Category: Spam

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Spam

Latest spam

wall.of.spam.jpg
First the image spam was coming through, then penny stocks, now we’re back to Nigeria….ugh!

In the last several days, I’ve been getting messages like this one –

My name is Mr Usman Lama, I am a former military intelligence officer, a captain by rank and a Presidential aide under the government of President Charles Taylor of Liberia .I want to invest the fund that i have made during my time in service into a well profitable business and i want to invest this fund outside my country for safety reason because i don’t want the government to question me of getting this large amount of money…

This is so 2002.

image by Flickr user Santos
Categories
Anti-spam Boxbe Spam

Are we winning the war on spam?

oreillyradarlogo.jpgDale Dougherty over on O’Reilly Radar attempts to answer that question and reports on their efforts to combat spam.

In a given week, 94% of the 904,060 all messages sent to O’Reilly servers are rejected because:

  1. the IP has been blacklisted
  2. the message had a SpamAssassin score of 10 or higher
  3. the message contained viruses or malware
  4. the message failed some other anti-spam technique

(And that doesn’t even account for messages the recipients didn’t actually want.)

Dale interviewed a number of industry luminaries on whether or not “we” are winning the war on spam. Here are a few quotes:

Eric Allman – developer of sendmail, a prominent email protocol

It depends on how you define “win”. I still get junk phone calls, but the phone system is reasonably usable today. I think that spam can get to that level.

Brad Templeton – Chairman of the Board, Electronic Frontier Foundation

I wouldn’t say that. There are a number of fairly decently working filtering systems, though a number of them have concerns about false positives. This doesn’t rely on draconian blacklists, though some people use them.

Danny Goodman – prolific tech writer and programmer

“It’s a lot like the war on terrorism. The hardest part is defining what the war is. The offenders are not clearly defined, the war is not clearly defined.” He said the war seems like “a constant game of whack-a-mole.”

If you are interested in the war on spam, this article is a great overview.

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