The Most Irritating Spam Blocking System Ever Created [Archive]

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Jason Dunn

05-08-2003, 05:30 PM

Ok, I just have to come out and say this: those of you using spam blocking solutions that require me to authenticate email messages coming from the Pocket PC Thoughts server are just killing me. :| PLEASE, for the love of all things holy, everyone add the pocketpcthoughts.com domain to a white list or a list of trusted senders. I cannot possibly spend the time necessary to authenticate, sign up, click on boxes, send carrier pigeons, or do whatever else each of these services require email senders to do. I appreciate your desire to be spam-free, I really do. These services work fine for small amounts of email going from person to person, but they wreak havoc with any sort of automated system (especially forum software). So, John using Mailsnare, you never got your forum registration message today, and I can't even add myself to your list of trusted senders because the email messages Mailsnare sends back have no instructions on how to do so, just a single line of text saying that I'm "not trusted". :roll: And the person using the planetnerd.net domain? You've set your email account to spam@planetnerd, yet you have your account set to watch threads. So every single time our forum software sends you an update about a thread your watching, your server bounces the message, and it comes back to me. :| We've hacked up phpBB to completely hide email addresses - no one but admins can access it, ever. It would be a great help to the admin team here if everyone could verify the email address they have in their profile (click on Preferences in the upper right corner under the banner ad). Remember we use this email address for picking contest winners too, so it's important that it be valid. This frustration also extends to those of you using auto-responders. Here's what happens: many of you turn on auto-responders before leaving your office for whatever reason, but you're still watching certain threads on the site. When that thread is updated, our server sends out an update email to the account you have on file. Your email server then politely sends an email response back to my server informing it that you're out of town, sick, or otherwise away, and that message gets forwarded to my email Inbox. Sometimes it happens multiple times because some email servers aren't smart enough to avoid a mail loops. People, people, people - these are email messages I really don't need to see. :wink: If possible, please add pocketpcthoughts.com to an ignore list for auto responders. I adore and treasure our readers, but stuff like this taints the otherwise fun experience that is Pocket PC Thoughts. :mrgreen: I also don't mean to embarrass anyone, or to point fingers, but one of the limitations of phpBB is that I can't look up users based on their email address, so it's very hard to get in touch with certain users based on the limited amount of information that I have.

rlobrecht

05-08-2003, 05:39 PM

This is only going to get worse. I read in the last day or so that one of the big ISPs (Earthlink maybe) is going to a permission based email system.

Jason Dunn

05-08-2003, 05:54 PM

This is only going to get worse. I read in the last day or so that one of the big ISPs (Earthlink maybe) is going to a permission based email system.

<sigh> :|

klinux

05-08-2003, 06:18 PM

Yup, it is common courtesy to add people to 'white lists' to prevent them (i.e. Jason) from doing work that benefits you.

Furthermore, when I leave the office now, I do not turn on AutoResponders anymore. It is my job (not my e-mail) to inform people I am going to be out and who can help them in my absence! As Jason have found, more than often, the auto-responders annoy people rather than help them!

bluevolume

05-08-2003, 06:20 PM

This is just a sign of things to come. And this particular thing is going to be the end of email, at least as we use it today. The gigantic spam beast has driven all but the last bit of life from email, and I see its only future on intranet based systems. Every measure that has been put down to reduce spam has simply caused the spam to mutate, just like any other determined parasite. The ability of spammers to forge headers in their messages may ultimately be the death blow to the geek's favorite method of communication.

Here's an example, something that happened to me. I start getting messages that I think are spam -- they are guys replying to a "come see my webcam" message from a 20's girl -- the message looks like they are replying to something that I had sent them. Then I start getting hundreds of 'undeliverable' return messages from things I never sent. Come to find out some spammer is forging his headers to look like they came from me. Now I find that many of my friends that use html mail aren't getting my messages -- I've been added to the spammer list. It's enough to make me puke.

Blue

scargill

05-08-2003, 06:21 PM

rbrome

05-08-2003, 06:36 PM

I dont understand why you dont send automails (such as reply informs) from a non existing account...just make sure you put on the bottom of each one that it is, then at least u wont get so much parp yourself!

That was my thought exactly. People don't need to be able to reply to an automatically-generated email like a thread subscription, so just set the from or reply-to address on outbound auto-emails to a "blackhole" account that points to /dev/null or something. Problem solved.

Jason Dunn

05-08-2003, 06:49 PM

This is only going to get worse. I read in the last day or so that one of the big ISPs (Earthlink maybe) is going to a permission based email system.

<sigh> :|

I dont understand why you dont send automails (such as reply informs) from a non existing account...just make sure you put on the bottom of each one that it is, then at least u wont get so much parp yourself!

That's something I can look into, but most of phpBB's functions are tied into a single email address AFAIK, and for quite a few things there needs to be a real person at the other end (forum registration problems, etc.)

Besides which, that doesn't address the problem, it just hides it - resources are still being wasted on both ends.

gorkon280

05-08-2003, 07:28 PM

I use Hotmail for all websites that need a e-mail address. If the website sends out something, it sticks out in the lsit of spam like a sore thumb. Most days, I delete delete delete. But I always skim the list before check all of those messages and blast them. At home, I use Outlook (patched up of course) and it has a decent Junk mail handling system. I only get a spam twice when they change their address and then all I have to do ti get rid of it is right click add to junk senders. I think it also seems to filter things out by subject automatically too. I don't see much spam there. At work we use Groupwise and I have yet figured out how to stem the tide of spam there. My work account used to be free of spam until some doofus decided to put the whole companies e-mail address on the companies home page! :bad-words: Now I get more spam then real mail. Also, does yoru company spam themselves? Ours does. I constantly get e-mail from people I only see twice a year telling the whole damn campus about the forum they are holding on german american poetry or folk singing or something like that! :bad-words:

Auto-responders....never use them and never will. With Groupwise's web interface, I just check my mail. If it's something important, it gets my time. If it ain't, seeya! :) :alfdance:

denivan

05-08-2003, 07:45 PM

My work account used to be free of spam until some doofus decided to put the whole companies e-mail address on the companies home page! :bad-words: Now I get more spam then real mail.

Maybe you can ask your company web designer to use this technique :
http://www.wbwip.com/wbw/emailencoder.html . It masks your e-mail adress in the html, but it's still normaly interpreted and visible in web browsers, so people can still click a mailto: link that is made this way. Alot of bots and spiders that crawl websites lurking for e-mail adresses can't interpret this correctly, although some of them are catching up.

Take a look at one of my sites : http://gprs.ivanencindy.be , all mailto: links on that page work, but you won't find a single e-mail address when you look at the page source.

Kind regards,
Ivan

lonesniper

05-08-2003, 08:12 PM

Because of spam being sent through my webhosts SMTP server one of my email addresses got black listed. Took me about 3 weeks to find out my business contacts weren't getting my email. Now I use my brother-in-laws own SMTP server as a trusted domain to send email.

I agree with people's coments about spam choking the life out of email. I get about 30-40 junk emails a day on one email account that is used on lots of forums. It used to be no problem as Outlook deletes any email with the usual key words like viagra, mortgage, penis, webcam, etc. But now I notice most of the junk uses embeded graphics to plug their crap so Outlook does not find the key words I have specified.

Colin

that_kid

05-08-2003, 08:31 PM

Yeah spam is the worse, I never used to get any spam then about 2 months ago it started ringing in. The bad thing is that now I can't send e-mail to any of my families who have aol. While I really really really really hate aol, I have a good amount of family and friends who use it and now I can't send them any e-mail.

James

05-08-2003, 08:47 PM

I hate the whole concept of the challenge/response time email systems. There are far more effective and productive ways to kill spam without requiring someone to do screw around with a challenge/response or editing whitelists, etc. etc. etc.

dma1965

05-08-2003, 09:13 PM

This is just another example of the enormous toll Spam takes on email users day in and day out. It is the electronic equivalent of walking around a neighorhood with boxes of flyers and dumping them on every doorstep in sight, every few minutes, intermingled with your real mail and newspaper. Imagine that happening every day and having to wake up and sift through a pile of rubbish before going to work EVERY SINGLE DAY, and then having to do it again when you come home and before you go to bed. It would not take long before a neighborhood lynch mob burned the offenders at a stake and toasted marshmallows over their glowing embers :devilboy:

Despite the ridiculous outcry of direct marketing associations and the ACLU that enacting laws against spam are a violation of the 1st Ammendment, I do not think that if voters could make the decision any anti-spam law would be struck down. I applaud Virginia for making it a felony to spam, and would love to see it become a federal offense to send ANY unsolicited commercial email of any kind. Email is NOT the place for that. Period :!:

If I knew a mob hitman and the location of a spammer I would gladly pay the hitman a week's salary for a custom made pair of cement shoes :!:

JoeMoon

05-08-2003, 09:14 PM

Here is my idea for the removal of spam from planet earth. The ISP and those collecting the new Internet tax should portion a % of the monies into a International Deposit Issuing of Total Spam Fund (IDIOTS Fund). When a convicted spammer gets sentenced, this fund pays for the following...

The convicted spammer gets dropped onto a small unescapable island with other convicted spammers. Each day, 5 tons of junk mail gets dumped on the island. The same junk mail on the same paper, with the same text, texture and color gets dumped each and every day. Sometimes multiple times a day. Now, each of the pieces of junk mail would contain buried within the text of the junk a unique ID number. At the end of their sentence a plane would fly over the island with a banner of one of the unique IDs. IF the person who holds the piece of junk mail with that unique ID is eligible to be lifted off the island, he has completed his sentence. Of course, before he/she is brought back into society their fingers are chopped off and they must wear a sandwich board stating that they are convicted spammers for all the remaining days of their life. And the only piece of technology they can have is a PALM PDA with 16 megs of ram.

Joe...

alanjrobertson

05-08-2003, 09:26 PM

I just installed POPFile on my PC (http://popfile.sourceforge.net) - it learns (Bayesian methods) to identify spam and flag it up (I then tell OE to put the flagged messages straight into Deleted Items, which I then check from time to time). Very nice system, free, and doesn't use challenge-response ;)
Cheers

Alan

PS. It was 'Project of the Month' for May 2003 at SourceForge - http://sourceforge.net/potm/potm-2003-05.php :D

jmarkevich

05-08-2003, 09:37 PM

The whole concept of ORBS and RBL is flawed and tends to punish the good with the bad. I hate that commercial products are coming out that promote this idea.

POPFile (and Mozilla's junk mail detection and management) are astounding, and THESE need to be promoted.

Philip Colmer

05-08-2003, 10:24 PM

This frustration also extends to those of you using auto-responders. Here's what happens: many of you turn on auto-responders before leaving your office for whatever reason, but you're still watching certain threads on the site. When that thread is updated, our server sends out an update email to the account you have on file. Your email server then politely sends an email response back to my server informing it that you're out of town, sick, or otherwise away, and that message gets forwarded to my email Inbox. Sometimes it happens multiple times because some email servers aren't smart enough to avoid a mail loops. People, people, people - these are email messages I really don't need to see. :wink: If possible, please add pocketpcthoughts.com to an ignore list for auto responders.

In most cases, if the email sent by the forum has an additional header line that says "Precedence: bulk", well behaved auto-responders won't respond to it.

Would it be possible to add that line to all email sent by the forum?

It doesn't mean that it is spam, btw, simply that the email has come from a mailing system and therefore shouldn't get an auto-response back.

Hope that helps. It is better to try to make one change than hundreds or thousands :-)

--Philip

rorithoughts

05-08-2003, 10:34 PM

SPAMPAL and SPAMWEASEL

This 2 freewares allows You to automatically filter spam without asking Your sender to do anything.

Maybe You can try and recomend this software.

I am a happy user and dont know nothing about this companies.

:D

beq

05-09-2003, 04:35 AM

Yep MailSnare offers TMDA (a C/R system), supposedly will offer SpamAssassin soon also.

I also think Bayesian filtering is very good...

Pony99CA

05-09-2003, 03:36 PM

Maybe you can ask your company web designer to use this technique :
http://www.wbwip.com/wbw/emailencoder.html . It masks your e-mail adress in the html, but it's still normaly interpreted and visible in web browsers, so people can still click a mailto: link that is made this way. Alot of bots and spiders that crawl websites lurking for e-mail adresses can't interpret this correctly, although some of them are catching up.

You don't even need to go that far. Most spiders likely key on either "mailto:" or "@". I just coded the "@" using HTML encoding, but I made it so that you can actually read my E-mail address on the Web site.

Here's what I do:

<A HREF="mailto:[email protected]"><img SRC="http://www.svpocketpc.com/svpocketpc-email.gif" ALT="[[email protected]]" HEIGHT=20 WIDTH=190 ALIGN=MIDDLE></A>

Here's how that looks:

http://www.svpocketpc.com/svpocketpc-email.gif ([email protected])

The graphic can be made in five minutes with Microsoft Paint. NOTE: The graphic doesn't really correspond to the E-mail address, which has been faked. It is just for illustrative purposes.

Since I started using this about three months ago, I haven't gotten any spam on that E-mail address.

Steve

Steven Cedrone

05-09-2003, 04:07 PM

You don't even need to go that far. Most spiders likely key on either "mailto:" or "@". I just coded the "@" using HTML encoding, but I made it so that you can actually read my E-mail address on the Web site.

Here's what I do:

Snip code...

Here's how that looks:

http://www.svpocketpc.com/svpocketpc-email.gif ([email protected])

Great tip!!! I suppose you could just change the text displayed to say something like "email me" and then use the hyperlink

mailto:comments@spamsucks.com

(eliminating the need for the graphic, unless you absolutely want the people to see your address)...

Steve

Arrrggg...Why is the code tag interpreting the "& # 64 ;" and replacing it with a @ symbol????

Jhokur2k

05-09-2003, 05:36 PM

Because of the code tag - I post on another forum that does the same thing... it "cleans up" the html for you :roll:

Steven Cedrone

05-09-2003, 05:49 PM

AFAIK, the code tag should leave whatever is in between the tags "as is"...

Oh well...

Steve

stevehiner

05-09-2003, 08:18 PM

http://www.wbwip.com/wbw/emailencoder.html . It masks your e-mail adress in the html, but it's still normaly interpreted and visible in web browsers, so people can still click a mailto: link that is made this way. Alot of bots and spiders that crawl websites lurking for e-mail adresses can't interpret this correctly, although some of them are catching up.

8O That is AWESOME! Thanks for mentioning it. I just converted my company's entire site. Our unmasked addresses have been out there so long it may be too late but hopefully it help cut down on the spam in the future.

Pony99CA

05-10-2003, 03:54 AM

Arrrggg...Why is the code tag interpreting the "& # 64 ;" and replacing it with a @ symbol????
You have to outsmart the HTML code replacement like I did. :-) Use the following:

&#64;

to type the HTML code in. It looks like this: "@".

If you go back to edit a post later, you'll also have to fix that.

Steve

Steven Cedrone

05-10-2003, 04:14 AM

You have to outsmart the HTML code replacement like I did. :-)

Ha!!! O.K., I see what you did!!! :lol:

Steve

BTW, I just had to go back and edit my post... :wink:

davidspalding

05-10-2003, 08:35 PM

AOhell is now refusing e-mail from my local mail server (at home, which admittedly is a "residential IP"). So if I want to correspond with AOler's I have to relay through my domain server (which my pal and host doesn't want to configure, reasonably), or I have to send from my domain's /webmail/ app.

Oh. I DO have an easier solution. NOT SEND MAIL TO AOL USERS. Yeah. Much easier. Now I have time to mow the f(*&ing lawn instead. Thank you AOL; now get the (*#@ off the Internet, it was better < 1994 when you opened a user gateway, anyway.
____________

WRT anti-spam spider code, there's a couple of solutions. You can copy and adapt the JS I use at http://www.Korova.com/contact/ which doesn't even look like a mailto address, and stops spiders. Or you can use the code that is created for free here (http://www.hiveware.com/enkoder_form.php), which is also unreadable by spiders. Both solutions don't use an image, but do require JS on the user end. [Correction, Hiveware's new version will also encode links using images. Kewl.]

Pony99CA

05-10-2003, 09:39 PM

WRT anti-spam spider code, there's a couple of solutions. You can copy and adapt the JS I use at http://www.Korova.com/contact/ which doesn't even look like a mailto address, and stops spiders. Or you can use the code that is created for free here (http://www.hiveware.com/enkoder_form.php), which is also unreadable by spiders. Both solutions don't use an image, but do require JS on the user end. [Correction, Hiveware's new version will also encode links using images. Kewl.]
I'd seen the Hiveware version in the past, but that requires JavaScript. Don't a lot of people turn JavaScript off to avoid pop-ups?

My code won't stop a mildly intelligent spider, but it doesn't require JavaScript and I haven't gotten any spam yet. :-)

I think there should be honey pots for spam spiders. These would be pages that everybody links to (using hidden links) that contain millions of fake E-mail addresses (and E-mail addresses of spamming companies :-D). That way the spammers' spiders would harvest garbage and spam companies would get more spam (a spammer might filter their own domain, but probably not the domains of other spammers).

Steve

davidspalding

05-11-2003, 03:31 AM

JS is now an integral part of web site functionality, I would think any idiot with any real business on the web uses ad blockers and such, not turning off things like JS, AS, Java and so on therefore breaking his browser, so to speak.

Yes, your solution doesn't depend on scripting ... as to whether it is truly ignored by spiders, time will tell.

Spammers already flood the net with messages to addresses that don't exist. That's what's polluting the net so much -- all those misfires going to nonexistant mailboxes. (E.g. From time to time, I re-enable old e-mail addees on my domain which were closed years ago. They immediately get daily gobs of spam. See, spammers don't care about bounces. )

I have a different tact. I have honeypot links on my main page which include the whois registration addees, corporate officers, etc., of confirmed spamming companies. One person who had previously refused to remove me from his list finally did so as a result of my publishing his address. Small victory, yippee. Course, that guy was a real doofus, it took him no < 2 e-mails to explain what he wanted me to do.

Kacey Green

06-24-2004, 05:46 AM