Forty Years of Spam Email (bbc.com) 95
An anonymous reader writes: The BBC has a video celebrating the 40th birthday of spam email. Here's a transcript of the video: "It is 40 years since the first spam email was sent. Marketer Gary Thuerk composed an email selling his company's newest computers and sent it to 400 users on ARPANET, which was the network that become the basis for the internet. Why is it called spam? It has been suggested that it was called spam after a song in a Monty Python sketch. Where patrons of a cafe were repeatedly offered something they didn't want. The concept of spam is nothing new. Unsolicited telegrams were sent over 100 years ago and we've come to accept junk mail as part of everyday life. Now [nearly 60%] of all email is spam. Like most rubbish, it can be found everywhere on earth."
If all you do about it is filter ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The only way to end this problem going forward is to finally look at spam for what it is. Spam is an economic problem. Spammers don't send you spam to make you mad or to waste your time. Spammers send you spam to make money, plain and simple. The only way to end it is to stop them from making money on it. You can't legislate it away by throwing arbitrary penalties at spammers - we've even heard of spammers being murdered on the street and it didn't stop more spammers from coming up to take their place. The only way to stop spam is to stop them from getting paid.
This has been shown effective before. We need to track down how they are getting paid - it most often is based on click-throughs so we need to find who owns the spamvertised domain - and interfere with it. If the money doesn't get to the spammer, they no longer have a reason to send spam.
Everything else is a waste of time, money, storage, more money, and more time.
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Re:If all you do about it is filter ... (Score:5, Insightful)
And since I run my own domain, I can give each company their own address. This way I know who sells off that bit of info (or got hacked) and if I try to unsubscribe and it isn't honored I can kill off that address.
Careful what you wish for (Score:1)
The big companies listened to your distaste for being offered products you do not need.
Solution:
find out what you do need by invading privacy tracking and spying
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Running your own domain isn't even needed, just register a few free mail addresses with different freemail providers. That way you also get to learn what freemail providers sell your address to which spammers.
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I miss a real email about once a year from SPAM filters in Gmail, and it's usually a shady email (as I contact form from a small website I setup, and didn't whitelist the address).
Every now and again a registration confirmation or receipt goes there, but I know to check because I'm expecting it.
I literally never check my Gmail SPAM just because.
Even so, it's not too bad, I assume the vast majority of true spam doesn't even hit that folder.
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I miss a real email about once a year from SPAM filters in Gmail, and it's usually a shady email. I literally never check my Gmail SPAM just because.
Seriously?
Let's take Linus, he somehow still uses Gmail. I'm too small a fry to send him pull requests, but I did make an April first [marc.info] one. (The mail archive web display mangles UTF-8 but it's correct in the actual mail, pretty vital for this actual patch set.). See Linus' complaint [marc.info]. Here we have correspondence from someone who had just participated in a two-way thread with Linus (something about modversions), the mail is GPG signed [xkcd.com] by a key one indirect node away, the mail being a well-formed pull reque
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Thus, Gmail is so bad in the false positive department that I don't think it's usable. Even worse, when it discards a mail this way, it doesn't notify the sender the way any sane server is supposed to!
I've been using gmail since beta, I don't think I've ever had a false positive. Just thought I'd add another anecdotal datapoint.
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gmail blocks legitimate email all the time. If you're not a big guy, you can't even use their tools to find out what's going on.
Gmail is not standards compliant. It's a nightmare.
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Maybe a filter for [git pull] would solve that?
It's formatted as a list message, the whole point of the square bracket list title is for the sake of mail filters.
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I use rspamd, which simply rejects very spammy looking emails, greylists ones that are quite spammy, and sticks borderline ones in my spam folder. I get an average of about 5 emails in my spam filter each day. It's well under the threshold where I can easily check it every day (though I typically check it every few days).
I don't think that the filters are making things worse: looking in my logs, I'm rejecting quite a lot of spam that appears to be from botnets. One of my colleagues studies spam and ha
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Give that roughly 50% of emails is spam (Sept 2017 [statista.com]), I hardly say "problem long solved"
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The problem isn't spam in gmail, it's false positives, which I get weekly. So I have to check the spam folder anyway, frequently, just to make sure I am not missing anything.
Re:If all you do about it is filter ... (Score:4, Funny)
we've even heard of spammers being murdered on the street and it didn't stop more spammers from coming up to take their place
I'm not sure that this solution has been properly and thoroughly tested, and I don't think, in good conscience and out of respect for the scientific principle that we can dismiss it so casually until we have more evidence.
Personally I'm a fan of a Lex Talionis type solution, where for every piece of Spam (unsolicted commercial email) sent, the sender must recieve (eat) one 'piece' of Spam (spiced ham). In one sitting. I'm happy for piece to be set at 1g. Small time offenders should survive that. And be suitable chastened.
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Personally I'm a fan of a Lex Talionis type solution, where for every piece of Spam (unsolicted commercial email) sent, the sender must recieve (eat) one 'piece' of Spam (spiced ham). In one sitting. I'm happy for piece to be set at 1g. Small time offenders should survive that. And be suitable chastened.
No. One bite per spam, which means at least 2.5g [quora.com].
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Tracking the money comes up every year at the MIT spam conference, or used to. It doesn't work. The cost of prosecution is so high, the international abuse from outlaw countries like Nigeria and Estonia are so high, and the "legitimate" spam vendors are such a part of modern business and advertising that laws will not be passed and vendors lobby to protect their spam business. Even the EFF got corrupted and sold out, when Jerry Berman took over the EFF and sold their soul to sign off on the CANSPAM act.
Actu
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Email needs to become 'opt in' (like your social media mail and instant messenger accounts). Then all you'll see is 'connection requests' from a Nigerian Prince, and not the actual spam. If you connect, then sure you'll get the spam otherwise you won't. The 'value' to Prince Mohammed of scatter-gunning connection requests around the world is going to be a lot less than sending actual content "just in case someone clicks on it". It'll still happen of course, but I suspect a lot less than you get spam emails
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The economic problem is actually worse than you stated: Spammers send spam email even if they don't make money off of it. Let us divide spam into two kinds: advertising, and malware.
Advertisers never knew how effective their ads were. (The web was supposed to fix that by giving them tons of analytics, but it never really worked out the way they hoped.) So even if spam advertising is economically negative for them, they have no way to know that and they send it anyway. So penalizing them economically wou
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So even if spam advertising is economically negative for them, they have no way to know that and they send it anyway.
This is one of two pillars of my "spam will never end" philosophy. The other, related issue, is that one person can be responsible for millions of pieces of spam. Even if it doesn't work, and even if the person responsible figures that out, it's entirely possible that someone else sees that spam and thinks "Hey, they wouldn't be doing it if it didn't work!"
And so it goes on and on. As long as a spammer has customers paying them to spam, they're going to spam. Whether or not the customers are repeat ones doe
Incredibly annoying (Score:2, Offtopic)
I really hate those unsolicited telegrams. I don't want or need any of your dag blum miracle liniment, consarn it!
Viral Marketing (Score:1)
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Apparently, Spam is really popular in Hawaii [wikipedia.org].
I think it's one of those products like fruitcake, which everyone claims to hate, but obviously some people actually like it because it's still around. So, I think plenty of people eat it, but perhaps don't talk about it. Or more to the point, probably not so much in circles techies run in, which are perhaps more of an "avocado toast" crowd.
Statistics from the 1990s say that 3.8 cans of Spam are consumed every second in the United States, totaling nearly 122 million cans annually. It became part of the diet of almost 30% of American households, perceived differently in various regions of the country. It is also sometimes associated with economic hardship because of its relatively low cost.
Generally speaking, I think Spam would have done fine, even without the e-mail-related moniker.
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Re: Viral Marketing (Score:2)
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122 million cans is a lot... but not really when you consider there are what, about 370million people in the US (not sure if that number is still accurate but I'll use it).
So one can per 3 people a year. 12oz in a can. So the average person consumes 4oz of spam a year. Or one third of an ounce a month. That's a really small amount- and it's probably offset by Hawaii where it is consumed at a higher rate, and by certain poor communities.
It's probably also purchased as a gag on a semi-regular basis. Ever
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Spam musubi is basically sushi with spam. It's delicious.
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The problem with your analogy to fruitcake is that there's a spectrum between "slow smoked ham" and "processed pig meat in a can", and there's likewise a spectrum between "moist gingerbread with homemade dried fruit reconstituted with rum" and "dense, dry cake with nasty bitter candied fruit rinds in it".
My mom makes an absolutely unbelievable fruitcake. Unfortunately, the cultural perception of fruitcake is more akin to spam than a nice smoked ham.
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You have to go to your post office and tell them that you consider the catalogs "sexually provocative" and, after they finish laughing at you, point them to Rowan v. Post Office Dept., under which they have to accept your judgment about the catalogs and may not substitute their own opinion.
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So then they will route all the catalogs to me? Sweet!
Re:Paper junk mail is very lucrative for the Post (Score:4, Funny)
I could never stop junk mail coming into my mailbox. So I decided to valorize it instead: years ago, I gave my adress to many stores, and in short order, I started receiving a lot of junk mail. As in, a LOT of junk mail.
What do I do with all that junk mail you ask? I make briquettes to throw in the fire in the winter. 3/4th of my heating needs are taken care of by that free fuel, delivered for free right on my doorstep. In the summer, I store the briquettes, and if I have too many of them, I sell them to the local recycler, who pays a token sum for it by the ton and burns it in our local power plant.
Making the briquette is a bit of a pain, even with the briquette machine, and they require sweeping the chimney more often because burning glossy paper fouls it up real fast. Also, burning the chemicals contained in the paper and in the ink isn't terribly green. But it results in real savings in heating fuel.
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I have a fireplace insert for heating. it's not an open fire - no smoke, no cancer. For cooking, I have an electric stove. And for hot water, I use my regular heating fuel boiler. That's why I said burning the paper briquettes only covers 3/4th of my heating needs.
But thanks for immediately assuming I'm a dumbass...
Re:Paper junk mail is very lucrative for the Post (Score:5, Funny)
Godzilla Threshold (Score:2)
Marketer Gary Thuerk composed an email selling his company's newest computers and sent it to 400 users on ARPANET
Marketers, just like Lawyers, giant radioactive lizards, and Old Ones, are best left deep in the ocean, unless you really need them.
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But unlike lawyers, great radioactive lizards and old ones, marketeers have no reason to exist.
Green card lottery spam (Score:4, Informative)
I am not one of the privileged few who was on ARPANET in 1978: I was at high school and in the wrong country.
I was, however, present for a somewhat later milestone in spam history: the green card lottery spam. On 12 April 2994, a pair of exceptionally unscrupulous lawyers spammed every newsgroup on Usenet with ads for (utterly unnecessary and very expensive) assistance in entering a lottery for USA green card (permanent residence.) This generated a great deal of internet hatred.
https://www.wired.com/1999/04/... [wired.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Me, too. Martha Siegel of Canter&Siegel wrote rude words about several of us from MIT for tracking them down and getting them kicked off of various ISP's for their abuse. They led to the change in user contracts that explicitly forbade spam.
They were followed by the Scientologiests, who tried to "rmgroup" alt.religion.scientology to hide their cult secrets, then spammed it with messages from their critics, then eventually just took to flat-out spam. 3000 messages a night, 30 KBytes each to avoid NNTP fi
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On 12 April 2994, a pair of exceptionally unscrupulous lawyers spammed every newsgroup on Usenet with ads for (utterly unnecessary and very expensive) assistance in entering a lottery for time travel .
FTFY
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In the Magic: the Gathering newsgroup, there was a lot of joking around, since Magic cards were generally black, white, red, blue, or green. It took a while for me to figure what had happened, since the spam message had been canceled by the time I logged in.
I almost dont mind... (Score:1)
INCREASE YOUR TONER CARTRIDGE SIZE, NATURALLY! (Score:5, Funny)
This message is not spam.
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If you do not wish to receive our emails, click this link and we will add you to our list of known, active email addresses and increase the rate of spam.
Let's Stop SMTP (Score:1)
I feel that the real problem that allows spam to thrive is due to the horrible protocol that's used. Sure, with improvements like SPF, DKIM, and the like, it's a lot better, however I feel we need to move to a more modern protocol.
Anything with a form of proof of work should cut down spam drastically. After users have confirmed legitimate mail from that MTA, allow an exception to be made, preventing the proof of work, or at least a more intensive version.
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Before specifying how users would be supposed to confirm legitimacy, it is de rigueur to check the method against a number of classic anti-spam proposals [rhyolite.com].
It's not the song that give it the name (Score:5, Informative)
It is the credits at the end.
Just watch the credits roll and you see the word "Spam" inserted everywhere.
Just like the junk messages littering you inbox, interspersed with the real messages.
Written and spam performed by:
Spam Terry Jones
Michael Spam Palin
John Spam John Spam
John Spam Cleese
Graham Spam Spam
Spam Chapman
etc..
40 years of spam.. (Score:4, Funny)
...and 40 years of users clicking on spam. When will they learn?
Wasn't spam originally NNTP? (Score:3)
I thought the original SPAM was cross-posted News (NNTP) postings. Wasn't it only later applied to emails?
I would appreciate the input of a neckbeard here.
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Usenet was started in 1980. The first well known Usenet spam was posted in 1994 (the Green Card Lottery). The email referenced by the BBC was sent in 1978, well before the infamous first Usenet spam.
Re:Wasn't spam originally NNTP? (Score:5, Interesting)
The authors of the first Usenet spam were lawyers, disbarred in multiple states for fraud against their clients. They also tried to start a business selling spam services to others, which had a short profitable period until their level of fraud and abuse against their network providers and their own clients became clear.
Some businesses engage in spam accidentally, because they are sold advertising services and don't understand the idea that "opt-in" email is accepted while "opt-out" is almost always unwanted, The vast majority, however, is abusive fraud. It remains a profound burden on every email system in the world, even those with good spam filtering, because there is a measurable cost of the filtering that generally far exceeds that for legitimate services.
Spam the "Meat" (Score:1)
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Mostly in 1943 and 1944 (or so the jokes went).
We also supplied the Soviets with a whole lot of Spam
Lesser known 10 year anniversary (Score:2)
When my buddy insisted DKIM would eliminate SPAM and I just wasn't smart enough to understand why. I'd email him but his inbox is full again so...
Hey Shawn! You're STILL WRONG!
200 million messages a month, 90-92% spam (Score:1)
I was first to use the word spam (Score:2)
Nov 23, 1987 - 1st documented use of the word "spam" to describe unwanted electronic correspondence.
And we still run into the problem (Score:2)
Ads are still a problem of the net. Yes, I said ads. Because what the fuck is spam other than that? Whether the junk litters your inbox or your browser real estate, what exactly is the difference?
A spam filter and an ad filter are essentially doing the same, getting rid of unwanted junk nobody asked for.
Spam spam spam spam spam, get it? (Score:2)
It's not called spam because they kept being offered spam. It's called spam because they kept repeating the word spam.
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Came for the usual spam solutions. Not really disappointed
It's old, but it still applies pretty universally:
https://craphound.com/spamsolu... [craphound.com]