Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT

WCDT 2066-2070; Nov. 28-Dec. 2, 2011

<< < (74/77) > >>

Sidhekin:
I think filters came first.  Both filtering amongst ISPs (quickly adopted) and for end-users (perhaps earlier, I'm not sure, but more slowly adopted).

Then followed the drop.

Of course, much of this drop is due to spammers finding targets other than e-mail.  Web forums of various kinds ... even wikis ... and recently Facebook, Twitter, G+ ...

I think I first received spam and/or attack email back in 1994.  By 1997, I had at least four different e-mail accounts, about as many aliases, and I had left behind at least two accounts (moved on).

The only reason I even vaguely remember ILOVEYOU &c was there was talk about them.  I didn't read any of them.  If there'd been a Gary-mail, I'm sure it would have been a notorious subject – even without the spreading to offline machines.  The contents would not even matter: Any geek would remember the event.

pwhodges:
I run spam filters on servers (work and home), and the proportion of mail that gets blocked is still around 50%.  It's hard to quantify precisely, because some is blocked at the point of identifying the IP address of the connecting server and dropping the connection with no message being transmitted at all, while some is only recognised by analysis of the message contents; and of course some will retry and others not.

I wrote a spam filter for use at work for the first time in about 1999; up till then, the anti-virus mail scanner I ran caught a reasonable proportion of the spam anyway (as transmitting viruses was a significant part of its reason for being sent).

The spam filter for this forum blocks an attempt to sign up by a known spammer roughly five times every hour.

Akima:

--- Quote from: pwhodges on 03 Dec 2011, 10:45 ---I run spam filters on servers (work and home), and the proportion of mail that gets blocked is still around 50%.
--- End quote ---
Me too, and yes, easily. There is some evidence that overall spam volume has been falling over the past year, but there is still a lot of it about.

Yay! Hanners gets her zipper back! You know, I must be thick or something, but it's only just dawned on me how tall Hanners is. I don't have time for an archive trawl, but she's at least as tall as Marten. And what's wrong with the name Gary anyway?

Kugai:
I think part of the dropoff in Spam comes fact that some of it may be someone trying what they think is a 'Hot, New Idea' - only to find it thoroughly blocked because someone tried that 10 or so years ago and everybody is protected against it or spots it for what it is.

I also think a lot more people Online are a lot more savvy about it these days than they were back when the 'Net was virtually a Wild West.

DSL:
Y'all got me to thinkin', it has been a while since I got wind of any Nigerian investment opportunities.
I do remember part of one particularly obnoxious bit of spam from the mid 90s, though (I was on AOL then; don't judge ...) Don't remember what the fellow wanted me to buy, but the spam contained the words: "And if you're thinking of asking to be taken off my mailing list, sorry, no can do. Welcome to the new world of free speech!" Never heard from him again, though.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page