[LINK] spam stats

[Adam Todd]

At 04:41 PM 29/10/2006, Ivan Trundle wrote:

>I concur. And don't forget Chinese spammers - which I spend most of
>my time dealing with (having worked with a Chinese colleague).

You can't just filter anything in odd character sets?  I do.

>It is absolutely appalling, a waste of time, and a waste of
>bandwidth. Imagine the outrage if junk mail in letterboxes amounted
>to the same quantum.

Um, drop around and clear my mail box any time you like.  Yesterday there 
were 18 catalogues in it.  Today there are another 26.  Hopefully tomorrow 
there will be nothing.

We have a large 240 litre "recycling" bin.  1/4 of it each fortnight is 
filled with catalogues and junk form the letter box.

We get maybe 1 or 2 letters a MONTH in our letter box (I prefer my PO 
BOX!  Less junk!)

>As far having to trawl through the detritus of spam, I avoid it like
>the plague - and it sickens me that there is a market for all this crap.

Sad but true.

>On the bright side, at least most spam is text or image-based, and
>not moving images (it will come, if it hasn't already).

Haven't you seen the new Shockwave includes!  ERGH!

>But again, imagine if any other infrastructure was equally clogged:
>roads, rail, air, water, etc. It's madness.

You haven't taken a drive on the M4 in the mornings have you!

>As an interesting aside, I have made some observations about the TYPE
>of spam that each of my server accounts receive - this IS
>illuminating. My teenage daughter, for example, gets mostly slimming
>spam (which she certainly doesn't need - but it seems that there is
>such a thing as teenage spam), A few friends get mostly Israeli
>investment scams and viagra/sex, I get viagra and Nigerian spam,
>others get a combination of viagra and sex organ improvements, whilst
>a few others get mostly viral content. If I hadn't checked, I would
>have assumed that the type of spam would have been equally spread
>across all of the accounts.

Actually my wife and I get rather different spam, and have for about two 
years now.  I find it interesting.  She gets the sliming, breast 
enhancement, rarely a penis enlarger, lost of "cheat on your husband" 
messages and heaps of "make him happy permanently"

I get a lot of penis enlarger ones, but my wife said that's not a good idea 
it's big enough, so is my brain apparently.  I get a rare slimming one, 
lots of "make her happy with a new tool" but she doesn't like tools so I 
ignore them.  I get a lot of nigerian stuff and I'm starting to see lots of 
investment things.

Our main accounts are generally "ambiguous" but with our full names taken 
from other people's address books no doubt spamers have a gender 
differentiation algorithm.

>There is, naturally, a direct correlation between the age and
>exposure of the e-mail address and the level of spam. Having a public
>e-mail address (as I have done for many years, being a web manager
>etc) and activity in e-lists (such as Link) increases the exposure to
>spam, too. All these things are obvious, and not easily avoided.

I changed my link email address a couple of years ago and the spam from the 
new link specific address is very low.  My old address is nasty though.

>But what annoys me is that whilst some e-mail addresses are
>disposable, and can be left behind, some e-mail addresses tend to
>stick for life - I'm wondering if it is wise to have an address that
>uniquely identifies you for your lifetime (such as john at howard.com,
>or tony at barry.id.au, etc).

I have; at ah.net  and prefer to use it, and do.  I also have adam 
todd.inoz.com which is the second most used and my third most used is adam 
iconoclast.inoz.com

I'm starting to see alot of spam to regisrations iconoclast.inoz.com and 
ip-media lists.ah.net which means as these are STRICTLY outbound to either 
users who register at the site and get a confirmation or the media, there 
are many outlook address books being compromised!