Things have been slightly up and down at spamnation.info over the first few days of the New Year, due to some technical glitches, including some associated with a move to a new server. Things should be mostly straightened out now.
Regular visitors to the site may also have noticed that the blog has been a bit quiet (read: totally dead) lately. I'll try to do better in the New Year. I also hope to roll out some improvements to the site, probably beginning with better statistics. Analytics suggest that many visitors come to the site looking for spam statistics, but the existing information on the stats page is fairly disappointing and not very informative.
Another part of the site that I'd like to expand in future is our coverage of Internet scams, many of which are still promoted through email spam. The overwhelming majority of spam is related to a scam of some kind or another — it's not as if those penis enlargement pills actually work, for example — but the majority could be described as short cons, scams that involve suckering people out of relatively small amounts of money. Alongside the short con scams are a number of forms of longer con — fake storefront scams, money transfer scams, 419 scams and their close cousins, prize pitch and package scams, plus phishing scams. Victims of these scams can find themselves out thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, so trying to raise awareness of these scams and sharing information that can cut into the scammers' profits seems like a worthwhile activity.
One part of the site that may be cut back or disappear is the database of spam-advertised domains. The goal of the database was to list 'mainstream' domains that are advertised by spam. Unfortunately, we lost that battle. More and more companies seem to feel it's just fine to send unsolicited email. As its opponents predicted, the CAN-SPAM Act and similar legislation effectively 'legitimized' spam. The number of identifiable companies sending spam seems to grow daily, to the point where keeping the database current is just too much work.
Answering email about items in the database is another big time-sink. Some of the messages come from people who aren't clear what website they're looking at; they search Google for a company that's spammed or defrauded them, click the link to our page and then — without stopping to work out what website they're actually looking at — click through to the contact form to send an angry message. I now ignore these.
Others come from the owners of the listed domains. Many of these are polite, or even apologetic. These domains typically get delisted after a short exchange of emails. A few are angry, even threatening. I've noticed that the most aggressive messages tend to come from hardcore spammers: the more glaring the publicly-available evidence against them, the more peremptory and menacing the messages they send. Of course, these are small-timers. The really high-volume spammers don't even bother. They know what they are.
Either way, it takes time to deal with this stuff. I won't miss it if and when I scale back that part of the site. I have other projects that I'd rather work on, so the big goal for this year will be reducing the amount of time that I put into keeping the site updated, while increasing the usefulness of the information offered.
As always, I'd welcome suggestions. What would be useful to you? I have a fairly dense stream of spam samples, and the ability to write tools to process and analyze that stream. What kind of information would you like to see on this site, that would help you in your own efforts to understand and combat spam?
Send me a message and let me know.