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Phil Smith
Joined: 08 Mar 2006
Posts: 7717
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| Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 2:08 am Post subject: Anyone Notice A Recent Reduction In Spam? |
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I have 3 e-mail accounts (2 web based). Between the 3, I use to get anywhere from 500 to 1,000 spam e-mails a day, maybe more. I'm not sure when things changed, but very recently, the amount of spam I receive went WAY down, to what seems to be less than 100 a day. The reduction is too dramatic for me to be imagining it. Spam is a fraction of what it used to be.
Has anyone else noticed this?
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Fujifrontier
Joined: 20 Oct 2007
Posts: 354
Location: San Antonio, Texas
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| Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 2:15 am Post subject: |
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it won't last for long
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Curt Palme
CRT Tech
Joined: 08 Mar 2006
Posts: 24396
Location: Langley, BC
TV/Projector: All of them!
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| Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 2:18 am Post subject: |
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Nope, I get more than ever. I'll bet your internet company put in some new spam protection, I know about 6 years ago I went from 50+ a day to zero, overnight. I called them, and they did indeed tell me that a new firewall or something got installed.
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Phil Smith
Joined: 08 Mar 2006
Posts: 7717
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| Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 2:32 am Post subject: |
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I was having trouble with my internet provider occasionally blocking ebay and paypal e-mails. For a guy that sells on ebay for a living, that was bad! So about 4 months ago, I turned the provider's spam blocker off.
The on-line e-mail accounts (Yahoo and Hotmail) aren't tied to my provider, and they too have experienced a significant reduction in spam.
I check them all several times a day, every day. I have a good idea of how much spam I was receiving. It's definitely gone down. Way down.
Or maybe I'm just trippin'... 
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kal
Forum Administrator
Joined: 06 Mar 2006
Posts: 18114
Location: Ottawa, Canada
TV/Projector: JVC DLA-NZ7
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Phil Smith
Joined: 08 Mar 2006
Posts: 7717
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| Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 4:41 am Post subject: |
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My IP is setup so it doesn't block any spam. I let Sea Monkey take care of it. It use to be when I turned on my computer in the morning, I would have 175 e-mails, well over 100 of them spam. This morning I think I had 35 or 40 e-mails, 10 to 15 of which were spam. My e-mails from customers and ebay searches seemed to have arrived as usual.
Yahoo and Hotmail have spam folders that the spam filters use to fill up quickly, but no longer do. Yahoo's spam blocker doesn't work all that well, and I would have to manually delete a lot of spam. Not anymore.
I know you guys must think I'm nuts, but I spend the vast majority of my day online. This is an easy thing for me to notice. A steady stream of spam use to come in, usually several every 5 minutes or so. That's no longer the case, and I haven't done anything to prompt this change.
Strange.
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Moose
Joined: 09 Mar 2006
Posts: 788
Location: Minnesota
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| Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 4:52 am Post subject: |
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I get virtually no spam. Maybe 1 a week. I'm not aware of any e-mails I'm not getting that I want. I don't think I'm doing anything special to accomplish this, just a firewall. Why do all of you get so much while I get so little?
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In the real world, I am alan halvorson, King of the Wild Frontier and Swell Guy.
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WanMan
Joined: 19 Mar 2006
Posts: 10270
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| Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 8:45 am Post subject: Re: Anyone Notice A Recent Reduction In Spam? |
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| Phil Smith wrote: | I have 3 e-mail accounts (2 web based). Between the 3, I use to get anywhere from 500 to 1,000 spam e-mails a day, maybe more. I'm not sure when things changed, but very recently, the amount of spam I receive went WAY down, to what seems to be less than 100 a day. The reduction is too dramatic for me to be imagining it. Spam is a fraction of what it used to be.
Has anyone else noticed this? |
Phil, evidentially you had zero control over Spam. If I have an email that starts to deliver Spam to me, that mailbox is terminated. How and why on earth you tolerated this is bewildering.
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Trust no one. Absolutely no one. Advice of the board.
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voodoo7869
Joined: 19 Oct 2007
Posts: 193
Location: Chicago, IL USA
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| Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 1:26 pm Post subject: |
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I have noticed it as well if i am not mistaken wasn't a new law passed in regards to the selling of information and spam? maybe I am wrong.
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Heywood Jablome
Joined: 12 Mar 2006
Posts: 1548
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| Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 3:23 pm Post subject: |
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| voodoo7869 wrote: | | I have noticed it as well if i am not mistaken wasn't a new law passed in regards to the selling of information and spam? maybe I am wrong. |
Law? In which jurisdiction? 
Laws are only as strong as their enforcement, and international laws against wirefraud are either 1) grossly slowed for those countries that might participate in some treaty or 2) entirely unenforceable for countries that are not in a treaty or have no local laws that apply (e.g. Nigeria.)
If there are well-publicized judgments against US-based SPAMmers then US-based SPAM will slow, but then the international crap will become the bigger problem.
_________________
"Those countries which lag behind in industry, in the application of mechanics and technical chemistry, in the careful selection and utilization of natural products, where the respect for such activities does not permeate all classes of society, will unfailingly decline in prosperity. They will sink faster when neighbor states, with an energetic exchange between science and industry, go forward with renewed vitality."
-- Baron Alexander von Humboldt: 1769-1859
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perisoft
Joined: 29 Aug 2007
Posts: 2920
Location: Ithaca, NY
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| Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 6:39 pm Post subject: Re: Anyone Notice A Recent Reduction In Spam? |
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| WanMan wrote: | | Phil Smith wrote: |
Has anyone else noticed this? |
Phil, evidentially you had zero control over Spam. If I have an email that starts to deliver Spam to me, that mailbox is terminated. How and why on earth you tolerated this is bewildering. |
Um, saying "an email that starts to deliver spam" is nonsensical. Spam doesn't come from a given account like regular mail; it's sent via huge botnets - tens of thousands of unique IP addresses and tens of thousands of faked return addresses. Blocking labeled senders only prevents repeat spams from 'gray market' "opt-in" marketers who pretend to be opt-in by buying email lists that've been sent down huge chains of resellers, and comply to the letter of CAN-SPAM but not the spirit.
I have a fairly well-publicized business email address, and without filtering I'll get 200 to 300 spams a day. Average is probably 99.5% spam. Filtering takes out a HUGE percentage of it, though; most of it is 'repeats' from the same senders. A few originators (guys selling the same stuff with the same obfuscation techniques) are responsible for 90% of the spam I get.
The stupid - incredibly stupid - thing is that 90% of spammers use the same 10 ISPs in China and Russia to host their web sites. Without those web sites they'd be dead in the water; aside from stock spam and a few others EVERY spam relies on some web site to actually do the business. But nobody considers cutting off the 10 people providing the single essential service to the spammers; instead they try to stop the fifty billion spam messages individually!
Idiotic.
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WanMan
Joined: 19 Mar 2006
Posts: 10270
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| Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 9:00 pm Post subject: |
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Peri, we are not talking about you, but Phil. I was not aware Phil had a business and treated his post as if he was talking about a personal email. I manage my email, no one is spam filtering for me, and I have never had 1/100 the amount of Spam he was experiencing. It just surprised the h3ll out of me.
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Trust no one. Absolutely no one. Advice of the board.
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Phil Smith
Joined: 08 Mar 2006
Posts: 7717
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| Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 9:11 pm Post subject: |
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Part of the reason I get so many spams to my IP e-mail (Verizon) is that's it's a business e-mail address that's easy to acquire. I also have dallas-music.com setup to forward e-mail to my IP e-mail, and a lot of spam came from that as well.
I use my Yahoo account to sign up for stuff that I think will give out my address, so it expectedly got a lot of spam.
I've only given out my Hotmail address to AVS, Netflix and Blockbuster, and it still got quite a bit of spam.
I check my IP spam blocker this morning. It's still turned off. Since last night (about 14 hours ago), I received about 22 spams to my IP address, 6 to Yahoo and 1 to my Hotmail account. None of these accounts are linked in any way.
That is a small, small fraction of the spam I would have received during the same time period, as little as a week ago. That ALL of my accounts suddenly started getting a lot less spam, seems to indicate it has to be something other than coincidence.
You would think this would be big news. I've Googled several times to see if I could find any comments about this. I didn't find anything that dated recently, which leads me to believe that voodoo and I are going crazy. 
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Phil Smith
Joined: 08 Mar 2006
Posts: 7717
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| Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 9:21 pm Post subject: |
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| WanMan wrote: | | Peri, we are not talking about you, but Phil. I was not aware Phil had a business and treated his post as if he was talking about a personal email. I manage my email, no one is spam filtering for me, and I have never had 1/100 the amount of Spam he was experiencing. It just surprised the h3ll out of me. |
You bring up a good point. Maybe the real issue isn't why I'm getting less spam, but why I use to get so many. Maybe I should be celebrating that I'm now receiving a "normal" amount, and wondering why I use to get so many.
My personal and business e-mail address are one and the same. I really don't have a need for separate addresses. Plus, as you can tell by my forum name, I'm not too concerned about privacy. My feeling is, if you're not a terrorist, rapist, child molester, etc., it doesn't matter if everyone knows who you really are.
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Heywood Jablome
Joined: 12 Mar 2006
Posts: 1548
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| Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 9:40 pm Post subject: |
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I was an early adopter and very active in the development of the MySQL database engine... (No, not one penny of the billion dollars Sun is paying for it is going to come my way  )
For several years some (un)helpful soul was copying the MySQL mailing list(s) to USENET.
Before Google started filtering eMail address patterns from its' results, you could search for my exact email address and get 385 pages of hits.
Were it not for my AntiSPAM I'm sure I'd be getting a thousand a day or more...
_________________
"Those countries which lag behind in industry, in the application of mechanics and technical chemistry, in the careful selection and utilization of natural products, where the respect for such activities does not permeate all classes of society, will unfailingly decline in prosperity. They will sink faster when neighbor states, with an energetic exchange between science and industry, go forward with renewed vitality."
-- Baron Alexander von Humboldt: 1769-1859
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AnalogRocks
Forum Moderator
Joined: 08 Mar 2006
Posts: 26706
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
TV/Projector: Sony 1252Q, AMPRO 4000G
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| Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 10:34 pm Post subject: |
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| Heywood Jablome wrote: | I was an early adopter and very active in the development of the MySQL database engine... (No, not one penny of the billion dollars Sun is paying for it is going to come my way )
For several years some (un)helpful soul was copying the MySQL mailing list(s) to USENET.
Before Google started filtering eMail address patterns from its' results, you could search for my exact email address and get 385 pages of hits.
Were it not for my AntiSPAM I'm sure I'd be getting a thousand a day or more... |
Thanks Heywood! Sorry about the loss of income though.
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AnalogRocks
Forum Moderator
Joined: 08 Mar 2006
Posts: 26706
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
TV/Projector: Sony 1252Q, AMPRO 4000G
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| Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 10:35 pm Post subject: |
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I must be doing something right. I googled my email address and got NO hit's
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CRT.
HD done right!
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Heywood Jablome
Joined: 12 Mar 2006
Posts: 1548
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| Posted: Thu Feb 21, 2008 1:28 am Post subject: |
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| AnalogRocks wrote: | | I must be doing something right. I googled my email address and got NO hit's |
Google uses the same pattern matching (*@*.*) that the spammers do, then hides those strings. They realized several years ago that they were a means for spammers to populate nefarious databases
_________________
"Those countries which lag behind in industry, in the application of mechanics and technical chemistry, in the careful selection and utilization of natural products, where the respect for such activities does not permeate all classes of society, will unfailingly decline in prosperity. They will sink faster when neighbor states, with an energetic exchange between science and industry, go forward with renewed vitality."
-- Baron Alexander von Humboldt: 1769-1859
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benareeno
Joined: 22 Mar 2006
Posts: 1614
Location: ottawa, canada
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| Posted: Thu Feb 21, 2008 4:11 am Post subject: |
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I notice the same thing recently...far less spam, and it's a good thing!
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Phil Smith
Joined: 08 Mar 2006
Posts: 7717
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| Posted: Sun Feb 24, 2008 5:36 pm Post subject: |
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Ok, that's 3 of us that have noticed this. That can't be a coincidence. At least some of us are truly getting less spam. Now I don't feel so crazy.
I saved all the spam I've received for the last 4 or 5 days (I forget what day I started  ). Between my 3 accounts, I've received 225-235 spams. I would have easily received that many in less than a half a day in the past, so you can see that the sudden reduction was dramatic and obvious.
Like Ben said, a very good thing! 
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