Unsavoury email traffic, is it just me?
Thread Starter
Joined: Mar 2004
Posts: 186
Likes: 0
From: Midlands
Unsavoury email traffic, is it just me?
Over the past month we have started to get a huge number of emails linking to porno sites, can be up to 50 per day. The majority of these have improper lanuage in the subject heading so there is no way of keeping it from the kiddiewinks. Most get dumped in the junk mail box. Have I been spared until now or has something changed? Any suggestions for getting rid?
Red On, Green On
Joined: May 2004
Posts: 6,490
Likes: 2
From: Between the woods and the water
Someone's got yr address and away it goes. I get a bundle to one address I've had for ages, and just got my first to a newer address today.
Use Mailwasher, or the anti-spam in McAfee/similar is my suggestion.
Use Mailwasher, or the anti-spam in McAfee/similar is my suggestion.
Official PPRuNe Chaplain
Joined: Apr 2001
Posts: 3,498
Likes: 0
From: Witnesham, Suffolk
You won't stop them.
If the address is one you can't change, then you need to use a filter - Spamcop is the one I use, and am happy with.
If you can dump the address that's getting the spam, and set up a new one, that'll stop it for a while. Then one of your correspondents will get a virus that will upload his/her address book to the spammers, and it will all start again.
If the address is one you can't change, then you need to use a filter - Spamcop is the one I use, and am happy with.
If you can dump the address that's getting the spam, and set up a new one, that'll stop it for a while. Then one of your correspondents will get a virus that will upload his/her address book to the spammers, and it will all start again.
Joined: Dec 2005
Posts: 1,694
Likes: 15
From: Wellington,NZ
If you are using Outlook Express (6) click on "message" (up top) and "block sender". Doesn't actually block the sender; the spam just goes directly to the deleted items folder so noone has to see the graphic titles.
Plastic PPRuNer
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 1,902
Likes: 0
From: Rochechouart, France
Can't speak too highly of Mailwasher - http://www.firetrust.com/
Excellent app., good support
Along with GetRight and a couple of others one of my essential applications.
Now available for the Mac and Linux - http://www.firetrust.com/firetrustma..._maclinux.html
Excellent app., good support
Along with GetRight and a couple of others one of my essential applications.
Now available for the Mac and Linux - http://www.firetrust.com/firetrustma..._maclinux.html
Joined: Apr 2001
Posts: 26
Likes: 0
From: West London
What I find astonishing is that the U.S. population and U.S. government agencies such as the FCC go absolutely crazy when Janet Jackson flashes a nipple for one whole second... yet they don't care that hard-core pornographic emails are frequently and regularly sent to children by spammers.
Total bloody hypocracy...
Total bloody hypocracy...
Joined: Jul 2003
Posts: 238
Likes: 15
From: Cow Corner
Anyone else's GMail Spam folder getting hit by various PHAxyzRMA mails? And over the last few days VxAGRA mails? Am surprised that the folks at GMail are actually even letting these get to the account and not stopping them outright....
Still, GMail has the best spam filter i've seen so far, and Lycos has the worst. Even worse than Hotmail....
Still, GMail has the best spam filter i've seen so far, and Lycos has the worst. Even worse than Hotmail....
Plastic PPRuNer
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 1,902
Likes: 0
From: Rochechouart, France
The answer to spam (apart from death/prison) lies with your ISP
My ISP (M-Web/Iafrica) has heavy-duty anti-spam, worm and virus filters in action and despite the fact that I'm online a lot I get very little spam.
An external firewall, Mailwasher, AVG and an up-to-date HOSTS file deal with the few that trickle through.
My brother in London (admittedly less sophisticated in his defences) is deluged with this garbage.
Your ISP should be dealing with this - if they're not, pressure them or change to one who does.
My ISP (M-Web/Iafrica) has heavy-duty anti-spam, worm and virus filters in action and despite the fact that I'm online a lot I get very little spam.
An external firewall, Mailwasher, AVG and an up-to-date HOSTS file deal with the few that trickle through.
My brother in London (admittedly less sophisticated in his defences) is deluged with this garbage.
Your ISP should be dealing with this - if they're not, pressure them or change to one who does.
'nough said
Joined: Sep 2002
Posts: 1,025
Likes: 0
From: Raynes Park
I have my own server with spamassassin installed - I reckon it captures about 99.5% of spam. A few slip through such as the odd-eBay and bank spoof/phishing and the you-must-buy-this-stock-now junk. I used to get 300+ a day with my former provider, now it's down to 5-6.
I can only guess most ISP don't use that sort of technology for fear of deleting something important
Joined: Jun 2003
Posts: 13,787
Likes: 0
From: EuroGA.org
I think this subject was discussed before. I recall suggesting having a domain name, and varying the bit to the left of the "@" when too much spam starts to arrive.
Spam filters are OK and can be quite clever but you have to understand that you will lose some genuine mail too. This is absolutely impossible to avoid. It may not matter to individuals but it should matter to a business. These days, spam filters and spamcop-type blacklists (the latter often unwarranted, and resulting from a whole ISP being blacklisted for a few days) ensure that a load of genuine emails go missing, which is IMHO pretty stupid.
In my business, we had a website since about 1995. I made the mistake of having several email addresses on the website (the usual [email protected], [email protected], etc) in plain text, and I think it was these more than any other single factor that eventually (by 2004) resulted in 98% of our email being spam. Today it is about 99%.
Filtering systems like Mailwasher (loaded with about 50 filters) are fun to play with but when you get say 10 real emails and 1000 spams per day, you will lose at least a couple of the real ones, which is unacceptable. Mailwasher will delete 990 of the spams too but that's useless if you lose a few real emails. The only solution is to let Mailwasher identify the spam prior to deletion and check it all manually, but that can take ages. IMHO, in any scenario where Mailwasher's spam ID can be manually checked,one could have deleted the spam manually.
So I went for an authentication system, which returns an email to each new sender asking him to REPLY to it. A reply then places the sending address on a whitelist. Spammers never read anything that comes back and they don't do the reply. There are several commercial outfits offering this kind of thing, but ours is clever in that outgoing emails are parsed for the To: header and that goes into the whitelist too, so if we write to somebody first he doesn't encounter the antispam system.
The whitelist was preloaded with known customers and we also run a list of keywords which, if found anywhere in the email, cause it to bypass the antispam system.
Now, we have a working email system. We don't lose any emails (other than those from people too dumb to read the authentication request, and there are always a few of those). The server works hard for its living grinding 1000 emails a day through all these keyword matching algorithms and running a few GB of spam on a 2-week FIFO queue but, hey, that's what computers are for!
A private individual should register a domain name ... I wrote out detailed instructions on this a month or two ago.
Spam filters are OK and can be quite clever but you have to understand that you will lose some genuine mail too. This is absolutely impossible to avoid. It may not matter to individuals but it should matter to a business. These days, spam filters and spamcop-type blacklists (the latter often unwarranted, and resulting from a whole ISP being blacklisted for a few days) ensure that a load of genuine emails go missing, which is IMHO pretty stupid.
In my business, we had a website since about 1995. I made the mistake of having several email addresses on the website (the usual [email protected], [email protected], etc) in plain text, and I think it was these more than any other single factor that eventually (by 2004) resulted in 98% of our email being spam. Today it is about 99%.
Filtering systems like Mailwasher (loaded with about 50 filters) are fun to play with but when you get say 10 real emails and 1000 spams per day, you will lose at least a couple of the real ones, which is unacceptable. Mailwasher will delete 990 of the spams too but that's useless if you lose a few real emails. The only solution is to let Mailwasher identify the spam prior to deletion and check it all manually, but that can take ages. IMHO, in any scenario where Mailwasher's spam ID can be manually checked,one could have deleted the spam manually.
So I went for an authentication system, which returns an email to each new sender asking him to REPLY to it. A reply then places the sending address on a whitelist. Spammers never read anything that comes back and they don't do the reply. There are several commercial outfits offering this kind of thing, but ours is clever in that outgoing emails are parsed for the To: header and that goes into the whitelist too, so if we write to somebody first he doesn't encounter the antispam system.
The whitelist was preloaded with known customers and we also run a list of keywords which, if found anywhere in the email, cause it to bypass the antispam system.
Now, we have a working email system. We don't lose any emails (other than those from people too dumb to read the authentication request, and there are always a few of those). The server works hard for its living grinding 1000 emails a day through all these keyword matching algorithms and running a few GB of spam on a 2-week FIFO queue but, hey, that's what computers are for!
A private individual should register a domain name ... I wrote out detailed instructions on this a month or two ago.
