> Has anyone else noticed a massive drop in spam recently?
It goes up and down. There are fads and cycles.
News item:
"Intercage, also known as Atrivo, has had its last upstream Internet provider pull the plug .... Atrivo had reportedly been turning a blind eye to spammers and other Internet malware purveyors who were its clients. .... Spamhaus blacklisted more than 1,000 of its IP addresses."
However no single ISP is the source of "most spam".
One hot racket is: for $1300 you buy a software package which pries open vulnerabilities in web browsers or even TCP stacks, infects many strangers, then takes spam content from the racketeer and broadcasts it through email. The sick person who buys into this is bad, but the real villain is the programmer who writes such stuff and sells it to middle-people to avoid direct exposure. Part of the up/down cycling is surely the balance between hacks and patches: last month's $1,300 program may not work so well this month, the small sucker may have to shell out more money for a newer hack.
Sometimes spam goes out of style. When money was loose, I got many-many re-finance offers. Some small-time mortgage brokers musta been paying a penny for each contact. That dropped as money tightened, and dropped again in the recent collapse. I do have a new "Good news! We can refinance!" but I strongly suspect it is NOT finance but some other perhaps nastier payload.
Sometimes someone gets busted (though surely his business goes on):
"Jeremy Jaynes was sentenced to nine years in prison ... three counts for sending unsolicited commercial email to tens of thousands of AOL customers."
But wait, the law grinds fine: "Virginia Supreme Court has overturned {the} spam conviction on the grounds that the state's anti-spam law violates the defendant's First Amendment rights to free speech. .... the 2003 Virginia anti-spam law is overly broad because it does not distinguish between commercial and political messages and under its purview, the Federalist Papers sent in a similar manner would constitute a violation of the law."
Since much spam originates on an unknown stranger's infested PC, the pay-off has to come elsewhere. Usually a link to a website, a link with the spammer's secret ID in it so hits can be counted and accounted. Sometimes (too darn often) the payoff is simply a new infection, a new powned PC for the spam-bot network.
While the $1300 buy-in jerks may think they are working for themselves, many experts think there are two BIG bot-masters behind all this, growing bot-nets that they can take-over and control directly. More spam? Massive flood-attacks on major websites or our woefully under-secured utility (power, water, gas) control systems?
> claim laundered money and free watches.
There's no laundered money. They need your bank account number "for deposit", you really get a withdrawal. Or if you won't fall for that, they need front money for expenses, fees, bribes... a lot of folks who won't share a bank number will wire $1000 "to get $500,000!"
Nobody offers me free watches, always "fake Rolex" so I can "speed up to the country club in style". (So how do I speed up? Someone hacked Masaratti's very weak customer site and stole hundreds of identities.)
> Yahoo ...told me they stopped letting emails with weird email addresses get thru.
Maybe so, maybe an oversimplification. What my school did was check the HELO. When one mailserver wants to give mail to another mailserver, it contacts with its IP number and its name. The IP "must" be correct, else the transaction can't happen. The name is not essential, though nice for logging. However RFC 2821 (a generally agreed document on proper email handling) says a mailserver's HELO name must be the public-known name registered in DNS. Infested personal PCs don't bother to know their own DNS name, makeshift spam servers also neglect the details, all "real" mailservers do HELO with the same name as registered in DNS. (The downside is that there are many small systems with semi-knowledgable admins who don't know RFC2821. MS Exchange is very prone to picking up an inside name instead of its DNS name. I have to tell these folks that their bounces are -their- fault.)
All the commercial mail-host teeter between over-strict and over-loose filtering. Either way, customers complain: about spam or about lost ham (desired emails).
Picture spam (big erect color prick, thong-butt closeup) has gone way down.
I do get many-many Russian spams with just a link which (careful now) turned out to be like a central HQ for Russian XXX-porno sites which I could join if I had Rubles.
I get a LOT of near-blank spam with an UnSubscribe link. Too good to be true. The spams are near identical but the links change every few hours. This is not a mail-list unsubscribe server, the link is something bad, changing frequently to avoid filters and shut-downs.
> now they are coming with farking read request notifications
That batch is new. It forced me to deny ALL read-requests. I generally think that is useless anyway, now it is official.
Don't fret. You'll have more spam again soon.
