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andrewduckerI am old enough to remember an internet without spam. I was online a good two years before the Green Card spam first hit the newsgroups in 1994.
This means that I remember when you didn't get any email, except from people who had something to say to you. They might be complete wierdos wanting to pick an arguemtn, , but they were an individual, sending you something personal. This was before companies really discovered the internet, so I wasn't even getting emails from Amazon, as they didn't come into existence until 1995.
Anyway, nowadays a vast amount of my email is spam. I don't both to keep track of it, and thankfully I'm sitting behind a series of filters - spamassassin throws away anything it scores over a 10. Anything scored 5-10 gets passed on to me with ****SPAM**** in the subject line. And then Thunderbird's adaptive filter has a go at what's left.
This kills off 95%, leaving about 20 a day to delete by hand. The vast majority of which are part of a fascinating development in spam - one which has stymied the majority of spamfilters - putting the text into an image.
Embedded images along with random text make it almost impossible for the content to be scanned. Some spam filters have started putting OCR in,to catch this - but then the spammers are altering the text enough to make it extremely hard to OCR it. It's entirely possible that this escalating warfare between spammers and spamfilterers will end up finding new wrinkles in OCR technology and visual perception, in their attempts to produce text that can be read only by people/produce code that can read said text.
Eventually I expect spam to consist of magic-eye pictures, where you haveto stare really hard at swirls of pseudo-random text until the name of the stock they want you to buy appears. Only three percent of the population will be able to actually see these messages, but these will also be the three percent of people who both have loads of money, and are entirely gullible about the stock market.
This means that I remember when you didn't get any email, except from people who had something to say to you. They might be complete wierdos wanting to pick an arguemtn, , but they were an individual, sending you something personal. This was before companies really discovered the internet, so I wasn't even getting emails from Amazon, as they didn't come into existence until 1995.
Anyway, nowadays a vast amount of my email is spam. I don't both to keep track of it, and thankfully I'm sitting behind a series of filters - spamassassin throws away anything it scores over a 10. Anything scored 5-10 gets passed on to me with ****SPAM**** in the subject line. And then Thunderbird's adaptive filter has a go at what's left.
This kills off 95%, leaving about 20 a day to delete by hand. The vast majority of which are part of a fascinating development in spam - one which has stymied the majority of spamfilters - putting the text into an image.
Embedded images along with random text make it almost impossible for the content to be scanned. Some spam filters have started putting OCR in,to catch this - but then the spammers are altering the text enough to make it extremely hard to OCR it. It's entirely possible that this escalating warfare between spammers and spamfilterers will end up finding new wrinkles in OCR technology and visual perception, in their attempts to produce text that can be read only by people/produce code that can read said text.
Eventually I expect spam to consist of magic-eye pictures, where you haveto stare really hard at swirls of pseudo-random text until the name of the stock they want you to buy appears. Only three percent of the population will be able to actually see these messages, but these will also be the three percent of people who both have loads of money, and are entirely gullible about the stock market.
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no subject
Date: 2006-12-12 11:50 pm (UTC)Yes, those were the days.
Luckily, my hotmail filter is all trained up and my private mail server has a reasonable filter and I use thunderbird to filter the rest. Poor little me only gets maybe one spam a month through all the filters - but a year ago I didn't get any.
I find just being careful what you look at and click on vastly dictates what spam gets to you. I'm not signed up to masses of news groups and the like which I believe contributes greatly to my lack of spam.
At the end of the day though, messenger software can leave messages for offline contacts these days and that might have to take over a bit - at least you can refuse stuff from users you don't know or choose who to allow stuff from.
Spammers are getting trickier - but at least they end up spamming each other which is a comfort at least. Ideally, they realise what an arse up they make of the internet and stop - but since many are paid for this activity we will never see the back of them until some get locked up or fined so heavily it will only leave the hardcore spammers to track down.
These days we would probably find it quite eerie if we didn't get any spam at all. Most of us might think our accounts had failed for some reason (one reason I noticed a glitch in one of mine recently).
Never mind folks, life wouldn't be life if we had nothing to gripe about. Living with spam is like living with reality TV. Mostly crap, but sometimes makes you laugh.