Enough!!! Who passed on my e-mail address! Help please!!!!
 

I have (for years) guarded my business e-mail like it was the family jewels, and have never gotten spam on it, none, zero, nada. Till now. Now I am getting a series everyday selling me codine, or software or horny houswives (with pics:)) . But seriously this has to be some common scam? The names on the sender are all random with goofy names like "Overflow M. Wolverine" or "Charles F. Stomaches"

How can I get rid of this stuff, it's killing me! Like 20 a day!

There's a zillion ways they can get your email address. Do you have your email configured as your FTP passwd in your browser? Could also be a dictionary attack.

Only 20 a day? I get over 10k spams a month. I implemented a challenge-response system, which cut down the spam dramatically. When a new user sends me an email, they get an email back which to which they must respond within 24 hours, or the email isn't delivered to my inbox. For the most part, this works well, but there are still legitimate users with the IQ just above the common houseplant that can't figure it out, and will write a follow-up email to the challenge email, or send me another fresh email asking why I haven't responded... :rolleyes:

I use a challenge-response system on my home e-mail: www.beprivate.com and it's cut my spam down from 100s to <5 a day.

Can't use that sort of system for work, though.

You could implement bayesian filtering, which isn't quite as heavy as a challenge response syste, but will pick off the obvious spam and can be trained.

This suddenly started happening to me as well. Deleted 4 of these "mails" already this morning. Could it be related to this BB?

Man there's gotta be an assload of money to be made if someone could actually kill these things! I was thinking the other day, and I know NOTHING about programming, but would a return e-mail to these addresses with some kind of virus or monster big bandwidth eating file affect them? Can we counter attack?

I read another guy on here talking about it too (can't remember who) so I thought the same thing. This is the ONLY place on the entire web that my business e-mail addy is used.

Probably was me...I started a thread, wondering if switching to Mac would stop this krap. So...there may be a Pelican connection here? I'm NOT one of the computer savvy here..

I hope I'm not stating the obvious but I always have a private "throw away" email address that I use for any BB etc.

hotmail and others have free email addresses.

Heck I have about six addresses that I use depending on the risk factor of getting spamed.

HTH

P.S. You wouldn't have a link to the horny houusewifes handy would you?
J/K!

Spam is, has been, and will be a huge problem. As long as morons keep buying stuff advertised that way, people will still keep sending it.

First of all, never reply to a spam. Ever. It's useless, and does nothing but confirm your email address. Most spam is sent from mail servers with open relaying, or zombied home PC's.

Switching to a Mac won't help.

The throw away e-mail is something I've been using for 10 years (Yahoo) I NEVER use this one for registering or whatever, only here.

Horny Housewives are plentiful on the internet, you cant swing a dead cat without hitting a dozen or so:)

Thom,

Cant you geeks:) come up with some kind of sentinel that checks if the address is real? There has got to be a way! Like a pay service where you register your address to be "real" and accept only e-mails from the same? Could sweep the nation Tombo, just remember to cut me in:)

I get over 300 a day and 60% are spam. Use a Yahoo email address for anything I am not sure of then give them my personal email address later once I know they are ok.

Also I use Pegasus, the email program that allows you to view the header of your emails on the internet, and delete spam and virus emails before they ever get to your computer.

Jon, what does "BePrivate" cost?

JoeA

One thing I've been thinking of, if things get out of hand (which, for me at least, they haven't yet), is to implement a password system, whereby you use a codeword in the subject line, which you freely give to anyone you give your email address to - put in in your email sig, on your business card, etc. Basically, when someone emails you they have to include the code word in the subject line. Then set up a filter in your email program that moves any email with the code word in the subject line into a folder called "real mail" or something. Then just delete everything remaining in the inbox (which wouldn't have the codeword in the subject line), as that will be the spam. The only holdback to this would be emails sent by a bot (email lists, auto-responses, etc).

Mail Washer

Randy

$40 a year.

Who is your ISP? Some are very active in controling spam in their email systems.

I use Earthlink and get NO spam; my free MSN Hotmail account is pretty effective in filtering out the junk too.

My wife uses AOL and says they do absolutely NOTHING to try to filter/control spam.

A few of my clients use Mailblocks...they like it.
AOL acquired them.
.
http://www.mailblocks.com/login.aspx
.

Reverse DNS lookup has been available in sendmail since at least 8.1 (1995 or so). If you're using a windoze-dependent ISP, suffer! :)

Tip: If anyone EVER sends you an internet "greeting card" promptly strangle them. That's how one of my accounts ended up on a spammers list.

What is an "internet greeting card"?

I use Yahoo.com as my only email for everything and it filters all of the "faces of goo" type stuff to the bulk folder every day. I periodically empty it after a quick scan to make sure that nothing real wound up there. (Sometimes happens due to filter working too well). :cool:

Ok, so I hear what you're saying about my address being grabbed from others address books, etc... but how did I do it for so long without any spam? I mean it, none, not a single piece, ever. For probably 5+ years!

You were just lucky, that's...

Len, the same thing just started happening to me. Senders with names like Modigliani G. Chancery and Ineffectual J. Parked (just got that last one today, anyone else?) It seems to me that these must all be coming from the same place, since the are all similar and trying to sell me one of three things: drugs, software or horny housewives.

I've been at this same email address (work) for five or so years, and have never gotten spam. As in never. I do the occasional surfing here and there ;) , but I'm pretty sure that Pelican is the only site that has my email address.

I'll try some of the above suggestions, I guess.

-Jim

Try Coud Mark - Excellent free-ware / low cost subscription spam protection 'community' A few of us started using it at work and it worked so well we've elected to pay for the server version. http://www.cloudmark.com/

Ok, I did a "view source" on one of the e-mails. This is the result:


hmm, it won't let me copy it here?????? Let me try this again. (I had to remove the "<" at the front of the lines to make them show up, otherwise they were invisible??????





DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
HTML><HEAD>

META content="MSHTML 6.00.2800.1437" name=GENERATOR>
STYLE></STYLE>
/HEAD>
BODY bgColor=#ffffff>
DIV>
Up and doing!



br><br><A href="http://gfllapassetbjk.com/M5TvdiIjBXIi8qiRSsykWTO8C/DA0LPwInDwcUCxoyCQIUGxVMDTwD.htm"><BR><BR><IMG
src="http://gfllapassetbjk.com/M5TvdiIjBXIi8qiRSsykWTO8C/Tm/44cR4MmI.GIF" alt="swarthier" border='0'><BR><IMG
src="http://gfllapassetbjk.com/M5TvdiIjBXIi8qiRSsykWTO8C/DA0LPwInDwcUCxoyCQIUGxVMDTwD.jpg" alt="abnegation" border="0"><BR><IMG
src="http://gfllapassetbjk.com/M5TvdiIjBXIi8qiRSsykWTO8C/nlfnN/Twg/Rfit.gif" alt="madcap" border=0><BR></A>Ayau







br><A href="http://gfllapassetbjk.com/M5TvdiIjBXIi8qiRSsykWTO8C/ZZMcU.html" target="kiddied"><IMG src="http://gfllapassetbjk.com/M5TvdiIjBXIi8qiRSsykWTO8C/fmg3DWOJi.gif" border=0>

I sense a pattern here, I've recently started getting the same junk from the same sources. In Outlook, Is there a way to have everthing except selected sources go to a junk folder?

And those images are to track who opens the email; you just verified your existence.

The newer Outlook versions have spam filtering in them, but I haven't used it.

Len,

Gave my father a laptop a couple of years ago. no matter how many times I show him how to use mail he just does not get it.

I think he has sent all of 2 maybe 3 emails in 3-4 years.

Every time I go to his house i fire up his mail and delete the few hundred pieces of junk mail that's sitting there.

2 weeks ago I had a problem with my hosting. Admin account mailbox for my URL was full. All junk. That's an email address I've NEVER used.

You've been lucky so far.

Scott

lendaddy,
The longer you have an email address the more spam you'll get... I use Outlook 2003 because the spam filters are very effective. I receive between 200-500 emails a day and more than 90% of the spam is filtered out by Outlook 2003.

I too get thousands of spams to my various accounts per month, but multiple layers of filtering reduce it to an almost tolerable nuisance.

The thing that REALLY irks me, though, is the effin' cellphone SMS spam. AT&T/Cingular has told me for the last couple years that (a) people are hacking into their SMS network and they can't stop it, and (b) there's no way to stop my phone from receiving SMS messages, even if I've opted-out from being able to send them. Thankfully in recent months it's slowed to "only" 1-3 msgs a day instead of the previous 10+/day rate.