Are We Beating Spam?
from the is-it-worth-asking? dept
A lot of people have been noticing that anti-spam filters have become fairly effective lately. They're not perfect, by any means, but they make email usable for plenty of people. Even the FTC has come out saying that anti-spam filters have been an effective way to deal with spam. So, that raises the next obvious question: if these spam filters are so effective, why is there still so much spam? Wouldn't the spammers start to recognize that their messages aren't getting through? Is there a lag, or is it that the folks who don't use filters at all are still keeping spammers in business? Update: Brian McWilliams rips apart the methodology used in this study. It's worse than you'd imagine. Rather than actually looking at how much spam the filters caught, they just compared two spam-filtered accounts to an unfiltered account, and assumed that the number of spam messages would be the same.
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Spam
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Spammers' motivations
Instead, it's only grown.. Which means someone, somewhere, is actually profiting from putting their ads in 150 million mailboxes. And I'm not talking about the spamming companies.
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Re: Are We Beating Spam?
What could that be? I don't yet know (not being a spammer), but I bet it won't look like today's email-clogging variety.
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Re: Spammers' motivations
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Side effect of filters
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