On Wed, Aug 16, 2017 at 11:16:27AM -0400, Evan Leibovitch via talk wrote:
Agreed. But I'd take it from a slightly different perspective that splits the issue.
IMO the volume of spam has not abated, but its effectiveness has.
I use gMail for a significant amount of my incoming mail, and it implements a pretty aggressive spam filter. There are almost no false positives getting through these days, but I do have to go into the spam mailbox every few weeks to check for false negatives (maybe a few percent of the total, non-critical stuff from a few read-only mailing lists) But the volume? Still as robust as ever. The old style sales calls, solicitations for money and phishing schemes. The filters successfully and consistently differentiate between real Interac eTransfer receipts and fake ones.
Yeah, I know the evils of Gmail. But every choice is a balance. In this realm it does surprisingly well, and I'm less bothered by spam than ever. But I wouldn't go as far as saying the phenomenon itself is dead, it's still seeking out the newcomers and unaware.
Strangely I see almost no spam these days. I just checked my spam folder for this account, and the filter found 25 messages in the last week. Not very much really. It used to be much more. I don't think I see more than 1 message a day that the spam filter missed either. On gmail I think it is similar. Very few spam show up these days. -- Len Sorensen