The blog about spam » Spam

New version of SpamDrain for iOS now available in App Store

henric — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 07:46:36 +0000

We have now finished the job with version 1.7 of our SpamDrain app for iOS and got it approved by Apple. In this new version you will be able to update your filtering settings, add new addresses for filtering and see the status of the filtering. For example you may now see if SpamDrain is having trouble logging in or connecting to your provider’s servers. These features have been available for some time on our web site but we also thought we wanted to provide it in our mobile apps, starting with iOS.

Please rate us – again

We also want to thank you all for your great reviews we are receiving, both in App Store and in Android Market. This really motivate us to keep up the work to stop spam from reaching your iPhones, Androids or other phones and computers.

We would like to ask you to rate the new version in App Store – even if you already have done so. Since the rating to some extent are reset when you release a new version we really need your help to keep our great rating up. Thanks!

Help your friends get rid of spam and receive free SpamDrain months

henric — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 12:26:39 +0000

Today we have made it easier for you to share SpamDrain and for you to get something out of it. Well, you probably already know that if everyone was using a great spam filter, sending spam wouldn’t pay off and the internet would be a much better and happier place. Help us making the world spam free by inviting your friends and colleagues to join SpamDrain and we will reward you with free months.

We have added a new Sharing page where you can send invites or share SpamDrain in your social networks, blogs, web pages etc. Simply Log in to your SpamDrain account and hit the Share icon in the upper right corner.

For every paying new filtered address you generate, we will add extra months to your subscription – depending on how many addresses you currently filter. For example, if you filter one address today, you will receive three free months for every new paying filtered address you generate. If you filter two addresses you will receive 1.5 free months for every new filtered address.

The more addresses your friends filter the more free months you receive. Isn’t that great?

If you are generating great volumes you will have the opportunity to join our reseller program instead and start earning real money.

So, start sharing today and make the world a bit more spam free.

Other new features in this update

Messages that you have retrieved from the archive can now be displayed and re-delivered.
Clearer indication when a message is blocked due to blacklisted sender.
Remove entries from blacklist.
You may now extend your subscription even when there is more than a year left.

New filter blocks newsletters and marketing emails

henric — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 11:59:02 +0000

For some time we have working on a new type of filter which blocks newsletters and marketing emails. We have being testing it for a while we are really happy with the progress. So today we tell you a little bit more about how it works. Really soon we will enable new functionality in our iPhone, Android and web apps, enabling you to control this filter. (We actually updated our web site today already)

First, some background. As you know you can report spam that SpamDrain has failed to block. This is done in our mobile apps or by logging on to our web site. We have noticed that different users have different definitions of spam. The most obvious definition might be “spam is everything I don’t want in my inbox” (even messages you have accepted to receive but don’t take the time to unsubscribe to). However, there is a problem with this definition. Some people want coupon offers from their local store and some do not want them. With viagra mail it’s much simpler – nobody wants that crap.

We have therefore chosen to introduce this new filter which identifies newsletters and marketing emails and put them in your Archive marked as “Newsletters”. These emails are always listed in your daily/weekly/monthly SpamDrain report so you never have to worry about missing important offers. Of course, you will be able to retrieve/release these blocked message as usual. When retrieving blocked messages from the Archive, SpamDrain will learn not to block similar messages again. You can also turn this filter entirely off.

To train our filters to become even more efficient, we appreciate if you our users could give us a little help when retrieving a message: You will now be asked to classify the message. By helping us deciding why you are retrieving a specific message you will help improving the overall filtering accuracy. The choice you will be given is:

You will get the same question when retrieving a message in the mobile apps.

We hope you will like these improvements – and hey, if you don’t – you can always turn the newsletter filter off. We hope you will enjoy receiving even less spam in the future. Please let us know what you think about these updates.

Please let us know what you think about these updates.

More for more information about the newsletter filter and retrieval of messages from the Archive.

Expert warns of insufficient virus protection

henric — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 12:48:16 +0000

There is an interesting article on viruses and filters in a Swedish newspaper today. Experts warn us that some filters are not efficient enough. They claim that some filters only catch 30% of the harmful e-mails. The reason for this being that the virus makers are quick at making new version and varieties of the code so it is hard to keep a traditional filter updated.

At SpamDrain we use artificial intelligence to continually refine the filtering process. This means that the filter can ‘learn’ what is spam and what is valid e-mail. The filter can therefore keep itself updated and quickly learn new tricks used by hackers to get their e-mails through spam filters.

This works quite nicely in Spamdrain when filtering spam and e-mail viruses. It would though be interesting to know if one could do something similar with desktop virus protection. I know that anti-virus companies have done some efforts in trying to “learn” the patterns of viruses and block viruses they don’t know about, but it’s unclear how well these techniques work.

Article link.

Spam appearing like Twitter e-mail updates

henric — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 20:50:13 +0000

Maybe you have seen the spam messages that looks just like a normal update from Twitter? The design and texts are identical to the Twitter original, informing you that you have 3 new messages or that someone has started to follow you. However, when you click the link that appears to go to Twitter, you end up at some drug store that sells these famous blue pills – or at least a cheap copy of them.The way they do this is to place the twitter link in the text part of the link, but setting the target of the link to the spam site. Example:

You have 3 unread message(s)

This method isn’t that new and we have seen it happening before for CNN for example. SpamDrain blocks these messages but we have seen that some of our users report them as not being spam. But obviously they are.

Focus on scalability, stability and user experience

henric — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 09:32:13 +0000

Lately we have been working hard on handling the recent growth we have had. As you probably have noticed we have had some stability problems and we apologize for that. The last weeks we have made some changes to our infrastructure and started to migrate to new servers. This work will increase performance and provide better fail over than before. We hope this work will be finished within the next 2 – 3 weeks. We’re expecting to carry out the remaining changes without any disruptions to the service.

As a necessary step we have also moved some of our system to the cloud. This will improve the performance of our database servers and will also let us handle backups more efficiently.

In parallel with this work we have also worked on making minor changes to improve the experience of the overall service, such as improving your SpamDrain reports, adding support for payments in USD and support for payments through Paypal. We have also updated our price lists so they are easier to read. The next step on the web site is to make the sign up and on boarding as easy as in our mobile applications. That will be exciting work and hopefully we will be able to help even more people to get rid of annoying and time consuming spam messages.

Until next time – we wish you e-mail peace of mind and hope that you continue reporting your spam to us. That’s what makes the SpamDrain service so fantastic!

Virus and spam levels back to normal again

henric — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 08:26:53 +0000

As we earlier reported virus levels have been rather higher than normal lately, but this now seem to have changed. We now see that virus level is back below 1 % which is more normal. Furthermore the dominating viruses aren’t actually viruses but phishing attempts.

Virus and phising share last 6 months - 2009

Interesting to see is that the spam rate seems to have followed the virus rate. Spam rate has been around 85 % but is now back to around 80 % again. Since many of the viruses are used to create botnets sending spam this is not that suprising.

Spam rate last 6 months 2009

More statistics at our main page and the Security Centre.

Google accounts sending spam to contacts in address book

henric — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:37:25 +0000

Have you experienced that spam messages are sent from your address? I can guarantee you that you’re not alone. This happens to all of us. The reason is that the protocol used for sending e-mail, SMTP, is a fairly simple protocol designed in the very beginning of the internet’s history. Anyone may basically put any e-mail address in the From field when sending a message. Spammers use this a lot to make it appear like a friend or a colleague is sending you an important message.

What’s even worse and something that we’ve seen lately is that users get their Google account information stolen. The spammers use the stolen information to send spam through Google’s Gmail servers by authenticating using the stolen identity. But they don’t stop there. Since they have access to the Google account, they also use the contacts in the user’s address book as recipients of the spam which not only increases the chances of slipping through spam filters but also increases the chances of the spam being read. The spam message appears to come from an address that you probably trust. An improvement the spammers could do is to translate the spam messages professionally into the language of the recipient. However, this too costly, but may be necessary in the future since it gets more difficult to get through to the more conscious internet users nowadays.

If you suspect that your password has been stolen you should change it immediately and the new one should be hard to guess. You should also make sure you always use SSL connections in Gmail (you turn this on by clicking Settings and Set ‘Browser Connection’ to ‘Always use https’). Also make sure you don’t have any viruses or spyware on your computer.

In Gmail you can see your last account activity in order to see if anyone else logged in to your account. More info here.

Forum thread of users reporting spam being sent to their contacts.

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One e-mail virus for every tenth valid message

henric — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:58:03 +0000

The last 5-6 weeks we have seen an increase of viruses blocked by the SpamDrain filter. The virus proportion has raised to levels around 2 – 3 %. This doesn’t sound much but compare this 0.2 -1 % for previous weeks. Two per cent corresponds to 15,000 viruses per week for our customers only. Since the spam proportion is around 80 % it means that for every tenth valid message there is a virus e-mail. Imagine the damage all these viruses could have made.

On the second place in our virus top list on the first page you currently find the Suspect.Bredozip virus. This is actually not a virus but an encrypted zip file. However, this is a very popular way to send viruses nowadays since virus filters is not able to decrypt the file in order to scan it for viruses. Normal users don’t send each other encrypted zip files and therefore it’s safe to block them as viruses.

Furthermore we see that Trojans dominates the list. Not suprised about this actually. Everytime we help people with infected computers there are trojans or rootkits involved – feasting on the computer resources. To sum up; I thought e-mail viruses were almost extinct, but as you see our statistics show that they are very much alive.

Fresh spam statistics – now on the front page

henric — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 09:55:18 +0000

Lately we’ve been working on a new front page along with new pages describing the SpamDrain service. Our goal is to give you as a visitor a quick overview of the service and its benefits.

On the top of the page you now also find the log in form which gives you easy access to your “My pages” where you access your filtered messages and handle your account. We have also added a Sign up link visible on all pages to the right in the menu.

The front page now show you live statistics including spam proportion the last hours, total number of spam mesasges blocked and on-going virus attacks. Currently the spam proportion seem to vary between 73 % and 80 % during the day.

We have also added the some “Add this” links on the top right corner of each page, so you easily can share SpamDrain using Facebook, E-mail, Twitter etc. We hope you to share SpamDrain with your friends and collegues as much as you can. By spreading the word about SpamDrain and helping others to use SpamDrain we can all help to lower the spam levels on the internet.