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posted by
martyb
on Sunday July 19 2015, @07:23PM
from the but-canned-meat-sales-are-on-the-rise dept.
from the but-canned-meat-sales-are-on-the-rise dept.
Good news for all of us who still have to use email: spam rates are dropping! In fact, junk messages now account for just 49.7 percent of all emails.
The latest figure comes from security firm Symantec's June 2015 Intelligence Report, which notes this is the first time in over a decade that the rate has fallen below 50 percent. The last time the company recorded a similar spam rate was back in September 2003, or almost 12 years ago.
More specifically, Symantec saw 704 billion email messages sent in June, of which 353 billion were classified as spam. At one of the peaks of the spam epidemic, in June 2009, 5.7 trillion of the 6.3 trillion messages sent were spam, according to past data from Symantec.
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Spam Rate Dropping Below 50% for the First Time in 12 Years
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If bankers can count, how come they have eight windows and only four tellers?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Appalbarry on Sunday July 19 2015, @08:05PM
Gmail has been "improving" their spam filtering. [theregister.co.uk]
As a direct result instead of seeing ten or twenty messages each day in my Gmail spam folder, I now see a couple of hundred.
Is there anything that Google can't break?
(Score: 1) by canopic jug on Sunday July 19 2015, @08:17PM
gmail's spam filter has never worked for me. It's always catching mailing list messages and letting through actual spam. Apparently the sorting algorithm doesn't ever learn even though I sort out the false positives manually, for years.
About fighting spam, most noise is about the ineffectual technical patches like spam filters. No effort has been made to go after and shut down the actual spammers. No, not the groups sending the messages, but those hiring those that send out the messages. They'd be easily trackable since they want money and it is possible to follow where the money goes. But maybe that's thinking too far upstream for certain interests because if people start thinking upstream they'll also start to notice the role that M$ Windoze has in feeding the spam industry. Without the Windoze botnets, there'd be very little spam.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by deimtee on Monday July 20 2015, @12:19AM
It's always catching mailing list messages and letting through actual spam.
That's because Google doesn't want you to use mailing lists. They want you to use google groups, or whatever the flavor of the week is, so that they can put ads on the page.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Monday July 20 2015, @08:29AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2, Informative) by TheMessageNotTheMessenger on Monday July 20 2015, @03:08AM
Some people don't understand how mailing lists work, and instead of properly unsubscribing, they'll just mark the mails as spam. But then the filtering algorithms also start marking very similar mails as spam. Including the very similar, if not identical, copies you received in your inbox.
You can set up filters in gmail to have certain domains etc. bypass the spam filter and directly go to your inbox.
Hello! :D
(Score: 2) by lentilla on Monday July 20 2015, @05:38AM
I only unsubscribe from mailing lists that I actively subscribed to.
If some group starts sending me uninteresting stuff I didn't ask for, I won't unsubscribe, I'll automatically delete them. We often see this happen when a company gets sold - initially there might have been an occasional mildly interesting email but the new owners take to pumping out junk.
I have an innate distrust of any "unsubscribe" link at the bottom of emails. (GNU Mailman I trust, anything else unlikely.) If I didn't specifically request it, I am not confirming the address is valid by "unsubscribing". Email is a one-way medium - like sending me a letter - you have no guarantee it was read or even if it arrived. I won't let HTML mail fetch links either, so if you fail to send me mail that I can see in plain text, then I won't read your missive.
Of course, since I run my own mail system, so I can afford to automate the trashing of junk. I realise there are probably issues with the way "normal people" treat junk mail - if people move "unwanted" mail into the "junk" folder, then this pollutes the junk-detection algorithms.
In the end it matters not what I do - people with similar habits (and ability) being a minuscule proportion of Internet-users. What matters is what happens for the 80%. It's hard - how can I tell people "don't reply to stuff you didn't ask for" when this is what "good actors" are supposed to do (per CAN-SPAM Act). It's impossible to teach people things when both situations and results are difficult to understand without a deep understanding of what is going on at multiple levels: technological, historical, political and; dare I say it; criminal.
Maybe GMail, et al, could monetise (ugh!) a product that aggregated all the "junk" (not spam) into a daily "mail shot". Automate the collection of everything that got put in a user's junk mail by rules, and collate into a single long email with a variety of sections, similar to the way the aforementioned Mailman software collates the day's posts into a single daily digest on request. Of course, this would mean that Google would become an even larger gorilla, gatekeeper of the world's electronic junk mail - but at least we could ignore one email a day instead of many.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday July 20 2015, @06:46AM
You DO take a minute to train the filters, don't you?
Tell it something is spam once or not spam, and you are golden.
Then there's always the guy who insists on posting to mailing lists with a 5 paragraph corporate disclosure statement appended.
That guy yyo want gone anyway .
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by canopic jug on Monday July 20 2015, @04:22PM
That might work for other services but does not work with Google's Gmail. Using their web interface to 'train' the filter seems to have no effect. Some of the mailing lists having trouble are pretty obscure and fairly technical so it is unlikely that someone has accidentally subscribed or been subscribed against their will. My conclusion is that Google's spam filter is broken and not trainable.
But again, that's just going after the symptom. The source is the companies hiring spammers to send spam and the Windoze botnets used to send the spam.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Sunday July 19 2015, @09:11PM
I don't know what Google is doing, but I think that they use outdated RBLs.
I run my own mail server in a VPS. I have never sent SPAM. If I send email to a "clean" Gmail account from that IP address, it is identified as SPAM. Sending the same email via my ISP's mail server results in the email not being identified as SPAM. The only thing to change is the IP addresses, but my own mailserver's IP address has been clean for plenty enough time for it to be delisted (it might have been listed because of its use before it was assigned to me). Furthermore, my IP address is not listed on any reputable RBLs.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday July 19 2015, @10:08PM
I think most algorithmic (not purely a block list) spam blockers automatically block anything coming from an unnatural domain (basically, anything that is not gmail.com, yahoo.com, *.edu, and so on). I have a personal domain and it's a pain sometimes.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday July 20 2015, @07:25AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @01:24AM
I run a few email servers on VPSs. I set up SPF records & DKIM and have no problems getting through to any recipients.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday July 20 2015, @06:48AM
They don't use RBLs at all.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Monday July 20 2015, @02:34PM
And you know this how?
My experiments suggest strongly that they do. That the same email when delivered from one IP address is marked as SPAM, but when delivered by a different address is not marked as SPAM is strong evidence that they do use some kind of IP reputation system. They might not call it an RBL, but it functions like one. Maybe it's not DNS based, hence the term RBL is not valid.