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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?

#51

Post by MerelyMortal »

low_tech_love wrote: post #38
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

Guess what happens when you click "unsubscribe"?

I don't receive any emails for about 6-12 months, and then I start receiving emails again. At least that's what has happened with NextDoor, twice - once each for different emails months/years apart.

NextDoor also used to violate the CanSpam Act by requring you to log in to unsubscribe, but they fixed that a couple of years ago.

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

#52

Post by plorkyeran »

low_tech_love wrote: post #38
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

Guess what happens when you click "unsubscribe"?

You get a ridiculous page that makes it as confusing as possible to actually unsubscribe from everything. Once you succeed at that, you stop getting emails from them until they roll out their next marketing campaign, which you couldn't unsubscribe from because it didn't exist yet.

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

#53

Post by dspillett »

beaconstudios wrote: post #10
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…

The cost for spammers can be actually free because they often use botnets and compromised accounts to send spam.

There is a whole economy around spam at some scales: sometimes the spammer (the one actually sending the mail) has convinced a scammer (or slightly less illegitimate seller) to pay them to send mail because they claim to be good at getting through - in those cases the spammer actually gets paid a small amount (depending on their situation, a small amount to us could be a huge amount to them) no matter what.

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

#54

Post by akavel »

Check "scambaiting" generally, or for example "Kitboga" or "Scammer Payback" specifically on YouTube, for some funny-sad look on how many people can become gullible and vulnerable to various deception tactics. I only hope I'll never fall for one, but never am completely 100% sure; and we are going to get older at some point...

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

#55

Post by wintermutestwin »

teeray wrote: post #26

Outright 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.

90% of the things I order from Amazon result in a "customer service" check in email from some random vendor.

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

#56

Post by catern »

maxwell86 wrote: post #50
gertrunde wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct - because the cost of the spam itself is negligible, but the cost of developing a prospective mark into cash-in-pocket is quite high in terms of time & resources. The last thing the scammer wants is for the mark to back out after the scammer has invested resources into them, and before they have realised any gains. Effectively, insufficiently gullible marks reduce their profit margins.

I would like an email service where, when someone wants to send me an email, they have to first get some hash, e.g., "{hash}.myaccount@myprovider.com". Then, in order to get the hash, they have to paypal me 20 cents. If my attention is not worth 20 cents to them, then they should not be contacting me in the first place. Further replies to the same thread should be free for some period of time (e.g. a month or so).

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

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

#58

Post by Cupertino95014 »

At least sending spam is basically free for them, so any returns at all are gravy.

In your snail mail you're probably getting mostly paper advertising which goes straight into your recycling bin, and those people have to pay something even if it's "not much". And it's still apparently profitable, or else they wouldn't keep doing it.

Just hang out on NextDoor and you'll see how dumb some email users are. And then if you consider all the ones who are too dumb to even get on NextDoor, and you've got a target-rich environment there.

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

#59

Post by BeetleB »

maxwell86 wrote: post #50
gertrunde wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct - because the cost of the spam itself is negligible, but the cost of developing a prospective mark into cash-in-pocket is quite high in terms of time & resources. The last thing the scammer wants is for the mark to back out after the scammer has invested resources into them, and before they have realised any gains. Effectively, insufficiently gullible marks reduce their profit margins.

I would like an email service where, when someone wants to send me an email, they have to first get some hash, e.g., "{hash}.myaccount@myprovider.com". Then, in order to get the hash, they have to paypal me 20 cents. If my attention is not worth 20 cents to them, then they should not be contacting me in the first place. Further replies to the same thread should be free for some period of time (e.g. a month or so).

A similar idea:

http://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2018/Sep/solving-my-email-proble...

See discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18100807

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

#60

Post by josho »

jasonjayr wrote: post #41
jcranmer wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pos…

It shouldn't ever be black holed, it should rejected in the SMTP transaction. I'd love to never have to ask "did you get my email message?"

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 as the current system is it leaves spammers with uncertainty over whether their message made it through the spam filter.

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