Spam Hits 95% of All Email

An anonymous reader writes "Commtouch released its Email Threats Trend Report based on the automated analysis of billions of email messages weekly. The report examines the appearance of new kinds of attachment spamsuch as PDF spam and Excel spam together with the decline of image spam, as well as the growing threat of innocent appearing spam containing links to malicious web sites. Image spam declined to a level of less than 5% of all spam, down from 30% in the first quarter of 2007; also, image pump-and-dump spam has all but disappeared, with pornographic images taking its place."

Summary only link

The link referenced in the posting goes to a summary page that is a little light on details. At the bottom of that page is a link to the PDF-formatted report [commtouch.com]. There's a lot more information there, including some screenshots of example SPAM and malware sites, trends in attack vectors, zombie systems, etc.. Interesting stuff.

My spam is still lame :-P

...also, image pump-and-dump spam has all but disappeared, with pornographic images taking its place.

Huh? Where? Man, all I ever get are stupid Viagra spam and "O3M S0FTWARE!" (and variants thereupon).

Humpfh. Everyone gets pr0n spam but me.

Dan Aris

Re:My spam is still lame :-P

Tell me, is it bad when if you recognize someone from high school in one of those.

Re:My spam is still lame :-P

Especially when its your phys ed. teacher.

Re:My spam is still lame :-P

Do you recognise the girl? Then call her!
Do you recognise the canine? Then yes, that's bad.

SPAM @ 95%?!

Thank God for Gmail and its excellent spam filtering! I don't think I've had any spam hit my inbox in 2 years. :-)

Re:SPAM @ 95%?!

That's because they read every mail before it hits your inbox.

Re:SPAM @ 95%?!

I do NOT want to know what words you teach your 3 year old.

Re:SPAM @ 95%?!

They're good, but they're not that good for me. I get several spams a day in my inbox (and thousands a day filtered out).

Bizarrely, they should be easy to identify. Most of them are in Russian. Whatever bayesian network they're doing should have figured out by now that I don't read Russian.

The other one is the same template, over and over, all beginning with the same phrase. I have no idea why that one keeps getting through.

I'm sure not complaining; they're clearly filtering out a huge amount of sheer misery.

call me a cynic, but

... here's a report from a company that specialises in anti-virus and other security products.

While I'm not denying spam etc. is an annoyance and does cause a lot of people some problems, do we really want to accept at face value some words from an organisation that could well have a vested interest in making the problem appear more threatening than it really is?

Personally I'd prefer to teach people how to avoid spam/virus infection - in the same way we teach people how to avoid clinical infection, than to go around wailing about how bad the problem is.

Re:call me a cynic, but

FWIW, about 90% of our e-mail has been spam... and we've seen a solid 50% increase in traffic over the past quarter. The numbers aren't that out of whack. quote: Personally I'd prefer to teach people how to avoid spam/virus infection... Good luck with that. Particularly with the avoiding spam part. If you come up with a foolproof method that actually involves using e-mail... I'm sure you'll be a lot richer than I am.

That's not an unrealistic number

I work at an ISP and we do SPAM detection and elimination at our border routers. We scan both incoming and outgoing email, and will auto blacklist our own internal IPs if we detect SPAM.

The highest two-week percentage of rejected incoming email that I've seen broke 97% a few months ago. It's normally between 90% and 95%.

It's loads of fun dealing with this crap.

Re:call me a cynic, but

Can you imagine any other form of communication that was 95% inefficient?

Flirting.

Let us pick some text randomly off a googled link and exercise our imagination.

"First for Emailing - UK's only Emailing Academy

We are offering you two free e-courses value $45 each. One is our new success emailing communication programme and the other is our popular lifestyle coaching programme

SUCCESS EMAILING Communication Tips - series of 4 communication tips modules. Designed to get you connecting and interacting more easily and effectively plus monthly success emailing newsletter with tips, quotes and news..."

When there is a large industry which advertises itself in terms like that instead of the original [flirtzone.com] then perhaps there would be a point to be made that email communications are unusually inefficient. In the meantime, well, sure looks to me like anyone who has ever interacted with the opposite sex should have no problem imagining a form of communication in which 5% efficiency would be a striking -- well nigh unbelievable actually -- increase, and somehow that communication medium has not died out in several millions of years.

*looks around* Ah .... neee-ver mind.

OK, another data point

Checking my mail stats, since 4 am this morning, I've received 51985 emails, 51909 of which were filtered as spam. That's 99%. Checking the bandwidth monitor, the spam has consumed a steady 100Kbit/s since 4 am, despite being mostly blocked in SMTP envelope via SPF and reputation (SPF blocks forgeries, reputation blocks spammers with the balls to use their own domain).

Re:call me a cynic, but

The statistics for CERN yesterday: 90% rejected, 7% (manually) moved to spam folder, 3% good mails. And that's not even including those that are just deleted without being moved to the spam folder. Scary tendency.

doubtful

I highly doubt that, "All Email"?

Did they track private networks? Encrypted Email?

Mine is full of spam...

All I ever get is spam.

Most of the subjects are as follows:(filtered for privacy)
Courses next term
[Course name here] Grades
IMPORTANT: Calculus Final Exam Time
Hello from [Relative name here]
[Subscribe newsletter here]
Funny pictures

Why wont it stop?

Those were my organization's summer levels

We were at 95% spam back in June. September and October so far are 98%. Meanwhile, November 2006 was 89%.

Not new.

Wasn't "95% of email is spam" reported by the BBC [bbc.co.uk] back in 2006?

And Security Focus has a great article [securityfocus.com] that shows how all of these numbers are totally made up.

Spam??

I didn't know there was still spam out there? I got CanIt from Roaring Penguin [roaringpenguin.com] and don't see spam anymore.

penalize the seller not the messenger

If the financial incentive is removed the problem should go away. The spammer is not the root cause, the entity hiring the spammer and benefiting from the people responding to the advertisement appears to be the root cause and is easier to identify.

The entity initiating the process is identifiable ( the contact information must be accurate in order to effect the sale ) unlike the spammer that can utilize many techniques to avoid identification.

Any different?

Is this any different then the stats of the dead tree style of spam that appears in my mailbox every day?
And we have seen the huge (cough) progress made in removing that snail mail spam from the system.

Honestly, there seems to have been more progress in weeding out the digital spam then the paper sort.
Even vague sort of laws and protections and such.

Been there for years

This is hardy new. Anyone with an old (>10 years) domain name is on every spam address list in the galaxy and likely gets 99.99% spam. All my mail server does is run spam assassin and clamav and a few times per day, actually delivers a real message.

That's an AVERAGE??

I get a fair bit of solicited and genuine email, and a moderate amount of spam. Thunderbird's and Gmail's filters seem to do almost all the filtering perfectly these days, but even checking the size of my inbox against my junk-boxes, I have to say that I'm getting nothing like 95%. Not even 50%.

Anecdotally, I don't think mine is an unusual scenario, which causes me to wonder: how many people are getting 96-100% spam, in order for this average to hold true? I mean, are there folks out there being inundated with a daily 100%-spam diet, just on the off-chance that they get a spot of lean steak one day?

Poor bastards.

Yahoo Mail welcome spam and block real email

Anyone experience this with Yahoo Mail? Yahoo Mail has blocked any email that contain my website url, even though my website contains no spam at all. (same case as what happened with YouTube [slashdot.org].) Yahoo Mail also blocked my other website's mail server that any mail being sent from that mail server goes into spam folder. All these just happened within last week.

The brute force style of filtering spam disappointed me alot as it makes innocent websites completely helpless to communicate with their members who use yahoo mail. Now that all my important messages go into spam folder and spam mails go into my inbox, the effectiveness of Yahoo spam filter becomes 0. (Yes I know I can unblock my website in my own account settings, but how about mails being sent to other people?)

Yahoo Mail sux and I am switching to GMail.

So where's the invisible hand?

Since most slashdotters are libertarians for some reason (and I could argue even I am to some degree) my question is: where's the technological efficient solution to this.

We've seen some "free market" solutions which basically required that you pay a fee to every mail provider so they don't trash your email. And this didn't particularly help spam either.

I come to the conclusion that spam as an issue is one of two things, or both of those things:

1) Not that big of a problem (hard to believe if you are a mail provider / ISP yourself)

2) Impossible to solve by means of free market solutions, and requires cooperation and standardization of new technology.

Point 2 is hard to happen since every little startup that comes with a mini solution, trumpet it on their own and hence they are only a nuissance to deal with in the big picture (due to lack of a single standard, it's impossible to have clients which make the process of whitelisting easier and even half automatic).

Here are couple of solution which would get us half-there, but are only quarter-implemented right now:

1) Whitelist SMTP servers by talking back to the supposed mail of origin and comparing IP-s. The SMTP may return list of IP-s this host responds from. This is then cached and used for further authentication on this domain. It *may* lead to DoS if many hosts do a first-time check simultaneously, but it's unlikely (and less problematic, given we're eliminating 95% of bad emails this way).

2) Test-for-human-intelligence in your first email to a new email. Such as, I don't know, some sort of CAPTCHA you fill-in? Once this is done, communication can proceed without further tests between those two emails. The receiver still has the option to block you, lest you employ a mechanical turk.

Those solutions are boring, they're incomplete in a way, they introduce hassle, but if we *all* agree on those, they can be made less of a hassle, and still not lose their efficacy.

That would require the likes of AOL, Hotmail, Gmail and so on free mail providers to cooperate with the likes of Microsoft, Apple, Linux devs and so on, to implement this on both the clients and servers.

Right now, I could see Hotmail cooperating with Microsoft (.. wink, wink.. :P ), but that's where it ends.

Spam auf deutsch?

Anyone else getting a lot of spam in German? I don't think the spammers know that I can speak German, but I would say that at least 25% of my spam these days is in German.

Why we can't stop spam with our current techniques

We can't stop it because we aren't addressing the real problem. Spam is an economic problem. People send out spam because they make money off of it. And they will therefore continue to send out spam as long as they make money off of it.

If you want to stop spam, you have to remove the economic incentive. To do that, you need to cut off the co-conspirators that are allowing the spamvertised domains to be established and hosted. If you can either prevent them from getting a cut off the action, or punish them severely for taking their cut, then you can stop spam.

Until then, if all we do is try to filter spam out, we'll just continue to see the costs of inaction. Beyond that, we're ignoring the fact that filtering has real costs, as well. Filtering doesn't prevent the spam from traversing the internet, and furthermore it requires human time to update as the spammers change their tactics.

Email is dead, long live Email

As email asymptotically reachs 100% spam, we will have essentially created a mechanism whose sole goal is to deliver us undesired ads and scams. Talking about spam detectors and blockers and blacklists is irrelevant. Why devote all of this energy to ensure that maybe 5, 10, or 20 people can contact you or your business a day? Or even 20,000, which only highlights the issue that separating spam from valid emails is just bad juju. Simply put, there is no solution to asynchronous communication that is not too tedious or too restrictive. We'd be a lot better off if we blew up all the email servers, and put all of the energy and cost savings into developing encrypted telepathy. You think I'm kidding.

Only a few more percentage points to go...

...before it reaches the level of spam I get in the mailbox in front of my house. I swear, if we want to save the trees, we need to start by arresting the people putting all those unwanted 20-100 page sales catalogs in everyone's mailbox every day.

Greylisting to the rescue!

Seriously.

I hate to bring up anecdotal evidence, but, while I still get spam, my flood has gone down to a relative trickle simply by plugging postgrey into postfix. I could probably reduce it to zero with a bayesian filter, but I won't bother. Scanning through my logs, my server rejects literally thousands of spams every day, and I'm just one guy with two email addresses and a handful of aliases.

So, it would come as no surprise to me that spam volume is that high, I just never see it. I almost want to turn off my filter for a day just to see what would happen.

Well, maybe not. :)

Re:Greylisting to the rescue! (or not)

I knew somebody would bring up greylisting. :) During the business day[1], I work for a company that produces several widely-used anti-spam appliances and a service-based filter as well. We see about 2,000 networks a week, and get a pretty good feel for spam trends and countermeasure effectiveness. I can say with all honesty that in my experiences, greylisting hurts more than it helps for most organizations.
 
Basically, greylisting is putting an email transaction on hold to see if the sender will retry. The idea is that if the sender is illigitimate, they won't bother resending. However, spammers have been onto this method for as long as it's existed, much moreso lately. All they have to do is take greylisted hosts and move them to the end of their script for later processing. The second time around, the spam gets through anyway. Even with its meager benefits, most organizations want email to come through as quickly as possible, and greylisting delays email by its very nature. It's also much less effective than existing technology that won't hinder most legitimate mail like DNSBL and/or SPF, spamwords+OCR (for image spam), and blocking on unknown recipients.
 
  To summate, if greylisting makes you happy, then don't let me dissuade you from using it. it does indeed stop some spam. But please don't give the false impression that it's a magic bullet; most of the complaints we receive are from clients who've enabled greylisting and can't figure out why their mail is delayed.

[1] I am also a consultant to another firm who hosts manged email with spam filtering. Due to the complaints above, we have also disabled greylisting there. It was only effective at stopping about 5% of spam reliably, but a delay is put on all mail that isn't otherwise whitelisted. There are plenty of other methods which are both more effective and don't slow down the mailflow or tie up much resources on the MTA.

Some real spam numbers

I work at a large financial institution, where I manage the email team, including our mail hygiene systems. We saw spam numbers skyrocket in late august, to the point where 99% of everything hitting our perimeter is spam. For the last 3 weeks in a row, we blocked over 200,000,000 messages, which is more than triple the numbers we were seeing only 2 months ago.

-Lok

So, it's not the Russians

Despite all the recent hoopla about Russian criminal gangs the article makes it clear that the US leads the world in zombied boxes.

My point is not that Americans are evil, but rather than we need to look a lot closer to home in tackling these problems rather than looking for some grand criminal conspiracy to crack.

The conspiracy may exist but if local ISPs simply refused to route packets from zombied boxes then their owners would soon work out they had to do something.

one of the way to avoid spam =)

try to use cellpoint product to secure mail gateway to protect email. it has capability to filter out email threats unmatcheds by traditional firewalls.also provides a complete secure mail reporting and management. it is a 7 A's of secure email protection which is anti-spam, anti-virus, anti-spyware,anti-phishing,anti-relay,anti-DoS, and anti-hacking.

Even trustworthy people/companies sell you out.

I think there's more to the spam problem then the usual people we blame for it.

I have a personal email address on my own domain that used to NEVER get spam. I moved into my own apartment a month ago and I signed up a new phone number with Bell Canada and a new account with my local city utility company. I gave that email address to both without thinking- usually I give one of my alternates. Well, now that address is getting tons of spam of the worst kind.

So, either Bell or my local utility sold my address. Two companies that are supposed to be reputable and trustworthy. They both have privacy policies that say they don't sell or share your personal info. Apparently that's bull.

Oh wait, the other option is that I was sent an evite from evite.com to that address. The spam might be coming from them. Gee, you can't even trust your friends not to give out your address.

I'm not impressed. In fact I'm pissed. If I can't avoid spam by being selective about who I give my address to, then I'm not sure there's anyway to avoid it. If I wasn't a web developer, I think I'd give up email permanently. As it is I have about 10-15 addresses for various things, yuk.

IE vulnerabilities

I keep seeing statements, including one in the PDF report from TFA, that Win+IE users can get their machines infected with malware just by visiting a web site, without even clicking their mouse on anything in the site. However, these statements always seem to come from people who make money in the security business, and they never seem to say anything about what the actual IE vulnerabilities are. I'm very skeptical, although I haven't run Windows in a decade, so maybe I'm just naive. Can any slashdotters with expertise in Win+IE security explain more about this? Does this only apply to IE6, not IE7? Versions earlier than Vista? Does it apply to a default install of Windows, or only to misconfigured systems? When a home user buys a machine with Windows these days, doesn't it basically come configured so that security updates are offered automatically, and all the user has to do is click OK? Are these vulnerabilities in ActiveX? Are they buffer overflows? Flaws in the basic Windows security model? In any case, the whole thing seems faintly ridiculous to me -- if IE+Win security is really this bad, you'd have to be an idiot not to switch to Firefox, and yet many security companies are proposing that users do expensive and/or time-consuming things to work around vulnerabilities in Win+IE.

Sometimes true, sometimes not

While the article is accurate for corporate emails, it is not accurate for my personal email.

The first day on my new job with a brand new email, it got barraged with spam. Instantly. The company has spam filtering and when I checked the spam folder they dated back to my start date. So somehow the spammers had access to the company directory. I configured Outlook to turn off the preview pane because that is how embedded executables run when you open an email.

My personal email account gets zero spam. ZERO. The personal address is given only to friends and family, never to a website or business. I have auxilary accounts that are reserved for those websites that insist on an email to join, or when I place an order over the net with a business. Sort of a layer between potential spam and me. None of my friends/family have those account addresses so I check them far less often, and on the rare occasion there is an email that requires my attention, I forward it to my personal account.

That has been very effective in keeping spam out of my inbox. My webmail is also effective in that it is text based and I never see HTML or embedded images, a popular tactic with spammers. It also can't autorun embedded viruses.

I can confirm that Yahoo! is the worse offender. I have a special account that only Yahoo! has. Their TOS claims they will not spam my account or sell the email address to 3rd parties. Either they are lying or someone has access to their email address database because that account has been barraged with spam and only Yahoo! has that address.

Maybe it's about time we got rid of email.

I don't think anything's going to curb the problem, short of a full-scale military invasion of russia and china.

Hey, now there's an idea... if we start labelling spammers as terr'ists something might get done about it.

Stating the Obvious

In other news, grass is green and the sky is blue.

The number is likely attempted deliveries only

We see a lot of junk hitting our greylist at the gateway, but 95% just ends there.

OpenBSD's spamd is a wonderful greylister, and it offers a few other options which will
make a dent in the reminaing few if you can be bothered to set it up. See my blog at
http://bsdly.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com] and links from there for some examples.

The spam percentage will keep growing

I predict the spam percentage will keep growing as long as no ISP is willing to spend the resources it takes to stop it. Companies, who think they can make money from fighting spam are never going to help. Rather it is companies that provide other services (such as email), who have to start understanding their obligation to spend some of their income on fighting the abuse that could be done through their service.

First of all when you sign up for a connection, the contract should state, that you are not allowed to send spam, and you are liable for the cost to track you down, if you do. It could be done by paying some reasonable deposit when signing up. And when ISPs make peering agreements, responsibility to track down the origin of spam has to be part of the agreement. If ISPs were willing to operate this way, it would just require one recipient of a spam message to contact his own ISP about it, and the source of that mail would be tracked down and disconnected from the net. (Same solution could be used for flooding and IP spoofing, which are also things that can only be stopped at the source).

It just ain't gonna happen. Because end users don't understand how it works. And as long as end users don't understand, they are going to choose the cheapest provider, which is the one who does not spend resources on fighting spam. Oh, maybe they have a socalled spam filter, which based on some heuristics throws away some of the messages to their own customers, and the customers will be happy (and blame the sender of messages, when the filter discards legitimate messages).

I feel we are now at the point, where the problems caused by spam filters blocking legitimate email are growing faster than the spam itself. And we will have to witness a total meltdown of the email system, before anybody will grab the problems by the root and solve it.

Egress filtering

The vast majority of the spam I see going through our servers at work comes from dynamic address space. There are LOTS of unpatched boxes connected to broadband service just waiting to be taken over (and over and over...) by bot-masters. It seems to me that the bulk of the problem could be solved if ISPs would simply apply egress filters for port 25 to traffic from their dynamic address space(s).

signal to noise ratio

its gettin to be a mighty high signal to noise ratio,
but people will still keep using email, because...

    The will is not set upon a surplus of pleasure, but upon
the amount of pleasure that remains after getting over the pain.
This is the essence of all genuine will... It reaches its goal
though the path be full of thorns. It lies in human nature to
pursue it so long as the displeasure connected with it
does not extinguish the desire altogether.

The question is not whether the pleasure to be gained is greater
than the pain, but whether the desire for the goal is greater
than the hindering effect of the pain involved... for the will
is not set upon a surplus of pleasure, but upon the amount of
pleasure that remains after getting over the pain.
This still appears as a goal worth striving for.

(R. Steiner, Philosphy of Freedom [wikipedia.org])

Use Cloudmark

In my experience, the best email filter is Cloudmark.com, for Outlook or Outlook Express. It doesn't use a challenge message (which I've found few people respond to, so I end up having to carefully review the trash heap). Cloudmark is a community-policing approach. If a spam message slips through into my inbox in Outlook Express, I simply click on a "spam" link in the tool bar (installed by Cloudmark), and the message is moved to the "Spam" folder where Cloudmark has automatically placed other items considered "spam" by others in the community. Such a designation is tagged on the sender's messages, automatically sending their messages to the "spam" folder on the other user's accounts so they never see it. An individual participant's credibility rating is weighed in whether or not a message is actually flagged as spam for the other members of the community. They have a 15-day free trial. In the first month I used it, only four legitimate messages made it into the "spam" folder, where I then clicked on the "unblock" button in the tool bar, to send it to the inbox. That is far less than any of the other filter services I've used. I've not had anything legitimate land there for a week. And what's nice about it is that they are all in one folder (the "spam" folder), and it is easy to visually scan down through them to make sure nothing legitimate is there. I can scan about 1000 spam messages in about a minute. I get around 800 spam/phish/virus messages a day. Of those, probably around 15-20 spam messages make it into my inbox. I only get about one phish message every three to four days in my inbox. One downside of this method is that all of my email (including the volumes of spam/phish/virus email) is being downloaded onto my computer, making my Norton pop up virus interception messages nearly every time Outlook Express cycles to retrieve new mail each hour. With SpamArrest, only the cleared emails were downloaded. Overall, with Cloudmark, I spend much less time tending to the junk mail each day. Cloudmark Desktop is the first and largest spam-fighting community in the world, which contributes to the speed and accuracy in tagging spam/phish/viruses.

How do they know?

No, I didn't read TFA but if they analyzed billions of messages, how do they know which ones are spam? I mean, for sure? And why do I still have a couple of false negatives with my Bogofilter if such a technology exists?
charon

MP3 spam

I got several MP3 spams this morning. I listened to one (after sandboxing it just in case it was an MPEG decoder exploit) and it was a female synth voice reading the text of a standard pump-and-dump stock spam.

95%??

Wow! 95%?! impressive..somebody must do something. i really hate spam. i always get stupid & useless spam in my inbox..X(

reduce spam

95% of spam huh? quite bad rite..this link contains information how can you reduce amount of spam in ur inbox=) http://www.lib.lsu.edu/systems/software/spam_info.html [lsu.edu] =))

Re:white lists are the way to go

And really - if I want to hear from you then you'll be on that list. If you aren't on that list then I don't want you cluttering up my inbox in the first place.

Let me guess: You don't run a business.

Re:Why can't we stop this shit ??

Most ISPs just block outgoing port 25. I heard a few viruses have started trying to get the ISP login id/pass so they can send through the ISP smtp servers, but that won't work really because the ISP will notice that fast and shut you down since it would get their servers on blacklists pretty fast. It's the ISPs that don't do a damn thing that are the problem - anyone know of any major ones that still don't block port 25?

Re:Why can't we stop this shit ??

ISPs are in the perfect position to sniff traffic and identify infected machines that are part of botnets. It's obviously technically possible since the government does it at AT&T. You don't even need to sniff ALL traffic, SYN packets are enough. Most tech savvy businesses already sniff all their traffic with IDS systems, it's not a big leap.

ISPs should also be blocking outbound port 25 traffic from dynamic addresses (and if you need to use an external mail relay, use a tunnel or port 587.) Some ISPs do this already, many don't.

To all the whiners that don't like the port 25 blocking: Dynamic IP space is already "damaged goods", and you have multiple workarounds available to you. Any sane mail admin (including many large ISPs) already blacklist dynamic space therefor you can't effectively run a mail server on dynamic IP space.

The solution that stops 90%+ spam is out there, but it costs a little money to implement. It's still less money than what we currently are spending fighting spam. What are they waiting for - government mandates? Fines? Lawsuits? Getting their netblocks in 2,000,000 private blacklists that they have no chance in hell of getting out of?

Re:white lists are the way to go

Must be nice not need to hear from customers. Or legit vendors. Or old friends who changed their e-mail addresses. I'm jealous.

I can't even the use apparently moderately effective "blacklist Chinese and Russian IPs" technique. We correspond all over the world.

Re:Why can't we stop this shit ??

Spammers then incorporate. You can have 1-person corporations.

Neutral carrier,

ISP's transmit data, I really don't want them to be starting to be clever. What next, RIAA requests that people are limited to X posts to usenet so they can't post large binaeries? Limit P2P traffic? Sniff traffic in general for undesired elements?

In a way, my PC becoming a spam zombie is part of the price of freedom. Do you really want the internet to be regulated?

Oh sure, you can start light, but in the end sooner or later someone will abuse it and push for ever more stringent restriction, all in the name of the common good.

For instance, limit each IP to no more then say 6 outbound connections, that should be enough, you can request more, and they will know you are a dirty P2Per who needs to be reported.

No my friend, let ISP's remain in their role as dumb data carriers, we got to fight spam another way then by given up freedom.

MOD PARENT UP

EXACTLY. Very unreliable, not due to spam but to spam filtering. Frankly I prefer reliability with 90% spam to what we've got now. At least I'd get to choose my own filtering and have noone to blame but myself for choosing it, if it's lousy. But then, I'm not an ISP who cares more about his bandwidth costs than he does his customer's email reliability...

Re:E-mail stinks

The problem is that the faxes can be in the fax inbox for days...

Anything that is important may go by the snail mail, the email may work if it's signed.

It's just too bad that even big outfits has fallen to spam relaying even today. Checked the mail log and it contained an entry from mail5.warnerbros.com.

Re:E-mail stinks

Phone is only reliable if used correctly. People dial wrong numbers and leave a voice mail message for a total stranger, without even listening to the recorded message. This happens on my office number, even though I have a very clear recorded message identifying myself and the company I work for.

Letters get lost, and only become moderately reliable when you use a registered post system. Even then, you're only guaranteeing that the item has arrived at the address. You don't know if it'll be received or read by the intended recipient.

Faxes are subject to plenty of reliability issues. Wrong numbers, or poor print quality.

Email can be reliable so long as you use it correctly. If you require confirmation, ask for it in your mail. If you don't receive a reply within the time specified, email again or use an alternate contact method.