AOL Reports Big Drop In Spam
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America Online Inc., the nation&#39;s largest Internet service provider, reported a significant reduction in the amount of spam sent to its subscribers, the first drop in five years.
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America Online said it had cut spam on its service for the first time in five years, slashing the annoying email advertisements in 2004 by 75 percent.
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The increase in spam that arrives with an attached image in order to evade spam filters has caused the amount of bandwidth spam eats to skyrocket.  About 50% of unwanted email is now image spam up from about 2% in September last year, according to Postini, a hosted email security provider.
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AOL believes spammers are starting to give up - at least when it comes to sending junk to its subscribers. The total number of spam complaints from AOL members fell more than 75% last month.
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bulk messages clogging instant-messaging accounts. AOL and its Anti-Spam Alliance partners -- EarthLink, Microsoft, and Yahoo
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A new MessageLabs report says more than 86% of the E-mail it sampled in June was spam--and nearly one in 10 contained a virus.
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DULLES, Va. - Short text advertisements touting AOL products and services are now being tacked to the bottom of e-mail messages sent from some AOL accounts.
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The Storm Worm botnet network may be shrinking in size, but it has managed to send out 15 million of those annoying audio spam messages in October, according to anti-spam vendor MessageLabs.It&#39;s hard to believe that the Storm messages were effective. Recipients had to first click on an attachment -- usually given a misleading name&#160;such as&#160;beatles.mp3 or Britney.mp3 -- to hear the stock pitch, which featured a warbly robotic woman advising people to invest in online car seller, Exit Only.This kind of scam, called &quot;pump and dump,&quot; tries to nudge up the price of penny stocks by a cent or two, giving the spammers a way to make a quick buck by selling the stock before it crashes. Spammers have been delivering their messages in different formats, including&#160;PDF and Excel files, over the past few years as part of a cat-and-mouse game with spam blockers. This&#160;move to MP3 spam&#160;is the latest development in this battle, observers say.Spam watchers say that pump-and-dump schemes are the hottest and most lucrative area for spammers today.The spam run began on Oct. 17, and lasted about 36 hours, using infected computers in the Storm Worm network to send out the mails, MessageLabs said in a statement released Tuesday. The spam sounded strange and warbly because the voice in the message was &quot;synthesized using a very low compression rate of 16KHz to keep the overall file size small, at around 50KB, to avoid detection,&quot; the company said.Storm is thought to have landed on as many as 15 million PCs over the past year, but recently&#160;its network of infected PCs has been shrinking. University of California, San Diego, researchers recently pegged it at about 160,000 computers, only 20,000 of which are accessible at any one time.Exit Only said it was not involved in sending the spam. Its stock was trading around $0.41 on Oct. 18, the day after the Storm spam started. On Tuesday it closed at $0.20.
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For spammers, it&#39;s been a summer of love. Two newly issued reports tracking the circulation of unsolicited e-mails say pornographic spam dominated this summer, nearly all of it originating from Internet addresses in North America.
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A spammer accused of sending unsolicited mail to 1.2 million AOL subscribers pleaded guilty and faces potentially substantial fines and jail time, but one observer said the victory was at best a moral one for AOL.
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Spam messages are increasingly plaguing e-mail inboxes, but more Americans are accepting them as a fact of life, a new study finds.
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You've got less spam, according to America Online, the world's largest online service.
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(InfoWorld) - AOL is now letting anyoneÂ test drive the latest version of its search engine, which saw a significant usage drop last month, apparently causedÂ by the release of user recordsÂ and an ensuing privacy scandal. AOL's revamped search engine, which is in beta mode, is being designed with broadband users in mind, the Web portal and Internet access provider said Wednesday. This version is operational but still under construction. When finished, it will mix, in a single results page, links to different types of files, like Web pages, photos, business listings and videos. It will also have tools for people to refine queries and fine-tune results. But if the latest search engine usage report from Nielsen/NetRatings is any indication, AOL needs to focus not only on new features but also on regaining people's confidence. Last month, people in the U.S. ran 18.2 percent fewer queries on AOL's search engine, compared with August 2005, Nielsen/NetRatings announced Tuesday. That landed AOL in fourth place with 5.5 percent of queries, or about 329 million. Among the top five providers, AOL was the only one whose usage share shrunk in August. AOL also experienced a drop in July, but it was smaller at 7.8 percent. The larger drop coincides with the privacy scandal that erupted in early August over AOL's release of about 20 million search records from about 658,000 of its members. This prompted outcry from privacy advocates and a public apology from AOL. The search records, covering the three-month period between March and May, didn't include member names, but AOL tagged each person's records with a unique number. This made it possible to see what each individual searched for. The data included search queries, as well as Web sites the members clicked on to. The queries contain all sorts of sensitive information, like credit card, telephone and Social Security numbers, as well as birth dates, full names and addresses. According to Nielsen/NetRatings,Â Google finished first with a little over half of all queries, or about 3 billion. Google's query volume grew 30 percent compared with August 2005. Yahoo Inc. came in second with 24 percent of all queries. Its query volume grew 23 percent. Microsoft Corp.'s MSN fielded 10 percent of all queries, and its query volume grew 3 percent. Finally, IAC/InterActiveCorp's Ask.com finished in fifth place with a 2.3 percent share. Its query volume grew 30 percent. A Nielsen/NetRatings analyst wasn't immediately available to comment on this latest report.
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America Online says you&#39;ve got less mail thanks to its ongoing battle against spammers. Despite the recent spike in spam, the company claims to have had a banner year in its fight against the scourge, which
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Add America Online Inc. to the growing list of companies and organizations shunning a spam-fighting proposal from Microsoft Corp. AOL cited &quot;tepid support&quot; for Microsoft&#39;s so-called Sender ID technology, which
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America Online (AOL) has cut spam on its service for the first time in five years. AOL says it has slashed the annoying email advertisements in 2004 by 75 per cent.
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DECEMBER 29, 2004 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - America Online Inc. has declared 2004 a &quot;banner year&quot; in its fight against spam. Spam reports from AOL&#39;s members fell from a daily average of almost 11 million in November