Personally, I believe a spam will exist while it makes a reasonable profit. In other words, while people are still clicking links in those emails, and sending a thousand emails is dirty cheap - it will exist. I also believe that spam is unbeatable as a matter as it's now everywhere not only in "dirty cheap emails": we all faced robo-calls, sms, messages in social networks, etc. I'm even still receiving a spam into my analog postbox right at front of my house. It's something that will pursue us while it makes a sense for businesses.
Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?
21–30 of 194 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?
#22Dude, spam on Usenet is still a thing. alt.books.iain-banks, for example, is utterly full of garbage, and that's for a discussion forum technology that's been obsolete for nearly twenty years.
I get spam from Google Apps customers, Office 365 customers, Mailgun customers, and more, despite these providers' terms of service. I get spam on my LinkedIn spamtrap address, my FreeBSD ports spamtrap address, and more. I'm seriously considering a switch to whitelisting, which is what I had to do on my phone to deal with all the robocallers. It's insane with motivated evil people will do for a little money.
Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?
#23> 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…
The cost for spammers can be actually free because they often use botnets and compromised accounts to send spam.
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!”
Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?
#24> 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…
> If an individual responds to the spam, then the spammer knows they have possibly found a very gullible individual that can be easily exploited.
This is absolutely key. The marginal cost of sending the spam is nil, but the marks self-select.
And you don’t need a lot if them to make a good income, especially if you’re in a developing country. In most of subsaharan africa, median income is under $1000. In some countries it’s under $500.
Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?
#25Because 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. You can DKIM, SPF, and do all the SMTP authentication you want, but the spammers still get through.
Sure, it might end up in the spam box. But so do real emails. So, spammers still get their emails viewed. As do phishers.
https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/tricked-rsa-worker-opened-b...
A well-crafted e-mail with the subject line "2011 Recruitment Plan" tricked an RSA employee to retrieve from a junk-mail folder and open a message containing a virus that led to a sophisticated attack on the company's information systems,
TL;DR: Email is fundamentally broken because it was designed in a time when you could leave your doors unlocked at night.
Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?
#26Outright spam is one thing. What’s more prevalent these days and vastly more annoying is corporate spam. Every purchase now is apparently free license to send you pure garbage emails multiple times per day.
Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?
#27Why does Gmail even show them in the spam filter? Shouldn't it be so obvious spam that I don't have to deal with it? And then only keep the dubious stuff and show it to me.
In general, what you see in the spam filter is the stuff that isn't obviously spam--the latter category is entirely black-holed.
False positives in spam detection are really bad, so you want to tune your algorithm to have really low false positive rates--which means you get high false negative rates in turn. Having a spam folder to filter non-black-holed spam into allows you to introduce another level where false positive rates can be higher without being catastrophic.
Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?
#28There are a lot of e-mail systems out there with not very good spam filters. And spammers do change up their methods to get around filters. You might not notice them, but people with less effective spam filters do get them. (And some people are dumb enough to read e-mails in their spam folder) It's always been an economic numbers game. You might send 1 million spams that costs you $100, but you might get $400 in retu…
Filtering is also not simple problem. One user might want to filter the "newsletter" subscriptions they have been automatically singed up for. And per best advise should not try to unsubscribe from as this tells the sender that it is good address to sell... Other one might actually want to see those.
Not to even mention those crap sites that allow you to signup with email without verification, looking at Instagram...
Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?
#29> These emails are so bad
From my understanding, that is a feature. It acts as a filter for the top % of more gullible targets.
Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?
#30Why does Gmail even show them in the spam filter? Shouldn't it be so obvious spam that I don't have to deal with it? And then only keep the dubious stuff and show it to me.
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