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.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Spam
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
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.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Spammers' motivations
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
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.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Side effect of filters
[ link to this | view in chronology ]