It’s quickly turning into an obsession for both Matthew Russell of MacDevCenter and I. Spam on .Mac. It’s been steadily increasing, and it’s not good.
Spammers don’t need to use clever (or unclever) web-scraping techniques when they can just harvest e-mail addresses by brute force. There’s just no other way to explain the correlation between the fury of suspicious, blank messages I’ve gotten lately along with the dramatic increase in offers for great sex-pills, “insider” stock info, and deals on vacations that are just too good to be true.
The process for spammers is simple: generate e-mail addresses by brute force, send out messages, and then wait. If an error message comes back, they know that the e-mail address is no good. If an error message doesn’t come back, then they know it’s a good one that they can start spamming to death.
I must have gotten on the order of 50 of these “blank” email messages in the last week. It’s annoying. Surely these messages are getting addressed to 5+ users a piece (which all the spam sent to .Mac is). While there is a danger of overzealous spam filters, filters that dump some less severe spam into a specific folder for moderation/training is an effective method. And really, can’t these blank messages just be bounced? There is no value in blank messages.
I’m seriously thinking about moving everything over to my webhost’s email, leaving sync as the only real part of .Mac I use.
> There is no value in
> blank messages.
Au contraire, oftentimes Subj= "Lunch Tues?" or "Thanks for Suggestion" is all I need to say.
Yes, spam is a Big Deal for lots of people, but I think your potshots at DotMac are just venting and not likely to help.
Why not ask Apple to join / convene a task force on spam, rather than expect that DotMac -- a tiny mail service --invent something that has eluded all the ISP's who get all their revenue from internet access?
You misunderstand. There is no subject. There is no body. There is no "To" line. It's a "From" and a date. That's all.
I'm not taking potshots. On no other service do I receive this type of spam. Other services include a Junk box where questionable mail gets dropped.
DotMac is not a tiny mail service. It's backed by Apple.
ISPs really don't care how effective their spam filtering is because their customers don't join them for email service alone or even as a deciding factor. It's a nice bonus.
Yahoo, Google, and even Microsoft in some small way all handle spam MUCH better than .Mac. And they're free.
As for a task force, I really don't care for them. They drum up a lot of press and usually end up being terribly ineffective. I want *good* spam filtering. Dot Mac is not delivering. It's just that simple.
My isp is iprimus and I have been receiving messages with no subject, no message and no to line. This has just started recently.
.mac is not alone.
Waahhh! I want! I want! Give it a break. You think Apple doesn't get it? Projection.