# HELP SPAM PROBLEM



## TinderBox (UK) (Dec 24, 2006)

for last couple of months i have been getting spam from some guy selling viagra and the like, three times a day every day.

the problem is he uses an different email address every time, and he only uses 

pictures, and a large lump of random giberish in the middle.

I usualy bounce them back manualy and delete them but i am getting sick of doing it.

I dont know where he got my email address from.?????????????

my normal spam filter can be set up reject emails with a certain address, or also look for certain words, but his have neither.

can anybody help, i am going craze.

my email server is with ORANGE UK, formely WANADOO, FREESERVE.

I use incredimail to read my emails.

thanks for any help.

John.


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## goldenlight (Dec 24, 2006)

One of the very worst things you can do is open a spam Email. 

This lets the sender know that your E-mail address is not only valid, but that you READ SPAM! That makes your E-mail address much more valuable when they sell lists of E-mail address to other spammers.

Likely, you are getting spam from several senders; not just one.

I have a free web based E-mail accout that's about 8 years old. Several ( three or four?) years ago, Lycos bought out mailcity.com.

But, I still get spam addressed to the old mailcity.com account.

Lists of E-mail address are sold over and over and over.

I NEVER use my 'real' E-mail address on a public forum, bulletin board, etc. It's a prime place for spammers to harvest E-mail addresses.


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## Fizz753 (Dec 24, 2006)

If it makes you feel better (although I dont know why it would  ) I have been geting spam like that as well. It looks like the spam senders have turned it up a notch or two for the holidays.

Found this artical a while back. Looks like it might be even higher this month :scowl:.

Spam Volume Jumps 35% In November
http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=2V1J23VBYZ0CKQSNDLRCKHSCJUNN2JVN?articleID=196701527


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## Mad1 (Dec 24, 2006)

You could stop using the spyware riddled incredimail and use Mozilla Thunderbird.

Also set incomming mail to display plain text only, turn off read reciepts and possilby take 5mins to setup some mail rules.


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## jtr1962 (Dec 24, 2006)

Maybe I'm missing something here, but if ISPs would only limit the number of email messages that an individual account can send out to something like 50 or 100 a day that would solve the spam problem. In order to send out more than that, I spammer would have to have (and pay for) multiple ISP accounts. This would quickly kill the economics of spamming. Paying for each email would probably solve the problem also.

Another thing I've heard is that a hard core group of maybe a few hundred people worldwide are responsible for 99% of the spam generated. Is it really so hard for law enforcement to find these people in order to prosecute, fine out of existence, and incarcerate them? Fact is spam has all but made email useless. It's time we took back the Internet from these cyberterrorists.


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## bfg9000 (Dec 24, 2006)

TinderBox (UK) said:


> I usualy bounce them back manualy


 You do realize the return addresses are usually fake don't you? And that those addresses may be real people that YOU are then spamming with a forwarded mail.

Even if the address is really theirs, I can't think of anything more guaranteed to generate future spam than emailing a spammer from your own email address to prove that it's a real one...


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## matrixshaman (Dec 24, 2006)

Article I read recently indicated a large increase in this type of spam lately by criminal gangs. Not much you can do except delete or change to a new email address which will keep it at bay for a little while. Spam should be punishable by life in prison - maybe that would stop all that crap - it's sucking a lot of Internet bandwidth too since a lot of spam now uses pictures of the text to bypass spam filters.


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## Brlux (Dec 24, 2006)

In discussing this issue with our IT person at work he said that a lot of business people are starting to Gmail as a spam filter. They are one of the few free email servers who allow you to receive your mail a pop3 for free and they supposedly have some of the best spam filtering. People are forwarding there regular email to Gmail which then filters it and than sending there Gmail to a pop3 like Outlook or Thunderbird.


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## DM51 (Dec 24, 2006)

Tinderbox, you are not alone. Usually the older an e-mail address is, the more spam it will receive. 

I get about 30-40 spam e-mails a day, but I have Norton's "Internet Security" program installed and this filters out all but one or two of them.

You would have thought the service providers themselves would do something about this - it can't be in their interests to have all this garbage clogging up their systems. If a ~$50 program like Norton can deal with it, why can't they? Maybe someone else can answer that.

As has been said above, NEVER open spam, and resist the understandable impulse to send garbage back where it came from. All that does is to announce you are are a genuine e-mail address, so the problem will just get worse.


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## nzgunnie (Dec 24, 2006)

I use mailwasher pro which allows me to delete email off the server before downloading it to outlook.

I find it works well for this, since I don't need to open them at all.

Of course it doesn't stop the spam in the first place.


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## light_emitting_dude (Dec 24, 2006)

I use a program called eprompter. You can preview your e-mail before you even begin to download it to your computer. If it looks like spam you can delete it from your isp server. 

http://www.eprompter.com/


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## Illum (Dec 24, 2006)

I have two mail accounts, I get sent "phallus-enlarging pills" or "Viagra" about 20+ on a daily basis....

I wish yahoo has a program where it deletes email searched using keywords, that makes everything a heck of a lot easier


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## Lightmeup (Dec 24, 2006)

I've been getting the "insider stock tips" and discount software spam a lot lately.


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## gregw (Dec 24, 2006)

I subscribe to an email account at Spamcop.net, which filters 99.9% of all spam I receive. I forward all my email accounts to my Spamcop email, then synchronize to Outlook on my PC using IMAP instead of POP3 as this allows me to see my outgoing emails on my Spamcop webmail when I'm not at my PC. 

Looking at my Spamcop "Held Mail" folder, which is where the spam gets filtered to, I'm now getting up to 300 spam emails every 12 hours or so.  Well worth the $30 per year.. 

To prevent "bots" from sending out Spam, all ISPs really need to block outgoing traffic on Port 25 from their network, except to the ISP's own authorised SMTP server. This effectively prevents anyone on their network from sending email, except through the ISP's own outgoing email server, which can then be configured to control the number of emails that are sent out per hour/day for each IP address. To improve security, ISPs should also require user id/password authorisation to use the SMTP server as well.. If *ALL* ISPs take these two simple steps, then Spam wouldn't be such a problem...


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## 3rd_shift (Dec 25, 2006)

Hehee. :laughing: 
I just junked one for Viagra from a wierd source.
Most of us are just fine without "cheap" viagra, thank you. :rock:

Yes spammers, I admit it.
I read your spam and I junk it whenever I see it just the same as any other hotmail user does. :thumbsdow :wave:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to the issue at hand;
For some reason, the spam count has been steadily decreasing with my hotmail.com email account overall as of late. 

Looks like most of the spam issues are happening with poorly defended, or defenseless email accounts at this time.


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## Pwallwin (Dec 25, 2006)

3rd_shift said:


> Hehee. :laughing:
> For some reason, the spam count has been steadily decreasing with my hotmail.com email account overall as of late.


 
My Hotmail account never receives spam in my inbox, it goes straight where it should (junk mail folder). Even my AOL account receives more spam mail than my hotmail.com.

By opening just one spam e-mail, you are verifying that your e-mail address is valid (currently being used by a human being), and so your address is then automatically fed to the list. And you can be sure it will be used time and time again!


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## 3rd_shift (Dec 25, 2006)

> (junk mail folder).


That's what I meant. 
Most of it ends up there.
On occasion, some ends up in my regular inbox and I get to do the nasty of junking it. :naughty:


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## Trashman (Dec 25, 2006)

I use a yahoo account and they filter almost all of it into my "bulk" box. Lately, though, a few have been getting through, but only a few, and only a few per week.


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## greenLED (Dec 25, 2006)

I do a couple of things:
- I have a "bogus" e-mail address that I use for signing up for stuff on-line, etc.
- I recently installed SpamBayes - it's freeware and it "learns" what spam looks like. It took a couple of days for me to train the algorithm (you just need to move spam to the proper folder, and the software "learns" what those messages look like), but now it catches virtually every single spam message that comes in.

-Oh, and don't ever use hotmail - it's the best spam magnet ever to be created.


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## BB (Dec 25, 2006)

Switch to FireFox (browser) and Thunderbird (mail reader) if you can...

FireFox you can change to only load images from the source website--when you are reading mail with imbedded junk images (usually referenced with an ID attached to confirm your email address) they will be blocked.

Also, with FireFox, there are browser extensions where they will automate the creation of temporary email accounts (like 6 hours) so that you can do some quick email exchanges without exposing your real address.

With Thunderbird, it has an (OK) spam detection engine (although, I had to change the learning value to a different number because it was not learning all my spam that well), but it will only load images if you say OK--plus it does not have the active-x / scripting support (turned on) that some emails use to infect your PC.

Thunderbird/Mozilla Spam settings basics

Thunderbird Advanced Setting for Junk Learn Variable: 



> The mail.adaptivefilters.junk_threshold preference is a threshold used to determine when messages are classified as junk. It defaults to 90 in version 1.5.0.4. Lowering this value will make it easier to recognize messages as spam, though it increases the risk that it will classify a legitimate message as spam. This might be useful if you get spam messages that it seems to have a tough time learning about. For example, messages that look like text but are actually clickable images.
> 
> *You can change the preference using Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> General -> Config Editor. Enter junk in the Filter field to show only the preferences that contain junk in their name, and then double-click on mail.adaptivefilters.junk_threshold , enter 50 in the edit field and press the OK button. That will set it to 50.*
> 
> ...



In the end, once your email address gets out there, you will probably just have to junk the address. Your next email address should not have a common name (like [email protected] or [email protected], etc.)... From what I understand, the spammers will simply take the dictionary and add @hotlink.com, @aol.com, @earhtlink.net, @etc.com to all of the common names/domain names.

-Bill


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## IlluminatingBikr (Dec 25, 2006)

jtr1962 said:


> Maybe I'm missing something here, but if ISPs would only limit the number of email messages that an individual account can send out to something like 50 or 100 a day that would solve the spam problem. In order to send out more than that, I spammer would have to have (and pay for) multiple ISP accounts. This would quickly kill the economics of spamming.



It wouldn't be all that hard for the spammers to circumvent such a limit. They could send e-mails using web-based services, such as Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail. Furthermore, there are many companies that legitimately need to do mass mailers - somethings to the order of thousands of e-mails in one day. How would you really be able to differentiate between the good guys and the bad guys? Also, many of the spammers live in foreign countries where they go by different rules. Even if we were to restrict mass e-mailing here in the U.S., it would most likely only make things more difficult for us, and not change a thing for spammers around the world. 



> Paying for each email would probably solve the problem also.



Yes, it probably would, if it was implemented globally, but do we really want to do that?



> Another thing I've heard is that a hard core group of maybe a few hundred people worldwide are responsible for 99% of the spam generated. Is it really so hard for law enforcement to find these people in order to prosecute, fine out of existence, and incarcerate them? Fact is spam has all but made email useless. It's time we took back the Internet from these cyberterrorists.



Again, these spammers live around the world, and in countries that have minimal laws and resources to be able to go after these sorts of people. I think calling them "cyberterrorists" might be going a bit too far. Are all of the advertisements on tv and the radio generated by "mediaterrorists"?


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## 3rd_shift (Dec 26, 2006)

> -Oh, and don't ever use hotmail - it's the best spam magnet ever to be created.



Hmmmm.
I thought AOL was the worst. 
Everyone I know who has AOL gets way more than I do. :thinking:


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## Carpe Diem (Dec 26, 2006)

nzgunnie said:


> I use mailwasher pro which allows me to delete email off the server before downloading it to outlook.
> 
> I find it works well for this, since I don't need to open them at all.
> 
> Of course it doesn't stop the spam in the first place.


 

I`m with Nzgunnie on this one. I have had great success with the "MailWasher Pro" software program. 

I`ve also found that after you use the program a while, it cuts way, way down on the spam you still receive...to the point that I now sometimes don`t even bother to run it before opening my email .

MailWasher Pro is the answer. 
Try it...you`ll like it!


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## Martin (Dec 26, 2006)

The 30..60 spam mails arriving in my inbox every day were driving me mad. I mean, it was not that easy to tell they are spam since the title, dummy-content and sender names are so inconspicuous. I often had to open and read such mails before I could safely delete them.

This was a lot of work and I decided I rather miss some valid e-mails but not see spam any more. So I installed filters. That is SpamPal + Thunderbird's internal filtering.
Now, no more than 5 spam mails per day get thru, these I identify and delete manually. In 2 months, I have not lost a single real mail. Now I can live with that.


If we only could convert spam into energy...


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## Empath (Dec 26, 2006)

IlluminatingBikr said:


> I think calling them "cyberterrorists" might be going a bit too far. Are all of the advertisements on tv and the radio generated by "mediaterrorists"?



Calling spammers terrorists is stretching it a lot, even though my regard for spammers is about as low as I could go for near-humans. Equating radio and TV advertisers with them, though, is way off the line. Radio and TV advertisers finance the medium. Spammers exploit the medium at the expense of the users.

Spammers don't pay for your connection; you do. Spammers don't finance your email box; you and/or the service provider does. Spammers exploit the medium at the user's expense with no regard for the damage it creates.

Incidentally, someone said that blocking port 25 would stop spam. No. Port 25 is only designated for smtp by common designated protocol. Nearly any port works. Many commercial email services permit the use of other ports in order to by-pass the deceptive blocking by an ISP. I say deceptive, because it's all show. Blocking port 25 only creates an illusion that the ISP is trying to combat spam. The only one it blocks are those that don't have enough experience to use a different port, and spammers have the experience and the know-how. You can even run your own smtp server on your computer and designate whatever port you wish.

Today's spammers aren't using smtp servers much nowadays anyway. They're hijacking your computer and using it to send their spam.


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## HEY HEY ITS HENDO (Dec 26, 2006)

Pwallwin said:


> My Hotmail account never receives spam in my inbox, it goes straight where it should (junk mail folder). Even my AOL account receives more spam mail than my hotmail.com.


i`ve never had spam in my hotmail account either, but my ntlworld account is constantly being spammed ...........:thumbsdow
so i would advise you to open a hotmail account
.


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## HEY HEY ITS HENDO (Dec 26, 2006)

greenLED said:


> Oh, and don't ever use hotmail - it's the best spam magnet ever to be created.


.................:lolsign: maybe from years past, but certainly not nowadays !!!


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## St8kout (Dec 26, 2006)

You should have at least two email accounts. One for family, friends, banking, credit cards, business, etc. that you DO NOT EVER give out to anyone you don't know or trust. Use the other one for registering for contests, forums, surveys, whatever, that you don't care if it fills up with spam (and it will) as you will only use it when necessary.


My private email gets all the important mail and no spam. The other has soooooo much garbage it's hilarious. I ignore it for weeks at a time as nothing important will be sent there unless I'm expecting it.

I also discovered that my 'junk' email account that I use for ebay gets a lot of ebay/paypal spoofs just after I buy something on ebay. However, I use the private email address for Paypal and never get spoofs. It's as if the bad guys are hacked into ebay email accounts.


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## tvodrd (Dec 27, 2006)

HEY HEY ITS HENDO said:


> i`ve never had spam in my hotmail account either, but my ntlworld account is constantly being spammed ...........:thumbsdow
> so i would advise you to open a hotmail account
> .



I've had a Hotmail account since Jan '00 and its spam filter catches 9 outta 10 which means ~1-2/day. I have to check the "junk mail" daily, because it frequently tags legitimate mail! :shrug: Welcome to the 21st Century!

Larry


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## jtr1962 (Dec 27, 2006)

IlluminatingBikr said:


> It wouldn't be all that hard for the spammers to circumvent such a limit. They could send e-mails using web-based services, such as Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail.


OK, so _those_ services could have a limit as well. I would think it would be in their own interests to do so.



> Furthermore, there are many companies that legitimately need to do mass mailers - somethings to the order of thousands of e-mails in one day. How would you really be able to differentiate between the good guys and the bad guys? Also, many of the spammers live in foreign countries where they go by different rules. Even if we were to restrict mass e-mailing here in the U.S., it would most likely only make things more difficult for us, and not change a thing for spammers around the world.


Maybe check out an organization thoroughly before giving them mass-mailing abilities, and revoke that privilege if it's found they're sending unsolicited messages. And block mass mailings from countries which don't have similar rules. 



> Yes, it probably would, if it was implemented globally, but do we really want to do that?


Pay per email would be quite palatable if you have some reasonable number of "free" messages per month. I'd be all for it. We're indirectly paying for all the spam crap anyway. 



> Again, these spammers live around the world, and in countries that have minimal laws and resources to be able to go after these sorts of people.


Well, then let the countries with the resources to do so go after and extradite them. Since spam crosses international boundaries spammers should be subject to the laws of whatever countries they're spamming.



> I think calling them "cyberterrorists" might be going a bit too far. Are all of the advertisements on tv and the radio generated by "mediaterrorists"?


They are terrorists in that they effectively cripple part of the Internet, rendering it all but useless. The economic drain from spam is enormous. So is the emotional toll of finding dozens to hundreds of crap messages every single day. The cumulative effect is probably far worse than a real terrorist act like blowing up a building.

TV and radio advertisers run their ads to pay for programming. While I don't like them either I at least realize that they reduce what I pay for TV service. Spam actually increases the cost of Internet service while providing absolutely nothing of value.


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## TinderBox (UK) (Jan 3, 2007)

Hi.

I have tried a few programs, without much success.

but this free program appears to work quite well

SPAM SHREDDER

At first everything will go into the spam directory, and you have to manually select which mails or not-spam so the program can learn the difference.

the only problem i cannot seem to minimize it to the system tray, as it has a function to check for mail at selected duration.

thanks for the help

John.


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## Empath (Jan 5, 2007)

An interesting site that demonstrates what the spammer learns when his email is opened can be found here:

http://www.nthelp.com/OEtest/oe.htm

It shows that using a mail client in html mode, instead of text, keeps your email address at the top of the spammers list.


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## Aloft (Jan 5, 2007)

Empath said:


> An interesting site that demonstrates what the spammer learns when his email is opened can be found here:
> 
> http://www.nthelp.com/OEtest/oe.htm
> 
> It shows that using a mail client in html mode, instead of text, keeps your email address at the top of the spammers list.



Empath is quite right. I run both a mailserver and webserver for a small group of my college classmates, so I'm familiar with how the logging works for TCP/IP connections. When you visit a website with a browser and thus access the server, that server's log file will list your IP address (not quite the same as your email address). By keeping good records, a spammer could conceivably know which addresses are 'active' by doing a little research. 

Running a mail program like Outlook or Thunderbird that shows mail as HTML is just like visiting the spammer's website! Turn this feature off, or use Thunderbird's other features to protect your privacy. I use Thunderbird and it blocks any images that would cause the spammer's logs to show my IP address. It also shows a button to 'View Images' if you know the email is legitimate, so you can still see coupons, pictures, etc. It's under 'Tools > Options > Privacy > Block Images ...'. Thunderbird also has a great junk mail filter, though that doesn't stop the actual downloading of the mail itself. Thunderbird is also immune to VB script viruses. Oh yeah, it's FREE!

And pay no attention to the 'From' field in spam ... it's almost invariably fake. I take great delight in emailing my friends and spoofing the 'From' field to lampoon some celebrity or politician ... it's ridiculously easy using Linux and not much harder using windoze. A better indicator is the "IP Originating Address" which I don't know how to spoof, but many spammers probably do, though it is apparently much more difficult.


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## gregw (Jan 5, 2007)

I know all about webbugs since I do use them if my clients want my company to provide a tracking record of who has actually read their broadcast email... In addition to an IP address, my webbugs record the email address of the person that actually opens the email. This is absolutely trivial to do, so everyone needs to be aware of this.

If you are using Outlook or Outlook Express, you really need to upgrade to the latest version since it is automatically configured to block images from websites in the preview pane, and you need to actually click on a button to allow the downloading of images to the viewing pane if you want the images to show. This will prevent webbugs from working since no images are downloaded.


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## ChopperCFI (Jan 7, 2007)

Another possibility is to set up a brand new email account somewhere, but never give out the new address, except to set up a disposable email address service. Spamex was my first choice, but it had an annual fee. I chose the free e4ward service.

With e4ward for example, register with the username tinderbox. You then login and create any email address you want to the left of the @. To the right of the @ will be tinderbox.e4ward.com. Let's say you want to create a new email to be used at amazon. Create the new email address something like "[email protected]" and then give that email out. You can create several different addresses and have them all forwarded to a single guarded account.

If you ever get spam, you know know exactly who sold your address. Most importantly, you can disable just that address and the spammer will get the 550 User Unknown code for an invalid email address.

These forwarding services also take care of fixing the reply address so your real email address is never divulged (except to the forwarding service). Creating a new email an email can also be done without divulging the real address, but it requires an extra step or two. Just make sure your email content or signature line does not contain your protected email address. If you forward an email from your real account, the real address will be divulged.

The final step is to start giving out disposable addresses to your valid users and eventually shut down the original email account. Good luck


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## fasuto (Jan 13, 2007)

best antispam program, free:
http://popfile.sourceforge.net/


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