A Friday in May...

Posted on 2008/05/16 21:45:11 (May 2008).

Yes, as Lox noticed, some spammer had even bothered to "attack" my empty blog space. It has to be assumed this spammer was some form of 'bot. I read something the other day which stated that over 90% of all email is spam. This now seems to have clearly reached epidemic proportions and I can't quite understand why we all put up with it. Oh I know there are mechanisms in place to prevent its egress but that's not my point. Using the Mail app on my Mac seems a good way to capture incoming spam. Only my web hosting company's messages get repeatedly marked as junk when they are not. Most other times it works flawlessly. However it shouldn't be there in the first place. To say 90% of all email is spam is amazing.

I'm no technical expert on the prevention side of things, and I fully realise the cleverness of spammers in circumventing our basic security, but I can't believe such a large proportion of email traffic is unsolicited but can't be stopped. I think, personally, that this must actually point to a fundamental flaw in the concept of the Internet and packet-routing technology as a whole. I reiterate, I've no answer... just pure frustration, and maybe even a weeny bit of anger!!!

Well the frustration got you to write again, so I am happy about it!! :D i think that these numbers are just thrown to the public to impress, the ignorant masses... Yes spam is out there, but when the younger generations will grow (I talk about your kids for example) spam will die slowly because people will know what it is and will fight it like you fight unwanted mail in your snail mail box... Then it will not be profitable anymore and spammers will hopefully die...

Posted by Lox at 2008/05/16 23:26:05.

Nice to see you writing on your blog again, Nigel, I for one enjoyed what you wrote before you stopped, and am sure others did too. As regards spam email, I think that we will be stuck with such emails forever, just as companies will always push junk mail through letterboxes - there will always be a small - yet lucrative - minority of people who will have cash on the hip and blindly purchase whatever rubbish the spammer/junk mailer is peddling. Another annoyance (at least here in Greece) is cold-calling at times when it is not done to phone people (siesta-time, three to five in the afternoon), trying to get us to sign up to credit cards. Highly irritating, as they always hide their caller ID, too.

Posted by Bryan at 2008/05/17 07:15:35.

Alas Nigel I am cleaning spam off my blog on a very regular basis. I usually forget about it for a few weeks, then I have do do a big sweep which can take hours. After that if I check the comments RSS feed I can usually just pick them off as they arrive.

It is a huge pain. I keep thinking I'll do some work at some point to improve the blog engine so it makes it easier to delete lots of comments at a time, and maybe even do some simple detection, but this sort of thing can turn into a lot of work and the sods will always find some way round it.

As for email, I've found since moving to GMail my life is pretty much spam free in that department. GMail benefits from all the mail being held centrally, so that if any single mail is identified as being spam, then all the users who got that mail will also have it filtered out.

Posted by John at 2008/05/17 10:17:21.

I agree that GMail is a great sevice to the community... It works really well and generally spam doesn't get through... As for the blog I wonder why John seems to have a lot of it and I don't... I guess because his blog is older than mine and maybe is ranked better?

Posted by Lox at 2008/05/17 11:47:22.

Actually Lox you *did* have quite a lot of spam - I cleaned it all off this morning for you. :)

Posted by John at 2008/05/17 14:59:07.

Hmmm, well thanks for the support guys - I appreciate it! I'll *try* to update... :)

As for spam, I think yesterday's outburst was purely because it annoys me so much that something I enjoy and which is so darn essential to everyday life these, er, days, is so riddled with this digital sickness (I spot a buzz-phrase there!!).

I appreciate your efforts John, as I know we all do. Oh well, come the revolution, we all know who'll be first against the wall...

Posted by Nigel at 2008/05/17 16:07:13.

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