Today, I blocked all e-mail with attachments coming to our company. Consider this:

1. There's a new virus every two days now, and Symantec takes about a day to release a new virus definition.
2. No matter how often I tell people to ask me when they aren't sure about the legitimacy of the attachments, my eight coworkers open an average of five viruses per day.

Considering I'm getting around 250 spams per day, I also spent a lot of time lately communicating through letters again. I seriously think that e-mail is at its end of useful life, and that people will revert to safer methods of communication soon. What do you think?

The amount of real e-mail I receive and send is directly antiproportional to the amount of spam circulating. Even people who don't really receive much spam (less than 100 a day) are cutting back on e-mail, because the medium has gotten more annoying than useful. Getting through to people with real e-mails gets harder and harder because of filters (both server-side and client-side) and (understandable) oversights (accidently deleting a real e-mail in the middle of all the spam).

So, well, I agree with your conclusion. Stopping spam has failed, all initiatives are doomed, because they either try to solve it from the wrong angle (client-side filters which basically just hide the spam, not prevent it), or they don't take the boundless stupidity of users into account. Note that I don't even consider all the 'solutions' which are based on 'virtual stamps' (and other methods involving money or a change in the whole SMTP/POP protocols) worth discussing.


Edit: Here's a very good example of why e-mail is hardly usable anymore. It has just happened to me again, for the nth time (lost count). I try to reply to an e-mail, but my reply gets bounced back because of some blacklist, filter or whatever. The other guy is most likely thinking I'm too lazy to answer. There is no way I can tell him he's wrong. It sucks.

Edited by Mr Creosote at 22:17 on March, 01st 2004

I "only" get about 20 junk mails a day, but I'm sure that I've already deleted some "real" e-mails because of that. Again, it's because of stupidity: If the subject of a "real" e-mail is "Hi", I will probably delete it right on the server so it will be lost. I also notice that the amount of serious e-mails I receive has decreased.

As for the viruses, I'm not really sorry for the people who open virus.exe. By now it should be known to everyone that there are certain dangers when using e-mails, and especially when it's used with certain software and OS.

Of course I can imagine that this is highly annoying if you are dircectly affected because of you stupid co-workers.

I think that the people will look for other ways of communications again, such as instant messaging, forums... and letters?!

Another impostant point is that you can't really use e-mail for important things as you can't be sure that the receiver will get and read it...

Just read something about a 'new' way virii use to infect systems: they hide in password-protected archives. That way, automatic virus scanners can't probe the contents of the archive. When a user tries to open the attachment, he/she is prompted for the password which is written down in the e-mail itself. Opening it, the computer gets infected.

So to sum this up: users have to actively enter a password to activate the virus. Still, people do that. Next step will probably be writing "please type format c:" in an e-mail and they'll do it.

And this is why spam will never be reduced again.


Another big problem I see (aside from the spam) is the security of e-mail (or the lack thereof). Everybody can pose as anyone, everybody can read mail which is floating around the net. Yes, there are methods to sign and encrypt e-mails, but how many of you are using those? I do, so don't blame me. However, sending encrypted e-mail is only possible if the receipient is able to decrypt it, so most of the mails I send are still going out in plain text (hint, hint)...

Actually, that new one almost got me fooled. It spoofs the sender address to look something like support@domain.com (where domain.com is your own e-mail domain). Of course, our company gets infected several times with every new virus because even people with 6+ years of college can't learn not to open suspicious attachment and instead ask me to look at them

There was a bad email virus that came over my campus this week. It spoofed the computer center's email address, and the message said something along the lines of, you have a virus, if you don't get rid of it in three days, we'll turn off your email (And they do actually send these out.) but this one at the end said, oh yeah, here is an attachment to fix the virus.

The attachment was the virus itself, and it looks as though a lot of people fell for it.
The worst thing is, though, the virus exposed the frame mailing server for the math department (which basically everyone is on, you take one math class and you're on it), so now I'm on a huge "list serv" now as people can't get over the novelty of being able to send email to everyone on campus. Way worse than spam, plus I never get spam on my university email address. So my one useful email account is in the limbo now.

Edited by Tuss at 16:29 on March, 05th 2004

That bites, Tuss. So much for privacy.

It's so odd to think that a mere 10 years ago people had barely heard of that strange "electronic mail thingy" and now most of us can't live without it. Including me.

The sad thing is that because of e-mail the postal services have become untrustworthy - at least once a year I never receive an important bill or corespondance. So, is the telephone the answer to the delima of making sure information is related? No, because the silly telemarketers have forced people to call-block unknown numbers. It's madness, I tell you. MADNESS!!!!!

There is also a probably even much greater danger on the horizon: the right to contact people (which is vital for freedom of speech) being restricted. As much as we all hate spammers and telemarketers, so we really want laws which forbid people to contact other people? That would probably result in 'contact rights' to become a commercial good itself...

I hate to say it, but if I didn't give you the right to contact me, you never would've. I switched my personal e-mail in a way that sends everything to trash, and only what gets filtered in ends up in various folders. This whitelisting is simply me giving people the right to contact me.

That's another case. Your method means that you're choosing to ignore certain people's tries to contact you (which is your right). However, you can't sue anyone for trying, and that's what I'm talking about.

Creating a whitelist for people who are permitted to contact me would be the last way to rescue my e-mail account, only if everything else has failed.

I had to allow all e-mail in for a while, while I was receiving resumes from candidates for my position. I then left on my roadtrip, and when I came back I found 2100 messages; all but 11 were either spam or viruses. At that point, my mainlbox overflowed and all other mail got bounced. So you can say that I already arrived to the last possible solution

I've never really used email as a "real" communication tool, I just use it for signing up for websites and such. Email is too slow and cumbersome for my tastes, I prefer instant messaging for any actual conversations. Oddly enough, even though I use my email acct for signing up on websites (a surefire way to get spam), I get very little spam. Little enough that a blocklist keeps my inbox 99% clean, I only get spam once every week or two.
The best way to handle spam would be to setup both a blacklist and a whitelist. Anything on the blacklist gets deleted immediately, anything on the whitelist gets sent to your inbox, everything else gets sent to a box called "limbo" where you can sift through it at your leisure.

Latest news on this: I'm now unable to send Tuss any e-mail, because goodolddays.net has been added to his provider's blacklist.

I always knew you were the one who sends all the spam...

You're just as suspicious as I am on that

I've been wondering about something.
Do you agree or not?

The only times I ever get HTML&graphics-containing e-mails, it is spam.
All other mails I get do not contain them, and are not spam.

That is why I set my mail client not to display HTML. Only crap can come out of it. And let's not forget HTML is one of the main indicators filters use to identify spam.

That's exactly the reason why I insist everybody in the office uses Eudora 3.0, which isn't capable of displaying HTML. Saves a lot of headaches...

Anyway, here's an interesting story. One of the grad schools I applied to was Wharton. They e-mailed me an invitation for an interview. I never replied. That was because they mailed it on a Monday morning, before I got to work and cleaned my mailbox off all the spam. On really bad weekends, I get enough spam to fill my account qouta and bounce all other incoming mail. Then they mailed me that I missed the interview deadline. I wrote them back, saying what the problem was, and telling them that I'd appreciate any future communication by snail mail. Yesterday, I got a message that I was rejected, because I didn't have an interview. That message arrived by e-mail