Forgive the cross-posting but had to ask somewhere and this seemed as good a place as any to start seeing as I have been on this group a bit lately.
Up until bout a week ago, I was getting round about 15-20 spam email's a day. Pain in the backside. However, as of a few days ago they have ALL STOPPED. Not cut down, stopped ENTIRELY.
Anyone else experienced this phenomena? Perhaps anyone with BT as their ISP?
Miguel
|Forgive the cross-posting but had to ask somewhere and this seemed as |good a place as any to start seeing as I have been on this group a bit |lately. | |Up until bout a week ago, I was getting round about 15-20 spam email's |a day. Pain in the backside. However, as of a few days ago they have |ALL STOPPED. Not cut down, stopped ENTIRELY. | |Anyone else experienced this phenomena? Perhaps anyone with BT as |their ISP?
My spam has also reduced considerably, I am also with BT connect, who have antispam and antivirus systems. This happened last night/yesterday.
One of the listservers I subscribe to, has also stopped. If nothing appears today I will run a test.
I expect BT run Brightmail or one of the similar spam blockers, and have done a regular update.
Screwfix? (pun intended)
Apparently there's a very large spamming going on at the moment, which is delaying much email (and regular spams no doubt). If you are not subject to this large spamming, then you will probably see a drop off in email until systems clear the backlog. Sorry, don't know any details, just a warning put out by my ISP (not Demon, contrary to what you might think).
The message from "The Medway Handyman" contains these words:
It's supposed to defeat anti-spam systems which look for a high proportion of spammy words by diluting them with unspammy words.
Does that cucumber address actually work?
So how am I supposed to know what he message is? Which words in the above are which? I'm confused!
The message from "The Medway Handyman" contains these words:
Oh, I didn't say it worked! It's often used by gormless twit who send you spam that doesn't actually have a message. Of course, that could just be a ploy to get you to reply so they know it's an active email address which are worth a lot more.
I seem to be a recipient. In the last three days my spam rate has gone from about 20 a day to over 1000 a day, mostly the sort where my email address has been used to randomly email all over and so what I get is the 'not known at this address' bouncebacks. At least they are easy to filter out
Does anyone know an authorative source where I can keep an eye on the 'world state of spamming' It would be good to know I am not alone and more importantly if anyone is likely to get caught and stopped.
I have a 'third party list' ISP spamtrap in place and also one on my email program. The ones that get through both filters seem to have a random 'From' a random 'Subject' and a gif for the message. I'd like to trap those too...
People moan about the state of the world today, terrorist security measures ... but I have never felt threatened until this spam deluge arrived :(
Drowning ... Anna ~~ Anna Kettle, Suffolk, England |""""| ~ Lime plaster repair and conservation / ^^ \ // Freehand modelling in lime: overmantels, pargeting etc |____|
No, in that I don't bother opening the mailbox for andrew@cucumber as it gets well over 1000 spams/day, and very rarely any non-spam.
I did see your mail to me a few days back as you gave me a heads-up, thanks. Did you hear back from David?
No, but as long as you got my email, that's fine. Thanks.
news.admin.net-abuse.email
Lurk before posting!
You have my hearfelt sympathies. I've had over 20 e-mail accounts, going back over more than 15 years and every one has eventually drowned in spam.
There is something very unsettling when you feel that your e-mail address has been used in the spam headers of some dodgy company. Let me assure you that because the headers are generally completely forged it's very obvious that it's not you. When I was running a business I felt particularly vulnerable because the thought that you can end up on a spammers list is pretty troubling. I ended up at the sharp end of tens of thousands of bounced e-mails. It did, however, go away.
My complaint is that it's difficult to find an ISP that filters at source (i.e. at their end) and prevents the spam being delivered to your end. Once spam is considered a crime worldwide (it *is* a crime in the UK) it will be easier to deal with. The fact that the whole approach is fraudulent seems to have gone unnoticed - it can't and doesn't work. No-one would buy drugs from a company after reading their spam-email but a spamming company has obviously sold the service to someone.
If anyone can prove to me that they have purchased something off the back off one of these spams, get in contact because I have a lovely bridge I'd like to sell you.
BTW: The random messages are a long-term attempt to dilute the rules of your (Bayesian) spam filter. If it ends up with rules that are totally convoluted it will become useless and need to be retrained. The way to deal with this is to delete these messages rather than label them as 'junk'. Yes, practically impossible - that's why they are doing it.
Z.
Setting up their filters is not easy, but about 80% of it can be stopped by adding a rule that BOUNCES mail from sites marked as blacklisted open relays.
ISP's maintain an active policy of blacklisting..there are nerds who forward mail that is spam to these sites and if an open relay is detected they automatically add it to the blacklists.
Next step is to block anyone who hasn't got a valid reply address. That ditches about half the rest. These get silently deleted as there is nowhere to bounce to.
Then blocking ALL the AOL, yahoo and usual domains gets rid of most of the rest - though in this case I have to punch holes for the one or two people I know that actually use those domains.
Then a final filter on my desktop allows me to trash most of the rest that slips through. Which is frankly because I have currently about 10 email identities on three domains..and haven't set up decent filters on all of them.
I don't think spam is a crime, unless done for malicious purposes.
Its just junk mail, that's all.
I use Virtual Access which only understands text emails, with or without attachments. I had always assumed that these are multipart messages so that all those who have had the sense to 'upgrade' to Outlook Express see the HTML version, no doubt complete with 'Click here' buttons and the rest.
But they do. The Register had a story a while back about a Viagra spammer whose database was hacked into. They were making more money that you or I do IIRC.
I used to use clara but stopped cos they changed their dialup number to one I couldnt access at a reasonable rate. That was some time ago and I expect the situation has changed by now so I'll look at them again.
I can see that the bank holiday weekend will be delightfully full of me investigating spamtrapping :( Thanks for the tips of how to trap it
I cant just dump my email address cos I use it for business but thankfully it is on an indirection so I can change service providers relatively painlessly if I need to
Anna
~~ Anna Kettle, Suffolk, England |""""| ~ Lime plaster repair and conservation / ^^ \ // Freehand modelling in lime: overmantels, pargeting etc |____|
Thanks, will do
Anna ~~ Anna Kettle, Suffolk, England |""""| ~ Lime plaster repair and conservation / ^^ \ // Freehand modelling in lime: overmantels, pargeting etc |____|
I direct mine through
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