Spam should be considered a statistic

Posted by multippt

You hate spam. Everyone hates spam. Spammers would hope that you mistakenly approve their spam, but that never really happens, if at all. As spam volumes continue to rise, people can easily brush it off as a regular thing. Nonetheless, let’s turn that nasty piece of garbage to a piece of “bragging right”. The idea is this: The more popular your site is, the more spam you’ll get.

Why this theory is true

Generally, comment spammers tend to target certain sites more than others. So, well-linked sites (and sites easily found by others through god-knows-what) tend to receive more attention by spammers. As far as anyone can tell, it does seem that spam bots are really efficient - being able to find well-concealed sites, and hitting them where you least expect them.

The good news - because spam is so common, you need not worry about getting rid of them, because that’s taken care of by Akismet. (So dear spammers, your advertisements will never see the light, ever.) What’s next? Show off your Akismet counter. Once thought of as a spam deterrent that has apparently failed, the Akismet counter can be now considered a bragging tool - despite the prominance of spam, it still takes real effort to rake up over 1000 spam comments detected and destroyed by Akismet. Want to make your friends go “wow” in an ackward manner? Show them you have gotten Akismet to trash over 10,000 spam comments.

The What IFs

People might say that others might attempt to inflate their spam count by simply… spamming their own blogs. That, I have to say, is utterly dumbfolding, because why on Earth would they want to do that? Secondly, if you were to spam on your own blog, you risk having your comments detected as spam on other blogs. The spam count will never be inflated, because people often look down on something as “trival” as the Akismet counter.

What if you do really want to use the spam counter as a statistic? The thing is, as with any website popularity measurement, there are its flaws. The spam counter is so looked down upon, that no one will ever use it, if ever. Do not hope in the near future that Akismet might do something like Alexa does with traffic - give a special website ranking called “spam rank”, which should ideally have popular sites at the top of that ladder (since they get spammed often).

*Akismet count on this blog: Over 1600.

What if spam were to disappear?

Posted by multippt

Email spam is just as annoying as it is important. It’s just plain interesting that some spammers are incredible at making “services” to irritate the hell out of people. Yet, spam is here despite it being a thorn to everyone’s (except the spammer’s) side.

Spam may disappear one day

The day we hope that will probably never come…, well, there is still hope.

Falling click-through

It’s no longer 1995, it’s 2007/8 - I mean, who would open spam messages for more than 10 seconds, if at all? The click-through rate (CTR) has fallen beyond recovery for spam. To compensate for this, spammers now send over 5 times the amount of spam, hoping that some person will click on that piece of junk. Sure, click-through rate was high way back a decade ago, but today it’s downright less than 0.5%.

If click-through rate were to decrease even more than the rate spam increases, spam will one day be a non-profitable subject - especially if spam were to negate the reputation of the promoted site. People rather report spam than read them, I mean, isn’t it a nice idea that you can get back at something that irritates you? The problem with spam is spam itself. In a bid to increase impressions, they send more, which ironically irritates people into not even bothering with spam.

Perfecting spam detection

What does a basic email account 10 years ago come with? Space and a trash bin. What does a basic email account today come with? Space and spam protection. With spam protection comes millions placed in funding to get rid of spam from everyone’s mail boxes. Sadly, because spam filtering is not perfected, false positives have a habit of appearing which gives spammers a light of hope, well, maybe that light only lasted for 5 seconds.

Dangerous spam

Sounds like spammers decided to go more creative, deciding to steal personal information aside from email addresses. The side-effect is that thanks to phishing, no one will now even dare touch “spam”, who knows? A carefully-crafted virus might just pop out. A big boo-boo against spam advertising products, caused by spammers themselves.

CAN-SPAM

According to this act, not all spam are spam. Great? We still receive spam, but at least it is legalized spam. Glad to see that “opt-out” link… who knows? Maybe if we click it we may just get less spam, not! Well, hopefully CAN-SPAM may be able to spur illegal spamming into legalized ones, offering an opportunity to opt out of spamming lists.

What if spam really disappear?

Spammers will have to look for new jobs, anti-spam companies need to look for new niches. Spam and its prevention is a multi-billion dollar industry. Well, actually the prevention part costs a little more, partly because spam is relentless in nature and utilizes black-hat ways, while anti-spam is generally powered by commercialism (let’s not forget that not many people will not want to study spam for free) and generally bounded by rules . Let’s hope that anti-spammers themselves won’t be spamming people just to stay in business. Then again, the definition of spam may change, so spam today may not be spam later. Commercial companies are already taking advantage of legal spamming, so what about the future?

Then again, it would be a nice feeling if there were to be no spam at all. No more spam checking. No more irrelevant emails. But, if we have grown used to spam, would we be able to deal with the absence of it? (Of course!)

What? Someone using my email address in spam mail?

Posted by multippt

The extent of things people can do just to get money is limitless. This is outrageous - someone used my email address to spoof as its sender in a spam mail, and it is probably delivered to millions (even to my own email). It is a spoofed email, sent via Geocities (proxy/sendmail/SMTP) by an anonymous person. Now I know why email sent via my email address often ends up in the spam folder… This time, I’m going to put my email address as an image so only people can read. :D

This spam mail advertises Viagra - one pharmaceutical thing I shouldn’t be mentioning here. Unfortunately, I deleted the email too quickly (I should have take a screenshot of it… :/).

I hope this problem would not occur to anyone else. Now I know why people do not put their email addresses in the open. Lesson learned.

A bad day for spammers means a good day for everyone

Posted by multippt

One of the world’s top 10 spammers have be arrested a few days ago on Wednesday.

Robert Alan Soloway is about to face 35 charges related to suspected fraudulent Internet activities. Soloway, the owner of Newport Internet Marketing, was indicted by a federal grand jury on the 23rd of May, 2007, for 10 counts of mail fraud, 5 counts of aggravated identity theft, and 13 counts of money laundering.

Dubbed as the “Spam King”, Soloway is in no way one of your daily spammers, as he is responsible for circulating millions of spam messages in the form of Emails online. Soloway is also accused of managing false websites posing as legitimate “broadcast Email services” with “permission-based opt-in Email addresses”, which have largely deceived many businesses into spending their money for tools that turn out to be spam tools. Soloway has also been accused of creating more than 2000 proxy computers or “zoombies” (computers that are hijacked by hackers without the user’s knowledge) used to send spam Emails.

With the arrest of Soloway, spam can be expected to decline a little, and users with nearly flooded mailboxes filled with Email spam can breath a sign of relieve. However, spam is not yet eliminated, simply because it can’t be eliminated easily with other spammers around.