HELP SPAM PROBLEM

TinderBox (UK) · Dec 24, 2006

for last couple of months i have been getting spam from some guy selling viagra and the like, three times a day every day.

the problem is he uses an different email address every time, and he only uses

pictures, and a large lump of random giberish in the middle.

I usualy bounce them back manualy and delete them but i am getting sick of doing it.

I dont know where he got my email address from.?????????????

my normal spam filter can be set up reject emails with a certain address, or also look for certain words, but his have neither.

can anybody help, i am going craze.

my email server is with ORANGE UK, formely WANADOO, FREESERVE.

I use incredimail to read my emails.

thanks for any help.

John.

goldenlight · Dec 24, 2006

One of the very worst things you can do is open a spam Email.

This lets the sender know that your E-mail address is not only valid, but that you READ SPAM! That makes your E-mail address much more valuable when they sell lists of E-mail address to other spammers.

Likely, you are getting spam from several senders; not just one.

I have a free web based E-mail accout that's about 8 years old. Several ( three or four?) years ago, Lycos bought out mailcity.com.

But, I still get spam addressed to the old mailcity.com account.

Lists of E-mail address are sold over and over and over.

I NEVER use my 'real' E-mail address on a public forum, bulletin board, etc. It's a prime place for spammers to harvest E-mail addresses.

Fizz753 · Dec 24, 2006

If it makes you feel better (although I dont know why it would :sssh:

) I have been geting spam like that as well. It looks like the spam senders have turned it up a notch or two for the holidays.

Found this artical a while back. Looks like it might be even higher this month :scowl:.

Spam Volume Jumps 35% In November
http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=2V1J23VBYZ0CKQSNDLRCKHSCJUNN2JVN?articleID=196701527

Mad1 · Dec 24, 2006

You could stop using the spyware riddled incredimail and use Mozilla Thunderbird.

Also set incomming mail to display plain text only, turn off read reciepts and possilby take 5mins to setup some mail rules.

jtr1962 · Dec 24, 2006

Maybe I'm missing something here, but if ISPs would only limit the number of email messages that an individual account can send out to something like 50 or 100 a day that would solve the spam problem. In order to send out more than that, I spammer would have to have (and pay for) multiple ISP accounts. This would quickly kill the economics of spamming. Paying for each email would probably solve the problem also.

Another thing I've heard is that a hard core group of maybe a few hundred people worldwide are responsible for 99% of the spam generated. Is it really so hard for law enforcement to find these people in order to prosecute, fine out of existence, and incarcerate them? Fact is spam has all but made email useless. It's time we took back the Internet from these cyberterrorists.

bfg9000 · Dec 24, 2006

TinderBox (UK) said:
I usualy bounce them back manualy

You do realize the return addresses are usually fake don't you? And that those addresses may be real people that YOU are then spamming with a forwarded mail.

Even if the address is really theirs, I can't think of anything more guaranteed to generate future spam than emailing a spammer from your own email address to prove that it's a real one...

matrixshaman · Dec 24, 2006

Article I read recently indicated a large increase in this type of spam lately by criminal gangs. Not much you can do except delete or change to a new email address which will keep it at bay for a little while. Spam should be punishable by life in prison - maybe that would stop all that crap - it's sucking a lot of Internet bandwidth too since a lot of spam now uses pictures of the text to bypass spam filters.

Brlux · Dec 24, 2006

In discussing this issue with our IT person at work he said that a lot of business people are starting to Gmail as a spam filter. They are one of the few free email servers who allow you to receive your mail a pop3 for free and they supposedly have some of the best spam filtering. People are forwarding there regular email to Gmail which then filters it and than sending there Gmail to a pop3 like Outlook or Thunderbird.

DM51 · Dec 24, 2006

Tinderbox, you are not alone. Usually the older an e-mail address is, the more spam it will receive.

I get about 30-40 spam e-mails a day, but I have Norton's "Internet Security" program installed and this filters out all but one or two of them.

You would have thought the service providers themselves would do something about this - it can't be in their interests to have all this garbage clogging up their systems. If a ~$50 program like Norton can deal with it, why can't they? Maybe someone else can answer that.

As has been said above, NEVER open spam, and resist the understandable impulse to send garbage back where it came from. All that does is to announce you are are a genuine e-mail address, so the problem will just get worse.

nzgunnie · Dec 24, 2006

I use mailwasher pro which allows me to delete email off the server before downloading it to outlook.

I find it works well for this, since I don't need to open them at all.

Of course it doesn't stop the spam in the first place.

light_emitting_dude · Dec 24, 2006

I use a program called eprompter. You can preview your e-mail before you even begin to download it to your computer. If it looks like spam you can delete it from your isp server.

http://www.eprompter.com/

Illum · Dec 24, 2006

I have two mail accounts, I get sent "phallus-enlarging pills" or "Viagra" about 20+ on a daily basis....

I wish yahoo has a program where it deletes email searched using keywords, that makes everything a heck of a lot easier

Lightmeup · Dec 24, 2006

I've been getting the "insider stock tips" and discount software spam a lot lately.

gregw · Dec 24, 2006

I subscribe to an email account at Spamcop.net, which filters 99.9% of all spam I receive. I forward all my email accounts to my Spamcop email, then synchronize to Outlook on my PC using IMAP instead of POP3 as this allows me to see my outgoing emails on my Spamcop webmail when I'm not at my PC.

Looking at my Spamcop "Held Mail" folder, which is where the spam gets filtered to, I'm now getting up to 300 spam emails every 12 hours or so. :ohgeez:

Well worth the $30 per year..

To prevent "bots" from sending out Spam, all ISPs really need to block outgoing traffic on Port 25 from their network, except to the ISP's own authorised SMTP server. This effectively prevents anyone on their network from sending email, except through the ISP's own outgoing email server, which can then be configured to control the number of emails that are sent out per hour/day for each IP address. To improve security, ISPs should also require user id/password authorisation to use the SMTP server as well.. If ALL ISPs take these two simple steps, then Spam wouldn't be such a problem...

3rd_shift · Dec 25, 2006

Hehee. :laughing:
I just junked one for Viagra from a wierd source.
Most of us are just fine without "cheap" viagra, thank you. :rock:

Yes spammers, I admit it.
I read your spam and I junk it whenever I see it just the same as any other hotmail user does. :thumbsdow :wave:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to the issue at hand;
For some reason, the spam count has been steadily decreasing with my hotmail.com email account overall as of late.

Looks like most of the spam issues are happening with poorly defended, or defenseless email accounts at this time.

Pwallwin · Dec 25, 2006

3rd_shift said:
Hehee. :laughing:
For some reason, the spam count has been steadily decreasing with my hotmail.com email account overall as of late.

My Hotmail account never receives spam in my inbox, it goes straight where it should (junk mail folder). Even my AOL account receives more spam mail than my hotmail.com.

By opening just one spam e-mail, you are verifying that your e-mail address is valid (currently being used by a human being), and so your address is then automatically fed to the list. And you can be sure it will be used time and time again! :rant:

3rd_shift · Dec 25, 2006

(junk mail folder).

That's what I meant.

Most of it ends up there.
On occasion, some ends up in my regular inbox and I get to do the nasty of junking it. :naughty:

Trashman · Dec 25, 2006

I use a yahoo account and they filter almost all of it into my "bulk" box. Lately, though, a few have been getting through, but only a few, and only a few per week.

greenLED · Dec 25, 2006

I do a couple of things:
- I have a "bogus" e-mail address that I use for signing up for stuff on-line, etc.
- I recently installed SpamBayes - it's freeware and it "learns" what spam looks like. It took a couple of days for me to train the algorithm (you just need to move spam to the proper folder, and the software "learns" what those messages look like), but now it catches virtually every single spam message that comes in.

-Oh, and don't ever use hotmail - it's the best spam magnet ever to be created.

BB · Dec 25, 2006

Switch to FireFox (browser) and Thunderbird (mail reader) if you can...

FireFox you can change to only load images from the source website--when you are reading mail with imbedded junk images (usually referenced with an ID attached to confirm your email address) they will be blocked.

Also, with FireFox, there are browser extensions where they will automate the creation of temporary email accounts (like 6 hours) so that you can do some quick email exchanges without exposing your real address.

With Thunderbird, it has an (OK) spam detection engine (although, I had to change the learning value to a different number because it was not learning all my spam that well), but it will only load images if you say OK--plus it does not have the active-x / scripting support (turned on) that some emails use to infect your PC.

Thunderbird/Mozilla Spam settings basics

Thunderbird Advanced Setting for Junk Learn Variable:

The mail.adaptivefilters.junk_threshold preference is a threshold used to determine when messages are classified as junk. It defaults to 90 in version 1.5.0.4. Lowering this value will make it easier to recognize messages as spam, though it increases the risk that it will classify a legitimate message as spam. This might be useful if you get spam messages that it seems to have a tough time learning about. For example, messages that look like text but are actually clickable images.

You can change the preference using Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> General -> Config Editor. Enter junk in the Filter field to show only the preferences that contain junk in their name, and then double-click on mail.adaptivefilters.junk_threshold , enter 50 in the edit field and press the OK button. That will set it to 50.

The bayesian filter typically requires several hundred spam and several hundred legitimate messages in order to train itself to recognize spam. Its needs both, if you have a thousand spam messages but only a dozen legitimate messages it won't learn much. You don't need to keep the messages afterwards, it stores all of the information it needs as tokens in the training.dat file.

The Bayes Junk Tool can be used to examine and modify the training data. Sometimes it helps to get rid of tokens that are just as likely to occur in spam and legitimate messages, especially if the training data file gets very large. The web site also has several sets of training data that you can import or merge with your existing training data.

Bayesian filters are useful, but they're not always the best tool. Sometimes checking whether the message was sent by somebody on a DNSBL list is more effective. See this article for how to integrate SpamPal and the junk mail controls, and control which messages are downloaded.

In the end, once your email address gets out there, you will probably just have to junk the address. Your next email address should not have a common name (like [email protected] or [email protected], etc.)... From what I understand, the spammers will simply take the dictionary and add @hotlink.com, @aol.com, @earhtlink.net, @etc.com to all of the common names/domain names.

-Bill

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