The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) has released its new spam report that indicates about 95% of emails are spam. The survey found that 95% of all email is spam. 70% of the respondents consider spam extremely significant or significant for their security operations.
Company Wants to End Email Senders Remorse November 20, 2007
Reuters says a technology company called Bigstring.com wants to put an end to "senders remorse" with erasable, recallable and password protected email.
Now that AOL has become free for broadband users they are running ads on emails sent from AOL.com addresses. Here is a sample of the ads.
Check out free AOL. Most comprehensive set of free safety and security
tools, millions of free high-quality videos from across the web, free AOL
Mail and much more.
**************************************
Check out free AOL at
http://free.aol.com/thenewaol/index.adp. Most comprehensive
set of free safety and security tools, millions of free high-quality videos
from across the web, free AOL Mail and much more.
It will be interesting to see how customers react. The ad could probably be much shorter and less intrusive. The URL in the ad just advertisers the new AOL service that works with your broadband access.
Have Yourself a Very Spammy Christmas November 20, 2006
It is that time of year again when your email boxes start to get more and more spam in them. Mass emailers target consumers harder this time of year according to a News.com story.
Mass e-mailers traditionally bump up their activity as the year winds down. But this year, the amount of junk messages could be unprecedented, companies that make spam-busting tools say. And senders of unsolicited ads are already celebrating the close of the harvest season and the approach of Christmas.
***
There's a holiday spam spike every year, because people are more likely to open the messages, experts said. Consumers are shopping online more, are desperate for gift ideas and expect electronic greeting cards. Spammers exploit all of that by sending fake order confirmations and e-cards and, of course, suggesting their products as gifts.
"People sell fake Rolexes via spam e-mail, and fake Rolexes make good holiday gifts," Pao said. "We expect that the amount of overall holiday-related spam to increase up to 50 percent during the week of Thanksgiving and continue through New Year's. It looks like this could turn out to be the largest, and longest, holiday spam season ever."
New tricks
There are a number of reasons for the rising tide of messages, experts say. For one, spammers are constantly looking for and finding new ways to reach unsuspecting people, said Miles Libbey, a product manager at Yahoo. "We continue to work tirelessly to make sure junk mail goes into the spam folder," he said. Yahoo, which operates one of the most popular free e-mail services, is using technology and collaborating with others to bust spam rings, Libbey said.
The article cites MessageLabs, an antispam specialist firm, as expecting the number of unsolicited messages to climb from 88.7% in October to 90% in November and December. The article also cites a company named IronPort that predicts the number of spam messages will average a staggering 78 billion a day in December. Santa needs to put the people responsible for all this spam on a permanent naughty list.
Spam now makes up 95%+ of all emails. The BBC reports that most of this spam comes from zombie computers -- computers taken over by spammers using bots and worms.
Analysis of the contents of millions of e-mails has revealed that less than 4% is legitimate traffic.
Further work has shown that most of this junk mail is originating on hijacked home computers.
E-mail security firm Return Path said 99% of the computers it monitors that send mail have been taken over by spammers or virus writers.
Return Path reached its estimate by calculating a "reputation score" for the 20 million net addresses of those machines.
Some of the spam is very strange and seemingly pointless like hobbit spam, which uses random bits of prose from Tolkein emails.
Wired has an interesting article about the rise of filters and how many ISP filters end up removing too much legitimate mail. They also discuss AOL's unpopular plan to charge email senders for a guaranteed delivery.
"If AOL or another ISP decides that someone's a spammer, then no e-mail from that individual gets through," said EFF attorney Cindy Cohn, whose group opposes the AOL plan. "But there's a fundamental difficulty at the heart of the spam debate: The only one who knows what you want delivered in your inbox is you."
For years, e-mail users complained that torrents of unwanted messages clogged their inboxes and crimped their productivity. Now, e-mail users, marketers and mailing list operators are more worried that spam filters are blocking out too many wanted messages.
AOL isn't the only company to face charges that it improperly blocks legitimate messages. But, as the world's largest ISP for years, it has long borne the brunt of complaints from mass e-mailers over the problem.
Those concerns are seeping into the debate over a planned AOL program, set to go live in the next month, in which approved e-mail senders pay to guarantee delivery of their messages.
The answer should be to develop better and better filters and not to start charging people to send email. The people who use AOL (or any other ISP that starts a fee-based mail service) want the legitimate mail people are trying to send them -- including legitimate emails that weren't paid for. AOL should be careful because users may depart AOL if people start realizing they are not receiving all the emails they should be receiving because of an overactive filter.
The Daily Independentreports that a single town called Festac is responsible for 70% of the spam that comes out of Lagos.
Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has again begun its clampdown on scammers in Lagos State.
In its latest move to check activities of the fraudsters, the anti-graft agency swooped on cyber cafes at FESTAC Town last week and arrested over 87 of operators and fraudsters who use the facilities to send scam letters.
A competent EFCC source said the exercise was necessary following reports from prominent residents of the area alleging an increasing number of such cyber cafés and how their activities were becoming a threat to the neighbourhood.
The official, who would not want his name in print, said after the mop-up, over 87 persons, including operators and scammers, were arrested. He added that most of them had made useful statements to the agency and would soon be charged to court.
The Raw Feed calls Festac the "Silicon Valley of Nigerian scammers."
What Happens to Your Email When You're Dead? June 1, 2005
After you are dead and gone from this world what happens to
your email, your blogs, your social networking accounts?
If it is hosted on a free account it might just sit there for a
very long time before eventually being removed by the host. Does
anyone else have the password besides you? Will your email provider
turn your emails over to a relative? Is that what you would
want to happen? The answer is somewhat unclear. The Mercury News
has an article on the topic that answers a few questions.
AOL has assigned a full-time person to help with these kinds of
questions:
America Online, with 28 million members, has assigned a full-time
employee to handle next-of-kin requests. Before releasing account
information, the company requires a copy of the death certificate
and documentation proving the person requesting the e-mail information
is the legal beneficiary or the estate representative, said America
Online spokesman Nicholas Graham.
MSN's Hotmail will provide a disk with data after it verifies the relatives
are related to the deceased.
MSN Hotmail will provide account contents on CDs or floppy disks to
relatives of deceased members after it verifies the legitimacy of the
request, said Brooke Richardson, MSN lead product manager, in a statement.
``We have tried to institute a policy that is very focused on
privacy, but at the same time honors the requests of bereaved
family members.''
And MercuryNews.com said Yahoo would not comment on its policy.
However, in another situation Yahoo terminates email accounts
if a user dies and won't turn over the emails without a court order.
After Lance Cpl. Justin Ellsworth of Michigan was killed Nov. 13 while
inspecting a bomb in Iraq, his father, John Ellsworth, wanted access to
his son's Yahoo email account. But Yahoo, whose policy is to terminate
email accounts upon a user's death, would not give him the material
until a probate judge ordered the Sunnyvale company to do so.
Danny O'Brien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco
non-profit that often gets involved in digital-privacy issues, said
it's difficult to find the right balance between personal privacy and
a family's desire to get all of a loved one's possessions.
``We are sympathetic to the pain families go through,'' he said. ``On
the other hand, there are a lot of things people want to keep private
from their close relatives. You need to have some way to do that.''
Reuters reports that AOL will be offering free email accounts to users of the web-based AOL Instant Messenger service. While free email from AOL will probably be popular the risk is that they could lose subscribers to the free accounts. Many AOL subscribers hold on their paid accounts just for the AOL email. However, AOL said it will not giveaway AOL.com email accounts as part of the free service. Also, the terms of service on the free accounts might not be as customer friendly as with the paid service. The Washington Post reports on the risk associated with AOL's free email plan:
Analysts said the risk is that AOL may accelerate the steady decline in its subscriber base by causing more people to stop paying for content and services since they will be able to get them for free. "Maybe this will cause the access business to wind down faster before the advertising business picks up," warned David Card, an analyst with Jupiter Research.
