Friday, October 28, 2005
[network] Cyberspace fights back
Over the past weekend, a tremendous wave of new spam hit a few of my websites. This particular variety chose random e-mail addresses as target.
My way of handling this is that all the mail that does not have a recognized address gets redirected to gmail, after which I forward it further. Gmail does quite a good job in tagging spam.
The reason why I am bringing this up is that it illustrates how effective immediate sharing of information in cyberspace can be. The scenario is as follows. A spammer starts sending mail, which he has to do in large batches of similar messages. As soon as the first of those messages is read by a human, they can hit the "report spam" button.
My way of handling this is that all the mail that does not have a recognized address gets redirected to gmail, after which I forward it further. Gmail does quite a good job in tagging spam.
The reason why I am bringing this up is that it illustrates how effective immediate sharing of information in cyberspace can be. The scenario is as follows. A spammer starts sending mail, which he has to do in large batches of similar messages. As soon as the first of those messages is read by a human, they can hit the "report spam" button.
Gmail can then immediately add the characteristics of this message to its spamfilter, which prevents other users from seeing the message at all. The more people use gmail, the better its spamfighting becomes. It also might explain why there is more spam over the weekend, as fewer people read their mail then.
However, spammers will probably innovate by further randomizing their messages, which spurs a kind of arms-race between spammers and gmail. Maybe it would be easier if we would give spammers their own .con domain :-)
