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AOL Falls In Love With The Wrong Spam Stats -- Says Spam Decreased
from the no,-just-the-complaints... dept
AOL is claiming that their new spam filter has greatly reduced spam, creating nice looking headlines about less spam. Of course, you could question their findings. The details show that what was reduced was spam complaints. This might be a proxy for the amount of spam that got through to inboxes, or it might just show that AOL subscribers have wised up and realized that reporting spam to AOL doesn't seem to do a bit of good -- and they've just given up on it.
Reader Comments
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AOL Spam Filters
Actually, I think you mentioned the member reports out of context, Mike. While the story you linked to did say that member complaints had fallen, you missed or neglected to mention these:
So, if you believe those figures, AOL actually seems to have seen a decrease in spam. There are some possible spins:- Spammers are realizing that AOL spam filters are good and have stopped spamming AOL addresses as much or they're afraid of CAN-SPAM.
- Spammers have gotten better at evading AOL's filters, so not as much gets blocked, invalidating the first statistic. If AOL's filters aren't blocking spam that they should, or AOL havs a list of spammers that's out of date (perhsaps missing bots), that could also invalidate the second statistic.
- Spammers have moved more to SPIM (Spam Instant Messages). Using IMs instead of E-mail is more in-your-face and I don't know if AOL filters SPIM yet (although users can turn on IM filtering).
So, while I won't discard the statistics, I do agree they seem to need more supporting information.Having some inkling of spammers, that doesn't seem very likely.
However, if that were the case, I'd think complaints would have stayed the same or gone up.
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Forgot One
I forgot one spin -- AOL's subscriber based has dropped enough that AOL sees less spam.
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