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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?

#141

Post by aeternum »

asdff wrote: post #116
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.

Because newsletters, special interest groups, internet forums, product updates also a valid uses of mass email.

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

#142

Post by denton-scratch »

Terry_Roll wrote: post #88

Because forcing people to use anti virus spam filters is a way to spy legally on other people whilst getting paid for that spying without a shred of proof that someone is spying on you! Ask yourself this, why doesnt email readers come up with a standalone built into way to reduce or shutdown the attack vector of antivirus and resource burn of spam filters?

Because spam filtering should be done at the server.

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

#143

Post by aeternum »

anderspitman wrote: post #77
pwg wrote: post #2

> These emails are so bad and there is almost no chance of them finding their way through a spam filter, why are people still sending them? Most likely because the cost to send per email is so low as to be essentially free. As well, there may be some amount of 'Nigerian email' issue here. I've heard it said that the "Nigerian prince with 65M needs help moving money to your country" emails are so poorly worded on purp…

I'd pay for a service that responds to every spam email with a GPT-generated conversation, with the goal of wasting more of their resources than yours. Maybe you could train it on a central database that keeps track of which conversations get the most consecutive replies from scammers. You might not even need GPT. Maybe just the act of responding with a reasonable amount of text would create a large filtering burden…

I see something similar as as a risk for the general internet. We are already seeing GPT-based content farms masquerading as product review sites. It's easy to monetize traffic via affiliate links.

It will get harder and harder to separate genuine (human-generated) content from AI-generated. Eventually I think we will have browser extensions designed to detect AI-generated content and it will result in another arms race.

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

#144

Post by mitchdoogle »

lokar wrote: post #123
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…

I feel like this has some parallel in the crypto space :)

Greed can make people do stupid things in any space

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

#145

Post by cosmodisk »

Clubber wrote: post #105
jacquesm wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup, they're robbing old people of their life savings. It seems nobody seems to be doing anything to prosecute or even track these people down.

It's an international crime most of the time, with operations that can be opened in a day. It doesn't help that local law enforcement in some countries actively covering these types of crimes.

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

#146

Post by frays »

bastard_op wrote: post #13

These days spam is less about selling you viagra or other crap, but probably more trying to phish or infect you in some way. They ransomeware you via some drive-by infection vector from email links, and then they get paid when you realize you're screwed.

Are drive-by attacks still actually possible if you're using a modern browser?

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

#147

Post by mitchdoogle »

ColinWright wrote: post #137
jaywalk wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

FWIW, every server-level spam filter I'm used has had so many false positives it's caused me significant problems. Also FWIW, people to whom I send email regularly tell me that their email systems mis-classify my emails as spam. I've spoken with several networking specialists, and they all shrug their shoulders and say: "It's the server level spam filtering ... it's not very good." GMail in particular is known to be…

Just as a counterpoint, my company uses Google Workspace for email and we receive a good deal of spam. Been using it a couple years now and it's been very good at identifying spam, with very few false positives.

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

#148

Post by anderspitman »

aeternum wrote: post #143
anderspitman wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd pay for a service that responds to every spam email with a GPT-generated conversation, with the goal of wasting more of their resources than yours. Maybe you could train it on a central database that keeps track of which conversations get the most consecutive replies from scammers. You might not even need GPT. Maybe just the act of responding with a reasonable amount of text would create a large filtering burden…

I see something similar as as a risk for the general internet. We are already seeing GPT-based content farms masquerading as product review sites. It's easy to monetize traffic via affiliate links. It will get harder and harder to separate genuine (human-generated) content from AI-generated. Eventually I think we will have browser extensions designed to detect AI-generated content and it will result in another arms r…

I think this might be a good thing in the long run. It may force us back to smaller social communities, where we get recommendations by asking our friends and their friends, rather than trusting search engines to curate the internet for us.

There are risks. You don't want people to get into echo chambers. But that's happening anyway.

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

#149

Post by michaelmrose »

ColinWright wrote: post #137
jaywalk wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

FWIW, every server-level spam filter I'm used has had so many false positives it's caused me significant problems. Also FWIW, people to whom I send email regularly tell me that their email systems mis-classify my emails as spam. I've spoken with several networking specialists, and they all shrug their shoulders and say: "It's the server level spam filtering ... it's not very good." GMail in particular is known to be…

> GMail in particular is known to be aggressively negative towards email originating from anywhere other than another GMail account.

This just isn't correct. Gmail does indeed have a HUGE market share at around 20-30% depending on source but with every business using mail for notification and business communication you will note that an even smaller minority of mail comes from other gmail accounts. If Gmail actually worked like that it would have ceased to work entirely and lost most of its users. If I understand correctly the actual issue is all the major players vs very small players like people running their own server.

In that scenario the users whether it be on yahoo, google, msn what have you get 99.999% of their intended email while the person running their own email server will have a much larger miss rate a bigger problem and one that can't be solved on the client side at all.

From the perspective of the end user who is neither aware nor concerned about small servers issues server side filtering works very well. Looking at my spam folder it seems to be filled not with nigerian scams which don't even make it to my spam folder but with emails from people who have send me emails which have some degree of legitimacy but which I have repeatedly deleted unread like political emails requesting contributions. From my perspective it works great.

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

#150

Post by netizen-936824 »

teddyh wrote: post #131
netizen-936824 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hope is that it would be an open and free standard instead of some of the usual bullshit vendor lock in

When has that ever happened?

That's an extremely broad question. Are you asking specifically about email replacements, communication standards, or just proprietary software in general?
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