Is Spam actually getting worse?

More spam seems to be getting passed the spam filters

Published on August 30, 2003 By Draginol In Personal Computing

Some months ago I started using some spam filters. My favorite has been SpamPal. Our mail server also has its own spam filter on there. They worked reasonably well. About 90% of the spam was caught by them. Which for me was significant because each day I get around 500 to 600 email of which around 300 to 400 is spam. Going through 600 email to find the 200 legitimate email was a major pain. It's still quite a pain even with the filters.

But in the past month, more and more spam has been getting through.

Anyone else running into this?

They need to pass a law so that totally unsolicited email cannot be sent out. I don't care if they have a valid email address. I don't mind getting email from buy.com, I've purchased from them. I don't mind classmates.com emailing me either since I signed up for a free account there. But I really resent "Jenny Smith" sending me a "Can you look at this?" which is in actuality an ad for some site that sends my information to hundreds of lenders. They have no business emailing me.

Comments

A reader

on Aug 30, 2003

I've noticed this happening with my own email and others have said similar things too. I wonder what's causing it?

Clayton D. Jones

on Sep 01, 2003

I've seen the same. From what I can see, most of it could be filtered easily -- assuming the mechanism were available -- by checking whether the return address exists or not.

green

on Sep 01, 2003

I have noticed this! I returned the other day after being gone a day and when I opened my outlook express (which has 3 hotmail accounts) I had no fewer than 13 spams about enlarging something. This is new with in the last 3 weeks or so. These spams all were of the concealed nature with lines and dashes indirect wording.

I have a fantasy that I have a device that when I push a button it traces these rancid emails back to the machine that sent them and sends out a burst of gamma radiation to cause the chinese or filipino or whoever is sending it to glow permanently. Hotmail seems to intercept the time share condos and some of the viagra ads that I used to get. I never give my internet provider email to any site that I register at.

Ashamed-to-be-American

on Oct 25, 2003

"the chinese or filipino or whoever is sending it"

OK... I grant you that, when you say "or whoever is sending it", you are clearly not excluding Americans as potential spamers. But why did "chinese or filipino" come to your mind first? Most of those companies sending spam are American companies. Most of them are DOT-COM, not DOT-COM-DOT-SOMETHING... Unlike freedom or democracy, spam is an American invention.

Sincerely,
Ashamed-to-be-American

rakebacks

on Sep 27, 2005

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