SPAM again

[RoadRunner]

I'm so tired of spam. For every 1 real email I get, I get about 10 spam. I wish they would make it illegal like they did junk faxes.

[kezzer]

Ugh! I know, my bulk folder gets at least 150 a day. Usually after I empty it I have new ones in it too.

[RoadRunner]

Spam, spam, spam, spam.

It seems like I get a little break on the weekends, then it picks back up on Mondays.

[Tybalt0125]

oh man, I get so much spam mails. it is horrible.
i hope that these guys who send those mails, are going to be
punished some time. :)

[raybeck]

Me, too! It is very aggravating to say the least, something must be done...but what?

[Tybalt0125]

I don't know. But maybe someone else has the answer.
*hoping*
:)

[RoadRunner]

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/127012_Microsoft17ww.htmlREDMOND -- Microsoft Corp. announced it has filed 15 lawsuits against alleged e-mail spammers in Washington state and the United Kingdom on Tuesday.

The lawsuits accuse the defendants collectively of flooding Microsoft's computer systems and its customers with more than 2 billion deceptive unsolicited e-mail messages.

The 15 lawsuits address some of the most misleading, deceptive and offensive spam e-mail received by Microsoft customers, the company said in a news release.

Microsoft cited Washington's strong anti-spam law, which allows Internet service providers to take action against spammers to protect consumers.If anyone ought to have the financial ability to fight spam, it would be Microsoft.

[raybeck]

Let's wish them much luck!

[Nise]

I have two accounts. The account with MSN gets the worst spam. It's vulgar and very offensive!!! I have tried to block/delete them but they come back with different email addresses....How are they doing that???
It really make me want to throw something. I'm afraid I'll open one sometime and my child see the smut they've sent me. GRRRRRR!

[raybeck]

I agree, very much of the spam mail is offensive! I never open it, but try to report it as spam, but they seem to keep sending, one way or another.

[dreuby]

I use MailWasher toi check my mail before I download it. Then I can delete the spam, and anything else I don't need to download, and send bounces.

[Radu]

Most email programs/services should offer e-mail filters in their prefferences. I've used usa.net and mail.com for my email, and both ofter filters. Just put in the most common terms that you see in spam, such as "sex" "viagra" "refinance" "be your own boss" "APR", ect. I've done that and I don't remember the last time I've gotten a spam email.

On another note.. is anybody else hungry? {cool}

[theyeti]

In the time I was gone I got 130-some spam emails at MSN. About 50 of which went straight to my Inbox! Of course, MSN is the one I use whenever I have to enter my email somewhere... I hardly ever get personal things there. Yahoo is what I use for my personal account, and I only got 3 SPAM emails there this week, and they all went to the bulk mail folder.

And yeah, I AM! {cool}

[Karenluvs6]

this new 9.0 'spam filter' is driving me crazy!!
It's tossing all my 'good' emails and allowing me to receive all the 'viagra' and 'weight loss' emails.
I swear I get about 10 viagra emails a day. {mad}

[raybeck]

Oh man, I just now updated to 9.0...hope I didn't make a mistake by doing that!!!

Hey, where has Roadrunner been??? Haven't seen him around in quite sometime.

[Karenluvs6]

I haven't really had any problems with the 9.0, raybeck. Just the spam thing...it's annoying.
I keep going into the spam folder and choosing the emails that shouldn't be in there and then click on 'this is not spam'..but it seems to keep putting those emails in there each day.
I shouldn't have to keep doing that with the same mails.
Other than that, I love the new aol.

[theyeti]

I want to know what's the deal with this new kind of spam i'm getting. Actually it's not really spam, but...
The stuff shows up in my inbox because it claims it's from the "Mail Delivery Subsystem", but really it's from some nonsense domain name. Usually it has a file attached, leading me to believe it's some sort of virus, so I delete it right away. But I've gotten 3 or 4 a day for the past couple days, so it's getting annoying.
Then just a couple minutes ago I got one claiming to be from AOL replying to a question I had asked them. I don't even have AOL.

[dreuby]

I'm getting them too ... but I'm clean of virii, so I'm not sure if they're just spam, or someone whose hijacked my domain name again {sigh}

[theyeti]

I'm starting to get more spam in my yahoo account. Not enough to be a big nuisance, its just that I'm always right close to the space limit b/c I'm one of those people who can never delete anything! {evil} So I have to empty my bulk mail when there's like... 5 in there. {rolleyes}

[kezzer]

I get a ton of spam in my yahoo, at least it is not near the degree to what I got in hotmail. And not as nasty.

[Grimey]

My spam has been down lately. Is it just me, or are other people getting less of it?

[mec]

Watch your credit account very closely. AOL sometimes extracts money for unsolicited services such as AOL AutoVantage. This keeps police busy investigating credit card fraud and getting refunds for the victims.

[mec]

The mail delivery subsystem spam may be coming through a Microsoft internal messaging mechanism that can be disabled without bad effect. You can probably search www.komando.com and find out how to do this.

The amazing thing about spam is there must be some idiots actually buying the products they are hawking. Scary since some of these people are driving cars and voting.

[jamesglewisf]

Hooray!!!!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/north_west/3594043.stmPeter Okoeguale, 33, was jailed for 20 months for his part in the e-mail fraud, also known as the Nigerian 419 scam.

Caernarfon Crown Court heard victims are promised a share of cash if they help with the movement of millions of dollars out of Africa.

But they are then duped into handing over cash themselves to overcome an unforeseen difficulty.

[mec]

The Nigerians have gotten such a bad rep on this that they have started pretending to come from different countries.

One interestng variation I got was from the brother of the defense minister in exile of the Congo Republic. He wanted me to assist with a multi million dollar gun running operation.

[CuriousG]

If you want to see someone who really took this to extremes, go to the link I've provided. The guy who made the website is a actually a friend of one of my coworkers. He got one of these Nigerian scam letters and just messed with the people who sent it to him for over six months. He would send them random things in the mail and actually talked on the phone to them, etc. Some of this stuff is pretty funny. He documented everything and I believe its all on the website. I think he may have had a little too much time on his hands...

http://www.deancameron.com/nigeria.htm

[mec]

umm hummmm. that's real United Nations, Hands across the Sea stuff there. Mebeso himfella get the message by'mby

[Grimey]

LOL! That's funny.

[jamesglewisf]

http://www.vnunet.com/news/1157396Virus writers are teaming up with spammers to generate more sophisticated email attacks, research shows.

The MessageLabs Intelligence Email Security report shows that 63.5 per cent of all email sent in the first half of 2004 was spam.

Furthermore, 8.3 per cent, or one in 12 emails sent, contained a virus, according to the report.

MessageLabs, which specialises in managed email security services, says virus writers are getting increasingly friendly with spammers and generating more devastating email attacks.

[mec]

I just heard a second hand story that the guy who was circulating that picture of the 1,000 pound hog called "hogzilla" had made a deal with some spam outfit to implant a spyware tracking program into the picture. Supposedly he got money for evey hit on the hog and the people who opened the pictured picked up another tracking cookie.

Story may be bogus but scumware is every where. If you open yahoo, you will pick up doubleclick, advertising.com, admint, and a bunch of others. I paid $30 for AdSubtract Pro. it kills pop-ups and lets you delete any spyware that gets through.

[Justawoman]

About a year ago I decided to tackle our spam/junk mail problem. We use outlook, whichever version is the latest. I figured out that if you check the properties of an email you will see an option. If you go to details, sometimes you can pick up an address where the email in your inbox generated from. I would email this entity and enclose the whole spam email. I would request that they remove us and that I was not giving them permission to sell our information to any third parties. It actually worked for awhile until my spouse decided he wanted to be in charge of email. Well he has a whole truck load again and does nothing with it. But if you decide to handle spam on your own be prepared to actually send letters snail mail to the companies with your request to be removed. Legally they are suppose to honor such request. I know tracing emails back to the original source works if you are willing to spend some significant time online doing so and writing letters and even sometimes calling the companies that provide email services to spammers and businesses.

[mec]

I tried that on my yahoo account and found out that returning their mail just confirms your active e-mail address and they send more spam. Got way out of hand and I still get about 900 spams on that address to every one legitimate message.

[jamesglewisf]

I registered my own domain name (jamesglewis.com) and pay about $10 a month with www.hostmatters.com to host it. They provide like 20 email addresses. But the most important features they offer are default email addresses, forwarding, and Spam Assassin. Here's how you make it work.

Let's say that your domain is freddyk.com. You set up a real email address like fkrueger@freddyk.com. That's the one that you give to your friends, but you never use it to sign up for anything. Instead, when you sign up for something, you use the first part of the email address to identify where you signed up. For instance,

nytimes@freddyk.com
frappydoo@freddyk.com
aol@freddyk.com
barnesandnoble@freddyk.com

Then you need to be careful when you are registering at those sites to opt out of any information sharing.

Next, on the hostmatters.com control panel for your URL, you set up fkrueger@freddyk.com as the default address.

When one of the companies, say The New York Times, sends you an email, they will send it to nytimes@freddyk.com. Since that email address really doesn't exist, the servers at hostmatters just forward the email to your default address.

Now you know when you receive an email from Billy Bob's Computer Warehouse that was sent to nytimes@freddyk.com that the nytimes website shared your email address.

If at some point you decide that you don't want to get anymore emails from nytimes, then you simply forward the nytimes@freddyk.com to :blackhole: which is a special command that tells the hostmatters servers just to delete the email.

If at sometime your fkrueger@freddyk.com got hijacked by a spammer, you just come up with a new email account like fk@freddyk.com. You start telling your friends about it. After you think all of your friends know about it, you delete the old fkrueger@freddyk.com account and you tell the server to forward all emails to fkrueger@freddyk.com to :fail:. That will make the emails bounce back to the sender for a while. At some point when you are absolutely positive that all the people you care about are using the new address, you make the old one point to :blackhole:. If you do blackhole first, people will think the email made it to you because there was no error message.

At some point, spammers will start sending emails to addresses they make up like:

webmaster@freddyk.com
info@freddyk.com
marketing@freddyk.com

You just go ahead from the beginning and forward them to :blackhole:.

There is one last feature that is useful at hostmatters servers. They have software called Spam Assassin that will evaluate your emails and ad something like *****SPAM****** to the subject line of every suspected spam email. It does a pretty good job.

BTW, I don't think I have ever gotten a bad email from one of those sites that I sign up at and use the special email address like nytimes@freddyk.com. And I have signed up at a bunch of places. Most websites are very honorable in their dealings with your private information.

[Justawoman]

Thanks James for the tip.

[jamesglewisf]

They had a big crackdown on spammers yesterday. They arrested over 20 people. The feds are cracking down on cybercrime.
Amid rumors that cyberterrorists planned to disrupt the Internet on Thursday, the Justice Department revealed major enforcement actions against identity thieves and spammers. The day before, DOJ officials said at a press conference that federal agents had served six warrants in New York, Texas, and Wisconsin against five residences and one Internet service provider as part of an investigation of illegal file trading over peer-to-peer networks.

"Today's actions send an important message to those who steal over the Internet. When online thieves illegally distribute copyrighted programs and products, they put the livelihoods of millions of hard-working Americans at risk and damage our economy," Attorney General John Ashcroft said. "The execution of today's warrants disrupted an extensive peer-to-peer network suspected of enabling users to traffic illegally in music, films, software, and published works. The Department of Justice is committed to enforcing intellectual-property laws, and we will pursue those who steal copyrighted materials even when they try to hide behind the false anonymity of peer-to-peer networks." http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=42700037

My internet was down last night. I wonder if there was a connection.