Gmail spam filter is letting more stuff through Tuesday, June 03, 2008
I've noticed far more spam getting through the Gmail spam filters over the last two weeks than I have ever experience. Normally very reliable, there could be many reasons why it's missing items. Inevitably I shall not be alone in this experience.
Oddly, you forget how invaluable the Gmail spam filter is until it's breached.
Labels: E-mail filtering, gmail, spam
posted by John Wilson @ 2:49 PM Permanent Link
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I'm no spammer - let me out of here Friday, February 01, 2008
Despite the sophistication of spam filters, they are barely holding back the flood of emails which offer a range of services or which aim to entice people to fall victim to some scam. Estimates of the proportion of email deemed to be spam range from 25%-50+% of all email sent.
Spam filters scan for words and phrases as well as referencing "dynamically" maintained blacklists of addresses, with some claiming to use "holistic" techniques that can see through to the underlying intent of the message.
Unfortunately, what can you do if your email address is deemed to be a spam originator, perhaps as consequence of its' misuse by spammers who hijack addresses for the purposes of mascarading as non-spam addresses i.e. identity fraud of sorts? This assumes you even realise that your address is now treated as a spam account.
To my knowledge there is no central authority to whom one can appeal and restore one's reputation amongst spam filters. So what can you do, without going through the major upheaval of changing email address?
Well, a bit of digging highlighted that it's not actually an email address per se that is blacklisted but the IP address from whence emails originate. This is because email address can be easily spoofed, whereas an IP address can't. For many people, the relevant IP address will be that of their ISP since many users get allocated an IP address each time they connect to the ISP rather than having a static IP address. Hence, problems with your emails are more likely to be an issue at your ISP. So in the first instance, this is who to turn to.
There are numerous registrars of spam blacklists and you should check if you appear on them. I've listed a couple below
Spamhaus.org
Spamcop.net
These provide facilities to check if your IP address is classified as a source of spam and if so there are facilities to delist your IP address. If your IP address relists, it can be because your machine has been infected by a virus that is surreptitiously sending out spam or because there is a similar problem at your ISP.
posted by John Wilson @ 8:30 AM Permanent Link
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Pump and dump - a guide to share trading tips Friday, March 09, 2007
Apparently criminals are estimated to make £500m profit on pump & dump schemes each year.
Of an estimated 100m spam messages per week, share scams were 25% of this.
A study by the Office of Fair Trading found about 90,000 Brits lost an average of £5,660 on such scams.
In case you are unfamiliar with how it works, spammers buy stocks with a low share price (few cents per share), usually on small USA exchanges. They then spam people with news which is "guaranteed" to drive the share price up & then sell as victims drive the share price up.
Of course, this self fulfilling prophesy does indeed show a share price rise in the stock subsequent to the spam emails, before it "corrects". So some people believe they were just unlucky and acted too slow on the unprompted share tip from the complete stranger that had kindly alerted them to this guaranteed winner!
The practice of "pump and dump" should not be confused with the issue of a broker research analyst's note to their client base + prospects re how a stock is seriously undervalued and clients should buy it, which is completely different. :-)
Labels: share trading, spam
posted by John Wilson @ 2:49 PM Permanent Link
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