Interesting Editor's note from the Information Week newsletter:
In recent weeks, you've probably noticed the return of an old pest: spam. For almost two years, it seemed as if spam might finally be on the decline. Remember when Bill Gates said that by 2006, "spam will be solved"? Well, that was all going well until a few months ago when spam struck back.
According to e-mail filtering vendor Postini, spam volumes have grown 73% in the last two months. There are several recent developments that have triggered the new growth of spam:
* Spammers are now embedding their messages in images to slip past spam filters that search for keywords and phrases. The number of e-mails with images has grown from nearly zero to almost 25%. * Spammers are experimenting with the text in their messages, especially in the subject lines. All it takes is a few minor tweaks and a spammer can successfully go from the spam filter to the in-box.
-- Bill
Speaking of spam, how have other people been doing since the earlier discussion on greylisting and/or blocklists?
For myself, I've seen two things: at work, where they haven't yet implemented either, I get oodles of crud. There is something set up which tags potential spam, but no hooks for retraining mis-judged email are available. On the other hand, the spambayes plugin for Outlook at least pre-sorts the rest with minimal retraining needed. My personal setup has greylisting and blocklists, and I get maybe one every day or two, and some of those are aimed at lists which are already whitelisted.
On 29 Dec, Tim Lavoie wrote:
Speaking of spam, how have other people been doing since the earlier discussion on greylisting and/or blocklists?
Here's some greylist stats from some of the servers I administer.
# Summary: 13866 records, 10138 greylisted, 3728 whitelisted # Summary: 26987 records, 25403 greylisted, 1584 whitelisted # Summary: 43094 records, 40437 greylisted, 2657 whitelisted # Summary: 2811 records, 2659 greylisted, 152 whitelisted
Since I've yet to be made aware of any false positives, and since around 95%+ of whitelisted emails appear to be non-spam, you can get a taste of how much spam is being blocked by this technique alone.
That's with a retention of 5 days for grey, 30 for white.
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Bill Reid -
Tim Lavoie -
Trevor Cordes