How to Manage Spam (The Sending Part)
We all know that all the infected Windows computers are forming a large network which is used for sending spam. What I did not know up to know how all those computes are managed.
That has changed. We can now have a look at the front-end of a botnet, look at this blog.
I must admit the interface looks very good. You can send spam emails from any random country on any random time even with counters for new bots, etc. It underlines the efford that has gone into it. That can only happen when sending Spam is delivering enough money.
It also underlines my statement that e-mail is rapidly loosing reliability and will probably become unusable somewhere in the future.
Your comment refers to a bug that is a duplicate of
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1
;)
Facebook and such is already replacing e-mail to some extent. I find myself using it as an email replacement sometimes. It makes sense… if your email box isn’t full of spam, its full of bills from the bank, mailing lists etc. Its not as personal.
Ideally something as important as email wouldn’t be a closed system like Facebook. But the closed nature of Facebook is what keeps it spam-proof (at least so far, I understand this isn’t the case of myspace).
E-mail is not losing reliability, it never was reliable in the first place. At least SMTP has never been reliable, and it has explicitly been designed like that.
If you want reliable mail transfer, go back to X.400 or similar controlled mechanisms. Large institutions still rely on it for core communication because of its built-in guarantees. Doesn’t make it a pleasure to work with though ;)