According to this New York Times article, the spam problem, which seems to be going away in the last few months has gotten worse rapidly recently. Softscan, reports that 89.73% of email is now spam.
According to the NYT, it is especially new forms of spam that make up the bulk of this resurgence. For example, there are messages that just consists of images (and some using images that are randomly changed in every email so that it can’t be discovered) and then there is penny stock spam (where the spammer wants you to buy some stock so that the spammer can reap the profits).
Om Malik suggest to route email through GMail:
No dice! Some of us simply have set up elaborate rules where we route emails to our Google Mail account, and then route it back to our main email account. That helps, since Google has good spam filters, but in reality it is a band aid fix.
As a GMail user, I hardly see spam, where I do see spam is on blogs, especially abandoned blogs. My Askimet spam filter here has prevented 14,000 messages so far from spamming my comments. All of them start with something like “Great site,” or “Best site ever” (you know that ain’t true) and then have a link to some online pharmacy that will sell you “performance enhancing” drugs.
I don’t know what to do about email spam, but the blogosphere has to find some way of avoiding getting caught up in the same problem. Jermey Zawodny had some good ideas about what bloggers can do about this in 2003 - and sadly, they still hold true (except he didn’t know about Akismet yet):
- turning off comments (bad)
- turning off comments after an entry is more than a few days old (might help, easy to do)
- sending confirmation URLs via e-mail to the poster (valid e-mail address required but not displayed on the site)
- writing a bit of content scanning code (there are certain features in common with all my comment spam)
- keeping all comments for each post in a separate file that’s included at display time via an IFRAME or FRAME in the page. Then I’d drop in a robots.txt file that tells Google to ignore all comments. That’d defeat the spammer’s main goal: higher PageRank.
Technorati Tags: spam, email, blogging, blog spam, comment spam, spam spam spam, emailxt
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[...] By way of The Last Podcast, I found out that a major newspaper in the United States reported that 89.73% of all email in your inbox is now spam. [...]
[...] Again: Using G mail to filter Spam is the improvised way. http://www.lastpodcast.net/2006/12/07/spam-spam-and-more-spam/ [...]
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