I think maybe some factual stuff might be involved here, rather than IMHO level issues. But I have noticed some things lately:
Spam has dropped off dramatically. I’m down to 3-6 a day on my hotmail account. (It was peaking at 100/day just a year ago. And still dozens just 2 weeks ago.) Other accounts are being hit less too. It is too soon for the new anti(hah!)-spam law to affect anything. What’s going on here?
We signed up a long time ago to get off automatic credit card solicitation offers. A major source of ID theft. But I’ve been getting a couple a week lately. Can I sue someone for violating the law here?
We have started to get “survey” phone calls. E.g., “Would you or any member of your family be interested in vacation packages?” Again, can I sue, etc.?
I’ve noticed a huuuuuuuuuuuuge decrease in viruses and a small decrease in SPAM.
I really don’t know why.
Maybe because I’m such a bad customer as I don’t want a 10 foot penis.
As a WAG, is it possible that some ISP’s are filtering more SPAM without us knowing about it, contributing to the decrease?
On the new look Hotmail there is a facility to mark any e-mails that slip through the net from the Junk Mail folder as spam. This was not available before. I used to forward any spam mails to SpamCop but I don,t after bother now. This may be the reason for the fall off of spam.
Interesting, but I suspect the reason is a more effective filter. Earlier this year, when I was getting about 30 spams a day, I got someone to set up a filter for me and put all the suspected spam into a separate box, which I monitored once a day. By the end of the summer, the amount of spam had grown to 150/day!. At this point, I stopped monitoring and it all goes to the wastebacket. Inevitably, some gets through, although I have had only one “Nigerian” spam since. I now have a secondary filter that whose output I monitor that catches anything with a dot between two letters in the subject line. Unfortunately, that catches web addresses. Oh well, nothing’s perfect. But no, the volume of spam grows apace.
Who is responding to it all? I realize that even a fraction of a percent response suffices, but who are these people who respond. If you have received 1000 Nigerian spams, surely you are not going to respond to the 1001st. There are too many to take any of them seriously.
I’ve seen the same decrease in my hotmail account, as well; however, there’s been an identical (in terms of time and proportion) decrease in spam in my earthlink account.
So unless earthlink and hotmail simultaneously synchronized their filters, it would seem to be something more.
The only other change that has taken place recently is that an anti-spam law has just been passed in the EU countries. What affect this will have on spam I do not know , mainly because most spam seems to originate in the USA .But this could be one reason that spam has reduced.
I haven’t noticed any dropoff either. I still get a couple hundred in the morning and a couple hundred more in the evening, with a trickle throughout the day.