Unsolicited Commercial E-mail Research Six Month Report

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.cdt.org/speech/spam/030319spamreport.shtml' target='_blank'>http://www.cdt.org/speech/spam/0303...pamreport.shtml</a><br /><br /></div>"In the summer of 2002, CDT embarked on a project to attempt to determine the source of spam. To do so, we set up hundreds of different e-mail addresses, used them for a single purpose, and then waited six months to see what kind of mail those addresses were receiving. It should come as no surprise to most e-mail users that many of the addresses CDT created for this study attracted spam, but it is very interesting to see the different ways that e-mail addresses attracted spam -- and the different volumes -- depending on where the e-mail addresses were used. The results offer Internet users insights about what online behavior results in the most spam. The results also debunk some of the myths about spam."<br /><br />Spam continues to be a huge problem, so if you're curious about how spammers work, check out this article. This is a good time for me to mention the only anti-spam tool that has lasted for more than a week on my computers: <a href="http://www.cloudmark.com/products/spamnet/">Cloudmark's Spamnet.</a> The principal behind Spamnet is insanely powerful: when I check my email, every message is processed and compared to a massive database on the Spamnet server. If it's spam, I have the software configured to send the spam into my deleted items folder in Outlook, and it's marked as read along the way, so I never even see it. If I see spam that isn't flagged as spam, I can click BLOCK - the message headers for that spam then get uploaded to the Spamnet server, and processed. When you check your email 10 minutes later and get the same piece of spam, it's flagged and tossed out, because I did the work of flagging that message as spam.<br /><br />The reality is that it's a little more complex than that of course on the back end - a certain number of users have to flag something as spam, and you can unblock a legitimate email message and that will help to cancel out the users flagging it as spam. The proof is in the numbers: since installing Spamnet on this build of my system, which is perhaps a month old now, I've received 5919 email messages. 2350 of those were spam, and Spamnet let 54 of them through. <b>That's 98% accuracy </b>- smokin'! Spamnet went through a rough period a few months ago when it was letting through about 30% of the spam, but lately it's been killer.<br /><br />If you run Outlook 2000 or XP, and you're sick of spam, PLEASE try this tool. I have no affiliation with the company, and for now the tool is free, so go check it out. It's rare to get people contacting me months later to thank me for recommending a piece of software to them, but it happens quite often with Spamnet. You gotta' love that! :mrgreen: And to the Pocket PC Thoughts reader who first told me about this tool, thank you!<br /><br /><b>UPDATE:</b> Talk about bad timing! Apparently Spamnet is no longer free and they're just about to move to a paid model. Still, check out the tool.

[Bob S]

I signed up for a new Email account when I signed up for A new account with a major country wide ISP. I have never told anyone what the address was and have never used it to send email. Within minutes of signing up I was recieving spam. Even with their Spam Blocker in service I still get 3-5 spams a day.

:roll:

[klinux]

Yup, sounds like a dictionary attack...

***

Wow, Jason, so you get 119 e-mails a day on average?! And this is probably just from one system as you may have other systems and accounts, and this is in addition to the site's forums and any other ones you may be ineterested in,etc - information overload - can't compute!!!! :twisted:

[Jason Dunn]

Wow, Jason, so you get 119 e-mails a day on average?! And this is probably just from one system as you may have other systems and accounts, and this is in addition to the site's forums and any other ones you may be ineterested in,etc - information overload - can't compute!!!! :twisted:

Yeah - it's actually more than that during the week days. The weekend it slows down a little. But isn't it pathetic that about 50% of my email is spam? Sheesh...insane! I HATE SPAM! That's why I love Spamnet so much - it's really, really good.

Honestly though, compared to the amount of email I've seen Microsoft people get when they do a SEND/RECEIVE in Outlook, I'm just a wee fish. ;-)

[Hyperluminal]

I used to get a lot of spam, more than the amount of real email I got. The funny thing was, my address was never really written publicly, I didn't use chat rooms or the like, and I didn't really give my address to many companies. Anyway, one day it really got to me, so I changed it. To prevent dictionary attacks, I made it a bunch of seemingly random letters and numbers. Now I don't get any spam (except for the occasional Nigerian 419 one every few months).

By the way, my old address was [email protected]. My new one is i36835: i for iPaq; 36 for my 3600; and 835 for the 3835 that I have now. :)

[jsanfordii]

I've been real happy with Choicemail (http://www.digiportal.com) (I have no affiliation with them).

I bought the software about 6-7 months ago, and love the concept. If they are in my outlook directory, then the mail comes through. If I send an email, then that address is allowed. All others have to fill out an easy form to ask for my permission to send me email. It works great.

I was concerned at first because as a small business owner, I wanted emails from prospects etc. to get through. So far this has not really been a problem, and I've asked people if it was a hassle, and so far not a single complaint.

Anyway, just my experience...

james

[Jason Dunn]

All others have to fill out an easy form to ask for my permission to send me email. It works great.

Permission-based systems are interesting, but only if there's a human at the other end. I don't really like having to jump through hoops like this for everyone who gets an email from our forum software (thread notifications, etc). :evil: If everyone used a system like this, I'd probably shut off all notifications. :|

[qmrq]

This isn't exactly news . .

[Jason Dunn]

This isn't exactly news . .

It's an off-topic post. If you don't like seeing them, please use the filtering function found at the top right of the home page.

[rlobrecht]

If you run Outlook 2000 or XP, and you're sick of spam, PLEASE try this tool. I have no affiliation with the company, and for now the tool is free, so go check it out.

It appears that it is no longer free. I couldn't find a price listed, but there is a bunch of information about subscribing to the service, and a free 30 day trial.

[Unreal32]

Interesting that although some people complained that they don't post their email address, it's possible still for companies to get your address and send spam: Bots or email harvesters comb the web looking for instances of the @ sign, and then process those as possible email addresses. So even if *you* didn't post your email address, it's possible someone else did somewhere. Web designers now recommend that you put your email address on your home pages now as a linked graphic rather than as text, to make it harder for a bot to snag. Same thing goes for keeping your internet security tight and only enabling cookies when necessary.

Also, the new Outlook 2003 has HTML email turned OFF by default, which will hopefully help prevent some quantity of spam. Currently, savvy spammers/e-marketers put scripts in their HTML email that tells them who read their message or viewed their page, even if you only have the "preview" mode of Outlook 2000 or 2002 enabled.

[darsmith]

For a very interesting and informative collection of articles on SPAM, go to http://www.paulgraham.com/antispam.html. It includes an article on "Filters vs. Blacklists" giving reasons why blacklists are ultimately not useful anti spam tools. I believe Spamnet falls into the "blacklist" tool category. The Cloudmark's site also indicates you can try it "for 30 days free". The implication is that if it's free now, it won't be much longer.

I recommend trying a statistically sound, free (Open Source) anti spam tool called POPFile (http://sourceforge.net/projects/popfile/). "POPFile is an email classification tool with a Naive Bayes classifier, a POP3 proxy and a web interface. It runs on most platforms and with most email clients."

I've used it to process over 4000 emails (93% spam), with over 98% accuracy and ZERO false positives.

[lgingell]

I used Cloudmark Spamnet for a while. It's great for a desktop Oulook user, but since it is client based, its useless for a PocketPC wireless user. I use Server ActiveSync, so I get tons of email when I'm wireless (70% of the time), so I don't bother with Cloudmark any longer.

A server based Spamnet is the only way to go. Currently we use a home-grown VBScript filter + ORF from http://www.vamsoft.com, which works pretty well....and its all server-based.

I know you don't use an Exchange server, but lots of folks out here do. I spent most of my life flying all over the place, and I can't leave a desktop machine logged into Outlook all the time. I used to have to do this with a BlackBerry and it stinks (and so did the Raspberry, er... BlackBerry!).

Oh to be rid of spam!
..lance

[Jason Dunn]

If you run Outlook 2000 or XP, and you're sick of spam, PLEASE try this tool. I have no affiliation with the company, and for now the tool is free, so go check it out.

It appears that it is no longer free. I couldn't find a price listed, but there is a bunch of information about subscribing to the service, and a free 30 day trial.

Gadzooks! Of all the bad timing...well, I'll likely subscribe, unless it's insanely expensive. :D

[Janak Parekh]

This isn't exactly news . .
Actually, did you read the article on the top? It was from last month. Jason talked about SpamNet as an aside, but the spam report was very interesting.

Myself, I have the luxury of deploying SpamAssassin (www.spamassassin.org) on my mail server. It's a free Perl script that works wonders. It has a bunch of static rules to catch most spam, and also employs Bayesian learning to learn my email profiles (i.e., spam vs. nonspam). Best of all, the learning can be mostly automatic; I only have to train it on stuff it misses the first time, for the most part. It also supports SpamNet-like features (like Vipul's Razor (razor.sourceforge.net)) if you want to set it up that way, although I haven't needed it - it's about 98% effective for me too.

--janak

[Jason Dunn]

Also, the new Outlook 2003 has HTML email turned OFF by default

I worry what this will do to all the great HTML newsletters I get via email...I refuse to return to the ugly world of plain text, even if it means getting spam.

[Jhokur2k]

I use Mailwasher, which presents me a list of the e-mails and the topics, and will also show the headers. It also works of a spam list, and allows you to add addresses by wildcard to a bounced (it will bounce blocked e-mails, as a reply from the server) or a friends list. It's been pretty good, but it does require more interaction that others.

[qmrq]

I don't care about the fact that it is offtopic, this study has useful information for anyone who uses a computer. Just a little surprised it's being posted when it happened so long ago. :P

[Janak Parekh]

Also, the new Outlook 2003 has HTML email turned OFF by default
I worry what this will do to all the great HTML newsletters I get via email...I refuse to return to the ugly world of plain text, even if it means getting spam.
I suspect it's off for sending, not receiving. (And as for me, give me plaintext newsletters any day. Yes, I'm weird. ;))

--janak

[bdeli]

UPDATE: Talk about bad timing! Apparently Spamnet is no longer free and they're just about to move to a paid model. Still, check out the tool.

I have to say that I am really disappointed with Spamnet. First it was free - I have been using their product for the past 6 months or so. A lot of BETA users myself included, helped Spamnet get their current database of spammers - so why are they going to charge now! :evil:

[bdeli]

Also, the new Outlook 2003 has HTML email turned OFF by default, which will hopefully help prevent some quantity of spam. Currently, savvy spammers/e-marketers put scripts in their HTML email that tells them who read their message or viewed their page, even if you only have the "preview" mode of Outlook 2000 or 2002 enabled.

Actually this is a great feature in Outlook 2003. If you have the address of a particular newsletter which you deem as secure you can add it in the Trusted sites in IE Options and when an email is received from that particulare site the HTML email will appear as it should. If not in the Trusted site - than HTML code will not display as long as you do not click on the option to show the blocked content.

[Jason Dunn]

Myself, I have the luxury of deploying SpamAssassin (www.spamassassin.org) on my mail server.

The problem I always have with server-based solutions is that I worry there are some valid email messages in there and I have to go check them out...that's also the same problem I've had with applications on the client side that sit between my POP3 server and Outlook and put email into a custom "spam zone".

But I feel the pain of not having a server-based solution whenever I check email wirelessly, that's for sure...

[retlaw]

I used to get 70-100 spam messages a day. I have had the same email address for 6 1/2 years and could not change it. I have tried over 25+ products to solve the problem and the only one I am happy with is www.ipermitmail.com I have been using it for 5 months now and I have been 100% spam free the entire time. :D

[gtarent]

The best Spam solution I have come up with is by using a combination of the built in filters of outlook. The most powerful being a simple check to see if my email address is in the "To" or "CC:" field, if it is not it moves to a seperate folder labeled as "Suspected SPAM". Works wonderfully, but has a few downsides. First it still downloads the email before filtering, but with a broadband connection this is not an issue. It also filters a lot of subscribed list emails, but I do not use these often, so no issue.

[Janak Parekh]

The problem I always have with server-based solutions is that I worry there are some valid email messages in there and I have to go check them out...that's also the same problem I've had with applications on the client side that sit between my POP3 server and Outlook and put email into a custom "spam zone".
Actually, this is what's nice about SpamAssassin. Potential spam just gets a few extra header fields tagged onto it, and I filter by those - that's it. :)

But I feel the pain of not having a server-based solution whenever I check email wirelessly, that's for sure...
Yep :D Server-side spam and mail filtering rocks.

--janak

[Jason Dunn]

I don't care about the fact that it is offtopic, this study has useful information for anyone who uses a computer. Just a little surprised it's being posted when it happened so long ago. :P

When WHAT happened so long ago? :lol: Spam isn't a static topic - there are always new ways to fight it, new tools, etc. Like I said, if you don't like us posting on this, please don't read it. :D

[Jason Dunn]

UPDATE: Talk about bad timing! Apparently Spamnet is no longer free and they're just about to move to a paid model. Still, check out the tool.

I have to say that I am really disappointed with Spamnet. First it was free - I have been using their product for the past 6 months or so. A lot of BETA users myself included, helped Spamnet get their current database of spammers - so why are they going to charge now! :evil:

&lt;shrug> Don't they have a right to make a living off their work? :| Code doesn't write itself, and I'm sure they have big server and bandwidth bills. I've gotten to be mostly spam free for almost a year now, so that's been very cool - I'm happy to help them beta test their product.

If a service is really good and useful, why would you oppose paying for it? Conversely, if you WON'T pay for something really useful, what WILL you pay for? :wink: Serious question...

[Unreal32]

Also, the new Outlook 2003 has HTML email turned OFF by default

I worry what this will do to all the great HTML newsletters I get via email...I refuse to return to the ugly world of plain text, even if it means getting spam.

You can allow certain senders to send full HTML email to you, by granting them permission in Outlook 2003. So the only time you might need to worry about this is the first time you receive an email from someone.

Although... that said, some mail I get seems to come from a different address every month (like this one annoying one I get from Palm every month or so). And for that, selectively allowing permissions wouldn't work. Although since I don't give a crap about Palm, it'd work great in my case :)

[bdeli]

&lt;shrug> Don't they have a right to make a living off their work? :| Code doesn't write itself, and I'm sure they have big server and bandwidth bills. I've gotten to be mostly spam free for almost a year now, so that's been very cool - I'm happy to help them beta test their product.

If a service is really good and useful, why would you oppose paying for it? Conversely, if you WON'T pay for something really useful, what WILL you pay for? :wink: Serious question...

Granted - but if you ever read the End user Licence Agreement it always said that spamnet was going to be free. A beta or two ago they included an option to include this piece of text in your signature - "Get your free, save spam protection at ...". In the last beta build it reads - "One month FREE spam protection at www.cloudmark.com".

[qmrq]

When the study was published. It's been a little while.

I also find this thread quite interesting, so I think I'll keep reading if you don't mind. ;P

[theroterts]

UPDATE: Talk about bad timing! Apparently Spamnet is no longer free and they're just about to move to a paid model. Still, check out the tool.

I'm kind of suprised anyone thought that it would be free forever... Spamnet is without a doubt the best spam filter I've used.

That said, look what their press release says about the new fees...

"To celebrate final availability and to thank our loyal SpamFighters, Cloudmark is offering beta users a special discount price of $3.99 a month to continue the fight against spam. New users can try SpamNet FREE for 30-days at www.cloudmark.com/spamnet and then pay only $4.99 a month to experience the spam protection trusted by hundreds of thousands."

And it also says...

"We will not expire or turn off the beta, so our current beta users will still be protected from spam even with the availability of 1.0."

So basically, don't upgrade and it's still free. Or if you want to help them out and say thanks, give 'em $4 a month. It's a no-brainer to me.

It's always funny to me that people make these decisions having never even checked the website to get the facts. Jason's right - they have to make a living!

[Jason Dunn]

I also find this thread quite interesting, so I think I'll keep reading if you don't mind. ;P

I agree! That's why I named the site "Pocket PC Thoughts" and not "Pocket PC Newswire". :lol:

[Jason Dunn]

[color=darkred]"To celebrate final availability and to thank our loyal SpamFighters, Cloudmark is offering beta users a special discount price of $3.99 a month to continue the fight against spam.

$3.99 a month is PERFECT. I'll pay that in a heartbeat - the service is worth at least that much to me. I would have paid $10 US a month for it if they asked...

[Kati Compton]

Also, the new Outlook 2003 has HTML email turned OFF by default

I worry what this will do to all the great HTML newsletters I get via email...I refuse to return to the ugly world of plain text, even if it means getting spam.

And for parents that want to send me emails and make some of the words a pretty shade of blue or red.

[bbarker]

I get a volume of email (and spam) comparable to Jason's. I used SpamNet for a few months and thought it was pretty good, although there were some things that annoyed me about it. I stopped using it about 2 months ago so some of these may have changed, but:
It took MANY steps and mouse clicks to add a sender to my white list (the list of senders whose mail will never be blocked).
Clicking on an email that was incorrectly filtered (and went to the SpamNet folder) does not add that sender to the white list. This is a huge inconvenience.
I found way too many messages getting filtered that shouldn't have. Adding these to the white list was a big pain (see above).PC Magazine recently gave SpamCatcher its Editor's Choice award so I tried it to see if it was any better. After the 30-day trial I purchased the product. It works so much better for me than SpamNet did! It overcomes each of the problems I listed above for SpamNet.

SpamCatcher is cheaper than SpamNet apparently will be. You pay $19.95 and that includes a year of updates.

(I am not affiliated in any way with either of these companies. I'm just a consumer.)

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

As someone else mentioned, it doesn't matter how secretive you keep your email address. The bot programs will find you if you choose an email name that is listed in one of their databases.

What I do is just choose two words and separate them with an underscore... so my email address would look similar to [email protected]. I've yet to receive a SINGLE spam message in 2.5 years.

Of course the trick is to make sure you don't inadvertently give that address to a shady operation in the future, but I do use my address with nearly all of the online shopping sites that I use (buy.com, amazon, handango, etc.) and all account management sites (credit cards, phone, etc.) with absolutely no issues.

[beq]

I agree many people seem to prefer SpamAssassin (www.spamassassin.org) (IIRC PCMag originally awarded (www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,849402,00.asp) Deersoft's now-defunct client-side Outlook add-in commercial version -- note that interested consumers would have to wait until Network Associates/McAfee somehow "merges" NovaSoft's SpamKiller and Deersoft's SA Pro later this year).

Anyways SA v2 seems to use just about every trick in the book as bdj mentioned, including Razor (a la SpamNet hashed msg signatures) and such. I just wish FastMail.fm (www.fastmail.fm) would hurry up and upgrade to the new version and set up the Bayesian filtering. That combined with Sieve scripting (with all extension modules) is just perfect for me. Well, that and using InsightConnector (http://www.bynari.net/index.php?id=7) for Outlook as the IMAP client -- if only there's web interface support for the non-email PST folders, but I digress...

Personally though I'm not too spam-desperate yet to use Challenge/Response filtering (it feels almost "arrogant") -- doesn't help that Mailblocks and Spam Arrest seem to be getting so much bad publicity (for suing other antispammers and spamming their own users, respectively). :) OTOH the disposable address services look interesting (Spamhole, Spamgourmet, Sneakemail, Spamex, Emailias, Mailshell, Spam Slicer, etc) as well as general filtering forward services like Despammed and Pobox. But custom domains and FM's subdomain addressing already help somewhat...

P.S. In regards to Outlook 2003, does having HTML "turned off" mean plain text display only, or still HTML but with remote image fetching turned off (like you can do on many webmails today)?? Preferrably there will be both options that you can toggle w/o having to close/reopen Outlook... Plus the ability to configure the preview pane and opened message window separately (so I can set preview to disable and message window to enable by default)!

[bdeli]

P.S. In regards to Outlook 2003, does having HTML "turned off" mean plain text display only, or still HTML but with remote image fetching turned off (like you can do on many webmails today)?? Preferrably there will be both options that you can toggle w/o having to close/reopen Outlook... Plus the ability to configure the preview pane and opened message window separately (so I can set preview to disable and message window to enable by default)!

When you receive an HTML email in Outlook 2003, images/other media originating from an external source are not shown and no info is sent to the webserver that you have read this email aka 'Web Beacon'. From Outlook 2003 Help file:
--------------------
To help protect your privacy and combat Web beacons, Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 is configured by default to not automatically download pictures and other content from the Internet. If an e-mail message tries to connect unannounced to a Web server on the Internet, Outlook blocks that connection until you decide to view the content. This feature can also help you to avoid viewing potentially offensive material (for external content linked to the message), and, if you are on a low-bandwidth connection, to decide whether an image warrants the time and bandwidth to download it.
--------------------

If you want to see the content of the image, you just click on 'Show Blocked Content' and the email will appear as it was intended to be read. If you want that HTML emails from a particular source are downloaded in full, just add that particular address/domain in the Trusted zone of Outlook.

[beq]

Oh, OK thanks for the info. So even with fetching turned off you *will* still see the HTML format of the message (bold/colored fonts, included images, etc), just with placeholders displayed in place of those remote links, right?

And I take it you can't configure the preview pane independently from the opened message view window? I think that would be perfect -- you can scroll down the message list w/o worrying about the preview pane fetching/running anything (so you could delete spam safely), but if there's a particular HTML mail you want to fully see just double click it and the new opened message window will fetch everything by default...

[bdeli]

Oh, OK thanks for the info. So even with fetching turned off you *will* still see the HTML format of the message (bold/colored fonts, included images, etc), just with placeholders displayed in place of those remote links, right?

And I take it you can't configure the preview pane independently from the opened message view window? I think that would be perfect -- you can scroll down the message list w/o worrying about the preview pane fetching/running anything (so you could delete spam safely), but if there's a particular HTML mail you want to fully see just double click it and the new opened message window will fetch everything by default...

If you have any preview pane turned on the only content in HTML emails which is downloaded are the ones you set in your Trusted Zones. Saying so the preview panes in Outlook 2003 BETA are the best I have ever seen...

[beq]

Oh yeah I read that earlier in the thread, makes sense :D

And argh I guess I wasn't thinking, you did also mention there's already an easy click toolbar button to show blocked content for the selected message, so I guess my request about preview/message window separate settings is moot...

[rlobrecht]

Myself, I have the luxury of deploying SpamAssassin (www.spamassassin.org) on my mail server. It's a free Perl script that works wonders.

I also use SpamAssassin. Its awesome. It runs on Linux at the perimiter of my network, and forwards clean mail in to my Exchange server. I run it with MailScanner (another OS script) to also scan for viruses and to filter exes, etc.

Server based is definitely the best way to go.

[marlof]

I recommend trying a statistically sound, free (Open Source) anti spam tool called POPFile (http://sourceforge.net/projects/popfile/). "POPFile is an email classification tool with a Naive Bayes classifier, a POP3 proxy and a web interface. It runs on most platforms and with most email clients."

I've used it to process over 4000 emails (93% spam), with over 98% accuracy and ZERO false positives.

Thanks for this tip. I was looking for a Naive Bayes Classifier for Windows, since I've had very good results from SpamSieve (http://www.c-command.com/spamsieve/) on OS X. I've installed POPFile, added Outclass (http://www.vargonsoft.com/Outclass/) to give it an Outlook frontend, and I'm a happy camper so far. Still in the training stages, but it's looking good.

[darsmith]

Marlof Bregonje wrote:I've installed POPFile, added Outclass to give it an Outlook frontend, and I'm a happy camper so far.

Actually, you only need to run Outclass on top of POPFile to work with an Exchange email account. If you have a regular POP mail account, POPFile will work just fine as an email proxy for practically any client.

I use Outlook as my email client for a regular POP mail connection. POPFile runs in the background while Outlook traps and actions the classification tags embedded in the header. It does a great job of not only classifying spam, but also recognizing and separating my regular email from subscription based and email meant for my wife.

[JoeMoon]

Well, here is a new one... Maybe a bit off the topic, but yet it ties into the the whole spam issue. I have been getting hammered by pop up ads... these are not the ordinary pop ads you get when you are surfing from site to site. These are ads that are sent directly to my IP address!

What gets me blood boiling on this is this - The company sending these obnoxious ads is also selling a blocker for the ads! Tell me something... Would it be wrong if I said these types of people/companies should stand in front of a firing squad!

It is like a doctor who injects you with some rare disease and then says... "For a small fee, I can give you the anti-serum for that disease I just injected into your blood stream..."

Aaaararrrrggggghhhh!!!!!

Where do these people come from? Did someone see them crawl out of the pit of hell or what?

Joe...

[Jason Dunn]

Well, here is a new one... Maybe a bit off the topic, but yet it ties into the the whole spam issue. I have been getting hammered by pop up ads... these are not the ordinary pop ads you get when you are surfing from site to site. These are ads that are sent directly to my IP address!

If you're getting these, you're not being protected by a firewall, which in this day and age is very, very dangerous. Run, don't walk to www.zonealarm.com and download their freeware version.

[JoeMoon]

Well, here is a new one... Maybe a bit off the topic, but yet it ties into the the whole spam issue. I have been getting hammered by pop up ads... these are not the ordinary pop ads you get when you are surfing from site to site. These are ads that are sent directly to my IP address!
If you're getting these, you're not being protected by a firewall, which in this day and age is very, very dangerous. Run, don't walk to www.zonealarm.com and download their freeware version.
Jason - Thanks... I can see this will be another little thing for me to learn and work around. I always thought McAfee and the Router were taking care of this for me. I guess I guessed wrong... Wouldn't be the first time!

You wouldn't know what kinda settings I need to put in place so that I can still access this machine from my house using Remote Access do you?

Joe...

[Jason Dunn]

Well, here is a new one... Maybe a bit off the topic, but yet it ties into the the whole spam issue. I have been getting hammered by pop up ads... these are not the ordinary pop ads you get when you are surfing from site to site. These are ads that are sent directly to my IP address!
If you're getting these, you're not being protected by a firewall, which in this day and age is very, very dangerous. Run, don't walk to www.zonealarm.com and download their freeware version.
Jason - Thanks... I can see this will be another little thing for me to learn and work around. I always thought McAfee and the Router were taking care of this for me. I guess I guessed wrong... Wouldn't be the first time!

You wouldn't know what kinda settings I need to put in place so that I can still access this machine from my house using Remote Access do you?

Joe...

Sure, just make sure that port 3389 is open on whatever firewall you use, and you'll be golden. Regarding the router and McAfee, do either have a firewall? It's possible you accidentally told McAfee to let one of the ads through once and now they all come through. There are about 20 variables here, so I can't cover them all, but in general I'm a fan of hardware firewalls - much more solid and clean than software firewalls. You can pick up a Microsoft MN-100 (http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/broadbandnetworking/wiredbasestation.aspx ) for really cheap now, and it will do everything you need. The setup is a breeze - I'm very impressed with their networking products.

[beq]

Just Google for messenger service spam ( http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=messenger+service+pop-up+spam ).

The problem is if you're running a server, in particular if you need to leave UDP 135 (RPC) open for things like remote connectivity to Exchange (heck it's already hard enough to nail down the specific port ranges Exchange uses). But blocking TCP 131/139 should at least help I believe. Or disabling the messenger service if you can live with that (not to be confused w/ MSN Messenger, which is also called Windows Messenger in XP) :)

P.S. What's port 3389?

[Jason Dunn]

P.S. What's port 3389?

Remote Desktop default port.