SERIOUS SPAM ISSUES

FatRakoon · 31 Oct 2006 at 13:36

Ok, having been getting more and mroe sick of the relentless spam I keep getting, I decided to have a try at counting the ammount of them I have in Outlook Express blocked senders list.

I see that the display window shows me 14 blocked senders per page...

I counted how many times I would press PAGE-UP and multiply iot by 14 right?

I gave up after 100, seeing that the scroll-barr had not really moved much at all, so, I went back to the top and timed how long it would take to go to the bottom...

43 seconds?

Ooooookkkkaaaaayyyyyy!

I exported the blocked senders list from the registry, and I have a 2.1GB REG file??? - you can only imagine just how many entries I have in there... So much that I cannot count them.

I deleted them out of the registry and I have saved myself 2GB on C:

Now, it seems to me that I really do have a serious issue here dont I?

Now, my EMail address that I use, is [email protected] its forwarded to another one, that other one I have never used, and the EMails are all going to that other one.

I could cure it by simply changing my forwarding EMail cant I? I know that it will stop the EMails going to the other EMail address thats for sure even if it does not stop them, they will certainly drop off like flies.

I have told my ISP, who have yet to answer me after a couple of weeks, so what can I do?

Bossk128 · 31 Oct 2006 at 13:49

I don't know if this is the kind of answer you were looking for, but if you use Thunderbird as your email client instead of Outlook Express, Thunderbird has a built in 'learning' spam filter. You mark mails as junk as they arrive, and it starts to automatically recognise spam mail itself. Once you are reasonally confident with it's decisions, you activate the mechanism where Thunderbird automatically moves the spam to a junk mail folder.

That's what I use, and it works pretty well. My only false positives are from etailors ad emails. There is a setting to guarantee Thunderbird keeps all email from people in your address book, so I added the etailor to my address book (or marking it as 'not spam').

Also, I was given a piece of advice ages ago, about not posting your email address in forums (at least, not without a blatant misspelling) as there are spambots that read web pages, harvesting email addresses to add to spam lists.

Dr_Evil · 31 Oct 2006 at 13:54

Dude - sign up for Google Mail! their anti-spam rules!

csmager · 31 Oct 2006 at 14:02

One real thing you could have done to help (probably too late now, but still a good idea) - don't write your email address on the web!

It's in your signature, you just wrote it further up too. Bots crawl the web looking for email addresses, and the whole time yours is on a page like this, it's just going to get added to more and more spam lists. I learnt that the hard way too.

www.spamcop.net offer a fantastic spam filtering service for ~£20/year.

The_KiD · 31 Oct 2006 at 17:12

csmager said:
One real thing you could have done to help (probably too late now, but still a good idea) - don't write your email address on the web!

It's in your signature, you just wrote it further up too. Bots crawl the web looking for email addresses, and the whole time yours is on a page like this, it's just going to get added to more and more spam lists. I learnt that the hard way too.

www.spamcop.net offer a fantastic spam filtering service for ~£20/year.

have u ever used spamcop for a corporate mail filter?

Dr_Evil · 31 Oct 2006 at 17:14

Corporate - go MessageLabs!

csmager · 31 Oct 2006 at 17:16

The_KiD said:
have u ever used spamcop for a corporate mail filter?

No, sorry. Only as my personal spam filter. I don't use them anymore - I let my server do it. It's not quite as good, but at least it means I don't have to check the spam folder online anymore... and it's free.

MAllen · 1 Nov 2006 at 22:52

Get away from Outlook Express - it comes free with the OS for a reason. It is lousy, and the "block senders" list is pointless as spam will always come from unique addresses. Thunderbird sounds good (especially now they are also merging in the Eudora code) Personally I am an Opera fan, so use it's built in M2 mail client. Baysian filtering is great
OE is especially bad as it tends to load up all them web bugs / pictures in emails, therefore proving that you are a "live" email address. SO ready for more spam.
OE's email address can also be easily mined out of your registry.... along with the password.
As mentioned by the poster above, stop publishing your email address. Even hiding behind "me at domain.com" isn't enough anymore. Sometimes things like "[email protected]" will work. Well, it stops the lazy robots, but gets spotted by a human review.
Don't hand over your email address to online shops. Make a spare address like "toys@" for buying things on line. then you can ignore this address when doing normal mail checks. Keep a very private one for just your mates.
When buyingonline, always hunt for that tick about sending you "offers". And more importantly look for the one about selling your details to third parties.
Move your domain hosting to a decent company who will do spam filtering on the server before it gets to you. This then kills off all the common spam that everyone else is getting (I use http://www.dc-hosting.com/ - great little Devon company with EXCELLENT support.)
Be very careful as to who you give your email address to. Don't hand it over to every tom dick and harry. (Especially pron sites)
Give up now on me@fatrakoon - it will of been sold on into tooo many spam lists.
You could also make use of filtering in any email program - even OE. Create a "white list" of your mates, and filter their emails out of your inbox into a "clean inbox". This is very quick to setup and highly effective. Kind of the reverse of your "OE blocked senders list"

Just a few ideas...

On similar topic.... I had to suppress the laughter when a customer phoned me up the other day. He seemed surprised that he "suddenly got 200 bits of spam in one day". He then went on to mention that "I clicked on a flashing advert that said I had won a laptop... so entered my email address". My advice to him? Delete him email account and just create a new one... in his case it was too late to help.

http://www.spamhaus.org/
(pity... www.spamradio.com seems to of disappeared... was always funny hearing spam messages "sung" back at you...)

Good Luck

Avalon · 1 Nov 2006 at 23:09

Thunderbird + SpamPal + selective use of email address as described above (after they've both been trained/whitelisted) = almost no Spam...down from the days of up to 1,000 emails per day across multiple domains.

MAllen · 1 Nov 2006 at 23:17

Should mention... I check approx 25 mail accounts, with eight personal domains (with catch all accounts pouring even more my way). The spam filtering on the servers kills 99% of spam. So I get less than a dozen spam mails into my Opera M2 spam filter each day. And maybe one incorrectly recognised message a week drops into my main inbox.

FatRakoon · 2 Nov 2006 at 01:56

Thanks for the good replies guys.

Yeah, I know that my EMail addy in the sig has been a bloody stupid thing to do, I am of the idea now that its simply too late.

Never too late I suppose, so thats will get editted later.

Thunderbird.

Yeah, I did use TB for a fair while... No excuses really and I dont rightfully know why I stopped using it... No doubt I had a good reason, but I will plonk it on in a few minutes and give it another blast.

GMAIL - yeah, I did try to sign up a while back but failed to find where the hell I was to actually sign up for it?

I have now managed it, and what I would like to do, is use my forwarder to let the [email protected] email go through the GMail one to then use GMails spam filters... If possible,. and then for the GMail one to go to my true EMail address, bu tthis would require forwarding the EMail twice??? - I dont see why it cant be done however???

At least I should be able to forward the me@fr account to the GMail at least, and use the GMail account info in my EMail program??? *** true one I can simply forget about for now...

I will try that one.

I have to be fair on BT however... When I was with them, I never had any spam... I changed over to XLN and what do I get?

The thing is, that as I said, NONE of the spam I am getting have me@fatrakoon in them... They do however have my true EMail address, so its not actually my me@fatrakoon account is it surely?

Either way, I got to sort it out one way or the other havent I?

Oh, for what its worth, today, I moved my inbox emails to atemp inbox and from about 11:30 this morning up until right now ( I just checked ) I have had 264 EMails and of those.... 17 are from people I know with genuinne emails... The rest are spam!

Ok, cheers all... Will update you as and when I have tried a few thigns out... Namely keepign what I have firstly and forwarding it through GMail, and if thats not good, then a new EMail addy coming up!

Andyt_uk · 2 Nov 2006 at 07:36

Dr_Evil said:
Corporate - go MessageLabs!

quoted for truth

GMAIL - yeah, I did try to sign up a while back but failed to find where the hell I was to actually sign up for it?

You need to be invited for it. Theres a thread in the windows? forum i think.

If you can get a gmail account I'd start afresh. Bit of a pain but you can mail all your friends/work etc before hand. If you can access the account via a web page then you can always just setup forwarding rules on important addresses.

Spiders also crawl webpages and forum posts so get rid of the address in the previous post or change it to me AT address DOT whatever. People are generally clever enough to be able to get the address from that.

skiba · 2 Nov 2006 at 07:48

Get SpamPal, it will solve most of your problems. Blocking addresses won't work as they are never from the same address.

Avalon · 2 Nov 2006 at 14:19

You may want to think about dumping the catch all as spammers love catch all domains as they will accept anything and can be sold as 5000000 individual users if they want. From what you've said your problem is your 'real' email address and who's ended up with it not your domain. I managed to train TB & Spampal in the space of a few days to filter 99% of all spam, it's very rare it gets it wrong and I have 5 hosted domains with at least two having a catch all forward on them

It's a little bit of time well invested to free up hours of my time each week not having to manually filter it etc.

bitslice · 2 Nov 2006 at 14:38

oddly enough, our email blacklist contains more Recruitment companies than the combined suppliers/personal/customers whitelists.

heh, we are seeing a big increase in image attachment spam, which is blocked/deleted entirely by a simple attachment filter.

spammers = yawn

.

MAllen · 2 Nov 2006 at 15:09

bitslice said:
heh, we are seeing a big increase in image attachment spam, which is blocked/deleted entirely by a simple attachment filter.

That's cos they think they can get around the baysian filters this way. I get a few with stock quotes and drug supplies.

Though I have had plenty of spam lately that is aiming directly for my baysian filters as it is just full of jumbled words... evil little %$*%*$%

Another hint, change your email client to show "text only" email. Not as pretty, but avoids all the web bug / dial backs etc.

Anyone here seen Incredimail? Evil little company who take a copy of Outlook Express and wrap it up in marketing rubbish. The classic "glittery items" than suck in the non-internet savvy. They claim to "give you lots of extra smiley faces" which then act as web bugs to track the emails being opened.... look at the smiley URLs and you'll find they all have a unique id.... Can't see any senseible use for this... unless they are harvesting details for later spamming use...

Oh - and to try and keep you hooked in, there are no export functions to export your emails and address book if you want to leave... nasty. (Though I have found a way... hahaha)

bitslice · 2 Nov 2006 at 15:37

MAllen said:
That's cos they think they can get around the baysian filters this way.

yup, if the dopes changed the spam attachment from .gif to something else then the filtering would be tricker... ...as it is they stand out a mile.

I had one spammer that used "random text" from a pron story, so he got stopped by the same lexical filter he was trying to fool....

I filter out anything containing an Incredimail tag, (most of it's users are female and I get more chain emails from them)

.