30% of e-mail is spam
Spam exceeded normal e-mail in July 2003
Most annoying spams purport to carry free passwords to sex sites

Sources: Surf Control and Messagelabs

- Spam top 10:

1) Free adult site passwords
2) Low price drugs (Viagra)
3) Refinance your mortgage
4) Nigerian confidential money transfer
5) Tiny remote control car
6) Best online casino
7) #1 Pasta pot
Get out of credit card debt
9) Meet singles in your area
10) Copy DVDs in one click

I have found four different types of spammers:

1) Stupid: (all of they are but…) they post dozens of links in the same comment (even images), in addition they can post the same comment many times. They copy & paste the same html code.

2) Moderate: they post very simple comments like “nice blog” or “very interesting article”. They use the keyword (viagra,phentermine) as the name, this way they get high google rankings with the text links. They fail in the keyword as the name, do you know someone with viagra as his real name?. Also the url is another key to catch them! Read the rest of this entry »

Every day, millions of people receive dozens of unsolicited commercial e-mails (UCE), known popularly as “spam.” Some users see spam as a minor annoyance, while others are so overwhelmed with spam that they are forced to switch e-mail addresses. This has led many Internet users to wonder: How did these people get my e-mail address.

CDT embarked on a project to attempt to determine the source of spam. To do so, we set up hundreds of different e-mail addresses, used them for a single purpose, and then waited six months to see what kind of mail those addresses were receiving. It should come as no surprise to most e-mail users that many of the addresses CDT created for this study attracted spam, but it is very interesting to see the different ways that e-mail addresses attracted spam ? and the different volumes ? depending on where the e-mail addresses were used.

The results offer Internet users insights about what online behavior results in the most spam. The results also debunk some of the myths about spam. Read the rest of this entry »

“Spam” is the term for unsolicited commercial bulk email, this which started out a very small nuisance on the internet has grown to become something that plagues people every time they check their inbox. This spam fills up inboxes with unsolicited mail for services that no one could ever want. They cost time and money to those that receive them and the cost to the email servers and internet service providers (ISP’s) in then passed on to the consumers in the form of higher bills. Measures have been taken to put and end to this scourge and to prevent future spammers from arising.

Spam is an ineffective way to advertise as it provides people with information about products and services that likely are of use to no one. Many spammers are unaware of what they are doing and have probably been duped into some kind of “Get-Rich-Quick” scheme. In a article about the commercial uses of spam (from Alchemy Mindworks) it was explained the reason that people spam and how they might be unaware of the damage they are causing:

The most prevalent sort of junk e-mail is commercial advertising. Judging by the content of most of these messages, their perpetrators have all just signed up with an Internet access provider, and were given complimentary copies of one of the many “How to Make Lots of Money on the Internet” books. Some of them are genuinely inconsiderate of the rights of other users of the net ? the bulk of them, however, are merely confused, deluded and ignorant. Read the rest of this entry »

SpamArchive.org is a community resource that provides a database of known spam to be used for testing, developing, and benchmarking anti-spam tools.

The goal of this project is to provide a large repository of spam that can be used by researchers and tool developers. In the past, there were a few small personal spam archives that were used. There was no large set of spam that could be used to test new anti-spam algorithms.

Thus, developers could not sufficiently test their techniques across a range of messages. Also, the lack of a “standard” sample of spam made it difficult to effectively benchmark anti-spam tools.

Posting an email address in a public place is not an invitation for companies to send unsolicited advertisements. Hosting a public Web forum or Usenet server does not give companies permission or the moral right to advertise on it. And soliciting comments from the public on a weblog entry or other Web page does not mean that companies or individuals are invited to use it for their advertising purposes.

Usenet news succumbed to spam long ago. Email was next. Now spammers have turned their attention to weblogs and comment forms. In order to increase search engine rankings you are posting advertisements to our Web pages. What you failed to understand is that bloggers are smarter, better connected, and more technologically savvy than the average email user. We control the medium that you are now attempting to exploit. You’ve picked a fight with us and it’s a fight you cannot win.

We have complained amongst ourselves, tried technological solutions, and tried to understand the nature of comment spam. And we are done. We now intend to fight back. Read the rest of this entry »

As you may know there is a lot of discussion going on out there regarding blog comment spam. In my opinion comment spam can be defined as a comment posted to a blog wich is not related with the content of your post. It will include a link in the comments field or in the name of the author to a commercial website. The problem is becoming serious as spammers are developing bots that can make dozens of post in an hour. We must stop this now or we´ll be the third spam generation victims after mail boxes and guestbooks.

Blog comment spam can´t be comprared yet with his big brother “email” but there is enough presence to be considered as a danger. MT doesn´t help too much cleaning your articles from spamming post so if you don´t want to spend an hour each day doing blog cleaning I recommend you to take action right now. They use bots to kill your blog but you don´t have a cleaning bot, remewmber this!. We must hit asap before this becomes a major problem. Some blacklists are ready to use and other methods are a good starting point. I have collected here some methods and solutions that blog owner are developing. I´ll add a brief description of each method and a link to the author´s website where you ca find more info. I don´t want to infright copyrighted material so you must get the original content from the authore´s website. Read the rest of this entry »

Advertising

Some companies engaged in legal business, advertise their products or services using spam. They can carry out its own newsletter, but more often ordered her to those companies (or individuals) who specialize in this. The attractiveness of such advertising is its relatively low cost and (presumably) a large scope of potential customers. Such unsolicited advertising may have the opposite effect, causing rejection of the recipients, and may even become synonymous with intrusive advertising, as happened with ham SPAM.

In connection with the sharp rejection of the spam recipients, and the tightening of legislation antispamovogo share of legal goods and services in the total volume of spam is decreasing.

It is believed that, with proper organization of promotional mailings, they can actually increase sales, not delivered to the recipient of special concern. The principal terms of mutual benefit to the recipient and the organizer of distribution are:

combining the roles of organizer and dispatches e-mail service provider;
improving the quality of the target audience of each specific distribution of advertising messages;
warning customers of the provider that he would send out promotional messages;
providing convenient means to block unwanted messages.

It should be noted, however, that the advertising message distributed to users with their consent, by definition, are not spam. Read the rest of this entry »