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97% Of All Email Is Spam, But How Much Of The Other 3% Is Just Noise?
from the overwhelmed dept
A new report from Microsoft says that 97 percent of all email is spam, reflecting the degree to which email systems worldwide are swamped with the messages. The figure seems high, but perhaps that's just because anti-spam tools have gotten better at deflecting spam away from most people's inboxes. But clearly enough is still getting through -- and enough people are buying what it's selling -- to make it financially worthwhile for spammers. Personally, I don't see too much spam these days, as Gmail's filter works pretty well for me. But what I do see lots of is "soft" spam -- messages that come from web services, retailers, mailing lists and thanks to writing on the web, PR people. Most of these messages come from things with which I've had some sort of relationship, commercial or otherwise, in the past, but most of them are still uninteresting and unwanted. While many of these people are pretty good about honoring unsubscribe requests, many are not, and also seem to share my email address with impunity. The result is that my email account is full of noise -- while my inbox isn't overrun by V1*GRA-type spam, all the other soft spam, as well as the bacn, or messages I've subscribed to but never read, obfuscate the messages I actually care about, making email a pain to deal with.
The point here isn't really to complain about my inbox, but rather to illustrate how even as "real" spam becomes more and more hidden from many users, email still has plenty of problems. Eliminating the 419 scams, joe-jobs, fake drug spam and the like would certainly be great, but even beyond that, email still has its flaws, leading people to communicate through IM, social networks and other means. To be sure, email is still eminently useful, but will that usefulness soon be outweighed by its detriments? And will it be salvageable?
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My Inbox
currently 1592 messages in the spam quarantine
many hundreds or thousands labeled, marked as read, and told to bypass the inbox. These I have a moderate interest in reading and do sometimes, or don't and just don't want to unsubscribe.
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Most "end users" I know of don't have much use for email anymore, most prefer to use message systems within sites like facebook for longer communications, and various IM systems for shorter messages. It seems that most people under 25 don't have the attention spans to write a full paragraph, unless they are forced to for a paper for class. Otherwise, the twitter 140 characters is all many of them need.
That is perhaps another point to. The internet use to be about communications. Now it's about self-broadcasting, which is pretty easy to tune out.
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Little trick: I own my own email DOMAIN. (.name)
So every time I need to give some e-tailer my email address, I create a PERSONALIZED address for that e-tailer: "_@.name".
In case I get unwanted spam there, at the very second I kill that address. Spam all you want. :-b
Added bonus: I always know who exactly sold my email to spammers...
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Sorry, it ate special characters...
Little trick: I own my own email DOMAIN. ([my_name].name)
So every time I need to give some e-tailer my email address, I create a PERSONALIZED address for that e-tailer: "[etailer_name]_[random_number]@[my_name].name".
In case I get unwanted spam there, at the very second I kill that address. Spam all you want. :-b
Added bonus: I always know who exactly sold my email to spammers...
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Bah
Oh, don't keep us waiting!
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I get no spam as well
It's the way to go that works.
On the other hand, I don't really get spam at my gmail either.
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Consider the Source
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Google does a good job.
Recently, I sold something on craigslist, and almost immediately started getting monster amounts of spam in my spam folder. I'm pretty sure it was when I responded to a phisher's very terse inquiry.
After that, I setup a separate GMail account specifically for Craigslist... But their filter is amazing.
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Re: valid items
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Re: Sorry, it ate special characters...
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Email will always be useful
Usually that's because they're in a time zone which limits me calling them, or we both have weird work schedules that prevent us from talking (Like I wanna call someone at 1 AM just to hope they're up and not working).
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Spam
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Spam
If everyone else is getting 95 percent, that leads to the question; why am I not getting my fair share?
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Sign up for a free dyndns account, install ubuntu, setup postfix, dovecot, and the dyndns client.
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Thats all??
RT
www.web-privacy.us.tc
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E-mail-What part of the other 3% is noise?
around 1% actually merits a response of any kind. That includes phone calls And IMs!
Around .01% merits forwarding.
Less than that should be cc'd and you should never use bcc!
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5000+ Spam mails!
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