Internet users unfazed by spam: study The volume of spam arriving in Americans' personal and workplace inboxes is rising, but email users are less bothered by it than they once were. That's according to a new study from the Pew Internet Project, which reveals that American internet users have become more sophisticated at dealing with unsolicited emails. Asked if …
Well I do believe it's pretty simple to distinguish spam from a legitimate mail - the only thing you need to do is know how to write.
The spam is the stuff that cannot possibly be grammatically or orthographically correct - not to mention that they use the exact same subject for 100 mails before changing.
Why don't Microsoft and other major email service providers create honeypot email addresses. These would exist purely to recieve spam (what other kind of mail could they recieve?). The messages these accounts recieve could then be used to more effectively detect similar spam recieved by legitimate accounts.
The spam filters already do a terrific job of that - they honeypot just about every email address in the organisation.
My personal favourite form of spam is the return message sent by retarded anti-virus software.
It appears the people who write anti-virus software still don't know that an email address can be spoofed. Every day that I have to explain why someone got an email telling them they're sending out viruses to people they've never heard of is a joy only idiot anti-virus developers can give. And they give so much.
Go ahead, explain to someone who doesn't understand how to create an Windows desktop shortcut why anti-virus servers send out junk mail. I'm beginning to wonder if these are the same people Symantec and McAfee use as a recruiting pool, but then that would be doing the users that don't know how to create shortcuts a disservice.
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