I have noticed an absolutely huge decrease in the amount of spam arriving at my main domain. Right now I'm receiving 15-20 spams a day, which is a tenfold reduction. My domain's hosted by Google, and the decrease has been so noticeable that I have an entry on my to-do list to start hunting through GMail's help and blogs to see if they've implemented something new. It looks like I've found my answer!
Yeah, I noticed the same, not on my own domain but on my gmail account. Since old spam is auto deleted from the spam folder at 60 days age the counter next to the folder is a good proxy of a 60-day moving average. A couple years ago mine was close to 10,000 spams for 60 days, currently it is at 1,444 (which is up from a week or two ago when it was at 1,310).
What people don't like to admit about spam, is that it created value for somebody. This is why some people clicked on the ads and why others profited.
SEO Spam creates value. Unfortunately, it also degrades value for a great many others. There is opportunity here. Google or some other search engine needs to figure out how to capture the value in SEO spam. (Perhaps by finding a way to identify "original pages" like those on StackOverflow and then act to enforce their terms of service?)
> What people don't like to admit about spam, is that it created value for somebody. This is why some people clicked on the ads and why others profited.
By this same logic, you can justify the heroin trade, the slave trade, and the child pornography trade.
Why is everyone umping to the conclusion that I'm justifying SEO spam? I'm only saying it creates value. (While destroying some for others.) This means that it can be co-opted.
Obvious trolling, but the slave trade and child pornography probably wouldn't be down with most libertarian principles. The core I've seen from most libertarian folks is "Do what you want to yourself, but don't harm other people." Slavery and child pornography are fairly obviously harming others. Heroin is trickier.
There doesn't appear to be any evidence of that being the case. Rustock (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rustock_botnet) appears to be responsible for the bulk of the drop in volume, but several others smaller botnets have fallen silent too. There haven't been any reports of it being used for anything other than spam and isolated ddos attacks (http://www.joestewart.org/rustock-ddos.html) in it's 4 year history. It is a bit of a mystery as to what is going on, but my bet would be it'll resume with a new approach or upgrade, rather than a complete re-purposing.
Where the grey is spam filtered by spamassassin and the red is obviously spam rejected outright due to an invalid recipient or an impossible sender or whatever.
The previous year's trend looked sort of similar - I think 2007 or 2008 was the peak in terms of spam we receive and it's been declining on average since then.
I guess that contributed plus a spike in people starting to use iPads and smart devices and Macs and Kindles etc and either abandoning or just not having their Windows desktops turned on as much. Botnet agents can't send spam when turned off or offline.
I wonder if the rise of gmail's (and other) spam filtering has made the practice of email spamming less lucrative and thus less popular among the spamming folks.
Weird, I've started getting more spam in my inbox than ever before. My gmail used to be entirely clean, and now I get a few messages daily that sneak past the filter.
Could also be a side effect of government efforts to close any security holes that have been or might be used by Wikileaks. Wouldn't have to be limited to US govt, could be others too. All speculation until more evidence comes to light.
Is it a sure sign of the effect hacker news has had on me that my first thought was "ooo... a hole in the market, I wonder if I could write something to fill that niche"
Meh - spam email has too many legal headaches. I'm sure you can make money doing it, but I tend to think it's a bit more trouble than it's worth.
Looking at some mailserver spam filtering log.... spam levels have dramatically dropped, but they also dramatically rose before that. At this point what I'm looking at is only slightly lower than things were in early december.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 95.0 ms ] threadSEO Spam creates value. Unfortunately, it also degrades value for a great many others. There is opportunity here. Google or some other search engine needs to figure out how to capture the value in SEO spam. (Perhaps by finding a way to identify "original pages" like those on StackOverflow and then act to enforce their terms of service?)
By this same logic, you can justify the heroin trade, the slave trade, and the child pornography trade.
For reference, I admin a mail server for a small charitable organisation, and our mail graph for the last year looks like this:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4957647/mailstats/mail.png
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4957647/mailstats/rejected.png
Where the grey is spam filtered by spamassassin and the red is obviously spam rejected outright due to an invalid recipient or an impossible sender or whatever.
The previous year's trend looked sort of similar - I think 2007 or 2008 was the peak in terms of spam we receive and it's been declining on average since then.
Meh - spam email has too many legal headaches. I'm sure you can make money doing it, but I tend to think it's a bit more trouble than it's worth.