Pablo Manalastas wrote:
In my yahoo360 blog, I wrote:
RP is e-mail spam capital of Asia? (March 27, 2007)
A news report by ABS-CBN News
(http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/storypage.aspx?StoryID=71193) claims
that "according to the (Symantec) report, 88 percent of e-mails
coming from the Philippines are spam".
I strongly disagree with this claim, for several reasons. First,
Filipinos do not yet have an e-mail culture. The truth is, we do
not have a writing culture at all! Filipinos don't write. Period.
We may be the text capital of the world, because we are text
crazy. We do not write when we send text message messages like "D2
NA ME" instead of "NANDITO NA AKO". We telegraph, abbreviate,
corrupt our Taglish into non-recognizable gibberish. But we don't
write! How can 88 percent of our emails be spam, when we hate
sending emails? To prove this, just email your favorite
congressman and see if he will answer you within one year.
Second, we do not have enough computers, and those who have
computers do not have broadband access. Broadband is a requirement
for generating email in such volumes as to be considered spam.
From the point of view of infrastructure, we can NOT be the e-mail
spam capital of Asia.
I think Symantec did not study its data enough to make that
conclusion. Did Symantec check the e-mail envelopes (that contain
all the email hops) to verify the actual origin of the emails? I
think Symantec had been remiss in ignoring the e-mail envelopes.
I will agree that 88 percent of the emails that I receive is spam.
Emails from other countries selling Viagra to me and to my
daughters, or selling all kinds of vitamins and pharmaceuticals,
or e-mails from South Africa wanting to give me USD2,000,000.00,
or e-mails telling me that I have won USD4,000,000.00 etc, or
Windows-virus-carrying e-mails which I laugh at because I use
Linux. The list is endless. But I don't originate them -- I just
receive them, and most of them are from abroad. And my experience,
and the experiences of my colleagues point to the conclusion that
88 percent of e-mail that we RECEIVE from abroad is SPAM. Not 88
percent of emails that we send. Symantec -- study your data before
you make such wild accusations.
doc,
there might be some basis on that since there are some 'outsourcing'
companies that specialize in spamming. i have already met about 3
persons who stated that they worked for such companies and even
described some of the software that they use. assuming that such
companies can shell out thousands of emails per day then that could
easily skew the statistics of emails coming from the philippines.
P~Manalastas
P.S.: I mentioned Linux so that this post will fit into the into the
[PLUG-OT] mailing list.
no disrespect meant doc but that would be plug-misc. i would go out on
a limb to even suggest posting your blog articles there (if they are
indeed OT here) since
1. it would allow us behind restrictive proxies to read your blog
posts, and
2. the traffic in plug-misc is not a sustained flood but merely
sporadic bursts. i think i get more ot posts here than in plug-misc. :D
ciao!
--
"Programming, an artform that fights back"
Anuerin G. Diaz
Registered Linux User #246176
Friendly Linux Board @ http://mandrivausers.org/index.php
http://capsule.ramfree17.org , when you absolutely have nothing else better to
do
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