Ironically, the problem of spam has created another weird problem. I'm not sure what's the right kind of thing to describe them, so I'll call them the ambulance chasers of the email world. But that doesn't sound right. Some kind of leech, patent troll, and mafia rolled into one?<p>Last week, one of my organization's user email accounts was hacked. It started getting used to send out spam. We caught it pretty quickly and updated the password so that the spammers couldn't use it anymore. But it was too late, we got listed on several spam blacklists. As such, all emails from our mail server started going into recipient mailbox spam folders. OK, we just get ourselves off of the spam blacklists, right?<p>Most of the spam blacklists gave us one of two options. First option was to manually request removal, some of them required sending an email to confirm what had happened and why we're confident the problem didn't exist anymore. Easy. Second option was to wait as their service monitored our email services to confirm if we were still sending out spam. If after a few days they confirmed that the spammy behaviour had stopped, we'd be automatically removed from their blacklist. Annoying wait, but reasonable methodology.<p>Then the annoying ones. One spam blacklist would not remove us for a week, though we could expedite the process by paying them $106 USD. Otherwise, we have a week of going into people's spam folders. It's a friggin racket. Dare I say even extortion? The other annoying spam blacklist said that we could not get removed from their list because we were on several other spam blacklists, including the blacklists that required us to wait a few days for them to monitor our email behaviour, AND the spam blacklist that wanted us to wait a week if we didn't pay $106 USD. So we're on one spam blacklist for a week due to not willing to pay extortion fees, and on the other spam blacklist for a week because they're too meta to develop their own spam blacklisting mechanisms and just follow what other blacklists are doing. The meta blacklist annoys me more than the extortioner. Why are they checking whether we're on other spam blacklists? They should be depending purely on their own capability to identify spammers, not the capability of other organizations. Why do they even exist? There's no value added by being meta here.<p>It really annoys me.
That constantly animated squiggly line is surprisingly annoying.<p>Please: do not animate things like that. Animation can be good when triggered by user interactions, to signify state transitions, but simple gratuitous animations can be quite annoying.
On the flipside, junk calls provide more opportunities to deploy "Lenny": <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/</a>
You know why spam is back? Because it works! I didn't get my head around this until late when I started my own company.
Mass contacting people is one of the easiest and successful ways. Of course, if you have the time and resources to do targeted marketing it's better, but what happens when you don't and you are an engineer who sees one or two opportunities to mass contact people?
The robocalls I get are so poorly done that I wonder if they even make money. I tried chatting them up a bit after being transferred to a real person and they have no sales skills. That's if you can even talk to a real person...the transfer often fails.
Spam never went away. I’ve had good success flagging calls using Hiya app. Most carriers have partnered with Hiya to provide a free version of the app in the App Store. AT&T’s is called Call Protect.
My life was awful until I started blocking numbers on my phone.<p>But the "spam is dead" message is totally misleading. Email spam is still pretty much alive and well. Try running an email server yourself or even publishing an address handled by Mailgun online.<p>Or, if you want some laughs, look at <a href="https://spa.mnesty.com/" rel="nofollow">https://spa.mnesty.com/</a>
Thoughts on nomorobo? Ive been thinking of signing up.<p>The spam calls are ridiculous. I have to keep do not disturb on 24/7, but some have caught on that they can call twice in a row to get through.
Phew, I thought they were talking about email spam coming back. This article is a bit clickbaity, and sorta tricks you into continuing to read until you figure out it's talking about social media, telephone, and SMS spam (by giving examples of people making progress against email spam, talking about email spam being a thing of the past).<p>As a small email system operator, I have seen spam fluctuate greatly. In my case it accounts for around 99% of connections, and 95% of successful connections (valid reverse dns, working STARTTLS), but today it only accounted for about 10% of successful connections. Miraculously, I have seen penny stock spam in 2017.
I recently got a call about my student loan debt, which I have zero. The script these people follow is incredibly terrible. I played along with the person asking questions, "oh, so which student loan, with what bank?"<p>"chase?" no, "wells fargo?", no, "bank of america?" no
and then the person hung up on me.
I don't really know if spam ever left, for it to be 'back'.<p>Though I do want to make a comment on the advertising in this site - I really, really like it. They're big graphics for those Macallan Rare Cask ads, but they are designed nicely and aren't "in your face", even though they are extremely prominent.<p>I like this.
There is also a new form of spam in 2017 (and even before), that's the notifications that we get from apps on our mobile phones. Does every app ask our permission before pushing notifications (for example at night when you try to sleep) ?<p>And every other website asking to push notifications on the desktop ?<p>And every Messenger bot ?
I'm surprised no one here is talking solutions. The fundamental problem is someone can connect to me and I have no way to trace it back to an organization who I can charge/sue.<p>The first step is to start adopting standards that aren't free either in cost or in compute. For email, this could be as simple as requiring proof of work before accepting an email. For private telcos requiring the ability to charge the company connecting to my number would solve most of these problems too. I'd love spam if I had the equivalent of an 80's era 976 number.