Aye Yi Yi
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AOL reports 90% of it's incoming SPAM comes from other ISP's mail relays. The estimate is that at this pace of growth, we'd be looking at 95% of all email being SPAM by mid-2006. I think 95% of my email right now is SPAM, so if things stayed the same, I'd be ok with that.
Just last week Bill Gates said "I don't want to minimize the problem at all. We will still have a few years of fighting with that [SPAM]. But, there are many things that have already improved.". I hope that fight will be won sooner than later, otherwise email will at some point become a semi-useless mechanism. Already I have some issues with things getting caught in filters and I've had to see about resends or deal with deadlines being missed because of the volume of SPAM. In one of my accounts, I get over 500 emails a day, with probably 20 or 30 of them services that I use or of interest to me and maybe 3-4 personal emails that I've sometimes caught in the junk filter, but with 400+ to deal with, it's not often I wade through them all.
We here at SQLServerCentral.com also deal with the issues of SPAM. I get a few emails every week complaining about the daily updates here or the weekly Database Daily and calling them SPAM. We've really strived to build a service that we are proud of and is useful to you. The same as many other businesses on the Internet. When you sign up, the newsletter is listed there as something you'll receive. You can opt-out, but we hope you don't. Not many people have time to read the newsletter everyday, but by receiving them you support the site and you can go back and check some of them out when you do have time. I do that with a few other newsletters that I receive. I might only review them once a week and then not all of them, but I do find some value and I'm happy to receive them and support the work they do.
SPAM is a huge problem, but not every email you receive is SPAM. Not every email sent to you that isn't a reply is SPAM. Just like commercials on TV, signs along the road, flyers in the mailbox at your residence, our newsletter and many other mails are legitimate marketing mechanisms. And these are mechanisms that make many of the world's businesses work. Without them, many things that you get at a low cost would be more expensive. Perhaps prohibitively expensive.
So phishing schemes, the adult enhancement emails, low mortgage offers from companies you've never bought anything from or visited are SPAM. Purchasing or selling lists of emails (something we DO NOT DO) walks the line, but I have to admit that I'm not sure where to draw the line. The Internet isn't free. You pay for bandwidth and you honestly pay with your eyeballs for many of the sites that you visit in the world. Without that "payment", the Internet would be a much more disconnected, and I'd argue, less enjoyable place to be.
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Using the Outlook 2003 blocked senders facility I blocked 113 SPAMS this morning.
Every morning I add between 20 and 30 new addresses to the list.
Theoretically I should trawl through the SPAM to make sure that crucial customer correspondance does not go missing but pressures of time prevent this.
I have found that the best way of dealing with SPAM is to set up Outlook rules that forward on legitemate mail into specific folders so at least I can prioritise my mail.
In other words assume that my inbox contains nothing but SPAM and pick out the few that aren't.
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It promises to get worse before it gets better as spammers have figured out how to bypass filtering.
Check out: http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_title=Spammers_Develop_Troubling_New_Strategy&story_id=30254#story-startMy hovercraft is full of eels.
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I recently discovered that Yahoo was filtering out some, but not all, of my reply notifications from SQL Server Central. I get about 100 SPAM e-mails at that account each day. I started clicking the "Not SPAM" button on my reply notifications, but it didn't seem to affect it at all. I finally had to create a rule that filters any e-mails with "SQLServerCentral.com" in the From field, and forwards them to my inbox. Since my discovery, I've been scrolling through my Junk mail folder on Yahoo daily, and have discovered a couple of other e-mails that should not have been there.
Steve "I hate SPAM* " (Not Jones)
* the e-mails AND the potted meat product!
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And they had it one the news recently, Gates get 1 million a day !!
KlK -
Bear with me, but what does "Aye, Yi Yi" mean?
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Frank Kalis
Microsoft SQL Server MVP
Webmaster: http://www.insidesql.org/blogs
My blog: http://www.insidesql.org/blogs/frankkalis/[/url] -
It had me baffled for a while. It's kind of like 'Oh my God!' or 'Oy Vey!' or 'Not This Again' - definitely an expression of exasperation.
Hope this helps....
My hovercraft is full of eels.
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You got it. It's a "I can't believe this is happening to me (or us in this case".
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Thanks for explaining. Sounds cooler than "I can't believe this is happening to me (or us in this case".
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Frank Kalis
Microsoft SQL Server MVP
Webmaster: http://www.insidesql.org/blogs
My blog: http://www.insidesql.org/blogs/frankkalis/[/url] -
Try http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/windows.html
You have to install Python on your PC but it is easy enough to install.
Make a folder in outlook and store all your spam in it until you have around 200 mails.
When you configure SpamBayes you have to specify a folder containing SPAM and a folder containing genuine mail. It will then build a scoring system that will allow it to classify the mail.
It will separate out mail into good, probable SPAM and SPAM.
You get the option to "Delete as SPAM", "Recover from SPAM" should it make a mistake, however after about a week of heavy SPAM the product rarely makes mistakes.
I would seriously recommend this product.
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This is off topic I suppose...but lately I am even more annoyed with the amount of junk 'snail mail' that I get than I am about Spam. When we first bought our house I thought it was bad, but later when we refinanced a couple of years ago it got a lot worse. And while e-mail spam is an annoyance, it doesn't actually kill trees like all of these unsolicited mass mailings do. There's a 'Do Not Call' list for telephone soliciters in the U.S. but as far as I know, there's no way to 'opt out' of junk mail and no penalties for the offenders.
Too bad there's no filters for the mailbox at my front door.I would say that about one in 20 pieces of mail that I get is actually something that I want or need to see and the rest goes straight into the garbage. I don't know if this is as big a problem in other countries but I think that it's really obscene the amount of paper (and everything else, for that matter) that we waste in the U.S.
Just my 2 cents and thanks for letting me vent.
My hovercraft is full of eels.
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We have a recycling scheme in my local area so all junk mail goes straight in the recycling bag.
It is the plastic tat from McDonalds happy meals that bugs me!
In the UK we are coming up to a general election when human spam try to convince us to vote them onto the gravy train.
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Hey, Frank!
Ok, so I'm a little slow on the draw, but I couldn't resist another analogy to Aye Yi Yi...
ACH! du lieber!
(spelling???)
Steve
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I agree on the snail mail. We have to walk to the mailbox and pass by the trash cans on the way back. The mail load certainly gets lighter as we get closer to the house
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Trees, schmees... You can easily regrow those. My first degree was in environmental science and you would not believe the pollucka we have bought into regarding MOST environmental issues...
Now, diggin' holes to throw away this bunch of snail mail?! That's a very legitimate issue. We fill up landfills all the time with this crap and the cost of moving these landfills further and further out is daunting. I would be willing to trade 2x's the amount of spam for all this snail mail. Spam I can delete with little to no consequence, but trash....
I wasn't born stupid - I had to study.
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