Netscape's anti-spam efforts are working

A little while ago Neil Patel covered an article I had written about how users were abusing Netscape's site-mail feature to spam other members for votes. A few weeks after that Netscape tweaked their site-mail feature to see if it would prevent system abuse. Here are my findings after a month of the feature being in place.

On January 31, the Netscape team announced on their blog that,

We've decided to disable one feature in particular: the "All Mutual Friends" box in the Send a Message interface. Why? For one thing, we've gotten frequent complaints from members about spam. So we're looking for the best balance between social networking tools and potential headaches for the community. In two weeks we'll figure out whether to bring back the "All Mutual Friends" box, disable it permanently, or perhaps modify it.

While more than two weeks have passed without word from Netscape, here are my findings on how disabling the 'spam all friends' has been working. I collected data on how many site-mail messages I was getting daily, from the 6th of November to the 31st of January (the pre-disabling period) and then from 31st of January to today (the post disabling period).

netscape spam messages

As you can see, while the messages received fluctuate wildly overall, the average daily messages have dropped to around 4 since the limitations on the feature were instituted, showing that the disabling has made quite a substantial dent in the daily solicitations received. This also means that it has become harder for stories to make it to the homepage of Netcape, which implicitly improves the quality of the promoted content on the site.

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Jeremiah, February 28, 2007

Did you keep all those messages man?! lol

I've had to take entire days to delete messages from my inbox on Netscape before. . .

HMTKSteve, February 28, 2007

I stopped adding you via site mail specifically because you raised a stink about it. Even if I find an article on Netscape that might interest you I no longer notify you.

Chip, March 1, 2007

Just wait a while until the spammers develop some scripts to make automatic mailing to all users. :D

ESCOTT Smith, March 1, 2007

I WONDERED WHY I WASN,T GETTING BARRAGE OF E-MAIL THE LAST FEW WEEKS. HOORAY

Jimbo, March 1, 2007

Mr. Saleem, you and apparently some of your readers are apparently confused as to what "spam" means. If you sign up to receive messages from someone and then they send you messages that is NOT spam. For example you might sign up to receive messages from "MoveOn.org" or from Rush Limbaugh. If you don't like the messages you get then you can always click the "unregister" link usually provided.

Well the same thing is true for Netscape "mutual friends". Under the old system someone could only send mass messages to peole who ACTIVELY AGREED to receive messages from them. If you were getting messages from someone and you didn't want to receive them all you had to do was to remove them from your friends list and then you wouldn't get messages if they did "message all mutual friends". If they persisted then you could always "block" that user.

Now under the new system REAL spam (as opposed to what you are mistakenly calling spam) isn't just possible, it's ENCOURAGED. Netscape still has a feature that allows people to send multiple messages at once. It's the "send this story" feature. With it you can send 5 messages at a time. But unlike the "message mutual friends" system, this one allows you to send messages to people who are NOT mutual friends and who have NOT actively agreed to receive messages from you. Sure you can only send 5 at a time, but with 20 submissions that's 100 messages sent. So gloat all you want, but you are only showing your own ignorance.

geordie boy, May 9, 2007