SpamAnti.net in November 2008

SPAM humour

Thanks to Dilbert

News of the SPAM world

2/3 less SPAM

Since the colsing of operations of the California hosting provider that was apparently at the source of 75% of world's SPAM, the Washington Post tells us that the SPAM volume was divided by 3.

It happened on November 11th. Did you see a reduction? I did.

But it will probably climb back soon.

Inside a SPAM network

Two recent studies analyze the architecture of SPAM netowrk from the inside.

Synthesis on ArsTechnica.

Your address may attract more SPAM

This is the unfortunate conclusion of an analysis carried out by University of Cambridge computer scientist Dr Richard Clayton. It seems that spammers are a bit lazy (surprise?) and some email addresses receive more email SPAM than others. Looking at the first letter, "A", "M", "S", "R" and "P" are the most popular (40% of all SPAM) and "Q", "Z" and "Y" are not.

Apparently, this comes from efficiency research which shows that if john@example.com works, it is worth trying john@another.com because there is a large chance that it will work too. All this is then be influenced by the frequency of letters in names and titles in (mostly) English and a few other languages.

Source: BBC

New SPAM idea: Bank mergers

The current financial crisis has given spammers new ideas. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) warned about scammers targetting confused customers into disclosing personal information. Reasons used for requesting private data (social engineering) include imprecise claims linked to financial difficulties of some of the banks currently merging or closing shop.

Source: The Inquirer

News of SpamAnti.net

Buy the encyclopaedia

The encyclopédie du courrier électronique et du SPAM (encyclopaedia of electronic mail and SPAM) is written in French, listed in alphabetic order. It defines words, lists products, technologies, etc. and gives some useful advice. But in French!

This bible of email knowledge (more than 200 pages, 8.26" x 11.69") can now be purchased on line at a very reasonnable price.

You'll get a book perfectly bound and able to serve you as a reference and easy to transport and read.

Some older news archived at SpamAnti.net

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