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by Mike Masnick

Mon, Nov 28th 2005 4:10pm





Are We Beating Spam?

from the is-it-worth-asking? dept

A lot of people have been noticing that anti-spam filters have become fairly effective lately. They're not perfect, by any means, but they make email usable for plenty of people. Even the FTC has come out saying that anti-spam filters have been an effective way to deal with spam. So, that raises the next obvious question: if these spam filters are so effective, why is there still so much spam? Wouldn't the spammers start to recognize that their messages aren't getting through? Is there a lag, or is it that the folks who don't use filters at all are still keeping spammers in business? Update: Brian McWilliams rips apart the methodology used in this study. It's worse than you'd imagine. Rather than actually looking at how much spam the filters caught, they just compared two spam-filtered accounts to an unfiltered account, and assumed that the number of spam messages would be the same.

5 Comments | Leave a Comment..


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  1.  

    Spam

    identicon
    RdeCaneva, Nov 28th, 2005 @ 4:27pm

    Spam filter work! So far the best service I found is spamarrest.com. I never worry about my email address getting out!

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  

    Spammers' motivations

    identicon
    Rikko, Nov 28th, 2005 @ 5:23pm

    A better question is, who are these retards that actually BUY things through spam? If we've had spam this long and no spamming effort will have ever been profitable, it would have ended long ago.

    Instead, it's only grown.. Which means someone, somewhere, is actually profiting from putting their ads in 150 million mailboxes. And I'm not talking about the spamming companies.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  3.  

    Re: Are We Beating Spam?

    identicon
    Susan Pallo, Nov 28th, 2005 @ 6:46pm

    Remember, this is an arms race. If the anti-spam side is currently winning, all that means is that the spam side is working on the next-generation spam.

    What could that be? I don't yet know (not being a spammer), but I bet it won't look like today's email-clogging variety.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  4.  

    Re: Spammers' motivations

    identicon
    Roy, Nov 28th, 2005 @ 9:47pm

    Another better question is, who are these retards who pay to have spam sent? Lately, a good 75% of the catches in my CRM114 quarantine have been entirely in Cyrillic or Korean. Even if I were the buy-from-a-spammer style of dimwit, I couldn't read the sales pitch. But somewhere, some shady Russian/Korean company paid for my "impression".

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  5.  

    Side effect of filters

    identicon
    Anonymous Coward, Nov 29th, 2005 @ 2:28am

    One side effect to spam filtering is that spam that makes it to the end user now has more credibility, and is there-for more likely to be read and taken as a serious message.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


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