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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?

#171

Post by kingcharles »

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…

This. The number of times I've checked an evildoer's Bitcoin address and seen multiple deposits in there makes me sad.

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

#172

Post by josho »

teddyh wrote: post #140
josho wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is by the time the message is deemed to be spam it's too late to reject the mail. Ie. The first step verifies the from/to addresses, then the message body is sent. So, if the message body is clearly spam and you reject the message body all you've done is confirmed to the spammer that they are sending to a legit email address and they need to change their message so it no longer is rejected as spam. As bad…

> The problem is by the time the message is deemed to be spam it's too late to reject the mail. That is incorrect. After the last DATA command from the spammer, your mail server can look at the mail and, if it’s spam, just say 558 5.7.1 That mail is ugly and you are ugly This rejects the mail and makes it bounce to the sender.

Yes, but unless that error is used frequently for other situations then it now becomes an obvious signal to spammers that their message has been flagged as spam.

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

#173

Post by upofadown »

geocrasher wrote: post #139
upofadown wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, it was a design choice made in the early 1970's before public key cryptography was even invented. And that's why it's broken and always will be. This is why email needs to go away completely. But then again, there are still laws on the books saying the only way to securely transmit a document is by fax machine. So even if somebody reinvents a backwards compatible email system tomorrow that solves all the problem…

HTTP was invented before SSL/TLS. Does that mean that the web needs to go away completely?

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

#174

Post by withinboredom »

antsar wrote: post #166
withinboredom wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are our own ESP at work and I work on the email team. When we get a (few) FBL from you, we block you from receiving any of our email whatsoever. Forgot your password or want to contact support? Oh well, we won’t spam you again. There are unsubscribe links, use those unless it really is unsolicited spam. What I find most interesting about email is how some people will mark email as spam literally months or years af…

> mark email as spam literally months or years after we sent the original email When a persistently spammy company compels me to open the Rules page to filter their trash, you bet I’m also going to Select-All and Report As Junk in hopes of maximally dinging their reputation. No idea if it works, but there’s one explanation :)

Nah, it isn’t that. These are one-offs.

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

#175

Post by teddyh »

josho wrote: post #172
teddyh wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is by the time the message is deemed to be spam it's too late to reject the mail. That is incorrect. After the last DATA command from the spammer, your mail server can look at the mail and, if it’s spam, just say 558 5.7.1 That mail is ugly and you are ugly This rejects the mail and makes it bounce to the sender.

Yes, but unless that error is used frequently for other situations then it now becomes an obvious signal to spammers that their message has been flagged as spam.

Then use 550 instead.

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

#176

Post by teddyh »

netizen-936824 wrote: post #169
teddyh wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When has ever a “ tech industry’s ‘reenvisioning’ of a free/cheap older, but universal, standard ” resulted in “ an open and free standard ” and not “ the usual bullshit vendor lock in ”?

Never that I can think of, which is why I stated my hope that it wouldn't be like that. But maybe that just means we can't necessarily depend on a profit motivated corporation to do the 'reenvisioning'

Bingo. See also the rumored “definition of insanity”; i.e. doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting a different result.

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

#177

Post by jonathanlydall »

buscoquadnary wrote: post #17
jonathanlydall wrote: post #11

Apparently enough people ultimately click the links to make it worth it for the spammers, otherwise it would have stopped. It's probably something like less than 1 in 10,000 emails getting a click, which is depressing when you consider all the computing resources wasted by receiving email servers and then by all the recipients which need to filter out the noise (for example I still at least scan subject lines of item…

> So with that considered, spammers clearly completely lack empathy for their fellow human beings, they have zero care on the cost of their practice, as long as it makes them a few bucks. I'll start by saying I in no way excuse like or can stand spammers, I think action should be taken against them as they've destroyed every communication medium in existence. But I have some friends that come from some third world co…

It sounds like these people are small scale spammers, doing things similar to 419 scams. A bit annoying, but really low volume.

The kind I'm referring to are single organizations which aim to send out 10s or possibly 100s of a millions of spam emails _every day_. I would expect there to be at least dozens of organizations at this scale. They're the ones who use botnets, open relays, and weird characters in their emails to get around filters.

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

#178

Post by throwawayvibes »

ColinWright wrote: post #160
chefkoch wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who up until recently managed the mail system and antispam for a business processing ~250k mails a das, false positives are an outlier. We had a ticket because of this perhabs once a week and most of the time it was because of poorly setup Mailservers in the other end. Server side filtering works quite well, most of the spam comes from hijacked leggid accounts that are burned quite quickly.

Great, I'm genuinely pleased to hear that your experience of server-side filters is a positive one. Mine is negative. The fact that you have a positive experience does not refute that mine is negative. Please: I've experimented with this for over two decades, and continue to do so. I know that lots of people say that server-side filtering is fine. My direct personal experience is that for me it is not fine, including…

Never had much of a problem with Gmail's filter. An odd newsletter end up in spam once every while. How does your issue manifest?

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

#180

Post by goodevans »

throwawayvibes wrote: post #178
ColinWright wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great, I'm genuinely pleased to hear that your experience of server-side filters is a positive one. Mine is negative. The fact that you have a positive experience does not refute that mine is negative. Please: I've experimented with this for over two decades, and continue to do so. I know that lots of people say that server-side filtering is fine. My direct personal experience is that for me it is not fine, including…

Never had much of a problem with Gmail's filter. An odd newsletter end up in spam once every while. How does your issue manifest?

It's his Nigerian Prince Scam How-To newsletter, goes missing every week!
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