OT: Winner of Multiple Competitions

Depending on the type of mailbox (which depends a bit on when you bought it and how you got it) 123 reg has 10 user selectable levels for both spam flagging, and spam deletion. They also do ingress filtering (as do nearly all ISPs and mail providers) that will bounce anything flagged on a spam blacklist on entry to the system.

(not that I would recommend 123 for anything other than basic personal email)

I can see why that wouldn't be worth it for an iPhone. ;-)

I have no filtering, apart from potential spam is flagged.

My way round this is to use different email addresses for personal and anything I sign up to.

Hence my earlier whinge about Santander, where I get email to an address which was snipped-for-privacy@mydomainname.com It was only ever given to Abbey National, when it existed, and have never given it to a third party. It becomes an easy matter to simply direct any email to this offending address into a lack hole.

You are assuming that anyone would send an iPhone. It doesn't take many people kindly responding to the email and paying the £3.

I can see why scams as so prevalent if some believe after paying £3 they're going to get a phone.

The Nigerian scams are based on the same idea, albeit with more handsome bounties for the scammers.

There is a saying, if it looks too good to be true it probably is. Especially for a competition you've never entered.

Stick your email address in here and see if it's been in a hacked database:

And you know this how exactly ?

Assuming there is a database, then any enquirer who hadn't already been hacked and spammed will be safe. As the enquirer would immediately put any new spam down to having visited the site.

However if an enquirer has already been hacked and spammed and these people know when, then allowing for decent interval if they then sell on an enquirers email address, there's no way the victim would know.

Free lunches and all that

bb

Because it is.

Perhaps you are unable to understand that not all people are out to get you. Stop smoking the weed.

Put the bong down.

It is a service which is provided to those who may wish to use it. No one is forcing anyone to use it.

Yes, that's what happens on my main E-Mail too.

I used to do that when I was a bit suspicious about signing up to something but the 'different' E-Mail addresses have turned up so infrequently I've stopped bothering.

Because I expect he has done the research like the rest of us?

The site is operated by Troy Hunt, a well known security consultant and developer and also a Microsoft Regional Director.

There is a massive database. He has collected all of the publicly available breached data "pastes" from across the darker corners of the web for years.

SPF is an ill thought out protocol intended to make forgeries more difficult but has the unfortunate side effect that poorly configured ISP mail servers and accounts belonging to naive not especially tech savvy small businesses end up with emails that SPF interprets as forgeries.

Under some circumstances BT servers can treat emails sent from one sort of BT customer to another sort the resulting email fails to pass the test. I have seen it and have never been able to pin down why it happens. They just vanish into the ether leaving the sender with the impression it has gone and the recipient non the wiser.

It (SPF fails) shows up a lot at this time of year when accountants are trying to contact their clients about year end tax and vice versa and things sometimes just disappear. If it is time critical it is as well to ring and check that it arrived safely since if a server drops it on the floor you will not get any kind of warning :(

Confused the hell out of my accountant last year when something like half their clients claimed never to have been reminded. Looking at their email headers I could understand why but it took some explaining and I told them to just forward my email to their ISP for them to sort it out.

I'm hoping that this year they won't run into the same brick wall.

SPF is an unholy bodge.

For some reason Paul's post is not showing up on my server, so I well reply here...

Remember that if you own the domain, then you also have control over SPF and DKIM records. So you should be able to avoid such problems.

You also control the MX records, so don't have to use the domain hosts email forwarding facilities if you don't want to.

The forwarder should check the SPF on the incoming mail. If it then forwards, and chooses to re-write the header, it should make sure it does so in accordance with its own SPF records.

In the case of ISPs perhaps. For many small businesses the default SPF record is usually no SPF record at all - which is far less harmful than an incorrectly configured one.

The biggest pain IME, is when you have a number of subcontracted organisations that you want to be able to send mail on your behalf. You then need a more complicated record that can designate their mail servers as legitimate senders of mail for your domain. You can soon run into the maximum length limits of the record itself, or the number of DNS lookups required to fully resolve it. And that is before you get the problems of subcontractors changing their email platform hosting arrangements and not telling you! (or telling you they are changing on a particular date and then not actually changing them)