Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing? • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by upofadown » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 5:14 PM UTC

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.

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

#72

Post by anderspitman » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 5:17 PM UTC

MerelyMortal wrote: post #51

low_tech_love wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I just learned how bad NextDoor's dark patterns are yesterday. I realized it was about the 4th time I'd tried to unsubscribe, navigated to the notifications page, and see that they have about 40 categories of emails they send you, split across several parent categories. You could turn off parent categories, but not silence everything at once.

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

#73

Post by throwawayffffas » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 5:18 PM UTC

matsemann wrote: post #8

Why 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.

They do only show you things they are not sure about. They filter out a lot more spam than what you see in your spam folder. I for one have found a lot of legit emails in my spam folder especially from smaller retailers etc.

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

#74

Post by skilled » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 5:19 PM UTC

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 have to admit, I never paid this much thought, but your comment made me laugh out loud. Hahaha!

Thank you!

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

#75

Post by anderspitman » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 5:20 PM UTC

TehShrike wrote: post #48

I switched away from Gmail a couple of years ago – I have gotten the impression that spam is only still a thing for Gmail users. Gmail's spam filters would break horribly for me every few years, either flooding my inbox with spam, or filing obviously-not-spam emails in the spam folder. With Fastmail, my experience is that all spam goes to the spam folder, and only a few questionable newsletters get put in the spam fo…

I get a lot more spam with Gmail than Fastmail, but it all goes directly to the spam folder so the experience is largely the same for me.

Hard to say how much of it is that my Gmail account has been around a lot longer and part of multiple email leaks.

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

#76

Post by MerelyMortal » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 5:20 PM UTC

vidanay wrote: post #69

MerelyMortal wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My nearest neighbor is more than a quarter mile away. In a two-mile radius, I have less than a dozen "neighbors", and yet somehow, I have a NextDoor account that I receive spam emails about.

Do the content previews in the emails look like they're for your area, or could it be someone with a similar name registered somewhere else with the wrong email address and NextDoor never validated the email address?

I hate it when companies allow people to signup with email addresses that aren't theirs, never validate the email address, and then start spamming me. I mark all of those as spam. The latest offender is Chime.com (I have a common-ish FirstLast@gmail that I'm phasing away from.)

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

#77

Post by anderspitman » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 5:25 PM UTC

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 for scammers.

I have to believe someone has tried this.

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

#78

Post by kevincox » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 5:27 PM UTC

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.

botnets are not free. It takes time to develop and maintain. But it does make the cost of email using them very, very low.

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

#79

Post by dhosek » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 5:28 PM UTC

I think that a lot of spam is sent to lists of emails compiled in the 90s. Pretty much any email address that ever posted to Usenet is hopelessly compromised. On the flip side, I don't think that the spammers scan websites for email addresses any more. I have an email I publish on my contact page on my writing website (with a mailto: link and everything) that gets close to zero spam, only marginally more than a domainname@domainname.com address that I never publish.

Looking at the spam that gets trapped in the filters, I do think that one source of addresses is now compromised accounts or computers since I'll occasionally see spam purporting to be from people I know.

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

#80

Post by beaconstudios » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 5:30 PM UTC

kevincox wrote: post #78

beaconstudios wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

botnets are not free. It takes time to develop and maintain. But it does make the cost of email using them very, very low.

sending a mailshot through a botnet has zero marginal cost. Maintaining the botnet has overhead, but that's not a cost of sending the email, it's an overhead.