Has anyone noticed, lately, a lot of messages in your email from "mailer-daemon" or "system administrator" or what-not, telling you there's some delivery failure, and click here for more information?
I use yahoo mail, and they've got checkboxes and a "spam" button, which is supposed to update their spam filter, but it doesn't seem to change the number of these things I'm getting every day.
Is this happening to anyone else, or should I get all paranoid about it, and assume it's personal? ;-)
Good spam blocking software will filter these out. The addresses frequently change, or there is some small change that your blocking it fails to register. Fortunately, this email I am using has full force blocking.
Yep, same here. That number hasn't increased much but the total number of spams has at least doubled over the last couple of months. They have become pretty inventive with their catch phrases. Are they thinking that anyone actually reads their spam?
Spam filters don't work well IMHO. After it almost shot down several important biz emails I turned all that off. So 3-4 times a day I go in and hosed off all the spam, then pull the flush handle. Unlike snail junk mail spam can't be used to start the wood stove...
It happened to me a few days ago. I got over 2000 bounced spam emails in a few hours.
They used a botnet as a large number of different ip addresses were used for sending the spam. The reply-to addresses were random names @ my domain. The ones I received were just those that got filtered and bounced.
Many more must have got through.
It would be much better if spam filters silently dumped the spam rather than bouncing it, as the bounces never go back to the true originator.
Best are those hard cards as long as they aren't glossy color prints since that supposedly lets off not so healthy emissions. But we use mostly dried tree clippings from pruning. Gets dropped into a black kiln pot in summer and becomes really good wood stove starter.
This sounds like partially filter SWEN virus. It seemed to only hit people who used Usenet, by reading the message headers, and sends itself to every person listed. I was getting over 1000 an hour when it first hit several years ago. Everyone that i asked that didn't use usenet was not getting the infected messages. It looks like someone is running a computer with the virus, and doesn't know, or care.
Now, Earthlink quarantines any e-mail with a live virus, but if the virus has been stripped by the sending mail server it is marked with a green triangle and put in their main webmail inbox. A couple clicks, and they are gone.
--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I\'ve got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.
Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida
If you are using a pop mail server try "Free mailwasher". It bounces the spam and sends a message that the mailbox doesn't exist. It does reduce the amount of spam. When I first used it, they dropped from over
200 a day to about 5 after a couple weeks.
--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I\'ve got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.
Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida
Unfortunately most mail servers are unable/unwilling to distinguish between genuine 'wrong addresses' and deliberate ones.
Within a year or so email will have changed in such a way that the existing system will be awash with so much cr*p that pretty well everyone who can afford a few dollars a week will have opted in to some system such as the one Micro$oft is trying to push (but not theirs because nobody wants to hand them so much power or, let's face it, any more money). Such a system involves paying a registration fee to a central authority who provide you with a secure cryptographic mechanism for signing your mail. When someone receives your email, they do a lookup similar to a DNS lookup on your signature, and if your 'license to send' has been revoked they simply discard your email (or better yet terminate the session without ever receiving it). There could even be 'levels' associated with your license to send: Some organisations would want to send legitimate promotional email to those they have determined would like to receive it, so they use their 'promotional license'. Don't agree that you want to receive it? Simply set your mail server to discard promotional emails. Any mail sender mis-identifying mail would become unlicensed in minutes, and re-registering would become problematic very quickly. Included in your license could be 'country of origin', so for example Russian mail servers would soon be able to send only to people already expecting mail from Russia. The various mail server developers have already started implementing mechanisms which nobody is activating as yet.
Meanwhile we'll gradually have to lose functionality from the existing system - notifications of every sort being one of the first things to go.
When you can't rely on any part of the message you receive being genuine, you eventually have to simply delete any message that has any flaw at all, or you'll be contributing to the great overwhelming tide of cr*p.
Within a short while any system that sends such notifications (NDRs, virus/spam notifications etc) will be firewalled off by the black-list databases.
Many systems will simply continue in such a fashion because millions of administrators simply don't know/care enough to fix them. And enough genuine mail senders will be sending from those domains that we will need a better way of determining genuine email from junk.
Enter some enterprising .org bunch who find a way of launching a mail-verification system such that:
It's free or super cheap
It's foolproof, so you can't simply register under dozens of aliases, burning licenses repeatedly
It's easy to implement for both mail administrators and individuals
For some reason everyone decides to join it 'straight away' so it's actually useful from day one
This last point is all that's holding up the next step. Currently the existing system is useful enough that nobody is motivated enough to 'go first' and become cut off from the majority of the rest of us.
Anyone here feel like solving *that* puzzle, and we'll all have spam-free email by next month.
Otherwise we'll have to wait until the existing system is broken enough that it's better to join up, but never fear, current trends indicate we don't have long left for our 'easy run' on the free uncontrolled email system.
One solution is to limit the accepted email alias names for your domain. Chances are a dozen or so will do it.
--
Many thanks,
Don Lancaster voice phone: (928)428-4073
Synergetics 3860 West First Street Box 809 Thatcher, AZ 85552
rss: http://www.tinaja.com/whtnu.xml email: don@tinaja.com
Please visit my GURU\'s LAIR web site at http://www.tinaja.com
Wow, I have not had this one yet. I do get tens (perhaps even hundreds) of spam messages per day and just deal with that by deleting/ignoring them. I guess it is a matter of time until my domain gets used for that as well...
To Rich's original question, though, I did get a few new type spam messages which claimed to be returned mail and contained a .exe or .zip (I don't remember which of the two) as an attachment I was supposed to view for details. I saw what it was without a problem because I read my mail under DPS and I know what is going on there (wintel is limited to the usage of a tvset here :-).
It bounces them. Didn't know mailwasher exists for *nix now, gotta give it a try. It was good under Win several years ago (about 6? for me), but some other proggies like spamweasel seemed to work better, just deleting the rubbish. Nothing beats Spamassassin though, or Opera's or Mozilla's v/a once trained.
If you are using POP you are too late anyway. The only proper way to handle spam is to reject it as soon as the spammer tries to deliver it, _before_ it is put in your POP mailbox. And that can only be done by your ISP.
Don't send bounce messages afterwards. Those bounce messages _will not_ reach the spammer because all spammers use spoofed sender addresses. Sending bounce messages doesn't solve anything, but increases the problem because you likely are sending to existing addresses chosen at random by the spammer as his "sender address".
If your spam reduced from 200 a day to 5 I think your filter learned from the spam and did a better job dropping it without telling you it has been dropped. I simply _do not_ believe that spammers stopped sending their junk.
Late at night, by candle light, Rich Grise penned this immortal opus:
Oh, it's been going on for years, particularly on my mail.com accounts. The few times I've bothered to check it's turned out to be some spammer using my return addy befuddling the victim server.
I've noticed that Yahoo's spam filter is not doing very well lately too, so it isn't your fault. In my case I think Yahoo mail has been catching only about 50% of the spam for the last few weeks, with (I'd guess) perhaps 1% false positives.
ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.