July spam captures exceed all of 2002

[MemorY]

Anybody still unconvinced about the scale of the spam epidemic should consider this fact: MessageLabs intercepted more spam in the last month than in the whole of 2002.

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105_2-5058168.html

whats up with these people ...why the spamming increase ?

[cutty]

That's ludicrous... Something needs to be done and soon. These people need to be taught a lesson.

MessageLabs' anti-spam service scanned more than 156.6 million e-mails during July. Of those 79.7 million were identified as spam and intercepted.

That's about 51% of all e-mails are spam. Man that's not good.

Guidance...

[Cybr1d]

You know the email addresses that spammers use? Would it be possible to mass-spam them too?

[thehorse13]

whats up with these people ...why the spamming increase ?

The increase can be attributed to several things:

1) Traditional marketing costs have gone up.
2) SPAM is a very effective way to market material at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing techniques.
3) People are actually responding to the SPAM. Yes, there are people who actually buy things based on SPAM. I remember reading that SPAM generates around 2 - 5% response rate.
4) More and more people are getting on the net worldwide. This means that the SPAM audience is a growing segment with no additional costs to market to the segment.

A parting thought, think about how much it costs to mail an advertisement to 500,000 people. Now, how much does a mailing list cost along with hardware and other startup fees for SPAMMING? Many of you know that if done correctly, the only thing you'll pay for is your ISP and some hardware.

--TH13

[hypronix]

Originally posted here by Cybr1d
You know the email addresses that spammers use? Would it be possible to mass-spam them too?

Not a chance. They either use bots to create free addresses on providers of webmail, or using on-site software they can spoof IP addresses [I have used some Perl scripts that allow you to put in any address and it sends it as that address].

Only by reading headers and trying to trace IPs can one attempt to fight back. But it's not really worth it I think... Too much work, and no chance to stop it ever. The way I see it, sometimes in the future excesive quantities of spam will cause free webmail to become unavailable and even servers to crash due to overloading and the such...

[CXGJarrod]

I wonder how they determine what is spam and what is not spam. We send out a client newsletter to our customers each month to about 2000 email addresses. Would they consider that spam?

[allenb1963]

Go to www.mailwasher.net and download mailwasher (it takes the Pro version for hotmail) to rid yourself of spam. This handy little tool will BOUNCE the spam you receive and get you removed from the lists used by those that spam....it isn't perfect but it beats doing nothing.

[EINzTEIN]

Spam sux

i got bout 300 messages waiting for me to be downloaded at my hotmail account.

RIP.......sniff.......sniff.

[Nimh]

Mailwasher actually BOUNCES the email, how convenient. If Gates and Co is successful
then Hotmail/MSN might actually Servers might have a chance in the future. But as was
said earlier, eventually the free accounts will go away, and bulk spoofing will be left to stop.

[DivineRogue]

Originally posted here by hypronix


Not a chance. They either use bots to create free addresses on providers of webmail, or using on-site software they can spoof IP addresses [I have used some Perl scripts that allow you to put in any address and it sends it as that address].

Only by reading headers and trying to trace IPs can one attempt to fight back. But it's not really worth it I think... Too much work, and no chance to stop it ever. The way I see it, sometimes in the future excesive quantities of spam will cause free webmail to become unavailable and even servers to crash due to overloading and the such...

So that was not really Britney Spears that emailed me.... RATS! (J/K)