Gmail and yahoo! mail : new dens of a spammer

Since the day i got my first mail ID, i have been getting spam mails. And it wasn't before long that these mails used to carry obscure(read crap) addresses as sender with no reply possible.But the scenario has changed dramatically with spammers realizing the worth of having a reliable looking address. Just before few months there was a story about some hack used to compromise CAPTCHA* (you might have seen this in action many times).This hack allowed users(read spammers) to bypass the word verification which traditionally is used to tell humans and software robots apart.

There are different antispam measures taken like blacklisting any suspicious IP so that it will no longer be useful.But most of the times these IPs belonged to someone who had no idea of the abuse.But services like Gmail and Yahoo! are highly popular,free and highly unlikely to be blacklisted a spammer gains a lot by using these.

Anti-spam filtering services such as MessageLabs have responded by throttling or slowing down the connection. "We're seeing more spam coming from Gmail and Yahoo!. Where a service is widely abused its reputation goes down and it's held back in the queue. This happens automatically," explained MessageLabs security analyst Paul Wood.

The approach, one stage in a multi-stage scanning and filtering process, is designed to make life difficult for spammers using botnets(a software robot that runs automatically) to send spam through compromised webmail accounts.

"These traffic management controls are not designed to block messages, they are intended only to slow down their transit. For messages that are subsequently blocked there should be a reason given in the non-delivery report," Wood told El Reg.

An analysis of spam trends in February 2008 (the last available monthly figures) by MessageLabs revealed that 4.6 per cent of all spam originates from web mail-based services.

The proportion of spam from Gmail increased two-fold from 1.3 per cent in January to 2.6 per cent in February, most of which spamvertised skin-flick websites. Yahoo! Mail was the most abused web mail service, responsible for sending 88.7 per cent of all web mail-based spam.

It was first thought that automated tools were used by spammers to defeat security checks and establish webmail accounts that might later be abused to send junk. More organisations are coming around to the theory, first floated by Brad Taylor, a Google software engineer, that bots are signing-up for accounts before sending the puzzles to real people.

Source: The Register

With mighty GOOGLE having registered this little problem atleast Gmail users can rest assured that it wont be long before their mailbox becomes spam free again.


*CAPTCHAs typically help ensure that online accounts can't be created until a user correctly identifies letters depicted in an image. The tactic is designed to frustrate the use of automated sign-up tools by spammers and other miscreants