At 12.22 -0500 01-01-21, James M Galvin wrote:
In fact, I would assert that spammers are not getting smarter at all and
characterizing them as "finding other ways around" is giving them way
too much credit. The methods used by spammers haven't changed all that
much in the recent past (say, a year or more).
To check this statement, I have counted the number of spams
containing different kinds of "intelligence" which I have
received since 1 january 1999. My statistics does thus not
show any increase in spammer intelligence before 1 january 1999.
Spam was defined as every message I did not want of a marketing
nature, thus it includes messages from companies to which I
have given my e-mail-address, like for example Amazon. So
probably some of this spam is my own fault, I should have
told the company that I did not want their messages. I also
included as spam any message in Japanese, since I was not
able to read them, some Japanese spammer(?) insists on
sending me mail, possibly because the initials of my
name is "jp" so they think I am Japanese! I have tried
asking them to stop without success.
I excluded spam to mailing lists which I moderate, and where
I stopped the spam, but not other spam which I received
through misuse of mailing lists.
Anyway, with these restrictions, here is my statistics:
1-jan-99 to 31-oct-00 1-nov-00 to 21-jan-01
Total no of spams 1000 451
spams/day 2.8 5.6
Percentage of spams
containing my e-mail
address in any
recipient field 22 % 45 %
Percentage of spams 9 % 20 %
containing my name
in the body of the
message (sometimes
hidden in non-
visible HTML code!)
Yes, the figure "1000" is no estimate, the total just happended
to become that even number!
Conclusion: Based on my statistics between two time periods
whose average date was about one year, both these kinds
of "intelligent" spamming had more than doubled its percentage
of all spams.
My statistics thus supports the idea that spammers are getting
more intelligent.
--
Jacob Palme <jpalme(_at_)dsv(_dot_)su(_dot_)se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/jpalme/