally in their teens to early 20's), who use less email and more social networking style (or dare I say "Web 2.0") services like Myspace, Facebook, Youtube, Gaia, etc.

Re:gmail spam

[HTH NE1]

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.

Re:If they give up

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

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:Silly question

[JRHelgeson]

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion