Why spammers persist despite filters and well-informed users

[A Guy]

Matilda Reich asked why, in a world where everyone knows about the dangers of spam, and every email program has a spam filter, these dreadful messages just keep coming.

To put it bluntly, some people don’t get it. As George Carlin put it, “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”

Spammers don’t even need to count on the less intelligent half of humanity. All they need to turn a profit is a very tiny fraction of the population.

Source

A Guy

 

[Layback Bear]

I don't care how many warning are given or how a compute security is set up; you can't protect some people from themselves.

 

[georgeks]

It's the same as giving advice to people with a H/W issue: It's up to them to follow any advice.

 

[carwiz]

The Honey Pot Project keeps tract of the worst offenders. Why these can't be simply blocked is beyond me. Even though the IPs are often black listed, servers keep passing them on.

 

[Computer0304]

The only problem is that they can most likely move to another location and create a new email for spamming. Some blacklists even block whole countries or ISPs. The only problem is that they would also be blocking off some people that are innocent. In fact, there is a whole DNS Blacklist for blocking South Korean IPs but they are forgetting the many others that are not spammers.

 

[NoelDP]

I have one domain attached to Project Honeypot - so far it's attracted around 30 'new' flies

I get a little note every time it catches one.

On Thu, 4 Apr 2013 16:11:14 -0400 (EDT), Project Honey Pot
<[email protected]> wrote:
>Noel --
>Regardless of how the rest of your day goes, here's something to be happy
>about -- today one of your donated MXs helped to identify a previously
>unknown email harvester (IP: 27.153.187.224). The harvester was
>caught a spam trap email address created with your donated MX:
>
>crashfixtest.com
>
>You can find information about your newly identified harvester here:
>
>27.153.187.224 | Spam Harvester | Comment Spammer | IP Address Inspector | Project Honey Pot
>
>Don't forget to tell your friends you made the Internet a little better
>today. You can refer them to Project Honey Pot directly from our
>website:
>
>Refer a Friend | Project Honey Pot
>
>You've chosen to receive this message every time one of your honey pots
>or donated MXs helps identify a new harvester. We don't blame you, we're
>constantly checking in to see what we've caught. However, if you're
>sick of these messages, you can turn them off by visiting your settings
>page:
>
>http://www.projecthoneypot.org/preferences.php
>
>Thanks from the entire Project Honey Pot team and, we're sure if they knew,
>from the Internet community as a whole.

 

[carwiz]

My personal response would be the Sodom and Gomorrah syndrome but I know there's smart ways to do it.

 

[carwiz]

Thanks Noel for your participation!

 

[Berton]

Also consider this, many spammers probably get paid simply because someone clicks a link. It's a lot like how TV commercials work, advertisers get paid just because a broadcaster ran theirs.

 

[Layback Bear]

I wouldn't be much help. I only get about 10 email a month. About half I don't open just delete.

 

[NoelDP]

I get on average around 150 - 200 per day - most of which are either deleted on the server without being downloaded or read, or are funnelled to my own spamtrap account.
ANY email sent to any of my domains is accepted by the servers - email sent to non-legitimate addresses is then funnelled to a single (spamtrap) account. email to expired accounts is deleted unread. email to legitimate accounts is forwarded in the normal way.

The spamtrap account is a great way to see what's the latest and greatest spam
I must have had a couple of hundred 'lose weight fast' offers this past week! (I'm about 160 lbs)

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

I was down to around two or three a day until fleabay got hacked. I quickly skyrocketed to 75 spam emails a day after that. It was back down to about five or six a day recently but now it's going back up again. Yahoo Mail has its issues (especially after Mayer defected from Google and has been trying to make Yahoo Mail into another Gmail) but it does have an excellent spam filter.

 

[Layback Bear]

Boy do I feel down; I'm not even worth spamming.
I get no respect.

 

[A Guy]

I only occasionally get spam



A Guy

 

[Callender]

Email spam

Well it's not just about email spam. Spammers create profiles on any site they can find and post links or HTML Tags that subsequently get indexed by search engines. The theory is - the more links they post on quality sites - the higher their site will show up in search results and therefore is more likely to be clicked on.

Here's an example from a forum powered by Expression Engine which seems to be a spammer's favorite type of forum.



So anywhere that WWW is shown means that it's pretty much guaranteed to be a spam link.

There's software available that can automate the whole process.

 

[Computer0304]

If only we were talking about to canned proccessed food Spam. Yum... spam :drool: The world would be better with tons of the processed food Spam than spam mail.

 

[Layback Bear]

If they would just lighten up a little on the Spam.

 

[Computer0304]

If they would just lighten up a little on the Spam.

:roflmao: But that picture sure look great...:drool:

 

[Barman58]

What's spam?

Seriously I use a gmail account to amalgamate my other email accounts - I may pop into the spam screen once in a while just to check anything that's been accidentally classed as spam but rarely find anything . The spam filter auto cleans the folder after 30 days so I let it do it's stuff. If I do see anything that might be classed as spam, (mostly it's where I sign up to some service and they start spamming me with offers, Rather than unsubscribe and risk generating more spam, I tag them as spam - they get the satisfaction of sending out the offer, but I never get bothered by it), I simply tag it as spam for the filter and forget it.

I have a Yahoo account, I needed one for my Flickr account but I've never used the account, which may explain the lack of spam email I recieve . On the forum we see a lot of spam, it's interesting how much originates from Yahoo addresses. The Yahoo filter is also an issue and quite a few of the email addresses that "Bounce" on member sign up, Which results in the member, being rejected, can be attributed to Yahoo filters

 

[Computer0304]

What's spam?

Seriously I use a gmail account to amalgamate my other email accounts - I may pop into the spam screen once in a while just to check anything that's been accidentally classed as spam but rarely find anything . The spam filter auto cleans the folder after 30 days so I let it do it's stuff. If I do see anything that might be classed as spam, (mostly it's where I sign up to some service and they start spamming me with offers, Rather than unsubscribe and risk generating more spam, I tag them as spam - they get the satisfaction of sending out the offer, but I never get bothered by it), I simply tag it as spam for the filter and forget it.

I have a Yahoo account, I needed one for my Flickr account but I've never used the account, which may explain the lack of spam email I recieve . On the forum we see a lot of spam, it's interesting how much originates from Yahoo addresses. The Yahoo filter is also an issue and quite a few of the email addresses that "Bounce" on member sign up, Which results in the member, being rejected, can be attributed to Yahoo filters

Yep same for me on Gmail. In fact, it is so good that it sometimes marks SevenForums notifications as spam because of the capitalized "DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL"