B.com E-mail?

[barfle]

Originally posted by analog:
Is anybody else getting forty spams a day?

I forward four or five a day to abuse@[wherever the header says they came from] but it's not helping.

any advice?

analog

Forty? My spam folder gets filled in three days (about 800 emails), and I have the feeling my address is being used TO spam, since I've gotten a couple of messages that someone I didn't send a message to has a full mailbox. And 75% of what is in my "main" folder is spam (but at least I can eliminate them from Outlook).

That, and now the spam folder shows a big message like "SPAM ALERT" instead of the original title, so I can't tell what it said in the first place to determine if it's really spam or not (still getting half a dozen false hits a week).

[OperaTenor]

Spam! Spam, spam spam! Spam! Spam, spam spam,...

[Selma in Sandy Eggo]

Originally posted by OperaTenor:
Spam! Spam, spam spam! Spam! Spam, spam spam,...

Got a tune for those lyrics?
Or are you planning fried rice?

[OperaTenor]

Originally posted by Selma in San Diego:

Originally posted by OperaTenor:
[b] Spam! Spam, spam spam! Spam! Spam, spam spam,...

Got a tune for those lyrics?
Or are you planning fried rice? [/b]

Actually, Monty Python's got that tune...

[piqaboo]

buns and spam, wonderful spam!

[analog]

Well i learned a bit about spam from a site "claws-and-paws.com", like the basics of reading headers. Appears the headers are forged so my complaints went to the wrong system administrators.

The internet needs a Tim Mcveigh.

[Selma in Sandy Eggo]

Originally posted by analog:
The internet needs a Tim Mcveigh.

I think we've got Timothy Leary instead. And his cat.

[piqaboo]

Yeah, instead of the fury, we got the furry!

[analog]

Yep, I was just flailing in vain. You are right, Ms Boo.

That site has some links to the anti-spam community, spam.abuse.org & arin.net to name two.

I did forward some spam to the IP's it came through, by deciphering the numbers in the header.
But it's just spitting into the wind.

[piqaboo]

Its worth the effort - horrible timewasting stuff, spam.
Good on ya for trying, analog!

[Selma in Sandy Eggo]

Both the cox.net and the aol spam filters work pretty well, and are continually refined as users forward offending spam to the filter desk.

Naturally some gets through, but the spam filtering costs to my provider and service must be huge.

Nobody mock me for the aol. It took me ten years to get my DH comfortable with it and now he's retired and can't live without it. For $25 a month, it's a cheap hobby.

[analog]

Now I realize what was going on a couple months ago when something turned off my Norton Security and the little Windows computer traffic icon light lit up solid. Guess I'm just a slow learner.

After tracing multiple hits by the same spam ad back to diverse sources like china.net and university of tennessee, i am beginning to appreciate the problem. They must have self copying programs out there that invade and spam from unsuspecting folks' computers.

That's geometric growth like cancer, and high school algebra says it must sooner or later suffocate the whole net. Providers will tire of throwing bandwidth at the problem, which really just fuels it.

This layman doesn't think anything is secure now.
Was commercializing the net a mistake?

[Selma in Sandy Eggo]

Originally posted by analog:
This layman doesn't think anything is secure now.
Was commercializing the net a mistake?

I've always figured the only secure place was the grave.

Commercializing the net lets us listen to Connecticut radio in New Zealand, Japan, the Netherlands, and Sandy Eggo. We have conversations with friends we've never seen, patronize businesses we've never been to, bank and trade our stocks online. My vote goes for the commercial web.

But I also get my Antivirus updates regularly. We do have to be careful because the crooks and people we'd rather not know have computers, too.

[analog]

I appreciate those conveniences.

But, having read of what these backdoor programs can do, i will not access my bank or pension account through a home computer.

Ive been experimenting with the spam. Beethoven mail has processing rules that let you handle mail according to conditional searches. I set it to search the subject for viagra, enlarge, hot chicks, and a couple other phrases. I told it to bounce all those mails. That reduced spam from about forty to thirty a day. Adding a body search for .biz trimmed another five or so. I hope bounce means what i assume it does, return as undeliverable.

Next i added a 'search header & bounce' rule for anything coming from addresses in all of Asia-Pacific, most of Europe, all of South America, Spain, and good ol' US domains COMCAST, CYBER-NET, ROADRUNNER, and another or two. That knocked it down to less than 10.

I know i'm just flailing, but at least feel less helpless.

And somebody at the far end has to delete those bounced messages. So a hearty Jacques Brel laugh to them - ya-ha, ha ha hah hah, ha ha HAH, ha HAH!

[piqaboo]

posted by analog:
"Next i added a 'search header & bounce' rule for anything coming from addresses .... and good ol' US domains .....ROADRUNNER, and another or two. "

Does that mean friends who have roadrunner email accts cant email you at your b.com address?

Legit Q from computer-illiterate

[Selma in Sandy Eggo]

I have friends here in town using Roadrunner, and their addresses come from a @san.rr.com domain. I don't know as how blocking that would be a good idea as there are real people there.

When you bounce e-mail from your account, the handling depends on how the address header is formatted and the handling policies of your ISP's mail desk. And if the spam has been fed through one of those anonymous remailer things, it has no legitimate point-of-origin to return to. I figure they go to that great bit bucket in the sky.

[barfle]

I still get false hits in my spam folder, even after the email address is forwarded to nospam@beethoven.com AND added to the whitelist.

In spite of the fact that I get about 120 spams A DAY, I would rather have a local filter that I can truly control.

Oh, and I believe my email address has been hacked, because I've received bounce messages from places I haven't sent emails to, and I even got one from myself.

Now that REALLY sucks!

[analog]

At the moment that's so. Asia, Latin America, Europe too.

But it's been ages since I had a legitimate email from Roadrunner. i think they're in east US where I do have friends though.

I'm experimenting to learn how the mail processor works and what one can do with it.

Those numbers in brackets in the header define an adddress, which gets more specific as you progress left to right through the number.


After a few days I'll unblock, say Roadrunner. Then I'll try to localize their spam to a range of rheir addresses and send that info to the right abuse department.

If temporarily blocking roadrunner stops their spam, then I've fooled a spam robot somewhere on roadrunner.

I may be just flailing. But to start I had to get the spam down to manageable volume.

And I appreciate the question. I am very computer illiterate , what little programming I've done was machine level to test a part of it. This stuff is a language not a science, and folks like you who are so fluent and eloquent in your language frankly intimidate me. I'm an old hardware guy.

[analog]

Barfle - have you tinkered with the Bcom mail processing rules? I'm not very good at it. Tinkering manually.

If i were smart enough I'd harvest the spam headers and sort 'em into address histograms .

The headers are obviously messed with, but in the "received from" line the numbers inside the bracket seem to decode okay at ARIN.NET. The other header numbers get messed with , i guess by the spam robots. But setting the rule to bounce when it finde [xxx.x in the header (x's of course a block of addresses you got from a header ) appears to block spam, of course legitimate mail too.

If I find a pattern will post it.

Selma you sound pretty well versed. Can I automate any of this?

And mine's been hacked too .

<small>[ 05-12-2004, 06:16 PM: Message edited by: analog ]</small>

[barfle]

analog, I'm also an old hardware guy (note my being mentored while working at Altec Lansing), although I'm probably as computer literate as anyone I work with (I have MCSE in NT4, for all the good that's doing me...).

I've played around with the rules a little, and poked into the headers of the particularly suspicious emails, but haven't really come up with much that's interesting. I've thought about deleting the spam folder to see what that does, but if it means all those messages go to the bit bucket, that's not what I'm after, certainly.

As far as roadrunner is concerned, I've known people on both coasts with .rr. email addresses. But that's the problem with any filter (as I'm sure you know) - they aren't infinitely deep and they don't have square sides.