Focus#4 Are Spammers Really Giving Up?

Google made a bold announcement this last week that Spammers are starting to throw in the towel. They claim Gmail has seen a decline in SPAM throughout the year. They claim that spam has plateaued and will continue this trend til it begins to decline in the years to come. 

Is it true? Are spammers giving up the fight? Or are they just taking a retreat to regroup? Maybe they are just getting smarter by making their SPAM legal…..

Lets start with the good stuff. What Spam is out there now. Well, the most favorite one in my book is the “I am a Lawyer and you (either) A) won the lottery B) Lost a wealthy long lost relative C) Have a client in a foreign country that needs your help”. No matter how hard email filters try, I always seem to get that email.

In 2007 we saw picture spam, PDF virus Spam, Spoof Spam (sending phishing schemes to ask you to update your account), ECard Spam and many others. In checking my Hotmail account alone, I have the obligitory:

• “United Nationa of Zimbabwe”

• A plan to save money on a vacation

• The oppertunity to play the National Lottery

• A job oppertunity (Wait. That might not be spam…. No. It is.)

• Quality Life protection

• Another vacation (to Myrtle Beach)

• Winning Notification from Microsoft (Wait, that may not be Spam….. Yes it is. I don’t think a Microsoft rep would use a yahoo.gr email, do you?)

• A chance to buy quality T-Shirts

• A System Administrator notice saying some spammer used my account and an email did not get delivered,
  and last but not least

• The enlargement pill.

Granted, I don’t have picture spam, pdf spam or some of the oldies like the “International Drivers License”. And in looking in the Junk Email, the majority is Newsletters and Updates from sites I signed up for and didn’t opt out of their sending practice. However, just because I don’t see it doesn’t mean an email wasn’t sent to my box.

In a 2006 report on Toptenreviews.com, apparently 40% of all email was considered Spam. 12.4 billion Emails were sent per day and it was expected to rise 63% in 2007. If my math is correct, that makes it 20.2 billion a day - a figure that an article on the Telegraph may have just proved correct (Well, at least in the UK). 

Last week on my podcast I commented on an article on USA Today. They reported that 60 to 150 billion Messages a day are passing through. The comments came from David Mayer - product manager at the e-mail security firm IronPort Systems, which is a Cisco division. IronPort also was the source cited in the article above from the Telegraph.

So how can Google and IronPort disagree on this information? Maybe the spammers are just not emailing Gmail accounts. Maybe there are more problems with Gmail than what we thought or maybe that’s a good thing for Gmail.

Could the spammers have gone corporate?

Dell recently started a campaign using celebrities like Burt Reynolds and Chuck Liddell to ask friends and family to help chip in and buy your loved one a new computer. When you sign up for certain promotions, you can be asked to write down a few emails so you can pass on the great deals. If you are a member of Facebook or MySpace, this happens when you search your gmail or yahoo accounts so they can invite friends to join the Social Network site.

On the front page, you see Geekazines’ email address. Every weeks’ podcast notes has that address. Because of this, I get spam all the time. If you have a podcast on iTunes, you know you’ll get spam. It’s inevitable, Mr. Anderson.

Maybe Google was referring to spam busting. Programs with algorithms that block spam from getting through. Well that would just be masking the problem - like an alcoholic that pours booze in a soda can to fool the others. Or a quitting smoker that sneaks off for a while only to come back with cigarette smoke and gum on their breath.

Not to knock it because there is a lot of good spam busting programs out there. The constant research allows users to create a path for email to travel and filters to catch what might not legitimate. It’s not 100% which is why you can receive a report in your email on what was filtered out.

There are other efforts in curbing spam. In 2003, the FTC created the Spam-act, which basically stated you can get fined or imprisoned for sending unsolicited email. There are full guidelines we won’t get into here, however if you would like to read all the particulars, it is available on the FTC’s website.

When the “Seattle Spammer” was arrested in May on fraudulent internet activities, The government sent a message that spam in the US will not be tolerated. Experts believed that this arrest would show a sharp decline in Spam in the coming months - which might explain Googles’ claims. Yet, that would only happen until the next “entrepreneur” decides to take the reins. And if they don’t live in the US, how do you stop that spam?

Maybe Spam is moving Mediums. Several sources state that Instant Messaging (IM) is starting to reduce email traffic.  So is IM the next culprit of spam? Since 2004, predictions of spam moving to IM were imminent. On a IM client like yahoo, anyone that uses it has been messaged from someone they don’t know. Just last week I had 3 invites to view peoples’ webcams.

Message boards, Blogs and other ”Web 2.0″ sites have to worry about SPAM, too. That is why we have “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” or CAPTCHA. It’s that little picture that displays numbers and letters when you register a site or post a reply. The information is in a distorted picture, so a bot cannot read the code to input it. I have been on messageboards that have been overrun by bot spam. Not only do they ruin the site with posts, but also clutter the users with usernames like akdhosljfjl or hotnheavy12803.

Whether or not alternate means of spam are being utilized more is something only time can tell. With the internet starting to cross over to everyday items - phones, clocks, refridgerators and so much more - it won’t be suprising to see mediums crossed and spam ultimately increased tenfold. Unfortuneately, Some people are just out to make a buck any way they can. And spammers can make a lot of money in collecting and selling your email address. This Wired article explains it all (It’s from 2003, but just a prevelant today).

As for now, the true result of how much Spam has been passed will be when they compile the numbers at the end of the year and calculate future spam for 2008. Maybe it will be found that Spam DID NOT increase 63%. It could have been a 20, 40 or even 60% increase. I couldn’t find any statistic for how many new email addresses were created in 2007. That plays a big part in spam. If in 2006 I had 1 email address, then in 2007 set up a second email address, that gives spammers a 2nd opportunity to send email.

So is Googles’ claim correct? Are we seeing less spam? Well, maybe we are seeing less spam in our In-boxes. Better software is helping comb out the junk. However, with more and more emails coming online every day, we give spammers more opportunity to send us junk. And with this being an issue that can span Internationally, it gets harder to pinpoint culprits. Everybody needs to make a buck - some do it in an unethical way. Bottom line: The only way that spam will most likely die is if email dies first.