Talk:Email spam

Out of place sentence

"On July 20, 2008, Eddie Davidson walked away from a federal prison camp in Florence, Colorado. He was subsequently found dead in Arapahoe County, Colorado, after reportedly killing his wife and three-year-old daughter, in an apparent murder-suicide." Um, huh? What does that have to do with the article, other than the fact he was a prolific mass spammer which by the way, is fact that is not even made clear in the article to help a reader understand the context of this sentence, and even so, I fail to understand why it is there. This isn't List of spammers, so I think that bit should be removed, or be placed in the "See also" section. --Whip it! ^{Now whip it good!} 00:41, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

Adding Original research banner

I've done this as the article clearly has issues, here's just a quick sample of prose which is unverified and possibly innappropriate in tone:

• Anti-spam techniques should not be employed on abuse email addresses, as is commonly the case. The result of this is that when people attempt to report spam to a host, the spam message is caught in the spam filter and the host remains unaware that their network is being exploited by spammers.

• As Bayesian filtering has become popular as a spam-filtering technique, spammers have started using methods to weaken it.

• So-called millions CDs are commonly advertised in spam. These are CD-ROMs purportedly containing lists of e-mail addresses, for use in sending spam to these addresses.

• Sometimes, if the sent spam is "bounced" or sent back to the sender by various programs that eliminate spam, or if the recipient clicks on an unsubscribe link, that may cause that email address to be marked as "valid", which is interpreted by the spammer as "send me more".

• Spammers frequently seek out and make use of vulnerable third-party systems such as open mail relays and open proxy servers. SMTP forwards mail from one server to another—mail servers that ISPs run commonly require some form of authentication to ensure that the user is a customer of that ISP. Open relays, however, do not properly check who is using the mail server and pass all mail to the destination address, making it harder to track down spammers.

• The whole of "Deception and fraud"

• Providers vary in their willingness or ability to enforce their AUP. Some actively enforce their terms and terminate spammers' accounts without warning.

Furthermore, the article fails to coherently focus the topic, it's quite ridiculous that right at the beginning of the article we are presented with superfluous information such as "Most common products advertised" without even discussing Spam's origins. The article History of email spam doesn't seem to expand on it's origins either. This glaring omission is reason enough for a quick fail alone. Sillyfolkboy (talk) (edits) 22:20, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

GA review

The article has been nominate for GA on 27 April, without the former review's issues being resolved. In particular, there are maintenance tags and fact-tags in the article. I am therefore going to an out-of-process quick fail (no need to fill up the article history with embarrassing successive GA failings). If it is renominated, I will do a formal quick-fail, unless the issues are fixed. Arsenikk ^(talk) 23:23, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Seriously, this has to stop. 199.125.109.76 (talk · contribs) keeps trying to nominate the article, even after it failed. The IP even tried to remove the old failed GA and replace it with another nomination. I warned the IP twice on User talk:199.125.109.76. It's at the point where it's just turning into vandalism. — HelloAnnyong ^{(say whaaat?!)} 23:27, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

According to the GA review, the article does not meet any of the quick fail requirements, nor has any fail criteria been specified. Therefore the article is currently GA and that needs to be noted, or someone else needs to review the article if the reviewer is unavailable. 199.125.109.76 (talk) 03:56, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

The article is not GA as it has never passed a review. This is getting tiresome and I'm going to head you off at the pass by expanding upon my previous comments above (which were the reasons I quick-failed the GA nomination) and give you a full review of the articles problems. Call it a peer review or an informal GA but I can guarantee that no article I have passed would have more than the outstanding problems listed above. (review forthcoming) Sillyfolkboy (talk) (edits) 14:32, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

When you do review it, provided there is no reason to actually quick-fail it, I would like to ask that you provide at least a few days for any problems you find to be fixed. 199.125.109.76 (talk) 13:54, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

Are you intentionally being tendentious? Stop attempting to nominate this article as GA. It's already failed twice, and you've done nothing to improve it. — HelloAnnyong ^{(say whaaat?!)} 18:41, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

Source for statistics?

"E-mail spam has steadily, even exponentially grown since the early 1990s to several billion messages a day. Spam has frustrated, confused, and annoyed e-mail users. The total volume of spam (over 100 billion emails per day as of April 2008[update]) has leveled off slightly in recent years, and is no longer growing exponentially. " source?? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.124.128.123 (talk) 19:35, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Due to misuse of citations and statistics, I have marked a number of citations and referenced numbers as questionable. The numbers I am concerned about is in the Statistics and Estimates section e.g. the number of spam emails per day or and statistical origins of spam. Many of the citations comes from press releases from a single commercial source, Sophos, specialising in IT-security and spam prevention tools. The press releases contains sales enhancing statements such as "Currently it is impossible to run a business email service without proper spam protection..." and so on. Some of the citations only contains generic statements about the number of spam messages per day. To remedy all this misinformation about the proportions of this problem, community wide independent research reports/studies should be referenced. The reports or studies should 1) be supported by other independent authorities on the matter and 2) contain raw data, analysis and statistics so that the findings can be independently verified. Tfinneid (talk) 11:03, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Bot Bait not in article

The article does not mention Bot Bait; web pages designed to recursively generate an infinite number of random e-mail addresses. (Although the See also section does contain a link to Spider trap.) Would this not be a useful addition to the article? HairyWombat (talk) 21:21, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Cyrillic script spam and question

I have come across a number of examples of this recently: does it source from Russia?

Apart from 'developers of spam-blocking mechanisms' and 'collectors of creative-language spam' are there any positive results from spam-generation (for example new techniques of managing such messages and word recognition)? 18:33, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

The information about Australian spam laws is plain wrong

The information in this Wikipedia entry about Australia's spam laws being opt-in only, and how this contrasts with US spam laws opt-out requirements is completely fictitious. There is nothing about this mentioned in the Spam Act 2003. The Spam Act 2003 allows for people to send a commercial email to another person provided they have express or inferred consent (and follow the other rules). You may legally send a commercial email to someone who has conspicuously published their email address so long as the email is relevant to their published role. Source: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/sa200366/sch2.html. E.g. you can, under the definition of inferred consent in the Spam Act, email offers of plumbing supplies to a plumber who has published his email address on his website. So in this case, with inferred consent, you can email the person a commercial email even if they did not opt-in. So whoever wrote that Australia's laws require an opt-in requirement was wrong. Whether an email is classified as spam by the Spam Act 2003 comes down to three things: 1) whether there is consent (opt-in is one form of consent, but consent can also be inferred), 2) whether the sender provides accurate identification, 3) whether the sender provides a mechanism for the receiver to unsubscribe. The Australian laws don't contrast with the U.S. laws, in fact they are very similar to them. So this needs to be revised because the information that Australian spam laws are an opt-in requirement is false. 27.33.131.151 (talk) 05:11, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

Reference 39

I was searching around the article and source 39 no longer exists and it needs to be replaced. Lothp (talk) 21:53, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

Feel free to do so! Meanwhile, I'll mark it with a "dead link" tag for reference. Qwyrxian (talk) 00:51, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

Actually, as I went to do that, I saw that most of that section consisted of unreliable sources. So, instead, I ended up stripping out most of the section and re-organizing. Basically none of the given timeline data was reliable; if someone has reliable sources, we could re-add, but not from corporate websites or blogs. Qwyrxian (talk) 01:02, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

Alright if I find any sources I'll add them to the page. Lothp (talk) 02:11, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

Bulgarian e-comerce act

The statement that some country did actually legalize spam must sound absurd for most of you. It seems absurd even for most people here in Bulgaria.

Unfortunately this section in the article is not fabricated. The Bulgarian e-comerce act does exist and believe me - it is extremely far from being the only, or the most absurd thing in this country. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dkavlakov (talk • contribs) 01:27, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

I could find not a single source for this. I have removed all mentions of this until this can be properly sourced. Bigar (talk) 00:55, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

Sources

• "Global spam e-mail levels suddenly fall." BBC. 6 January 2011. WhisperToMe (talk) 18:32, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Additional external link?

I certainly don't want to clog up the External links section with irrelevant or worthless links, but Randy Cassingham's Spam Primer (SpamPrimer.com) seems particularly relevant, comprehensive and gives a really good run-down on the different kinds of spam and how to deal with them. Yes, no? — Frεcklεfσσt | Talk 16:24, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

"Email spam has steadily grown since the early 1990s" but this isn't true anymore, is it?

The intro paragraph says "Email spam has steadily grown since the early 1990s". This is no longer true as far as I can tell. While we really don't know if it's because of botnet takedowns or other reasons, the level of spam on the Internet has decreased in the past couple of years. See, for example:

1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/technology-12126880

2. http://www.symantec.com/business/security_response/landing/spam/ (Symantec's Brightnet statistics; you'll have to click on "History" to see multiple years. This represents an estimate by Symantec of global spam and shows a pronounced decrease in the past 18 months.)

3. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/30/spam_volumes_shrink/

It seems to me that this sentence should be changed, but I'm not sure how to change it and how to source it since no one seems to be talking about it much after the initial fall after the takedown of Rustock. All I can find for sources are graphs that are difficult to link to. Perhaps something like "Email spam grew steadily through the early 1990's and the first decade of the 21st century but recently volumes have fallen"? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Paultparker (talk • contribs) 15:05, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

Not only is volume falling: proportion of all email has been dropping too. The article needs updating for 2013 data by anyone who has the time to search out reliable sources. Kaspersky, eg, is still showing 2012 data. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.168.212.28 (talk) 01:50, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

Ethical considerations

I am person who continuously have to explain people that spam is not good even when it is legal. Current wiki page indirectly supports view that if spam is legal, then it has nothing to do with ethics. I think this is wrong. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.213.52.170 (talk) 06:50, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia is written based upon what reliable sources say, not any of our opinions. Qwyrxian (talk) 07:14, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

I must agree with 122.213.52.170, even if the "legal spam" is allowed, it is still a problem, so it may be considered an ethical issue. --土地 空気 火災 水 14:23, 21 June 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gilthanas91 (talk • contribs)

Bacn merge

Bacn has been proposed for merging (by User:Jarble in April), into the Email spam#Related vocabulary subsection. Any objections?

• I support, as it is well-referenced (with tons more potential references in the EL section, that we'd probably have to either read through and use, or just copy them into this thread as a temp holding pen), but it is unlikely to grow into a top-rated (FA) article. —Quiddity (talk) 17:17, 24 September 2012 (UTC)
• I also support; while I can appreciate that some bloggers may use this term, it is certainly not yet dictionary or encyclopaedia ready. If it truly matched up with its namesake (some dweeb's feeble attempt at humour I suppose), it would be the first email most of us would read! Garth of the Forest (talk) 03:48, 27 September 2012 (UTC)
• Support, as it's not that big a topic, so reasonable cited details can be fitted into here. It's not as well known a term as Spam, but I hear it more and more in technical realms (though some people confuse by using the word "Ham" quite often too; presumably due to them sounding related: Spam vs. Ham !). Please make sure to also redirect to the Bacn section on this page, following merger. Jimthing (talk) 15:36, 21 February 2013 (UTC)
• Support, as it's a very small part of the spam picture, and not enough thus to merit its own article. It's best within a vocabulary list... Cesium 133 (talk) 01:50, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
• Potential merge with http://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Graymail_(email)? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.183.0.65 (talk) 10:50, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

 Done. I'm impressed that it took three years for this to happen, given that apparently there is no opposition. Content of the former Bacn article is available in the article's history. Ivanvector (talk) 18:50, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

I propose to delete the section on Bacn. "Email that you want, but not right now" implies that spam is email that you don't want.

That is completely incorrect. Spam is unsolicited bulk email, not "email that you don't want". If bacn is email that you don't want, then it doesn't belong in this article, because that definition is unrelated to spam.

I don't know how I missed this merge proposal; I would have argued (and voted) against it. Also, as far as I can see, this is a term that emerged last year at some podcasting camp, that may or may not be chucked around by some bloggers. I can only find in the article two citations for this term, and one of those refers to the other. Basically, the term is cited to one podcaster rally in 2017. MrDemeanour (talk) 16:28, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

I would argue that "UBE" is a definition without utility or applicability. The recipient of an email generally has no way to determine whether it was sent in bulk or not. "Unsolicited Commercial Email" is a more useful definition for that reason alone, because a recipient can at least see whether the email is unsolicited and commercial in nature. Yes, on very rare occasions email of non-commercial nature gets sent out in large quantities to people who did not ask for it, but other than criminals sending phishing emails--which are likewise unsusceptible to analysis by the recipient to determine whether they were sent in bulk--but it is the tiniest, slimmest splinter of the spam problem. If unsolicited commercial email and phishing scam email all ceased tomorrow, there'd be no spam problem to speak of.

The crux of the matter of spam is that there are people walking around with dog-eared 25-year-old copies of "You Too can be an Internet Billionaire, for Dummies" and a misplaced sense of entitlement, who think it's okay to steal other people's time and bandwidth, hijacking their computers to shove advertisements no one wants to see under their noses. Spam is not a terribly efficient marketing tool--everyone hates television commercials, everyone hated banner ads in the 1990s, everyone despises nagging warning messages that come up when people try to view certain web pages with a web browser that has ad blocking software installed, everyone loathes spam--but the barrier to entry is low, the laws against it are toothless even in the vanishingly rare circumstance that a government tries to enforce them, so the risk/reward calculus and the low barrier to entry make it all obvious.

And yes, in the unlikely event that someone from a marketing department somewhere is reading this, if you have to ask whether a proposed tactic is unethical, it's unethical, and you shouldn't do that. If you have to ask whether your "cold emails" or "email blasts" are spam, they're spam, and you should stop. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.42.77.244 (talk) 04:06, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

How is spam filtered? Can a disgruntled person flag a legitimate address as spam as revenge?

I received an email from a disgruntled/apparently unethical or just not self-aware person saying they had flagged my email address as spam (on what looks like Time Warner's Road Runner mail). It got me wondering how an address becomes spam. Could an angry ex flag all of your email as spam and have some effect? How would you know if your mail is being routed into spam folders, since you don't typically get mail back telling you as such? Are spam registries at all confederated? These all seem like interesting questions that I would love to read answers to--172.243.161.115 (talk) 17:39, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

No to the first question, assuming your angry ex is not still admin of your computer. This article, anti-spam techniques may answer some of your questions. Darrell_Greenwood (talk) 21:31, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

No my question is. Could it be possible to make an email address be seen as spam, simply by using the "flag as spam" option provided by many email system. For instance, if someone sent a thousand emails from address A to different email accounts, and had those accounts flag all of the emails as spam. Then suddenly A's emails would be sent to the spam folders on all of the systems that share spam information. Which seems to be how things work. In other words, when say on Gmail you mark mail as spam. It isn't simply saying that you are blacklisting it on your account. That mark propagates to others' accounts. And possibly to any service that shares Gmail's spam database. CASE IN POINT. I just pulled an email from my satellite television provider concerning my bill, that appears completely legit, and likely is. It was in spam. Could their competitor be sabotaging them? Could they be sabotaging themselves in order to increase late pay fees? Just for example. It seems like the current approach to spam filtering has some ethical pitfalls built in. Perhaps a government system should be used instead. If there is no better way to manage the onslaught of spam. At any rate, the current algorithms don't seem smart enough around false positives. That email was no different from many just like it that were sorted into the inbox. --172.243.161.115 (talk) 15:49, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

It's a bit off-topic for this page (where we're suppose to discuss improving the article, not the article's subject), but I run a few mailing lists which from time to time end up on some of the big ISPs 'spam' lists - mainly because subscribers who decide they no longer want to get list mail prefer to hit 'mark as spam' rather than 'unsubscribe'.. so what you are suggesting is technically possible. You may want to read Bayesian spam filtering. --Versageek 19:13, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

Agree as to being off topic -- but I'll allow myself a final observation: I have 5 email providers, they each use a different spam rejection system from the dozens available. No, it is not possible to make an email address be seen as spam to my knowledge. Your premise is not valid. Darrell_Greenwood (talk) 19:40, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

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spam emails.

this is a list of emails anyone can spam, enjoy :D somethingtodohere65@gmail.com — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2605:E000:AC92:AC00:B405:4492:2DCB:143D (talk) 04:58, 13 August 2017 (UTC)

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Deception and fraud

This section is entirely free of citations.

In general, this article suffers from citation problems: statements that appear to be cited, because they are in a para that ends with a citation, but which are not supported by the source.

In general, I think this is a pretty awful article. I have made a number of edits with the aim of improving it, but there is a lot of work to do. MrDemeanour (talk) 11:59, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

I've made quite a lot of edits to this article, and to Spamming and Email marketing. All three articles suffered from masses of uncited content, much of which was WP:OR. Also, all three articles are unduly long. People seem to love to come to these articles and add another wee titbit, cited or not, often in the wrong section, without regard to whether the addition improves the article. I guess everyone knows something about spam; so WP:OR gets everywhere.

There's still a lot of uncited material. The articles are still too long. There's still too much OR. Actually, I think there are too many articles; but I can't see any merge opportunity that won't make the resulting article a WP:COATRACK. MrDemeanour (talk) 12:12, 18 August 2018 (UTC)

How is the reference to CANSPAM contentious

User:snori removed the text

The legal status of spam varies from one jurisdiction to another. In the United States, the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 preempted state laws specific to e-mail, making redress more difficult; it required that messages adheres to rules set by the Act and by the FTC, but did not otherwise address Unsolicited Bulk E-mail (UBE). ISPs have attempted to recover the cost of spam through lawsuits against spammers, although they have been mostly unsuccessful in collecting damages despite winning in court.

with the edit summary (re-org, remove contentious CANSPAM comment). That text is a factual decription of the legal status of spam, not a comment on it, and I see nothing contentious about it. Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 19:36, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

Well my edit summary was poor. What I should have said was that (a) This para was overly US-centric, (b) The wording "preempted state laws specific to e-mail, making redress more difficult" is argumentative - even if it's true. What's really needed imho, if anything, is a simple statement something like:

The legal status of spam varies from one jurisdiction to another, but laws and lawsuits have nowhere been particularly successful in stemming spam

Interesting. I agree that wedging a discussion of CANSPAM into a 4-line paragraph about spam and the law is overly US-centric. But somewhere in the article the point needs to be made that legislative attempts to control spam have been feeble and insipid - possibly because lobbyists manage to convince legislators that email is 'an important marketing channel' (no, I can't source that). Shmuel is right; CANSPAM hobbled state attempts to legislate, and was itself hobbled. MrDemeanour (talk) 10:10, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

The paragraph was not US centric. There is text particular to the US, but the first and third sentence apply globally.

The statute uses the word word supersedes; would you be happy if I wrote superseded instead of preempted? Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 19:15, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

I prefer 'preempted'. You cannot supersede something that hasn't yet happened; the effect of CANSPAM was to preemptively cripple any future state anti-spam legislation, in addition to superseding existing state legislation. The term used when discussing the effect of CANSPAM was usually 'preempt'. MrDemeanour (talk) 12:54, 8 January 2019 (UTC)

Oddly I was not aware of the controversy about CANSPAM when it came out - so I'm actually keen to see it reflected in the article - just not in the intro.

I've just done this. - Snori (talk) 13:30, 9 January 2019 (UTC)

References

CAN-SPAM does not legalize UBE or UCE

CAN-SPAM does not legalize either UBE or UCE, although it does make redress more difficult; it explicitly leaves intact laws not specific to e-mail. Courts have ruled that spam is, e.g., Trespass to Chattel. Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 19:48, 9 January 2019 (UTC)

References

"Spam bait" listed at Redirects for discussion

A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Spam bait. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 July 27#Spam bait until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. Not a very active user (talk) 16:20, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

"Ham (e-mail)" listed at Redirects for discussion

A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Ham (e-mail). The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 July 27#Ham (e-mail) until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. Not a very active user (talk) 16:27, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

"Rolex (spam)" listed at Redirects for discussion

A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Rolex (spam). The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 July 27#Rolex (spam) until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. Not a very active user (talk) 17:09, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

"E-blast" listed at Redirects for discussion

A discussion is taking place to address the redirect E-blast. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 July 27#E-blast until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. Not a very active user (talk) 17:16, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

"Email Blasting" listed at Redirects for discussion

A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Email Blasting. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 July 27#Email Blasting until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. Steel1943 (talk) 18:13, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

feedback

The information in this article needs to be updated some, and there is some information in the article that isn't important. Ravyn cavanaugh (talk) 17:37, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

That's probably the case with most articles. The trick is ensure that your changes make it better :-) -Snori (talk) 22:18, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

Would fine if there complete sentences (grammar faults intended).--Mideal (talk) 13:06, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

Name of Hormel product upper case?

Isn't the name of the product SPAM® rather than Spam? That's certainly what the Hormel web page at https://www.hormelfoods.com/brand/spam-brand/ says. --Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 13:33, 5 August 2021 (UTC)

Spam carrying....

Can the following be used: Spam used to carry viruses and used to defraud people? Example: "You WON $120,000,000! Click on THIS link!". You click on it, then your bank later calls you, E-mails you, etc. stating that your accounts have no money in them, you got some kiddie porn on your computer, you lost your house, worse. I've seen it happen on the news, etc.216.247.72.142 (talk) 06:12, 3 July 2023 (UTC)

Yes, spam can carry a malicious payload; the exact damage it can cause depends on your, e.g., browser, configuration, firewall, operating system.

However, e-mails and telephone calls claiming that you have been cracked are likely to themselves be fraudulent. Never give sensitive information to someone claiming to be from, e.g., your bank; ask for details and call back at a number that you know is valid. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 12:22, 3 July 2023 (UTC)