Spam Egg Spam Spam Bacon And Spam

[Kati Compton]

Do you hate spam? Sure! We all do! In fact, we've made <a href="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=29180&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0">a few posts on the subject.</a> But do you UNSUBSCRIBE from it? There are two schools of thought on this. 1. While some spammers may use it as a verification that your address is "good" and send you more spam, most will remove you from their list, and therefore, your <i>overall</i> spam will be reduced.<br /><br />2. Most spammers are not honest, or they wouldn't be advertising underage porn and warez. Therefore, any unsubscribe attempt will only <i>increase</i> the amount of spam.<br />Personally, for my most spam-infested email account, I unsubscribe when I have time. I think it's reduced the amount of spam I get, but perhaps an account needs to reach a certain threshold before it helps. Though, I have to say, I don't bother for warez spam. And why is it that mortgage spam is among the worst for not having unsubscribe links?<br /><br />Anyway - I can kind of understand some spam tricking the unwary into clicking and such, and therefore perpetuating the spam. But there are certain types of spam I just don't understand at all. I'm not trusting tons of money to a mortgage broker that has to use obvious tricks to get through my spam filter. If I can't trust them to have valid unsubscribe links that actually unsubscribe, why would I trust them with my financial future? I also hate it when the unsubscribe link redirects to a CNN news page on netscape.com. That gets me really mad!<br /><br />Even more bizarre - are you going to buy l33t medicine? V14gr4 or Z4n4x or something? Who are the people buying from these spam emails? Frankly, if they can't spell it properly, I wouldn't feel safe taking it. Plus, I'm not sure I would want people to see a bottle on my counter labeled Z010ft. "No... This is a BETTER drug than "Zoloft". It's much more 133t."

[jkendrick]

I personally never unsubscribe due to the email confirmation reason you mention.

But the reason they intentionally mispell the product names is to confuse spam blockers which is the only way they get through in the first place.

[Mithras61]

The single biggest problem with both schools is that they are both correct and both wrong.

1) Unsubscribing works only with "legit" spam, but at the same time, confirms the email address as valid. You may not get anymore spam from the company you "unsubscribed" from, but at the same time, you confirmed it is a valid email address, and they will often sell your address, so you end up getting more, not less.

2) Ignoring spam, or using an inbox filter of some sort (like qurb or spamassasin or such) still doesn't stop spam completely because of the l33t spellings, but can help some. The fundamental problem, though, is that they didn't get a NDR from an invalid address, so they keep using the address. This has slowed down somewhat as ISPs start learning that they have to block outbound NDRs to the Internet, so spammers can no longer tell if an address is valid or not based on receipt of a NDR, but this is a relatively new thing for many ISPs, so it will take a while to filter through.

3) As was pointed out in another thread, SPAM will always be a step ahead of things like spam filters, since the filter can't always be depended on to recognize a pattern correctly, so even though it doesn't appear in your Inbox, you still have to doublesheck the junkmail folder and sort through it (even if only a cursory glance is given) just to make sure your filters haven't decided that someone you correspond with is a junk sender.

In my opinion, SPAM will only be stopped when itis no longer profitable. So long as spammers can send out hundreds of thousands of emails with little or no cost, they'll keep doing so. As a spammer, even with a .05% rate of response, you're getting something (a prospect or customer) for nothing.

[Kacey Green]

anyone have a link to that spam song?

I hate spam
spam spam spam spam spam spamimity spam spam
stop singing!
spam spam spam ...

[PR.]

Exchange 2003s built in mail filters seems to get a good 98% of the rubbish the only ones it has trouble with are these wierd empty ones.

I block most domains including hotmail and yahoo, if anyone I know has these addresses they go in the safe list and they go to my inbox

Outlook 2003 blocks loading the pics and I never unsubscribe from them.

[Ryan Joseph]

You chouldn't have a post about Spam without Monty Python references! Very good! "Baked beans are off!"

Anyway, I unsubscribe occationally. I use Outlook's Junk Senders list sometimes, but I mostly just delete the spam as it comes. My problem is that I never have the time to unsubscribe. "That was never 5 minutes just now!"

:mrgreen:

[surur]

May I be the first to complement Kati on a very well put together poll, which really covered all the eventualities, especially those of the Monty Python lovers :).

Ive been using hotmail as my primary mail account for ages, and recently their spam filters have become very good, resulting in most of my "spam" being newsletters i have subscribed to long time ago, but are no longer interested in. Ive unsubscribed from some of them, but some just refuse to stop coming (e.g the hewlett packard critical update newsletter).

In short, however, recently spam has not been a problem at all (which is a pity, as Ive been enjoying the game of creating regex to catch them without killing all my other mail with MailWasher Pro).

Surur

[daS]

Even more bizarre - are you going to buy l33t medicine? V14gr4 or Z4n4x or something? Who are the people buying from these spam emails?
In some cases - nobody. There are certain spam messages that are sent only for the purpose of getting lists of vaild addresses to sell to other spammers based on the unsubscribes. They might only have an unsubscribe link and you might not find a link to buy anything in the spam itself.

Of course, the worst spam now is the "phishing" messages. Made to look like they are from the security department of Citibank, eBay, PayPal, etc. Some are even linked to very real looking copies of the company's web site and are used to get unsuspecting users to enter their account and access numbers. Never, ever click on a link in an email from your bank, etc. I take the time to send the raw text of each such message I receive to the company's fraud department. It's the only spam I do anything with besides remove it from my server (before downloading via Mailwasher (www.firetrust.com).)

By the way, I now have a "honeypot" email link on my web site. If a webbot grabs all the email addresses off the site and that address is used to send spam, the messages are automatically deleted from my mailserver and the sender is blacklisted so I don't see any of their spam going to my real email addresses. :mrgreen:

[GoldKey]

Actually, between spam filters and common sense on the ones that get through, I very rarely end up opening Spam. Therefore, I would not know if there was an unsubscribe link or not.

Like others have said, if it is actually something I signed up for, I will unsubscribe. Otherwise, if they resort to SPAM in the first place, I have very little faith they will honor my request. Even if they did, the probably unsubscribe me from their list and then resell my address as a verified one.

[Jason Dunn]

By the way, I now have a "honeypot" email link on my web site. If a webbot grabs all the email addresses off the site and that address is used to send spam, the messages are automatically deleted from my mailserver and the sender is blacklisted so I don't see any of their spam going to my real email addresses. :mrgreen:

My, how very devious! :-)

[MBaas]

anyone have a link to that spam song?


Try http://spamcollector.mbaas.de/spamsong.wav

:D

[Pony99CA]

Do you hate spam? Sure! We all do! In fact, we've made a few posts on the subject. (http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=29180&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0) But do you UNSUBSCRIBE from it? There are two schools of thought on this. 1. While some spammers may use it as a verification that your address is "good" and send you more spam, most will remove you from their list, and therefore, your overall spam will be reduced.

2. Most spammers are not honest, or they wouldn't be advertising underage porn and warez. Therefore, any unsubscribe attempt will only increase the amount of spam.

I have the ability to check all of my daughter's E-mail (well, most -- if she downloads it first, I won't see it). Around August 14th or 15th last year, she started getting tons of spam. She hadn't gotten any (well, maybe one or two pieces) since I got her her own laptop in August 2001.

I tried unsubscribing from those, but mostly kept getting spam, so I couldn't tell if there was much of a reduction. Eventually I got her her own domain with E-mail forwarding and showed her how to give everybody a unique E-mail address.

Her spam had dropped off to about two pieces per day recently on her old account. One day, two pieces came in from the same From address, so I decided to unsubscribe (thinking they might send more if I didn't).

Well, it was off to the races for the spammers almost as soon as I did that. Since that day, she has been getting 5 or 6 pieces a day, sometimes more.

That's why I voted to only unsubscribe from the ones that look legitimate (from companies that you've actually heard of).

I do occasionally call those "business opportunity" spams that include phone numbers and tell them what I think of their marketing to 12-year-old girls. Usually the people seem quite reasonable, claiming they just got her E-mail address from some list. I point out that maybe they should use double opt-in because they're getting unreliable lists. It is interesting to hear what they think, though.

Steve

[Pony99CA]

By the way, I now have a "honeypot" email link on my web site. If a webbot grabs all the email addresses off the site and that address is used to send spam, the messages are automatically deleted from my mailserver and the sender is blacklisted so I don't see any of their spam going to my real email addresses. :mrgreen:
My, how very devious! :-)
Yeah, I like that. I suggested a different kind of honeypot (http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=111056#111056) last year, but it was designed to waste spammers' time and bandwidth.

Steve

[daS]

Yeah, I like that. I suggested a different kind of honeypot (http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=111056#111056) last year, but it was designed to waste spammers' time and bandwidth.
I like your idea as well.

Jason: I wish I could take credit for the honeypot I'm using, but I read about it somewhere. I also started changing my mailto links to the ASCII (Bob Bemer R.I.P. (http://my.netscape.com/corewidgets/news/story.psp?cat=50380&id=2004062417120002238238)) codes for each character. But I think that most spiders have been updated to figure that one out. :?

[x999x]

I do freelance design for one of the largest spammers on the west coast. He has had an ongoing legal battle with microsoft, and has been sued by them four times now. If any of you are familiar with BrowserAid, then you are familiar with this guys work.

Long story short, clicking unsubscribe at the bottom of your spam does nothing but verify you recieved the mail. "Opting out" as it's called simply puts you on another list which is harvested and used again on another IP Block so you'll continue to recieve spam no matter what.

Currently, there's no way to stop spam, there are programs out there available to spammers which will hijack MSN for example, and send their spam out using their network. Another popular method is to send an email to an address that doesnt work, and relies on the mail server do bounce back the email to whom it was sent from, however in this case the person it's sent from is the actual victim's email address, and not the spammers. End result, you get spam at no cost to them.

Don't bother emailing these guys your gripes, or trying to track them down, because they're fiendishly smarter than you when it comes to playing this game. If that wasn't the case, you wouldn't have companies like AOL disabling entire ip blocks...

Some userful tips for keeping a spam free email box is:

1- make a new account for signing up to messageboards and any other service that asks for an email address to confirm your account. I'm not saying all sites will use your info for personal gain, but all it takes is one, and it's all down hill from there, since every spammer pulls addys from the same data-miners. I recommend using a free webbased email like yahoo for this.

2- when you absolutely have to post your email address, spell out the @ sign, or put some kind of breaks in there so that bots can't harvest it when they spider the web. Ex: reader(at)pocketpcthoughts.com

3- If you get spam, don't opt out, just create a filter to block the address.

Hope that helps, I look forward to infecting your inept relative's computers again in the near future.

x999x (LOOK I MAKED THE SPAM MOM!!!)

[ricksfiona]

I personally never unsubscribe due to the email confirmation reason you mention.

But the reason they intentionally mispell the product names is to confuse spam blockers which is the only way they get through in the first place.

Or the spammers have outsourced to India :wink:

[ricksfiona]

By the way, I now have a "honeypot" email link on my web site. If a webbot grabs all the email addresses off the site and that address is used to send spam, the messages are automatically deleted from my mailserver and the sender is blacklisted so I don't see any of their spam going to my real email addresses. :mrgreen:

My, how very devious! :-)

Please explain? How does this work?

[dean_shan]

I proud to say the my 'real' email address is spamfree. I have only recieved 5 or so spam messages from when I set it up last year.

[daS]

I do freelance design for one of the largest spammers on the west coast.
Your mother must be very proud of you. :evil:

Why don't you invest your talents in something that is less antisocial and possibly even productive?

[daS]

By the way, I now have a "honeypot" email link on my web site. If a webbot grabs all the email addresses off the site and that address is used to send spam, the messages are automatically deleted from my mailserver and the sender is blacklisted so I don't see any of their spam going to my real email addresses. :mrgreen:

My, how very devious! :-)

Please explain? How does this work?
On your web site, you provide an email address, such as [email protected] in very small font (or white text on a white background, etc.) You can even indicate: "If you send email to this address you will be blacklisted."

Then, using your anti-spam program (I use Mailwasher Pro (www.firetrust.com)) you set a filter that automatically blacklists any from address that sends email to the [email protected] address. This is known as a honeypot since it attracts your prey to the trap.

[Dr. Smooth]

I proud to say the my 'real' email address is spamfree. I have only recieved 5 or so spam messages from when I set it up last year.

Enjoy it while you can. It's only a matter of time before a friend of yours types your address into a web page (maybe as a referral, or to send you an Amazon wish list or something).

[foldedspace]

The sad truth is that if you 'unsubscribe', you *may* be taken off that spammers list, but your email address will be sold to several other spammers.

I disable images as well....

[ziggy]

"That was never 5 minutes just now!"

:mrgreen:


Yes it was!

[Steven Cedrone]

O.K., now I know it's tempting to do 50 posts back and forth ala "I came in here for an arguement"...

But please, add something of substance to the Great Spam debate as well...

Anyway, this isn't an argument, it's just contradiction... :wink:

And for the 3 of you that have no idea what anyone here is talking about:

Argument (http://www.mindspring.com/~mfpatton/sketch.htm)
SPAM (http://www.ironworks.com/comedy/python/spam.htm)

Steve

[Shagin099]

My boss came up with this method and it works quite well, what we do is we do a whois on the domain the spam is coming from (if its a legit domain) then e-mail all the contact adresses threatening with legal action that they have no idea what really is. I have found this actually works 95% of the time, and if you act really importaint and stuff, sometimes you get an apology, or they tell you where they got your adress. Overall its worked well for me. :)

-Dan

[Gerard]

Yeah, I'm a bit puzzled by x999x's choice of employers too. I get over 300 spam every day, largely due to pocketnow's long-standing policy of making contributors include their email address in articles. Though it's been a long while since I wrote anything for the site, still those addresses are being harvested. Some days I get as many as 500. Fortunately I use nPOPw, and have arranged a set of filters which automatically mark for deletion from the server about 80% of my spam. Combined with download previews of about 2KB each, this makes very quick work of rounding up and batch-deleting all the crap.

But to know that a person of talent such as x999x, whose altruist community spirit in the past has been most exemplary, is involved in spam in any way, well, it's a bit depressing. Come on man, there's got to be another place to get some work!

[billbuckner]

Spam? You all get Spam? :devilboy: I always use a charter.net mail address when I sign up for anything. It gets 200 average spam messages a day. 8O My personal gMail account gets no spam. I only visit my Charter account to clear out all the spam so I can get a verification letter.

[Kati Compton]

Oh - I should add...

As the person that gets the newsletter bounces from PPCT, I'd like to ask people to PLEASE unsubscribe rather than spam-block. Steve handles the unsubscribe requests himself, there is no list, etc. It would help reduce the 300-500 bounces a week I have to scan to remove "user unknowns". This really sucks up a lot of time each week, so if people can spend 5 seconds to reduce that, I'd like them to. ;)

And if you are a registered user, and don't know what I'm talking about when I say "newsletter", your ISP is probably blocking it as spam. Just send a note to moderator@ and we'll remove you so I don't get your bounce. Thanks!

[ricksfiona]

Spam? You all get Spam? :devilboy: I always use a charter.net mail address when I sign up for anything. It gets 200 average spam messages a day. 8O My personal gMail account gets no spam. I only visit my Charter account to clear out all the spam so I can get a verification letter.

Yes, I think many people do something similar to that. I have a Yahoo account I do that with.

[Janak Parekh]

And if you are a registered user, and don't know what I'm talking about when I say "newsletter", your ISP is probably blocking it as spam. Just send a note to moderator@ and we'll remove you so I don't get your bounce. Thanks!
FYI, you can also unsubscribe yourself - go into Preferences at the top of this page, and about 3/4ths down there's the weekly digest toggle, where you can set it to No.

--janak

[Saxmoore]

Oh - I should add...

As the person that gets the newsletter bounces from PPCT, I'd like to ask people to PLEASE unsubscribe rather than spam-block. Steve handles the unsubscribe requests himself, there is no list, etc. It would help reduce the 300-500 bounces a week I have to scan to remove "user unknowns". This really sucks up a lot of time each week, so if people can spend 5 seconds to reduce that, I'd like them to. ;)

And if you are a registered user, and don't know what I'm talking about when I say "newsletter", your ISP is probably blocking it as spam. Just send a note to moderator@ and we'll remove you so I don't get your bounce. Thanks!

Edit: Nevermind. I finally figured out which address to place in my hotmail allow list!

[Pony99CA]

Yeah, I like that. I suggested a different kind of honeypot (http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=111056#111056) last year, but it was designed to waste spammers' time and bandwidth.
I like your idea as well.
The downside with my honeypot is that it would likely result in a lot more spam on the Internet, further clogging things up. But it would also reduce the spammers chances of hitting somebody real, so I'm torn.

I also started changing my mailto links to the ASCII (Bob Bemer R.I.P. (http://my.netscape.com/corewidgets/news/story.psp?cat=50380&id=2004062417120002238238)) codes for each character. But I think that most spiders have been updated to figure that one out. :?
Not many seem to have been, actually. I only get one spam to my Web E-mail addresses a month (if that), and I only encode the "@". Of course, maybe my Web site isn't as popular as I hoped. :-D

The spams I do get at the Web addresses seem to be Nigerian scams, not your generic garage.

Steve

[Pony99CA]

I get over 300 spam every day, largely due to pocketnow's long-standing policy of making contributors include their email address in articles. Though it's been a long while since I wrote anything for the site, still those addresses are being harvested. Some days I get as many as 500.
I've only written three reviews for pocketnow, but I think I've only gotten one or two spams since I started. I can't imagine getting 300 or more a day. :-( Maybe CAN-SPAM is having some effect on harvesting.

I also wonder why pocketnow (or any similar site) would require an E-mail address, especially when every review or article has a discussion forum linked to it. If anything, clicking the author's name should take the user to the Private Message entry screen.

Steve

[Kacey Green]

I proud to say the my 'real' email address is spamfree. I have only recieved 5 or so spam messages from when I set it up last year.

same here :D

[Kacey Green]

I get over 300 spam every day, largely due to pocketnow's long-standing policy of making contributors include their email address in articles. Though it's been a long while since I wrote anything for the site, still those addresses are being harvested. Some days I get as many as 500.
I've only written three reviews for pocketnow, but I think I've only gotten one or two spams since I started. I can't imagine getting 300 or more a day. :-( Maybe CAN-SPAM is having some effect on harvesting.

I also wonder why pocketnow (or any similar site) would require an E-mail address, especially when every review or article has a discussion forum linked to it. If anything, clicking the author's name should take the user to the Private Message entry screen.

Steve
yeah, I couldn't imagine such a thing, I'd view that as an invaison of the author's privacy (even most print mags. online don't require something like this)