Possible new email swindle?

[Mike Barnes]

Tim Streater :

Your world is clearly different from mine. I don't get spam of the sort you describe. I haven't received anything remotely like the message that started this thread, or dick enhancers, or Swiss watches, etc, for many many years.

Examples of the spam I get are shops that I've bought from wanting me to know about their latest offers, or friends inviting me to sponsor them running a marathon etc. They do that once, I ask them to stop, they don't do it again.

There is no classic spam filtering at my ISP[1], as far as I'm aware, or in my mail client. I guess there might be a spam filter at the throwaway gmail address you'll find in the headers of my Usenet postings; I've never bothered to check. I do have my own method of spam control, which boils down to taking care whenever I'm asked to provide my e-mail address.

I don't get cold phone calls either. Or junk e-mail.

[D.M.Chapman]

We recieve many many thousands of spam emails a day (and refuse many 10s/100s of thousands). The variety amazes me...although very few are in anyway convincing IMO but people do fall for them :-(

Running a fairly large website we are constantly being attacked by people looking for compromisable apps that would allow them to host fake bank sites etc. We also see many many phishing emails looking for username and passwords. Many of these are the "Your email account is over quota, reply with your username and password to keep access to your email" type.

Annoyingly, some of these are carefully targetted at our users (even to the point of using our logo etc sometimes) and we constantly have both staff and students falling for them :-(

First thing we know is when one of our accounts is noticed sending 10s of thousands of emails - normally more phishing scams. They don't get far as we have various rate limits etc in place to catch them but with a fast internet connection, and a large userbase we are a constant target :-(

Darren

[Tim+]

Um, I use yahoo and google mail. They are both now very good at sorting spam and virtually nothing that I would classify as spam gets through either. Yahoo does have the occasional "false positive" so I do check my spam folder periodically but they are both a long way from being "bad" without any user training.

Tim

[Dave Liquorice]

reaches

Full header, that windows does it's best to stop people looking at. My mail client has a button in the tool bar to toggle the full header on or off. All I can see is an orginating machine to their MTA then to my MTA.

If it didn't use $ and ask for a zip code, it would be really very genuine looking. Good english, good spelling etc.

[Tim Streater]

Their definition of spam, not yours. Sometimes there is stuff that interest me for a short while, after which I just label it as spam, and soon after that the spam filter is sufficiently trained and I no longer have to bother. I prefer a flexible definition of spam, not someone else's.

[Tim+]

penis enlargement? ;-)

Fair enough, but I still maintain that some mail providers do a pretty damned good job of filtering these days.

Tim

[Tim Streater]

*** S M A C K ***

[Graham.]

Actually that does seem to be a plausible explanation for a good proportion of posts on Usenet.

[Lobster]

Tim+ wrote in news: [e-mail]-sep tember.org:

I agree they're pretty good these days; however they aren't perfect and the 'false-positive' issue is why I never trust them. I can't afford the risk of an important email not getting through due to an over-zealous spam filter, so all my filtering is done by me, using POPfile which I trained. It does mean that any incoming spam does get downloaded to my PC before being ID'ed, but as it's a very small proportion of my total email, I can live with that.

The other aspect of allowing false positives is that if an expected email doesn't materialise I'd always be worrying it had been caught by a spam filter en route, and would need to keep checking my ISPs server. As it is, I simply have an email folder on Thunderbird called POPfile, and I just have a look in there.

The other nice thing for me about this set up is that POPfile happily and uncannily accurately distinguishes personal stuff from junk email, even when it comes from and is being sent to the same addresses. Thus, emails with information about an order from Amazon get filtered into my "Personal" folder, whereas all their marketing emails, which I may or may not want to look at, go into "Commercial"

[Scion]

Tim Streater put finger to keyboard:

It worked, then.

[bert]

I get quite a high level of false positives with BTYahoo. Fortunately they don't delete it but put it in a Spam folder.

[tim......]

Because it doesn't match any of the criteria that spam filters use (which, usually, doesn't include reading the contents)

Not everyone can work with "white list only" so that is of no use to most people, but perhaps it helps you

tim

[Tim Streater]

[spam snipped]

A proper spam filter will read the contents. That way you are getting the spammers themselves to tell you that their mail is spam.

[tim......]

what does it do

look for misspelled words and poor grammar

tim