Netizen: Spam

Showing posts with label Spam. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 08, 2013

1 TB: Yahoo Mail's Reentry With A Bang

August 2000 Issue of Yahoo! Internet Life (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Of all things Yahoo Mail could have done, 1 TB in free storage tops the charts. It totally grabbed my attention. Already in recent weeks I have been mass labeling a bunch of mail in my Yahoo inbox as spam so as to declutter.

Getting only relevant mail and 1 TB of free storage surely gets me to give Yahoo Mail a second look. There is no way I am walking away from Gmail. But we all can use a good second email address. I know I need one. Heck, I could use three. Let Hotmail compete.

I could use a Yahoo version of Google Drive for free online storage.

Sunday, August 05, 2012

Grum

How a botnet works: 1. A botnet operator sends out viruses or worms, infecting ordinary users' computers, whose payload is a malicious application — the bot. 2. The bot on the infected PC logs into a particular command and control (C&C) server (often an IRC server, but, in some cases a web server). 3. A spammer purchases access to the botnet from the operator. 4. The spammer sends instructions via the IRC server to the infected PCs, causing them to send out spam messages to mail servers. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Spam fighting is not just an issue of the good folks ending up with vastly superior technology. Basic law enforcement has to go hand in hand.

Grum: Inside The Takedown Of One Of The World’s Biggest Spam Networks

Grum sent over a quarter of the world’s spam and was one of the most ingenious botnets ever created. But, with savvy, a lot of luck, and cooperative ISPs, the Grum botnet dried up and died last month. ..... Like a biological virus primed to thrive in a certain type of medium, the Grum virus was susceptible to defeat if someone knocked out each of those CnC IP addresses. ..... Like Microsoft or Apple pushing out OS patches, the Grum makers were upgrading their virus regularly, adding new features and fixing problems. ...... The Grum botnet was one of the most robust and powerful in the world. ..... the system worked without peer and slowly began spamming the world, mostly with poorly worded pharmaceutical emails. ...... – for half a decade. ..... Spamming isn’t very lucrative. .... most major spammers hover at around $150 million in a good year. In the bell curve of spammers, however, most end up on the side of making very little. ..... set up in 2006 by someone who walked into a WebMoney office in Moscow and presented a Russian passport #4505016266. The name on the passport was a 26-year-old named Nikolai Alekseevich Kostogryz. ...... Around the world, sysadmins were watching the Grum takedown with interest. In Moscow, a response team from Group ID was at the ready to begin taking down the Russian and Ukrainian servers. Van Straten volunteered to assist in contacting various authorities. ..... 5 years, 3 months, and 17 days after the first emails began spewing out of the Grum botnet, the last server was dead..... The Internet got just a bit quieter

Friday, April 30, 2010

Reimagining The Inbox The Simple Way

2010: Location, Random Connections, The Inbox, Frictionless Payments

If You Like Your Inbox, Keep It

Like Obama never tired of saying on the campaign trail for health care reform, if you like your current coverage, you get to keep it. So if you like your current inbox where you get emails from your friends and family and those dictators in Nigeria, you get to keep it. You actively would have to choose to go for the multi inbox option. (Obama's Got Momentum: He Could Defy History In November)

The Inbox As A Spectrum

All human beings are created equal, but that does not apply to emails. All emails are not equal. And the inbox has to reflect that.

Inbox 1

This is the inbox that you see when you log in. These are emails sent by people whose emails you have saved as contacts. These are emails sent only to you and not to a group of people.

Inbox 2

Emails sent by people whose emails you have saved as contacts, but these emails have also been sent to other people at the same time.

Inbox 3

Emails from mailing lists I might have subscribed to.

Inbox 4

Emails from everyone else. This is not the folder for the spam emails. The current spam folder gets to hold ground.

Addendum

An email that should have showed up in inbox 3, if it shows up in inbox 1, you get to tell the system it belonged in inbox 3, and all future emails from that address would end up in inbox 3. You teach the system as you use it.

Also you get to set an expiry date on the various inboxes. All emails in inbox 3 that are more than a month old, please delete them without asking, something like that. Because even Gmail has a space limit.

And there should be an easy way to delete contacts. If you ended up saving an email address you did not mean to save, delete. Free the soul.

I think with this simple change, the inbox could see new life. Inbox 1 could again become something to always look forward to. And this suggestion is not to displace the already in place concept of threaded conversations and the other goodies.