Anybody notice an increase in spiced potted ham product

spam, the junk mail type. My E-link account has been pretty quiet. I don't see the junk unless the address or domain is in my address book but I have to scan the spam folder because many newsletters I have use random addressing to keep them safer from spam bots. Just in the past few days there has been a sudden increase in offers to expand my hoo-ha or to see what I am sure are entertaining pics. I haven't went to any unusual sites that I don't normally visit and the account has been quiet of such offers for a while.

I do notice many of the addresses are hot mail or g mail domains.

I ask because there are a couple of people at work that will freak if there is an upswing in this junk and it passes our filters and then I have to deal with it. Most of us just delete the junk but there are a few sensitive persons. If it is on the upswing It would be nice to know.

Spam mail to my account has been decreasing during the last year or so. I have gone from 2000+ spam mails a month to 700 or so. I have noticed no sudden increase during the last couple of days.

According to a recent news article spam has been on a fairly sharp increase in the last year or so. This doesn't take into account spam fillters. I had almost no spam until the last 6 months or so and now it's getting annoying but I still prefer to make my own filters and not use email that filters it for me. It's a crime some of the stuff that does come by email - not fit for young eyes and until they increase penalities for this it will just keep getting worse. I'm gonna suggest life in prison for this or worse - that may stop some of it. One spammer can cause thousands of hours in lost production if you consider all the people who have to deal with their junk.

Interesting. I had just assumed that something had gotten my email address. I've been seeing a jump of 100 this month, and I'm up to almost 400 messages in my junk mail. At least gmail does a good job at filtering for me.

matrixshaman said:

I'm gonna suggest life in prison for this or worse - that may stop some of it. One spammer can cause thousands of hours in lost production if you consider all the people who have to deal with their junk.

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I'll second that. I wouldn't mind stiff penalties for those responding to this junk as well. If everyone just deleted this crap unopened, it would soon stop completely as the profit would be gone.

I don't know why ISPs don't just not allow sending thousands of emails per month from the same address, and registering multiple addresses from the same ISP? That would stop the bulk of it. I'll even go with charging something like a penny per email. For most people it wouldn't amount to more than a few dollars a month, if that, but it would put the spammers right out of business.

This excuse for a used douche (Rhodona Garst) is one of the most prolific spambags in existence today. :green:

Since the internet belongs to no one, it's going to be difficult to pick out someone as the happy recipient of the charge. No individual, no corporation, no nation, no ISP, no nothing is in a position of merit that would make them deserving of the distinction of email postage collector. Except me maybe, I'll volunteer.

To a great extent, some spam could be reduced by those running servers permitting large mailings by anyone that hasn't explained and cleared the operation with the mail provider. However, spammers often run their own servers, or hijack servers and other mail oriented systems. More recently, they've taken to using trojans on millions of compromised computers to do their dirty work. Millions are sending out spam without even knowing it.

DM51 said:

There is an alternative school of thought which says that spam is actually good, because the huge volume of e-mail traffic, most of it spam, makes it very much more for government snoopers to monitor our private e-mails. Speaking purely personally, I am not convinced by this argument.​

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I'm not convinced, either. The same way spam filters pick out most of the spam, more sophisticated government run filters can pick out even more. The most sophisticated filters can even pick up on spam with innocuous subject lines which use images instead of text in the body of the email. Those who think a large volume of spam makes it harder for governments to snoop their emails are just deluding themselves. What the spam does do, however, is waste tons of computing resources, billions of hours of user productivity, and in many cases causes vital emails to be missed. Eventually, the ever-increasing volume of spam makes almost every new email address useless. The sooner this scourge can be eliminated the better. Perhaps if all email providers adopted something where you have to jump through several hoops, all involving human recognition of complex pictures, before sending out mass mailings, then this could be stopped. You simply need to set up the system where it requires an actual human being to send out mass mailings in order to stop mass mailings via things like trojans. In addition, limiting the mass mailings to perhaps 25 recipients at a time, would help. You can make exceptions for legitimate businesses which go through an application procedure to get an exemption. And if the privilege to send large mass mailings was found to be abused, it could be revoked, and the spammer prosecuted.

It's my understanding that less than 100 individuals worldwide are responsible for 99% of the spam on the Internet. Is it really so hard for law enforcement to catch and lock up these people? Surely they must leave some tracks.