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By BRAD STONE
Published: December 6, 2006

Hearing from a lot of new friends lately? You know, the ones that write “It’s me, Esmeralda,” and tip you off to an obscure stock that is “poised to explode” or a great deal on prescription drugs.

You’re not the only one. Spam is back — in e-mail in-boxes and on everyone’s minds. In the last six months, the problem has gotten measurably worse. Worldwide spam volumes have doubled from last year, according to Ironport, a spam filtering firm, and unsolicited junk mail now accounts for more than 9 of every 10 e-mail messages sent over the Internet.

Much of that flood is made up of a nettlesome new breed of junk e-mail called image spam, in which the words of the advertisement are part of a picture, often fooling traditional spam detectors that look for telltale phrases. Image spam increased fourfold from last year and now represents 25 to 45 percent of all junk e-mail, depending on the day, Ironport says.

The antispam industry is struggling to keep up with the surge. It is adding computer power and developing new techniques in an effort to avoid losing the battle with the most sophisticated spammers.

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Just yesterday I had to clear out 2600+ messages from my secondary (which used to be my primary) email account. About 2 1/2 weeks worth of messages. That account is no longer functional for me. I can't find the real email amidst the pages of junk.

There is no galactic law down here, he intoned with a voice like a
of my mother. I do this very rarely; it must be all the male-female
As his image faded I coughed to cover the grunt of suspicion that
was over-of it were ever over-I promised myself a nice long holiday.
tied to the post. No shirt.
Theres no one here but me-me-me.
that manner and assumed it was the local dialect.
expensive humanoid robots that money can afford. Which money will not
trouble. Call him.
must be the volunteer with the nom de guerre of Jim about whose

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Originally posted by jas:
It doesn't explain the gibberish email, though.

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Originally posted by jrootham:
Do you have images turned on when you read email?

A lot of the gibberish text messages put the actual spam message in a graphic. It's much harder to filter graphics than text.

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Originally posted by Gir Draxon:

Trojans/Viruses?

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It doesn't explain the gibberish email, though.

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Most of spam email is orginating from locations where English isn't the primary language. Hehe, you've seen some poorly translated foriegn products (I recently got an email full of them in a joke email ring... Theres an image of a bag of candy labelled "Shito Mix : Traditionally Recipe, New improved Shito!" written on it)... Some of these gibberish emails are simply exceedingly poorly translated english lacking most forms of grammar. Heh, imagine what it'd look like if you wrote up a spam email to send to everyone... In Icelandic or Romanian.

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There must be a way to track it. And the spammers should be prosecuted with the full force of the law. Honestly, what are they thinking?

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Full force of the law doesn't help much when the spam problem is a global issue and the spam laws enforced are by nation. Most spam does not originate from locations that have applicable laws.

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If you get one of these a day, you're getting at least 15. It's like getting 15 vacuum cleaner salespeople coming to your door every day. Do they think this is a great way to sell stuff? No.

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As a small ISP, I deliver about 5500-6500 emails a day to about 650 clients. I am not sure what percentage of these are SPAM, but it is over 80%.

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Originally posted by jas:
I wonder what some of these programmes can do, because for a while there, some of the keywords in these spam-mails would seem to reflect the content of my emails (using political topics or politician's names or uncommon names of people I actually knew) if not some content on my hard-drive (or eg; my posting history on Babble?). Unless it's sheer coincidence.

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It is miracle cure if you control your own mail server. You just place a cheap linux box running postfix in front of your default mail server, add a sender_access to whitelist listserves and blacklist commercial emailers (legitimate spammers like staples, air canada, etc ... maybe you want to keep them too) and voila! Your spam is reduced 95% overnight and, and, you have protection against mail bombs to boot (greylisting denies spam at the door requiring very little processor time).

Total cost: 1 box and about 2 hours of your time. 30 mins if you have a linux box up and ready to go.

Complaints? At first, one or two. Some mail senders will complain about thier mail being bounced. Either white list them, or explain your spam controls. After about six months, no complaints and very little spam. Best of all, no lost mail and no user interaction required.

Try it! What do you have to lose?

[ 07 December 2006: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]

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Nothing? Let me introduce you to greylisting.

It is miracle cure if you control your own mail server. You just place a cheap linux box running postfix in front of your default mail server, add a sender_access to whitelist listserves and blacklist commercial emailers (legitimate spammers like staples, air canada, etc ... maybe you want to keep them too) and voila! Your spam is reduced 95% overnight and, and, you have protection against mail bombs to boot (greylisting denies spam at the door requiring very little processor time).

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