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“Stopping spam [using Bayesian filtering] is a bit like trying to stop the rain by catching every drop before it hits the ground.”

You had me at hello, Michael Specter.

If you want a well written, literary non-fiction description of the worldwide spam problem, Michael Specter at the New Yorker serves one up this week.

Productivity

Specter takes the productivity angle with when looking at spam:

If a billion spam messages elude detection every day—which means that ninety-nine per cent do not—that adds up to a hundred and fifty-nine years of collective time lost hitting the delete button every day.

Not to mention sore fingers….

Legislation

Additionally, Specter shows how little legislation has helped us dig out of our collective spam problem.

In the year after the law was enacted (2003), less than seven per cent of spam complied with the requirements of the legislation, according to MX Logic, an Internet-security firm. Last year, compliance with the law never even reached one per cent.

Finally

A great summary of where we are and where we’ve been, but Brad Taylor, spam czar of Google sums most anti-spam software up best:

“But I wanted to fix the problem and return to the bliss that existed before spam,’’ he said. “Often the fight is fun, like a game. But last year there were some low points. We started getting these image spams, and the spammer would adapt to anything we did. He would write software that cut the image into little pieces that reassembled by the time you opened your mail. When we figured out how to deal with that, he started making text that waved around and curved in odd ways. So we figured that out. Then he started with random images.’’ Taylor laughed. “This went on for a while. But, finally, he just gave up. And that’s our hope. It’s kind of like war. One side eventually gets tired. And we just can’t let it be us.”

To you and me, that sounds a heck of lot like an arms race. I’m glad we’re aiming a little higher than tit for tat in the war on spam.

Read

[via Slashdot]

From the “you win some, you lose some” department, Wired’s Threat Level blog reports that the “Appeals Court Says Feds Need Warrants to Search E-Mail.”

The Good

“A federal appeals court on Monday issued a landmark decision that holds that e-mail has similar constitutional privacy protections as telephone communications, meaning that federal investigators who search and seize emails without obtaining probable cause warrants will now have to do so.”

Which in and of itself is a good thing. In this day and age, email is such an important part of communication between people, having that communication protected like the telephone seems reasonable.

From the EFF:

“Email users clearly expect that their inboxes are private, but the government argues the Fourth Amendment doesn’t protect emails at all when they are stored with an ISP or a webmail provider like Hotmail or Gmail. EFF disagrees and argues that the Fourth Amendment applies online just as strongly as it does offline.”

The Bad

The bad news is that this new ruling is helping a known spammer, Steven Warshak, weasel his way out of a fraud conviction. Steven Warshak is known for launching Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, which sells Enzyte, a controversial “marital aid.”

Read
[via Slashdot.org]

More coverage of the story

EFF’s Case Briefing
Court to feds: Hands off ‘Smiling Bob’s’ e-mail – Network World
Court Protects Email from Secret Government Searches – Privacy Digest
Regulating the Cloud: Warshak v. United States – University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog
Email Protected by 4th Amendment, Court Says – Freedom to Tinker
Email Safe From Government Searches – WebProNews
Appeals court: Feds can’t secretly seize e-mail without a warrant – Ars Technica
The Privacy of Internet Email – Monsters and Critics
Volokh Conspiracy – lots of detail and backstory on the case.

photo from Flickr user heathermariecarr

Ars Technica reported yesterday that a convicted “Spam King may rule prison cell for 11 years after Feds nail him.”

“(Adam) Vitale and codefendant Todd Moeller were arrested by the Secret Service in February 2006 after setting up a scheme to advertise a PC security application in exchange for 50 percent of the profits. Unfortunately for Vitale and Moeller, they were dealing with a government informant.”

Reuters added that “in less than a week in August 2005, Vitale and Moeller sent e-mails on behalf of the informant to more than 1,277,000 addresses of subscribers at AOL, the online division of Time Warner Inc.”

Yow… glad to see the CAN-SPAM Act is getting some of the big spammers here in the US.

Other reports on the story
All Things D
Download Squad
Deep Web

image by Flickr user r80o

Major Anti-Spam Lawsuit Filed in Virginia – Washington Post
“The company filed the suit on behalf of some 20,000 people who use its anti-spam tool. Web site owners use the project’s free software to generate pages that feature unique “spam trap” e-mail addresses each time those pages are visited. The software then records the Internet address of the visitor and the date and time of the visit. Because those addresses are never used to sign up for e-mail lists, the software can help investigators draw connections between harvesters and spammers if an address generated by a spam trap or “honey pot” later receives junk e-mail.” [via Ars Technica and Slashdot]

Before you declare email bankruptcy – Web Worker Daily
“Did you ever wish you could delete all your email without responding? Maybe you can. It’s called email bankruptcy. You realize you are never going to dig yourself out from under the pile of email in your inbox so you just declare that you won’t. You start afresh.”

Great tips on how to avoid an email overload calamity. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve considered doing this.

Classic DM tactics are spam for filters – Direct Marketing News
“More and more well-intended e-mail is ending up in the junk box as companies and individuals tighten the screws on their anti-spam systems.”

Interesting article about the multitude of false positives that are generated by standard email spam filters.

Photo by Flickr member Rosa y Dani