+1

I’ve felt at times that my GMail acct must be hosted on some long forgotten server that never gets updated spam profiles!

That said, they certainly do catch a lot of spam as well.

Even novice anti-spammers know that there are always
marked fluctuations in the quantity (and origin, and character) of spam as measured at any one point on the Internet. In order to assess the overall trend, many measurements are needed, taken at a sufficiently-diverse
set of points — i.e., different domains, different networks, different countries, different mail systems.

The worldwide trend in spam is clearly up, with debate over just what numeric value to assign to “up”, in part
because it constitutes such a high percentage of mail
that it may be reaching saturation. (Luckily, well-known,
easily-implemented techniques using open-source
software and free databases will suffice to block 95%
of it with very little effort or cost. That’s almost
always “good enough”, but in instances where it’s not,
refinement of those same techniques makes it possible
to go to 98-99% without too much trouble.)

What is down — and markedly so — is the apparent effort that Google is putting into controlling (a) spam outbound from its own servers (b) spam referencing web sites it is hosting and (c) spammer dropboxes on its freemail service. As a result of
this failure, Google is increasingly finding itself
compared to Hotmail and Yahoo — the
poster children for utter incompetence in running mail systems. (Hotmail’s abuse desk is legendary for their cluelessness, including inability to recognize their own IP address ranges even when pointed out to them.)

And of course, one of the consequences of this is that Google is now contributing to the problem.

I think it would be interesting if they compared the spam levels for people who actually have @gmail.com addresses against people with Google for domains.

I wish server-side email address verification was more reliable. (SMTP based verify) I had it on for a while and it kept my server from even receiving almost all spams, but it also kept my own brother and many friends from being able to email me. Those could be fixed with whitelisting, but it spoke to a more fundamental problem with the strategy. (What of business contacts that aren’t sending spam but are sending from a misconfigured mail server?)

There has been a similarly marked increase, both in volume and variety, of variations of the Nigerian scam, bogus lottery winnings, eBay and PayPal phishing, work at home, make gazillions off of the internet, etc. etc. emails; more of the phishing/spoofing ilk than of direct sales pitches.

I hope everyone is as diligent as I am in forwarding the spoof emails to the true websites’ security mailboxes. They are the easiest to track down, I think, and the legitimate businesses are finally actively pursuing the malefactors.

I could ramble on ad nauseum, but I need to claim my winnings in a UK lotto I’ve been awarded without even having to enter, and a widow in communist China needs my help in transferring funds from her late husband’s estate.

RSK, DCulberson, you’re saying that (1.) spam comes in waves, and (2.) Google isn’t aware of it?

For some reason, it absolutely *refuses* to learn that any email mentioning a lottery or telling me that I won something is ALWAYS spam, no matter how many thousands of times I report them as spam. It also misses lots of 419-style scams from countries other than Nigeria.

Trying to measure spam globally is difficult,
because the picture as seen from any one measurement
point (even a big one like Google) is often markedly
different than that seen from other points. Spammers
may target particular countries, domains, networks,
groups of end users, mail software or combinations;
they may also avoid them. They may “take a break”
and work on new methods, then deploy them in
test mode or full production. The impact of all this is
that it’s very common for site A to report a significant
increase in spam while site B reports just the opposite.
Extrapolate to the scale of the Internet and it’s a
difficult measurement problem.

Add to this another factor: spammers don’t just spam. Like any successful “business”, they diversify.
They’re into spyware, adware, phishing, domain kiting,
domain typosquatting, junk faxing, spit, spim, identity
theft — and a host of related areas. So even if a
sufficiently diverse set of measurements indicates, let’s say, that “spammer X is sending less spam” this doesn’t
mean that they’re not busy. They’re most likely just engaged in some other form of abuse at the moment.

And that’s the good news. Here’s the bad news: we are only at the beginning of the spam problem. It’s poised to get worse — much, much worse. Spammers have demonstrated the ability to innovate on an as-needed basis, and to rapidly deploy those innovations in production. What appears to be coming is much worse than what we’ve seen to date.

I agree with LINDZ69.

There are too many spam opportunities on too many sites like MySpace and YouTube to keep these leaches happy. Of course, the other ideas about avoiding gmail because it’s diligent are solid too.

I think that it’s a good thing to be considering these differences when discussing the quality of service for these sites. Facebook vs. MySpace would yield Facebook as the winner, Gmail vs. Hotmail is no question either.

Now I just can’t figure out why YouTube is ‘better’ than Vimeo…except for the same ways that MySpace is ‘better’ than Facebook: the mass appeal.

You’re right about the increase in “quasi-spam”, though. I get DOZENS of these “dear valued customer” turds a week now. For entertainment I like to write back to an address I know will read it with suggestions for ways it would be fun to watch their children die or some such.

Mr. Moeller and Mr. Vitale are presently guests of the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, NY. I wonder if they would appreciate some mail.