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I stopped using ISP based e-mail accounts years ago, they always had lousy spam control and after joining a few mailing lists they used to get flooded with junk.
I always found web based mail systems to have much more effective spam filtering systems, plus I don’t have to waste my time and bandwidth downloading spam mails to categorise them with a bayesian filter such as the one in Thunderbird.
Web mail systems have the advantage of having such a huge userbase, people marking mails as spam are in the millions so the bayesian database for spam and ham would be extremely accurate.
An anti-spam software company has revealed that three of the UK’s five most spammed individuals use Orange as their ISP.
Figures released by ClearMyMail show that the three Orange customers have around 63,339 spam emails blocked every day and 23,118,735 spam emails blocked every year.
ClearMyMail failed to establish a connection between a customer’s choice of ISP and the amount of spam they receive, but did name the UK’s most spammed citizen, Exeter-based Colin Wells.
According to ClearMyMail, 44,000 spam emails heading for Wells’s inbox are blocked each day, amounting to around 16 million a year.
That’s an incredible amount of spam gathered by just 3 users! Well even one user with 44,000 a day that’s about 1.3 million spam mails a month – incredible! Imagine what a database they could build up harvesting that address alone.
It’s sad though so much resources are wasted dealing with, storing, filtering and managing spam and junk mails.
At the height of the problem Wells, a workshop foreman for Stagecoach buses, was spending two hours a day deleting spam from his account, making the prospect of “taking a week’s holiday a complete nightmare”.
The UK’s second most spammed individual, who also uses Orange as their ISP, is fortunate by comparison with just 13,578 daily junk messages.
The third, fourth and fifth most spammed British citizens get 12,428, 5,760 and 3,982 spam mails a day respectively.
Colin must have his e-mail address in some really dodgy mailing lists, he’s getting almost 3 times as much as the second place and almost 10 times as much as the fourth place!
It just shows spam isn’t going to stop *sigh*.
Source: Vnunet (Thanks razta)
d347hm4n says
BIG ROFL, I feel sorry for the most spammed guy, has anyone showed him the shift click, click on the first one, shift click on the last one to select them all. Doens’t matter how many there are that way.
I wonder how pertinent the ISP that you use is to the number of spams recieved?
Probably not very, might have something to do with all that pr0n ^^
send in the forensics SWAT team says
If you highlight them all though you are going to delete your legit mails too – you’d still have to read through each one (not each mail, just the sender & title in the inbox) to uncheck (to not delete) the legit mails.
Only thing he could do there is have a trusted inbox for specific senders who are ok-ed, then everything else goes in a different inbox and can be deleted in one go (and marked as ‘spam’ if his email service has that feature).
And make another e-mail account, to use from then on, that isn’t given out to anyone.
Has anyone tried having an email (server) just for capturing any real data on where the spams originate? And then using those servers for other things, if you find out their IPs / name pointers.
They all use spoofed return domains and IPs and so forth, but the actual traffic logs on the internets routers still exists to various extents – but you’d need to be watching the spam arrive in realtime to try and read what actual named router / physical connection point they are closest to (or their host(s) is).
It helps if you can query the routers / attached hw for their traffic logs, cause the spoof still has to travel through each router with the same spoofed header, and routers are linear so you only need to check each attached router to the one you know the spoofed header passed through to see what other router it also passed through – and keep doing that until it doesn’t appear on any other router so then that’s the one it first went out on; which narrows things down, at least geographically because of the exchanges.
I’m meaning that if you have the tools and some know-how then those servers are easy targets, cause nobody that runs a spam server will be able to complain if its hacked and used by anyone else.
What would they do – submit their spamlogs as evidence? Say you resolve the traffic to a mailer someplace, and you determine that mailer is the first one (or one of the first ones) that the spams are uploaded to before they are distributed; so if you want to know where the original spams are being sent from you can see if its been logged on that mailer or any attached hw to it. So what if it’s noticed that you are scanning it to get in – it’s being used for spam anyway, so you’d be highlighting that moreso than exposing yourself. Plus there’s places that have lists of spam IPs and domains – you could add it there.
jd says
Hypothetically, even if you happen to track down a spammer, there is a large possibility that he or she is in a country with extradition laws that don’t agree with ours. I have traced my own spam e-mails, for exercise, on a few occasions and they almost always end up pointing to countries like China, Turkey, and South Korea.
Maybe he could just whitelist the people he knows are legitimate and then have the ISP automatically delete any e-mails that don’t come from those people. It would make it difficult to receive e-mails from new people who are legitimate but if he could edit the whitelist himself, he could just add the people he wants and everything else could be automatically deleted– it would certainly save resources on the processing of the spam and he will get two hours of his life back every day.
Hmm…that story does beg the question, though: Does he get a large amount of junk postal mail, too?
Navin says
ROFLMAO!! Had read this in the papers a few days ago…… I’ve heard tht the UK recieves most junk mail followed by the US and then Australia (or maybe tht was US 1st, UK 2nd and Australia 3rd), while countries like mine (in the southeast) get only roughly 5-10% of the spam recieved by an average person in the UK/US. So for us guys, unless you’ve joined a thousand mailing lists or so, the amt of spam recieved is pretty low.
There was once a time, before spam filters came into use, when I had to search through spam for important mails…..I wonder if this guy has to do so ;)
Changlinn says
Yikes… and I thought I was bad, I get about 4000 a month, all blocked by googles filter, and I have had the same email address since 1999, and am on about 5 public mailing lists. He must have had the email address for ages and be really, really into the warez and pr0n to get that much.
He should sell that address on to a harvester so they can harvest out the spam and add it to their list, then just tell his friends his address has changed, problem solved.
lyz says
It’s so hard to battle with spam nowadays. What we did was to mark all identified spams with this ***spam***. I then created a rule in Outlook to move the message that has a subject mark with the string I used to the “Deleted” folders. And finally, automatically delete message. This works for me.
Morgan Storey says
@lyz: yeah some older software or filters does that, it isn’t really effective though as you are still paying the processing power and bandwidth of sucking it down. I have seen smaller companies start routing through external services that do it, even one that used Gmail to route it through then split it up at the other end, gmails spam filter is awesome simply because of the userbase that is marking spam as spam for you is so damn large.