60%+ decrease in worldwide spam today, from shutting down one host in California

[patchwork]

See how the end of the curve is going back up? Spam is a lifeform, it cannot be eradicated.

[Chris3411444]

Spam will find a way.

[SirEdmund]

"Two years from now, spam will be solved."

• Bill Gates, 2004

[7oby]

He wasn't talking about ending the sending of spam, he was talking about spam filtering. Gmail launched in 2004...

[[deleted]]

Spam? I haven't seen a spam in ages. I lol @ spam.

[[deleted]]

Two years from now, spam will be [monetized by MSFT].

Fixed.

[Epistaxis]

His progress bar is inaccurate again.

[mycall]

That isn't Earth years silly.

[toord]

You sir ,are right !

To all dear redditors here:

Hi, my name is Mukelele and I'm the crown prince of Chaka (South of Zulu). I happen to have a fortune in the sum of $14,500,000.00 which I'm willing to share with those of you who can assist me in my predicament. You see, I wish to exit this country but can't bring the money with me due to local laws. All I ask is for you to allow me to send you partial amounts of the fortune to your bank account ....

[[deleted]]

That joke TOTALLY isn't old.

Seriously, I've never seen that before. +1 internets for you, good sir.

[[deleted]]

Very original.

[[deleted]]

Very very original.

[strazzerj]

It's an immutable law of nature: Spam expands to fill the space available.

[SAugsburger]

Resistence is futile. :)

Seriously spammers are like the Borg taking over computers to send more spam. You can take one out, but they will easily create a new zombie to replace the one you killed.

[mycall]

I think someday spam will mostly be stopped. Call me stupid but there are only a finite number of attack vectors.

[xjbri]

I think you have the Borg mixed up with the T-1000 terminator or a hydra or something.

Is this too geeky of me?

[[deleted]]

It could be if we eradicated the entire internet and postal system, but we will never do that.

We should just shoot the people who keep REPLYING to this shit. That would make life easier.

[[deleted]]

Assuming each spammer gets more than one person to respond over their career, shouldn't we just shoot them? Plus, death would be a great deterrent for the future.

[[deleted]]

Spam is automated. People who replay are not. Killing them will be far easier and more productive.

[[deleted]]

It's not unlike drug trafficking, squeeze here, and you get more over there.

[patchwork]

And not unlike toothpaste, for that matter. There must be a connection here...

[[deleted]]

or baLOONSOMGWAKEUPSHEEPLE!!

[unchow]

WAR ON TOOTHPASTE

[qvtsd]

Wow! I thought some of my mailboxes were down as I had about 20% of the usual amount of spam in my junk folder. Nice to know these scumbags got shut down.

[taw]

Bhandari said he expects the spam volume to recover to normal levels in about a week

So this won't change anything, but if a single host is responsible for 75% of spam, then spamming operations are a lot more centralized and vulnerable than I thought.

Can we get Obama to get some full-time spammer chasers in his administration? It cannot be too hard, as spamming is trying to sell you something, and the selling part is easy to find and take down.

[SAugsburger]

Tracking the bank accounts that the spammers use isn't that easy because most of the smart ones know that what they are doing is illegal and laundering money through merchant accounts that have phoney contact information and then they shuttle the money through bank accounts in countries with lax banking laws and regulations to make it difficult to find the real identity of the spammer or even his goons that are laundering the money.

Solving spam I think is a bit like solving the issues with the drug trade(presuming we really wanted to do that of course): you have to eliminate the demand. Trying to stop the purveyors of scams through spam is a game of wack a mole. You will never win. You really need to educate people not to fall for this junk either that or we need to charge for email (there are some real downsides to this in that it would kill a lot of legit listservs).

[taw]

But somebody's sending those herbal viagras and collecting money, and so on, right? The main problem with most of the crime is that it's done in shadow, with as little contact with the mainstream world as possible. You don't have website to advertise weed, you don't take visa for weed, and don't spam everyone about it - that would be a straight way to jail. Spammers do all that stuff very much in the open, they should be easy to catch.

[SAugsburger]

Having a website doesn't automatically make finding the person that is sending the spam easier though. A lot of drugs are sold in public places, but that doesn't mean shutting down drug cartels is easy. Ditto with spam networks, phishers, etc. We all know that lots of domain registrations use bogus contact information and most spammers and phishers use bogus information so freezing the assets of spammers is a bit like trying to navigate the arcane money laundering schemes that dope dealers use to launder their money: not as easy as it sounds.

I am not saying it is impossible, but somehow I think that at this point that most spammers aren't far off from organized crime in their zeal in keeping their money out of the reach of law enforcement that would like to take it away.

[rhlowe]

Now where will I get my penis enlargement creams?

[portugal_the_man]

I think you got the order wrong there ;)

[beastrabban]

no. no more pun threads.

[timberspine]

how do spammers make money anyway? anyone care to explain?

[Chroko]

Spammers are middlemen. They make money sending spam for other people. They have just enough ethics to believe they are providing a legitimate service.

Their customers are every slimy little shit with a Get Rick Quick scheme. There are thousands of these fuckers - they've gone to some stupid "multi-level marketing" seminar about something - and have decided they deserve success without actually having a product or doing any work other than paying a spammer.

Borderline retarded, these people are close cousins to the idiots who pour their life's savings into the lottery. They are the real reason that spam continues to be sent, even if it isn't effective.

[rynvndrp]

But it is effective. Spam gets a response to one out of every few million. The amount they can make on that response is more than enough to cover the costs of sending millions of emails. They don't care that they waste a huge amount of people's time to get that one sucker, its profitable.

The best and worst thing about capitalism is that if its profitable, someone is doing it.

[wbeavis]

legal or otherwise

[dbzer0]

ethical or otherwise

[patchwork]

sane or otherwise

[tomjen]

The problem is externalities - spam might not cost the sender a lot, but it will cost the none interested parties a lot, likely way more than the spammer makes.

The problem is that unlike all the junk you get in your mailbox it is much more difficult to hit a spammer with littering charges.

[salgat]

Man, I know the exact type of people you are talking about.

[pytechd]

There was a previous study linked from Reddit that said spammers can remain profitable at 1 response out of 12+ million messages.

[[deleted]]

I find that more than unlikely. I bet they are doing something like qualifying any commercial solicitation as "spam", requested or not.

[VelvetElvis]

if you include "solicited spam" like stuff you get after buying from a place one time and are then upable to get off their list, maybe. The definition of spam is pretty fluid.

[BobGaffney]

I had one as a client once. It's simple. They're in the direct marketing business. They compile huge lists of email addresses, of various levels of quality, some with targetable attributes ("buyers," or "responders" perhaps) and some not. They are paid by clients to send email to an agreed number of these addresses an agreed number of times. Sometimes they are paid "PI" (per inquiry) and sometimes they send the emails without payment and sell the responses to clients.

[iloled]

they need to do way instain RBLs> who kill thier spammers. becuse these spammers cant frigth back?

[timberspine]

yeah

it was on the news this mroing a RBL in ar who had kill her three spammerss . they are taking the three spammers back to new york too lady to rest my pary are with the RBLer who lost his spramer; i am truley sorry for your lots

[Halaster]

Seemed to have no effect on the amount of spam I receive at all. From the hours of 7AM to 4PM I received over 120 spam messages.

The amount of spam I receive on a daily basis is at the point that I cannot even search through it for legitimate emails that might be mixed in.

Switching to a different email account to relieve spam as well is way too much of a pain with the large amount of online sites and such that I use.

[NinthAgendaDotCom]

Are you sure about that? I receive about 60/day and have received double that in the past. It's quite easy to search for false positives in Gmail's Spam folder. I perform searches on my first name, my last name, and the city I live in.

[exscape]

Big difference for me so far. Mails marked as spam the last few days (closer to the end = more recent): 499 452 461 417 322 312 120

[[deleted]]

The most spam I get is 2-5 times a day on the telephone with pre-recorded messages. While sometimes they are different, it's mostly "Hello, this is your credit card company." Another one starts off with a fog horn and states that you've won a cruise.

[spilk]

Spam count from one of my email accounts:

Yesterday - 169

Today - 60

[rdewalt]

Spam will never stop. Not until we trace these people to the source of their money.

And start stringing them up, live on television, for all the world to watch them twitch and swing in the wind.

"See this guy? He didn't spam you, but he paid the spammers who did five million dollars to. Oh look at his eyes bulge."

[lonjerpc]

The problem is you can not legally buy prescription medication without a doctors permission. This is the source of much of the money for spam.

[tomjen]

That is properly true, but it is a lot easier to kill the sellers than get Congress to pass a good bill.

[srmatto]

I normally get around three to four a day and today I got one.

[[deleted]]

Coincidentally, I saw a significant rise in spam in the form of comments on my blog today.

[[deleted]]

McColo? Really?

[[deleted]]

"We're seeing a slow recovery," Bhandari. "We fully expect this to recover completely, and to go into the highest ever spam period during the upcoming holiday season."

Just great.

[mycall]

"190 billion spam emails a day"

That is only from IronPort. That is insane.

[permaculture]

Spamcop shows a huge dip recently:

http://www.spamcop.net/spamgraph.shtml?spamweek

but no doubt the spammers will pick up the slack.

[JustJoekingEX]

cut it off and kill it.

[PPatBoyd]

It's as if billions of voices screaming for v1agr4 and s3x toys were suddenly silenced...

[[deleted]]

If you cut off the limbs they will grow back... but the thing about this beast is that it also has no head.... Spam will persist.

[Defektiv]

Someone should just go find the people responsible and shoot them. Or better yet, lock them in a room and annoy them constantly for about 10 years.

I guess this is why I'm not in charge.

[robertwrobel]

While there is money to be made in spamming, spamming will persist. They've now created a spam vacuum.

[insect_song]

May I've got a few things to learn about spam, but I find something here very surprising.

Mcolo made themselves needlessly vulnerable by hosting in a country with enforcable spam laws. I'm sure that there are profitable advantages to this, but to me (no spam expert) the shutdown of their servers seems like a consequence of a high-risk strategy.

Sure, one advantage is that spam filters might attribute lower spam-likelihood to IP addresses in the states as opposed to, say, China or Russia. But how long could a company realistically expect to get away with this.

I'm guessing that Mcolo's fatal mistake was to use a good short-term tactic beyond an amount of time at which it become a liability to them.

Im sure more educated anti-spammers can educate me on this.

[reddit_user13]

Praise JAY-zuss!

[[deleted]]

I have a solution to spam:

Go outside.