Spam shows sudden slide

[fac51]

Have to say my inbox has noticed a decrease in spam over the past couple of weeks which ties in nicely with this:

Worldwide spam levels have mysteriously dropped off over the past week, according to managed e-mail provider SoftScan, possibly as a result of a major botnet going out of service.

Spam levels continued to rise in December, but crashed by 30 percent in the first week of January, SoftScan said on Tuesday.

The company has seen nothing similar in the past, but believes the most likely explanation is that a botnet -- a network of compromised machines -- has temporarily lost control of its client systems.

source

[mr mixin]

I've been getting more in the last week or so

[vinnieza]

I've had less come through my inbox

[fac51]

I've been getting more in the last week or so

Maybe they're just targeting you instead of us now

[mr mixin]

Bastids!

[117]

i've been getting just as many.....

[117]

If you feel like your inbox is suddenly overrun with spam again, you are right.

Not long ago, there seemed hope that spam had passed its prime. Just last December, the Federal Trade Commission published an optimistic state-of-spam report, citing research indicating spam had leveled off or even dropped during the previous year.

Instead, it now appears spammers had simply gone back to the drawing board. There's more spam now than ever before.

In fact, there's twice as much spam now as opposed to this time last year. And the messages themselves are causing more trouble. About half of all spam sent now is "image spam," containing server-clogging pictures that are up to 10 times the size of traditional text spam. And most image spam is stock-related, pump-and-dump scams which can harm investors who don't even use e-mail. About one-third of all spam is stock spam now.

story

i'd concur with that last bit - i'm getting loads of image-based spam advertising stock these days

[Vlammetje]

I get no images but just random words put together resembling a story..... been like that for a year or so...

[vinnieza]

i get a mix of both. Image spam bi-passes junk filters though as someone sending an image maybe legitimate and junk filters cannot read them?

The thing is, although more people read them, still no-one bothers clicking the links so why bother!

[fac51]

still no-one bothers clicking the links so why bother!

because people (loose term for the idiots) must bother :alt:

[117]

unfortunately for every one sensible person on sites like this that doesn't click them, there are (I would guess) several thousand idiots out there that do, and of those several thousand if just a few actually hand over money then it's been worth the spammers' money.

mate of mine is one of those several thousand, he can't distinguish between an ad on a website and the website itself, he asks me for a weblink for summat he's seen me do (most recent case http://www.live-footy.org ), then 10mins later he's hassling me to find out why it's not doing what he saw me do (and normally why it's asking for his card details), 9 times out of 10 it turns out that he's clicked an ad instead of something on the site itself (and often these ads have text under them saying "Ads by Google" or summat similar ffs

[mr mixin]

And then they ask you to fix their computer because it's all spam, spyware and virus ridden

[117]

yup, you got it I actually stalled this person in particular with my advice on where to get their laptop (and what one to get) because I knew it was only gonna turn out to be more of a headache for me in the long run, then eventually I relented when the person announced that they were off the next day to pc worm to choose their own