Less Evil, Still Annoying: 92% of Emails are Spam

[fayzaan]

I love the "you win a $ billion dollars!! CHACHIGN!!" emails 😀

 

[digitalwitchcraft]

[citation][nom]_cubase_[/nom]If I had said yes to all of the spam emails I have gotten, I would be $20mil richer, own about 3 countries, 50 iPods, and have a penis stemming from here to Massachusetts![/citation]

I ROFLed !!!
😀

 

[Guest]

While my mom was in the hospital last month, I decided to keep her inbox tidy. If there was an email I didn't know was spam, or knew explicitly wasn't, but was still not sure if she wanted, I called her. Everything else was either filed away in her folders or sent off to the recycle bin. Still, imagine my amazement when I discovered 90% of her spam consisted of advertisements for Viagra.

 

[cablechewer]

Well 92% is a pretty close match to the percentage of junk mail I receive through traditional postal services. About 7% is bills and other dull stuff. The last 1% is the stuff I actually care about.

If it wasn't so easy to spread malicious crap electronically I would just shrug because the virtual world had mirrored the real world. At least via my traditional mailbox the only toxic items I have received recently are from the local political candidates...

 

[zaixionito]

How much spam? About none. Seriously, I follow all the rules... I have a Windows Live mail account for places that I do not trust, which gets all my spam. Those that I know are good, such as bank, nice forums, I use my real info. I also keep my email adress hidden, or something like "Real!lyfor!male!mail@Gma!il.com, remove the things that don't belong"

 

[dEAne]

not much, I never go in for advertising lure.

 

[randomizer]

I've had several family members die in plane crashes (different years, same location), all of whom were rich. I don't know why the Bank of Congo thinks they have the right to give me some of my dead family members' money but keep the rest, but they said they want to split it.

I also don't know how Mr. Kabir Hakam of the bank in Burkina Faso got a request from me to release $16M US from a random deceased customer into my account.

 

[mayne92]

[citation][nom]jtt283[/nom]...and it will continue, as long as it is treated like a game. A spammer who is convicted should be put down; guilt may be appealed, but not the sentence. GAME OVER.[/citation]
They wouldn't be doing it I'm sure if there weren't stupid people who exist who actually fall for spam emails...

 

[legin]

I was once sent an email by the FBI that I had won 1 milion dollars, they never came =(

 

[luke904]

many people have old accounts that are just sitting and collecting spam.

my primary email gets none.

 

[hoofhearted]

[citation][nom]Mark Heath[/nom]I guess on the whole I'd prefer more spam that was less dangerous, since (almost) all the spam gets filtered out in Gmail anyway[/citation]

tax email, tariff the borders (boundaries)

 

[hoofhearted]

oops, quoted the wrong post ... should have been

[citation][nom]bourgeoisdude[/nom]As bad as this sounds, this should, in theory, actually solve the problem. Obviously though, this is not likely to happen and I certainly wouldn't want to pay taxes on email.Another problem with this approach--or any legislative or legal approach--is that with approximately 238 geopolitical entities in the world the chances of all of them agreeing on this is zero. Spammers will just camp in the country or countries that don't care or don't enforce it.oops, quoted the wrong post ... should have been[/citation]

for my post above
[citation][nom]hoofhearted[/nom]tax email, tariff the borders (boundaries)[/citation]

 

[f-14]

i wish ISP would just ban the IP's the spam is comming from, disconnecting that server from the web and acceptable IP log. would save them over 30%-50% of their costs in electric bills and hardware infastructure and probably restore enough unused bandwidth to the internet even file sharers can't bog down?!

 

[spartanii]

Wouldnt know since the only time I check my e-mail is when im expecting a important e-mail which isn't often. Dont use facebook dont use myspace or twitter. Toms and a few gaming web sites are the only accounts I have on the web. If you only visit a couple of trusted websites and dont give out your e-mail willy nilly you won't have a huge spam problem. The internet is like a bad neighborhood, get in, get what you need, get out.

 

[sailfish]

It's hard to tell how much I get since I have a tight filter on my email checker. If they aren't on my whitelist, I arbitrarily delete them. If it's important, they contact me through other means.

 

[extremepcs]

We run a Barracuda Spam Firewall at work. Last time I checked the stats, it had handled about 29 million messages. 27.5 million were classified as spam!

 

[pjmelect]

I work for Phizer and I am annoyed that all of the e-mails sent to me end up in my junk mail folder.

 

[redgarl]

Phhh... way too much... now the big trend is scam surrounding social sites...

 

[maestintaolius]

[citation][nom]hoof_hearted[/nom]Tax email[/citation]
If this will cut down on the number of worthless emails I get from coworkers 50 feet away from me that are too lazy to walk, I'll vote for it.

 

[random_yggdrasil]

I would say I get about 60% spam not including what is auto marked as junk.

 

[maydaynomore]

[citation][nom]JMcEntegart[/nom]I can hook you up with a friend of mine who got in touch a while back. He has several squillion dollars tied up in holding because his family was wiped out in one fell swoop. He just needs €5,000 to free up his funds and then he's going to split it with me. Wanna go halfsies? Surely it's much more reliable than investing.[/citation]
I actually know a guy who fell for that one.. what an idiot. He asked me for advice if he should do it or not. After I told him that it was a scam, he told me that he had alredy sent him a copy of his ss card, passport, drivers license and a check for $1,000. I told him he was screwed. not only the $1,000 he sent, but a lot more since they have all of his private info..

 

[dgingeri]

is it just me, or was there a surge of spam over the weekend? Both my hotmail and my main account got hit with a lot of spam yesterday and this morning. I signed in Saturday night to 5 spam messages on both accounts and emptied the spam folders. I signed in last night, about 24 hours later, and had 27 in my hotmail and 19 in my main account. Then I got up this morning with 15 more in hotmail and 12 more in my main account, then got to work and there was already 19 more in my main account and 5 more in my hotmail account! Total spam overload. 87 spam messages in 24 hours? They're nuts.

 

[dgingeri]

[citation][nom]f-14[/nom]i wish ISP would just ban the IP's the spam is comming from, disconnecting that server from the web and acceptable IP log. would save them over 30%-50% of their costs in electric bills and hardware infastructure and probably restore enough unused bandwidth to the internet even file sharers can't bog down?![/citation]

can't. free press. if we censor this, then other things will get censored, and we'd lose the freedom of speech and press. The government will take advantage of any slack given to them. So, we have to deal with stuff like this, street gangs, and racist nutcases so that the regular people will have the freedom to do our own things.

Go after street gangs for who they hang around with and we'd all lose freedom of assembly. Go after racist nutcases for their speeches, and we'd all lose freedom of speech. Go after spammers and we'd all lose freedom of press.

I wish there was a way around these things, but there isn't. Trusting the government to not abuse power is just not an option. our governments changes too much and too often to trust that.

 

[bildo123]

[citation][nom]Marco925[/nom]usually get half-baked World of warcraft phishing scams. Come on... I know that blizzard didn't purchase wow-blizzardbattle-passwordchange.net[/citation]

This times 9000. At least one a day if not every other day. Well, just like any other "bad business" like gold selling in MMO's; if there's a customer, there's a business. So some dumb-ass is falling for these scams.

 

[Matthias99]

"can't. free press. if we censor this, then other things will get censored, and we'd lose the freedom of speech and press."

Actually, unsolicited commercial email *is* illegal (see, e.g., the CAN-SPAM act), and ISPs *will* shut down accounts that are sending it. Several high-profile spammers have been brought up on criminal charges.

The problem is that most of it is sent by computers that have been compromised with trojans or viruses. By the time an ISP notices that one of its accounts is acting funny, it's already sent out a couple million spam emails. They can shut it down, but the spammers will just buy more systems from a botnet and keep going. Not to mention that some ISPs in other countries probably just don't care. You can't just start not accepting any emails from, say, every ISP in Eastern Europe.