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Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

#111

Post by Marsymars »

low_tech_love wrote: post #39
jonplackett wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I reckon it’s just a numbers game. Gmail will every now and then let absolutely ridiculous emails through the spam filter. Badly spelled, bogus URLs, with $$$$ all over the place and All CAPS and just so clearly to any human a phishing attempt or just general scumminess and gmail takes a look at it and says “yup everything seems legit here. On to the inbox!”

My Gmail inbox from 2004 is 99% spam. I've tried everything I can imagine, nothing works. It is absolute chaos.

I've got the opposite problem - I get almost no spam to my inbox but regularly get legitimate emails routed to my spam folder, so I have to treat my spam folder like a second inbox anyway.

Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

#112

Post by denton-scratch »

dspillett wrote: post #65
starwind wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I order something online, I always uncheck the box that says "I want to receive your newsletter" or never check it the first place. Inevitably, in the next few days, I start to receive their product offerings

This is why I have a catch-all and give each company a different address. I can just forward that address to junk¹ instead of bothering to unsubscribe. It isn't just when they ignore their own consent options for sending their own stuff, often mailing lists are hacked out of companies and become junk targets that way. Or they are actively sold: the amount of crap I get to the addresses I have registered with kickstar…

> bouncing increases the chance I'm becoming part of a back-scatter issue

Bouncing doesn't cause backscatter, provided it's a real bounce; that means a bounce that is a rejection by your mailserver, performed during the SMTP transaction. The message commonly known as a "bounce message" is technically known as a delivery status notification. The actual bounce message is composed by the sender's mailserver, and can't cause backscatter.

Basically, a bounce sent after the SMTP server has said "Message accepted for delivery" is a bogus bounce, and causes backscatter. Sending bogus bounces is a reprehensible practice (and quite useless).

Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

#113

Post by jaywalk »

lbriner wrote: post #67
jlengrand wrote: post #36

Because it works. Still relevant, from Microsoft Research: "Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are from Nigeria?" This approach suggests an answer to the question in the title. Far-fetched tales of West African riches strike most as comical. Our analysis suggests that is an advantage to the attacker, not a disadvantage. Since his attack has a low density of victims the Nigerian scammer has an over-riding need to reduc…

Also, a lot of people I suspect still have old email software (Outlook Express anyone?) which might not even have spam filters set up. It is sad because I think it isn't just gullible people generally, but those who did not grow up with computers and won't understand that "This is your bank informing you of a security breach" is bogus are unfairly hit. Other thing is that the cost of sending massive numbers of emails…

Who uses spam filtering in their email client anymore? That's done at the server level.

Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

#114

Post by creeble »

upofadown wrote: post #71
geocrasher wrote: post #25

Because email is a system designed for ARPAnet not Internet, and it was designed to be used be people who could be trusted to not spam. No protections were built in, and email hasn't fundamentally changed since the late 70's. In mid-late 90's the masses came, and since then we've been adding band-aids to it to keep it alive but the truth of the matter is that it's still an open door just waiting to be walked into. Yo…

Any system that runs off anonymous messages is going to have a spam problem. There isn't anything special about how email is designed that enables spam past that. If you were to design a new system you would have to have signed messages. But we could just do that now with email. It isn't a design choice, it is a choice that we make every time we send an unsigned email.

I think this is the essential fact, thanks for posting.

Lots of people complain about the “insecurity” of email, but as long as you want this feature (sending anyone a message knowing nothing more than just their email address), there will always be spam.

And if this is a feature you can do without, then there are lots of alternative communication systems, or you can always use signatures in email.

Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

#115

Post by godelski »

> These emails are so bad and there is almost no chance of them finding their way through a spam filter,

I still get frequent emails in my gmail that say

> Hey It is your friend my e-mail HRU?

Or

> Hi godelski, are you in Cincinnati?

Just this week I got one about a Norton 360 purchase that looks really legit but I see no statement on my bank.

Lots of spam still gets through.

Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

#116

Post by asdff »

jlengrand wrote: post #36

Because it works. Still relevant, from Microsoft Research: "Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are from Nigeria?" This approach suggests an answer to the question in the title. Far-fetched tales of West African riches strike most as comical. Our analysis suggests that is an advantage to the attacker, not a disadvantage. Since his attack has a low density of victims the Nigerian scammer has an over-riding need to reduc…

To get this approach to work you need to mass email to get over the low hit rate. The next question that follows, is why don't providers crack down on these scammers who need to send mass emails for their numbers to even pencil out? I'm struck this all hasn't happened 25 years ago at this point.

Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

#117

Post by iotku »

jacquesm wrote: post #102
jlengrand wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve discovered that paper a couple years back and indeed, once you hear it it just makes total sense, in a funny way

Not so funny for some. One person I know, (80+) got scammed out of a reasonably large sum of money (very large for them, probably pocket change for HN). They could not imagine that people would be so mean as to feign an emergency to scam others. These assholes really hurt people.

Yep, often praying on good will or desperation of older generations.

A lot of people think it's laughable that anyone would fall for "simple obvious scams" but I've met a good handful of older family and their more elderly friends who either fell to a scam or were only stopped once someone at a store questioned them as to why they were buying lots of gift cards all at once. In some cases scammers will work on people over a long period of time to gain their trust.

Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

#118

Post by jaywalk »

iamben wrote: post #95

Check your spam box. There's probably one saying "we have control of your camera and we've seen you playing with yourself". There's usually a bitcoin address to send a few hundred bucks to so they don't "send all your contacts the video". Give it a few days and go look at the address in a Blockchain explorer. There's usually 2 or 3 transactions. I guess you send 10m emails, you get lucky a handful of times. Spam work…

No matter how secure I make my PCs and network, they still are constantly gaining control of my webcam and watching me play with myself. I don't know how they are able to see through the lens cover, but I don't want the video getting out so I just pay.

Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

#119

Post by jlengrand »

jacquesm wrote: post #102
jlengrand wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve discovered that paper a couple years back and indeed, once you hear it it just makes total sense, in a funny way

Not so funny for some. One person I know, (80+) got scammed out of a reasonably large sum of money (very large for them, probably pocket change for HN). They could not imagine that people would be so mean as to feign an emergency to scam others. These assholes really hurt people.

You may have misunderstood my comment. The way the introduction of the article is phrased is funny, what scammers do is horrifying.

I've had people in my close family fall into debts to those folks, they target the weakest and literally go heaps and bounds to extract as much as they can from their 'mugus'.

Not fun at all :S

Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

#120

Post by asdff »

muttantt wrote: post #108

Same reason spam snail mail is a thing. All parties involve make money from it.

Except for the email providers who have to pay for engineers to fight in the spam arms race as well as pay to host spam email. I wouldn't be surprise if the majority of email providor storage was holding spam; signal to noise ratio seems extremely low.

You would think that these companies like microsoft or google that pay for these hosting costs would put more pressure on ISPs to ban clients that are clearly sending millions of trivally greppable spam emails an hour.

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