Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 194 posts

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

#81

Post by kevincox »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #73
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.

I remember hearing a rumour that nearly half of all mail that hits Google's SMTP servers ever land in an inbox. While there are reasons such as wrong addresses the vast majority of that is spam.

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

#82

Post by kevincox »

beaconstudios wrote: post #80
kevincox wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I doubt this. Because even bot nodes will get blocked eventually so each email is degrading that value of that node. Again, very, very low, but not exactly zero.

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

#83

Post by codecutter »

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 wished there would be some service like 'Lenny for phone spam' that will automatically keep on replying to spam emails and waste their time and resources.

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

#84

Post by vidanay »

MerelyMortal wrote: post #76
vidanay wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's definitely the correct geographical location.

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

#85

Post by dahart »

Old_Thrashbarg wrote: post #33
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.

Please report spam on these. The email providers won't know they were unsolicited and unwanted if you just unsubscribe.

Marketing email from an account you chose to sign up for may well be unwanted, but it isn’t entirely unsolicited. And it’s not at all the same as spam from companies that you haven’t interacted with. There are problems with reporting any and all email you don’t want as spam, especially when you’ve done business with that company. That devalues the meaning of spam and it will cause email providers and spam filter providers to become less stringent on identifying spam, not more. It’s already happening to gmail.

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

#86

Post by throwawayffffas »

kevincox wrote: post #81
throwawayffffas wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I remember hearing a rumour that nearly half of all mail that hits Google's SMTP servers ever land in an inbox. While there are reasons such as wrong addresses the vast majority of that is spam.

I would not be surprised if it was more than half given the trivial cost of sending email.

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

#87

Post by johannes1234321 »

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…

It is true that it most likely works well enough to get some returns. However on this point:

> Apparently enough people ultimately click the links to make it worth it for the spammers, otherwise it would have stopped.

Each generation has to learn new. Every day, there is somebody new to try out spamming. Every day somebody got their first mail address and their first spam.

Most of those spammers will quit soon again, some will improve and have some small win.

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

#88

Post by Terry_Roll »

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?

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

#89

Post by bdcravens »

dhosek wrote: post #79

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 domai…

Possibly, but most people willingly give out their email address. If it's for sale once, it'll be for sale 1000x.

Also if you've ever had your email exposed in a breach (I suspect pretty much everyone has) you're in same boat. Often the two are combined (Looking my primary email up at haveibeenpwned I see places I knew had accounts with, as well as several marketing firms I had never heard of who no doubt bought my information)

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

#90

Post by rocky_raccoon »

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…

Sort of! I used to play around with Spamnesty [1] some 5 years ago. It looks like it's still around.

[1] https://spa.mnesty.com/

Post reply on HN