Changing Face of "Spam" Email
As a network engineer involved in bringing up some of the first Internet connections in the upper midwest in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I also managed email systems in the 1990s as spam email started becoming a nuisance. In the past decade, spam has been more than a nuisance – email systems must have effective spam filters to keep email usable for end users.
There is an interesting trend I see now – I am getting a fair bit of relevant business-related marketing email in my inbox. The amount of “online pharmacy” spam is way down, but I still get a fair amount of complete junk, including a lot of Cyrillic and Mandarin spam that is completely unintelligible to me. Fortunately, my company’s spam filter, including up-to-date SpamAssassin rule lists and a good blacklist, are doing a good job discarding and classifying the useless spam, while allowing through the reasonable marketing queries (I think).
A few years back, the sales team at my employer emailed potential customers asking if they could setup meetings to introduce the company’s software – not an unusual email message, especially nowadays. One particular recipient hit the roof and replied with a rant worthy of a response to the first massive Usenet spam from the green card lawyers back in the day.
Are people’s attitudes changing about spam? Is there an increasing acceptance of reasonable marketing-type contact via email?
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Info Loss authored by Guy Helmer. Read the original post at: http://infoloss.blogspot.com/2011/08/changing-face-of-spam-email.html