If you were out on a walk and 9 out of 10 people where trying to mug you, you'd very quickly adjust your behavior to only walk in very safe places and let as few people as possible access that area.
There is a significant cost in spam protection by tracking reputation and content for the unending ocean of bullshit flooding the SMTP lines. Most providers want to cut communication with the spam source as quickly as possible to reduce costs.
Is spam also killing every social media platform, messaging app and even Google itself? Is spam not an indicator that people still use it if it's still lucrative spamming people, thus proving it isn't dying and is actually a sign it is still used?
Consider that email accounts are the go-to account recovery method for most services, and it's ubiquitous in biz. Also consider that you can prioritize specific domains or filter x domains to never go to spam, e.g., your own company's domain.
Any "death" is that people struggle with their own mailserver as a general rule of thumb. Does that thus mean email is dying? No. As the article says, perhaps independent email is, but it hasn't been in a good place for over a decade at this point.
Oh my god, yes. To all appearances they declared defeat in the Great Webspam War some time around '08 or '09 and their results have been markedly worse ever since.
In terms of end-user quality of result, yes, I agree, but they're still wildly profitable, ergo they are not dying. They're a business. Their pulse is measured in dollars, not quality or user sentiment.
I've been on Telegram since 2016 and I probably receive one spam message per 4 months. And I'm super active in a lot of groups. Possibly could be related to the types of groups you join though. I've noticed that 100% of the spam I receive on Telegram is about blockchain scams so perhaps being in tech or finance related groups (which I am not) could increase the risk.
Like with Snapchat, almost all of mine are camshow and crypto spam. It must definitely be some kind of demographic thing with what you're active in; lonely nerds for the camshow spam? Lmao. It also wouldn't surprise me if there's lists for sale of people of xyz demographics.
I kind of wished the 1 penny an email idea would have taken hold. As much email as I send $5 would last me years. It would have probably deterred the people sending out millions of spam mails.
Would Spam stop if people stopped responding to it? There has to be a non zero amount of stupid people that react to junk mail and make a purchase or fall for some scam. This number is only increasing with more people coming online.
>Would Spam stop if people stopped responding to it?
I don't ever intend to respond to spam, and have become extremely adept at spotting the patterns and swatting it away. However, it becomes a game of chance, when a service like Outlook puts it right at the top of the app (both iOS and Android) where you would reflexively jab at it, unless of course, you pay the premium to remove it.
For now, I have found a way to stop this nuisance. However, MS are playing fast and loose with their policies and now very legitimate looking spam is leaking into the inbox, escaping any filters. Since last year it is appearing along with the glaringly obvious Unicode riddled ones, with increasing regularity. It seems like a matter of time and co-incidence, where you would end up interacting with a piece of disguised mail you were expecting e.g. an order from Amazon or a service which you use regularly, and possibly respond without checking the header.
This recent episode was probably the worst experience, albeit not the first time it has happened.
There is a wide spectrum of unsolicited mail, not all of it is stupid people responding to scams. I suspect the quality and response curves are inversely related.
If you were out on a walk and 9 out of 10 people where trying to mug you, you'd very quickly adjust your behavior to only walk in very safe places and let as few people as possible access that area.
There is a significant cost in spam protection by tracking reputation and content for the unending ocean of bullshit flooding the SMTP lines. Most providers want to cut communication with the spam source as quickly as possible to reduce costs.