OT Has anyone else seen a HUGE drop in Spam?

=========== Your ISP may have installed or updated their spam blocker.

Uncle George

Not really but i've kept myself under the radar anyhow i still get my 10 a day

I'm just enjoying how quickly the signal to noise ratio improves in this newsgroup when you turn on a filter to refuse any message with Bush or Iran in the title if i could only set it to remove any message crossposted to anything in alt.politics i'd be in heaven

I see the same quantity of spam arriving, but more of it is caught by my spam filter. I recently upgraded a filter program called SpamAssassin. It is awesome and uses numerous approaches to spam detection, such as matching spammy URLs, identifying computers known to belong to spammers, noticing keyword patterns like "Dear PayPal User", etc.

Last time that happen was when Katrina took out the cesspool in New Orleans. Or was that when it made a cesspool?

Try XNews - a freebie available on download.com - that you can set to either (1) ignore *all* cross-posted messages or (2) those cross-posted to more than a given [user-determined] number of groups.

Read about it at

Will it act as an email client too?

THe problem with crossposting is a LOT of messages in here are equally valid crossposted to sci.engr.joining.welding or alt.machines.cnc

but ir>

well we need something to wipe boca raton Fla off the map

i dont know who or what but it IS the spam capital of the world.

I dont know who created the situation o make it that way but it happens ot be the physical location that creates the most spam

TEN?!?! I get about 300 a day! But, I post on a lot of newsgroups, easy prey for those fishing for live email addresses. About half of those are easily filtered.

Jon

I agree. I notice a drastic drop in spam after the storm. Not to worry----others are now taking the place of the lost stuff.

Harold

this email is used for usenet and usenet only but i'm very careful wiht the ones i care about. I reactiviated this email addy a month ago having not checked it for FIVE years and NEVER given it away

and it had 200 spams

ISP filters tend to flag commercial messages that I want to recieve. My delete key is faster than logging on to ISP's filter site and flagging what I want that they impounded.

Wes S

I only get one or two through the filters a day, but the "bucket" has been much smaller in the last couple days, yeah. Spamcop lets me manage my own rulesets, and I haven't changed anything, so it seems to be down.

Strangely so, yes. was climbing in the weeks before to about double the average over the last year then almost nothing for the past several days. Just Odd.

StaticsJason

According to StaticsJason :

Could it have been impacted by the new Kama Sutra virus? I know that most spam these days is sent out by compromised machines.

Hmm ... perhaps what is needed is a "beneficial virus" which confers immunity to the other ones. That would reduce the number of sources of spam. :-)

And I've been noticing for about the last month that a number of sites which I have in my normal IP-based blocklists to refuse smtp (e-mail) connections have been ignoring the refusals, and continaully trying -- at the rate of one or two thousand attempts per hour. Since these are refused, I have no idea whether they are virus infection attempts, or spam. In either case, I have taken extra steps to make my e-mail machines vanish from the net as far as they are concerned. (And

Anyway -- spam seems to be on the order of 10-20 per day for me right no, with about 90% of it automatically shuttled off to a "purgatory" folder for checking whether something real got in there and needs rescuing, and the rest gets processed to add to the IP based blocklists. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

My best guess is that with the publicity surrounding the Friday K.S. activation lots of otherwise apathetic people updated their antivirus software and cleaned house. Perhaps it took a bit for spammers to recover the lost nodes elsewhere. And now they are back with a vengance today.

Hmmm. A viral antivirus utility. With the large number of people who either don't know or don't care about proper security I imagine it would take something like this to come close to eradicating spam from unwitting senders. =) Bit of a catch 22 though, could create a future problem to fix a current problem if someone later piggybacked something malicious on it.

I've been getting a lot with an unknown date, making filtering impossible.

Actually, that makes filtering for that, very easy. No valid email will ever come in that way; toss anything with invalid date. If your spam filter doesn't let you do that, get a better one.