Anybody else notice a strange drop in spam?

[Captain Kidd]

For the website I'm webmaster for (webmastering?) each day I clean out 30-50 spam emails that didn't go to an accurate email address. Suddenly they've quit showing up. Has anybody else noticed this or did I just jinx myself into getting overwhelmed with spam to make up for the lack thereof? 8-[

[Humphrey]

Well in the last month at least two major U.S. spammers have been jailed. They could of been the ones sending you the stuff.

That or whoever hosts your e-mail could of updated their spam software

[weatherc]

I think my ISP is doing a better job of filtering spam than it used to. I used to get about a dozen spam messages a day, and now I get maybe one a day, or one every other day. No complaints about that from me.

If you ask me, it's not the spammers that should go to jail, it should be anyone foolish enough to actually buy anything from them. After all, if no one bought anything that the spammers was selling, no one would enlist the spammers for their services, would they?

[beskeptical]

I think I am still getting the same amount.

At my comcast address I get about 2-3 a day. All of them are for Viagra or phentermine, (weight loss drug).

At my yahoo address, since I stupidly gave in to one of those claims of giving me $50 in Best Buy credit for filling out the survey, I got no money but immediately started getting ~50 spams per day. Fortunately yahoo has a junk mail box they go into.

My brother told me he just got one of those "open the zip file" it has your e-mails sent by mistake to the sender's site. :roll: I'd like to know why it is so hard to track those attack e-mails. There must be some Internet spyware out there that can catch those from the first sender before they go through other sites.

[Fortis]

It's quiet. Too quiet... :o

[Kristophe]

I've been getting about two spam e-mails a day for the past 3 months. They're nasty things, too. They're either from off continent (the english in them is very, very bad), or made to look as if they are, and they consist mostly of images. Outlook's been kind enough to block the images, but I decided to download them once to see what they were, and they installed lop.com's browser hijack. Nasty stuff.

[Captain Kidd]

My personal email account is getting its normal rate, it's just the site's inboxes and spam boxes that are strangely empty.

[Argos]

I did notice a drop. I seems it wasn´t just me, because my ISP issued a note to the users reporting a steep drop. I wonder what happened.

[Nicolas]

I noticed a drop about a month ago, but now it's them trying to get me slimmer, more muscular, longer, general healthier etcetc at full force again (10 spams/day) :roll: :roll:

[Crazieman]

I've noticed a massive drop myself. 200/day to 70/day

[Gullible Jones]

So far, I've gotten only one spam - an ad for Kaspersky Antivirus. That's in the entire history of my account...

[Sammy]

My spam count is definitely down.

I'm stuck with a slow AOL dial up connection (beacuse the local phone lines don't support DSL and the cable crooks want $56/month for a cable modem) but they seem to have developed a very good spam filter. Identified spam goes into a seperate spam box. The count has been running about 3-4 a week, a steep decline from the old days when I got several spams for either breast or penile enlargement just about everytime I looked at my mail. AOL's filter gets about 2-3 false positives and false negatives a month, which isn't bad at all.

[Lord Jubjub]

I, too, suddenly realize that the volume has dropped somewhat. Mind you, I'm careful enough with even the spam-catcher e-mail address so that I rarely get more than five or six junks a day.

Though I'm slightly distressed that my new personal accout with RoadRunner is getting spammed. Methinks Time/Warner should be careful about whom they sell their list to. :-?

[Tensor]

AOL's filter gets about 2-3 false positives and false negatives a month, which isn't bad at all.

I really don't mind the few false positives, if the spam doesn't get to my inbox.

[Russ]

OooooH! So you guys are the reason my spam income has jumped ten thousand percent! It's not coming to you now, it's coming to me. :evil: I've been cruising along at about 15/day and just a few days ago I started getting 1,500.

I did a pitcha***** to my ISP and they gave me some soft that blocks anything I dele without reading. Today I've only gotten about 1k spams so it seems to be working a little.

You can have it all back. :roll:

[Sammy]

AOL's filter gets about 2-3 false positives and false negatives a month, which isn't bad at all.

I really don't mind the few false positives, if the spam doesn't get to my inbox.

The false positives just show up in the spam box, which I check every so often. It's usually no prob to ID the non-spam emails and switch them to my regular inbox before hitting the "Delete All" button. Also, switching the false positives to the regular box tells AOL's filter, which evidently "learns" how to better ID the good guys from the bad guys.

[mickal555]

I wish people would stop buying stuff too,
It accoutns for 23% of web-site traffic!
60% is search engines.

I used to get about five/day

I now get .3/day

[Amadeus]

I get about 10 a day, the ISPs spam filter is pretty good and most of it gets put into a spam folder.

I cant believe though is this day and age it's not possible to stop people bulk emailing like this.

I'am assuming spammers like us have to use a ISP account. Why not have a code of conduct between all ISPs that limits each account holder to one email ever 30 seconds? this would mean that the most spams they can send in any day would be 2880.

[edit]

If a customer has a special need for more emails than that they could apply for a licence that is dependant on a code of conduct.

[sts60]

Nowadays, much of the spam comes from "zombie" computers - home or office PCs (almost exclusively Windoze) whose careless, lazy, or ignorant users let become infected with spam-spewing viruses or worms. The users are clueless as to what's happened until their system grinds to a halt or is suddenly blocked by their provider.

beskeptical, my Comcast account gets upwards of a couple of dozen spam a day, and hitting the "Report as Spam" button seems to have as much effect as the "Push to Walk" button at crosswalks (which, of course, is not connected to anything). Fortunately, our mail is read on a Mac and the Mail program is quite smart at discarding junk. (I occasionally go into the webmail interface and clean out the accumulated dreck, which is when I see the spam.)
If you ask me, it's not the spammers that should go to jail, it should be anyone foolish enough to actually buy anything from them. After all, if no one bought anything that the spammers was selling, no one would enlist the spammers for their services, would they?While all spammers deserve, at a minimum, long prison sentences, and I would make an exception to the Eighth Amendment specifically for them, you're half right - the lusers who actually respond to spam also deserve some un-natural selection. As stated in Spammers Can Kiss My A** and Die (http://www.seawana.com/opinions.php?op=3):
Spam has nothing worth buying, looking at or even thinking about. That's why it's spam in the first place. Don't ever reply to spam. It's that simple. Never. If you do, you should be killed.

[Tunga]

The amount of SPAM email which I receive has dropped around 90% over the last 6 months. But the amount of illegal SCAM and phishing emails have grown. I receive 5 or 6 every day now. They take the form of hidden 6 or 7 figure bank accounts where bank insiders are willing to cut me in, individuals who passed away leaving relatives vast fortunes but the relatives need my help to extract the funds, as oversea lotteries which I have purportedly won, offers of becoming intermediates with foreign companies. The variety is almost unreal. In the past one could easily spot these SCAMS because they were typed in all caps but nowadays they have become more sophisticated. I wonder how many individuals are falling into these death traps!

[Jorge]

The amount of SPAM email which I receive has dropped around 90% over the last 6 months. But the amount of illegal SCAM and phishing emails have grown. I receive 5 or 6 every day now. They take the form of hidden 6 or 7 figure bank accounts where bank insiders are willing to cut me in, individuals who passed away leaving relatives vast fortunes but the relatives need my help to extract the funds, as oversea lotteries which I have purportedly won, offers of becoming intermediates with foreign companies. The variety is almost unreal. In the past one could easily spot these SCAMS because they were typed in all caps but nowadays they have become more sophisticated. I wonder how many individuals are falling into these death traps!

to many people, if no one did, spam/scam... would stop to exist.

but most people who use a computer are of the n00b/basic level, a small part is intermediet to advance and there are very very few guru's out there who know a lot about everything there are a few who specialize in smaller parts though

[mopc]

Upon reading this thread, I got a feeling that maybe I too have been getting fewer spam and junkmail recently. I checked, and for the past month or so I have been getting 2 to 4 spam-mails a day, than I went back on my deleted folder, and for example on the 16 of march, I had gotten about 15!

[HenrikOlsen]

After looking at the spamfilter at the mailservers I admin, I can see we trap about 575 a day, after a gradual drop since february where it was at about 850 a day.

It's possible this is because I've been more dilligent in updating our autoblock patterns, which are patterns on the reverse dns of the connecting machine, which when matched cause the mail to go in the archive for documentation, and the ip number to go straight on the blocked list that gets an immediate rejection.

Incidentally, this system currently has 480406 ip numbers in it, 282223 of which are blocked 8)
The archive of caught mail has 449982 mails, 43686 where forwarded, either for being false positives or for hitting rules but not enough to be blocked.

[HenrikOlsen]

I'am assuming spammers like us have to use a ISP account. Why not have a code of conduct between all ISPs that limits each account holder to one email ever 30 seconds? this would mean that the most spams they can send in any day would be 2880.
Your proposal would work if the spammers had to use the ISP's mailservers, ie. outgoing mail sent to addresses other than the ISP mailservers where blocked.

Unfortunately the vast majority of ISP's do not do this blocking, which means a large amount of the spam received is directly from people's computers, often with dynamically assigned IP numbers which makes finding them almost impossible.

Actually if the blocking was in place you wouldn't even have to limit the number of mails, as there would automatically be a record of each mail sent, which would make tracking spammers very easy.

This is why many people block mail from dialup addresses.

[mopc]

checking better.. yeah, definite drop. Hardly any spam received today...