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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?

#91

Post by bdcravens »

darknavi wrote: post #68
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've been using gmail (Google Apps for Business or what ever they call it now days) for like 10 years and the spam functionality has always worked pretty well for me.

I agree, though over the past 2 years more and more keeps sneaking through their spam filters.

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

#92

Post by RF_Savage »

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…

Does not even need to be that smart . "Lenny" and others are existing anti-telemarketer scripts and recordings. Reportedly 10-15 different answers from a "confused old man" are enough to waste their time.

So something similar with a bit of variation thrown in should turn that spammer advantage on it's head with the 65million spam emails getting 1million replies instead of 100.

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

#93

Post by FalconSensei »

masklinn wrote: post #24
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…

> 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 countri…

Due to conversion, minimum wage in Brazil is now $217,18

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

#94

Post by jasonjayr »

josho wrote: post #60
jasonjayr wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What's stopping spammers from just having a GMail account they can use to test if the message made it through?

I mean; I have to assume the engineers in charge of this @ Google are making the right call, but the cynic in me can't help but worry they are making the call in a way that benefits them at the cost of a healthier SMTP ecosystem. (ie, "Lets make email just unreliable enough that folks switch to Google Email 100%, or use some other Google Product for messaging ...")

You can reject the message anytime after TO/FROM/DATA w/o signaling which of those 3 caused it the message to be rejected.

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

#95

Post by iamben »

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 works enough to make it worth it, especially for what, 7 minutes work?

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

#96

Post by jlengrand »

skilled wrote: post #74
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!

I’ve discovered that paper a couple years back and indeed, once you hear it it just makes total sense, in a funny way

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

#97

Post by tartoran »

As long as spammers can send large numbers of emails for free we’ll have spam. This extended to phone calls as well and I find this even more irritating as they interrupt me daily.

Id love to find a solution that does not involve adding more cost but I can’t. In the US I get spam calls from numbers that are completely made up legit numbers from my area code. Once my partner was called by a despetate lady screaming out not to spam call her anymore and no amount of explaining the phone calls didn’t originate from us would appease her. This particular incident happened 5 years ago. Spam calls haven’t stopped though. Luckily smart phones can label spam calls but they still disrupt.

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

#98

Post by squidblimp »

I recently realized that some websites which aggregate data on people (the same annoying ones that come up when you google your name) advertise the fact that the email addresses have been "verified", including the fact that emails sent to the address don't bounce.

So that makes me wonder which percentage of spam emails are actually just checking that the email address is valid and active.

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

#99

Post by FL410 »

codecutter wrote: post #83
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.

This is an awesome idea. With something like GPT3 you could probably keep them going for a really long time. I have to imagine that if something like that became (somewhat) common, it would really cause some changes in how spammy sales works.

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

#100

Post by Broken_Hippo »

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 don't have that issue. In general, spam goes into the spam folder, which I can conveniently ignore. This wasn't the case some years ago. I might occasionally mark something as spam. I occasionally check the spam folder. I tell myself this is to make sure I didn't miss anything but realistically, it is so I can laugh at the ridiculousness. Only rarely does something I want get put in the spam folder.
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