Date: Tue, 2 Apr 2002 21:40:27 -0500 (EST) From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at keithlynch.net> To: WSFAlist at keithlynch.net Subject: [WSFA] Re: Capclave '02 (was Re: minders) Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net> Ted White <tedwhite at compusnet.com> wrote: > Um, Keith? Right now well over 90% of my snail mail is "junk mail" > -- the direct equivilent of spam. It would only be the direct equivilent of spam if: * You received a dump truck full of it every day, with your legitimate mail mixed in. * You were billed for the space it took up. * If there wasn't enough space, the post office would discard junk and legitimate mail alike. * ALL of it was fraudulent and worthless. > There is, however, one major difference: credibility. Right. Since it costs money to send paper mail, the sender has to get a positive response rate of several percent. With spam, a positive response rate of one in TEN MILLION is considered outstanding. The spammers make up for it in volume. If they can send a billion spams, they'll probably reach several suckers. And with today's technology, sending a billion messages is easy. Spammers have become more aggressive as they're learning that their crime has no consequences. It's like a perpetual riot. The police are so utterly overwhelmed that they don't even try. Five years ago, when one spammer advertised child pornography, numerous people promptly called the FBI. It turned out that the message was a hoax, intended to get an innocent person in trouble. Subsequent attempts to do the same resulted in no similar response, so finally spammers have started advertising child pornography for real. Even to children. > I ignore even the offers of cut-rate toner and supplies because I > *assume* they are scams and ripoffs, seeking access to my credit > card account(s). Right. If you gave them your credit card number, they would max it out and ship nothing. And would also use it to open new Internet accounts in your name, and send vast numbers of spams from them. To make it difficult to track them down, they'd also place it on a web page in hopes that people all over the world would see it there and run up charges on it. > Be that as it may, I typically get one to two hundred e-mails a day > and the spam has never added up to even 10% of that, Probably because your email address is almost secret. It has only appeared it two newsgroup postings, ever. And in no web pages as far as I can tell. Plus, your ISP is almost certainly already filtering. Before I started aggressively filtering, my spam volume had zoomed to more than one per minute, around the clock. Since then attempts at spamming me have more than tripled. With filtering, I'm blocking 99% of it, so I seldom get more than a couple hundred per day. I'm also losing perhaps 10% of all non-spam email, which I consider intolerable, except that I have no better alternative left. Unfortunately, when volumes continue to increase, I'll have to filter even more aggressively, which means I'll lose an even higher percentage of non-spam email. When legitimate email is increasingly likely to be discarded unread, people are less likely to bother to send it in the first place. It's not just me. There's discussion of this issue in the latest issue of the RISKS digest (aka the comp.risks newsgroup). > If spam continues to increase it will be filtered more vigorously. If you can come up with an algorithm that can block 99.999% of all spam, while blocking less than 1% of all non-spam, that will buy us some more time. Too bad nobody did anything with the time that was bought with the filters and other anti-spam technologies that started being developed six years ago. I've put in several thousand hours of unpaid work fighting spam. That's FAR more time than I've spent maintaining the WSFA web page, setting up and running this list, attending WSFA meetings, writing for the WSFA Journal and for this list, and working at conventions. And every minute of it was a complete waste. I might as well have been bailing the Titanic. Email is dying. Spammers are killing it. Filtering, blacklists, tarpits, and other anti-spam techniques have bought some time, but that time is rapidly running out. -- Keith F. Lynch - kfl at keithlynch.net - http://keithlynch.net/ I always welcome replies to my e-mail, postings, and web pages, but unsolicited bulk e-mail (spam) is not acceptable. Please do not send me HTML, "rich text," or attachments, as all such email is discarded unread.