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Bypassing Gmail's spam filters with ChatGPT
- Crystalin 4y agowell, you don't need ChatGPT for that. I receive daily scam in my gmail with 99% the same content each time (and i mark it spam each time)... the worst part ? the server serving it is google (but the email attached to it is always a different obscure email)
- jeffbee 4y agoPeople are overestimating the importance of the message body in spam classification. The stuff that appears in your spam label on gmail is what google considered marginal, almost ham. The vast, vast majority of what they think is spam is rejected with temporary failure codes at SMTP time and never gets delivered with any label. IP reputation and other related metadata features are the key features in spam classification, and repeatedly sending different messages is not a valid test of whether the body looks spammy or not.
- topicseed 4y ago> and other related metadata features Such as? Actually curious and doing a lot of sales myself, I'm interested!
- jeffbee 4y agoEvery email operator considers their classification features to be trade secrets. The closest you will get to advice from Google on this topic is https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en But anyway it sounds like you intend to send spam. I recommend doing literally anything else.
- labria 4y agoThe last line reads like something Clippy would say :)
- DwnVoteHoneyPot 4y agoYeah, I’m starting to hear and understand that more myself. There was a extremely long twitter thread (i think from former Reddit CEO) that said the key to content moderation is moderating bad behaviour, not bad content.
- walrus01 4y agoI concur on this for the most part because I would say that my custom postfix + spamassassin + opendkim setup, on my self run MX, correctly classifies 75%+ of the spam or outright rejects it for SMTP transfer just based on: a) invalid rdns of other mx b) invalid spf c) invalid DKIM / no DKIM signature d) failed RBL list check - I subscribe to and feed it a few different common sense SMTP RBLs Rejecting as spam things in the above category before it even looks at the content. Adding a high score for invalid rdns, spf or dkim before something generally similar to spamassassin or a more advanced message subject line/body analyzing system begins classifying things help. And then additional score is added of course for text spam content in message subject line and body.
- BenjiWiebe 4y agoWhich RBLs do you use/suggest? My main anti spam solution is currently just Thunderbird's adaptive spam filter, but that doesn't help when I access it with a different app or via web.
- walrus01 4y agoDo you run your own MX? Primarily SORBS and spamhaus.
- astrange 4y agoOne signal for spam is just the same email going to many different people who don't like receiving it, but "the same email" doesn't have to mean it has exactly the same text.
- mfi 4y ago> I’m no AI or machine learning expert so I don’t know how it works. But I am also worried that spammers could use ChatGPT to get around Gmail and Outlook’s spam filters. This will not only increase the spam-problem, but will most likely be used to scale and do targeted phishing attack as well. I wrote an extensive article[0] where I analyzed this. And to no surprise, GPT-3 can be used to generate dynamic phishing campaigns on the fly in multiple languages, classify email responses, improve email thread hijacking attacks etc. [0] https://www.xorlab.com/en/blog/why-ai-powered-phishing-will-become-a-serious-security-issue-for-your-organization https://www.xorlab.com/en/blog/why-ai-powered-phishing-will-...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- shadowgovt 4y agoOn the other hand, ChatGPT becomes a very convenient tool for generating example data to train the ML component of the spam filter on.
- aitball 4y agosomething.. something... arms race
- barking_biscuit 4y agosomething... something... technology is not neutral.
- rzzzt 4y agogenerative... adversarial... network
- HyperSane 4y agoMaybe the Amish were right after all.
- 4y ago
- thyrox 4y agoAll this can be done since GPT3 API has been available. I see a lot of people thinking chatgpt is something new capable of such stuff but GPT3 is far less restrictive and has been able to do all this for almost an year now.
- puffybuf 4y agoBut you must pay to use these APIs. They did give me $20 free trial though. You could make a bunch of accounts and abuse the free trial I guess. It must be cost effective for the scammers. You can change up the prompt to change the writing style so spam filters will have trouble catching this new world of spam.
- dhruval 4y agoChatGPT also throttles the number of requests an hour and has various measures to prevent bots (though not that hard to bypass, easier to pay for API)
- jokoon 4y agoonly way to make email work is to let the user choose what domain they trust, and maybe to have a feature where the user must whitelist addresses.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Avamander 4y agoIn addition to further emphasis on "trusted senders" in the form of contact books, we'll also hopefully see a rise in identity-validated S/MIME. Though I get the feeling it'll hurt really bad before either gets deployed to a sufficient extent.
- fIREpOK 4y agoThen everyone would choose "gmail.com" and Google will get its true monopoly?
- killingtime74 4y agoGive google half a chance and they will make "Gmail" domain only opt-out, won't even ask you to choose
- 867-5309 4y agoover 90% of the world's smartphones are onboarding with gmail
- deno 4y agoI can’t find it but Gmail actually had some sort of whitepaper or something once about Gmail-originated SPAM and how it became a huge problem which was partially the reason they started doing phone verification. The parent’s comment is valid. Any modern email peer is doing domain based reputation which is possible thanks to SPF and DKIM, and if you don’t have those configured you’ll have a bad time. Then it’s the job of the domain owner or email operator (postmaster) to make sure you’re not blasting out SPAM and respond to abuse feedback. If you think about it, this is the only sane way for email to function without preauthentication. The only major outlier to this is Outlook, which is still doing IP based reputation. And of course a long tail of small server operators that rely on legacy SPAM lists from decade ago and reject only legitimate emails and pass through plenty of Viagra ads.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoAnecdotally, almost every email I see in my gmail inbox is advertisement of some sort. There's newsletters I never signed up for, special offers from companies I've never had dealings with, it never ends. Some of it hasn't even been sent to me as an email, but shows up in the inbox as though it was an email. Granted, there's fewer scam emails than in my non-gmail inbox, but man is there a lot of spam.
- 4g 4y agoUsing these tools to mitigate spam is as likely a scenario as this, imagine that every spam mail receives a masterfully crafted response showing utter fascination and interest in SEO, or helping out a Nigerian prince. Every phone call to an unregistered number is answered by an artificial, frail, and forgetful lady that is trying her best to register gift cards. When reporting an e-mail as spam it will not only block the address but waste the spammers time, rendering the actions unprofitable.
- themitigating 4y agoIt wastes my time and spammers will create new addresses automatically
- wolverine876 4y agoSo the two AIs will be talking to each other, trying to suss out if the other is fake (a sort of Turing test), trying to con the other to keep talking or to really buy in?
- beachy 4y agoSounds absurd all right. But what's to prevent this from being the future of the internet?
- codetrotter 4y agoReminds me of Adventure Time Season 4, episode 10: Goliad https://adventuretime.fandom.com/wiki/Goliad_(episode) https://adventuretime.fandom.com/wiki/Goliad_(episode) (Spoilers follow) > Princess Bubblegum is concerned over her mortality, and reveals her designated successor to Finn and Jake. However, things get out of control when the heir turns against Princess Bubblegum. > […] The heir is Goliad, a pink Sphinx with a mound on her forehead […] > […] Goliad reveals that her mound concealed a third eye, and proceeds to psychically control Finn and the obstacles in the course for a perfect completion. She explains that with her in control, everything would be perfect. […] > […] > […] Finn and Jake confront Goliad but are beaten by her psychic powers. Goliad tries to read Finn's mind, and Finn narrowly avoids revealing the plan by interrupting his memories with nonsense. The new creature; another sphinx with an eagle's head, white feathers, and golden hair; rescues Finn and battles Goliad. Goliad tries to convince her brother, named Stormo, that they should work together, but Stormo refuses by screeching. They engage in a psychic showdown, but with their powers matched the two creatures are eternally locked in a mental stalemate.
- wolverine876 4y agoThink what can be done with an AI trained on all the data that's been collected about you.
- astrange 4y agoNot all that much, considering how when you buy a blender on Amazon it recommends a second blender.
- thaumasiotes 4y agoI assume most blender purchases on Amazon are for "will it blend?" YouTube channels. ;D
- b1n 4y agoSpear-fishing now scales.
- Tagbert 4y agoAFAIK all it takes to bypass Gmails spam filters is to resend the same scammy email that was Flagged but using a different email address. I get the same kind of scammy emails, flag them as spam, and then a couple days later, Gmail lets the same email in though it is coming from a different 123134r12345124@blahblah.com address.
- orlp 4y agoIn my experience the new strategy is to just send an email with no body, no title, optionally with an image of a conventionally attractive lady, in the hope people respond after which they're automatically whitelisted (as there's now a 'conversation').
- Tagbert 4y agoI get a lot of those. Never download the image so I don’t know if there is an attractive lady or not. I do always mark them as phishing spam for gmail but it just keeps delivering more. I lost count of the free Yeti mugs I’ve missed out on.
- ceejayoz 4y agoThere also seems to be a *@salesforce.com exception built in.
- steveBK123 4y agoInterpretations I've seen of ChatGPT type tools, and playing around with it, I would sum up as "reducing the marginal cost of creating BS to $0". Great for content farms, spam, disinfo/propaganda campaigns. Stuff where it doesn't have to be correct, have a high hit rate, or even be edited. Just need to produce plausible enough sounding, human-like content.
- natch 4y agoI don’t think ChatGPT is really needed here. Gmail’s spam filters are Google’s weakest tech. At least I don’t know of anything worse.
- teruakohatu 4y ago> Gmail’s spam filters are Google’s weakest tech. At least I don’t know of anything worse. I get a fair amount obvious spam coming through the filter, but the issue with any sort of classification is the tradeoff between False Positives and False Negatives. The occasional False Negative causes a lot less damage (2 seconds to delete or report as spam) verses the damage of a False Positive (not seeing an important email for two weeks or ever).
- natch 4y agoI get a ton of false positives. The tech is truly lame.
- narrator 4y agoAs I have said before, the future will have two kinds of AI everywhere. Their AI to get you to buy something, do something, believe something, or in a warzone to kill you and Your AI to protect you from Their AI. Reality may even become so dangerous and illusory that humans lose a lot of their agency to Your AI.
- sorry_outta_gas 4y agoThis is about all its' good for, it won't even write sexy fan fiction for me
- astrange 4y agoOpenAI Playground will do that. Whether it's good quality I can't say. The RLHF models are too boring and the older ones are very hard to control.
- londons_explore 4y agoI don't think message content is weighted very heavily in modern spam filters... Things like IP reputation, sender reputation, and various SPF-like headers are far more important.
- tnzk 4y agoIt makes sense in itself, but then why do you think the second email went through in this case, considering no factors other than content didn't change?
- londons_explore 4y agowell this is the 2nd email from the same server, and the first was viewed by the user for 20+ seconds and not deleted, so probably not spam...
- sirsinsalot 4y agoIf we thought the signal vs noise problem was bad, wait until 90% of data is banal AI drivel drowning out any semblance of authenticity. Boring, brown, homogeneous noise
- teaearlgraycold 4y agoWe’ll be forced back to the outside world
- cosmojg 4y agoIs it finally time for Hashcash[1]/PennyPost[2]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash [2] https://pennypost.sourceforge.net/PennyPost https://pennypost.sourceforge.net/PennyPost
- graypegg 4y agoI think the future model of email will be spam-by-default, where you whitelist senders as you need them. Already doing that with hey email [0] where you screen all incoming senders. [0] https://hey.com https://hey.com
- okasaki 4y agoIf you want to spam gmail you can just share documents with people or add events to their calendar. Apparently there's no way to stop this.
- _glass 4y agoOn the other hand it's easy to detect ChatGPT, at least for now https://huggingface.co/openai-detector https://huggingface.co/openai-detector
- sprremix 4y agowhich detects the text from the article as 99% real...
- mk_stjames 4y agoI must be in the extreme minority upon reading comments on email spam, as I almost never receive a spam message in my main gmail inbox that is truly spam and not something I'm getting an email for because I lazily opted-in to a mailing list or was put on one due to association with a product. Actual, oldschool spam (Nigerian princes, claim your prize etc) literally never gets to my inbox. Maybe I'm just not a popular person. Or maybe I've kept my email private enough that it doesn't get scraped for such things? I don't understand the discrepancy between my experience and so many others here.
- butz 4y agoWhoever is doing this, please stop. Thank you.
- low_tech_love 4y agoConsidering how much crap I get in my Gmail inbox, doesn’t seem like it’s a hard task. Seriously, my Gmail account is borderline useless nowadays.