email Spam

   Hi guys,

lately I have been bombarded by 10s of spam emails, and I kept my email address private. No one knows it except those I give. But now , and only now, i start getting lots of spam andjunk mail. Outlook express does not filter the spam or junk mail. So I am left to go through each one of them and its a hard time consuming thing to do.

The interesting thing I observed, the destination email is not even mine it has parts of it, as if they are using software that generate randomal emails at a given ISP. and its sent as a carbon copy to all these variations one of them by chance happen to be mine.


How can one prevent this? Do i just make a new email? its just sad.

It seems to have got out of hand in the last few weeks, we are getting bombarded by hundreds of spam emails that seem to have found away to get by the IMF in exchange.  It's getting to the point where I'm think I'm going to have to buy something else to kill all this crap.

Yesterday alone we got the following statistics on spam reaching our Scottsdale location.    

Don't forget, your ISP knows your email. Sometimes they sell mailing lists.

I am just getting bombarded with spam messages recently, something in the region of 4-6 per hour. Outlook does a good job at removing most of the filth, but just the ideal of the messages' presence in my junk folder makes me cringe

100/hour... ok, that's a problem... but, so long as it's not kiddie (I need to watch my language)... then pressing [DELETE] every now and then... it just doesn't bother me... there are plenty of things that bug me more than that.Of course... YMMV

...why is the word P0RN unacceptable ??

"I kept my email address private. No one knows it except those I give."

Some companies have pre-existing contracts to share their email listings. Where your address goes from there who knows.

IMHO email as we know it today esp. SMTP is just a mess and needs a re-work.

for a while I was on an IETF group and gave up when I saw that they all felt that any changes that did any real fix to email were to much.

what we need is a new protocol that replaces SMTP.


why?

SMTP has no checks on validity of the message and no accountability of the sender or the relay or the reciver.


for example you can often create a "double" set of headers and get an smtp server to deliver a message such that when you get it the outer headers are gone... the *REAL* ones that point back to the sending server.

the inner set can say anything.

also I have seen mail sever addons send error messsages for attachments etc... to the email of somneone who never sent the email.... also based on the fake headers used by the spamer.

as long as the sender can hide the spam will keep coming.

fix the system to allow me to know who sent the message and the spam will stop.

the thing is forget about the "spam" it's not the problem...


really !

it's a symptom of the basic problem.

the way to combat this is based on the fraud and abuse.

for example if I can take some a$$ to court and make them pay me for the theft of my money -- by stealing my cpu time, disk storage, network bandwith, electric bills, man-hours etc...
now just me no big.... but if say I find 10,000 users and 2-3 ISP's who have each suffered damges and we all sue the abuser....

Bing!  one down, and soon others will find a new line of theft to follow.

we can do this if we can prove who the sender was and that they were not legit.

spam blocking is a bandaid. it slows it down but your system is still hurt by it.

for example if 70-90% of the inbound traffic to an ISP's mail server is junk the users don't want then the ISP has to charge the users for the cost of the bandwith and server.

also if an ISP has users with zombi pc's sending junk then the legit users are paying for this also.

bandwidth and more network gear to keep the spam flowing.

and this also makes the ISP's do more work manageing the network and trying to halt the junk.
and again the users will pay for that.

so we pay for spam even when the ISP is trying to block it.

so fix SMTP to make the sender's pay for it or stop sending it.

the only way to make that happen is not not let them hide behind proxy's and hacked mua / mta software that fails to identify them.

if smtp fails to do this then someone will create a new standard and we will move to it.

and smtp will die.

I feel better for reading this

Even with my intelligent message filtering set to extremely strict in exchange and using GFI Mail Essentials im still getting about 10/hr through...

I wish someone would castrate the people that make these new spam bots.

Yeah, But guys, suppose your email is myEmail@MyISP.com.

why would you be receiving spam email not even directed to your email address? I am receiving email that is directed to myEma@MyISP.c om, and other variants but not my actual myEmail@ myips..., it really is amazing. Is there something wrong with my Isp's addressing or something that allows emails intended to others to reach me? I am not myEm, or MyEma, or MyE....etc. but i keep getting these spam addressed to an email not entirely mine.

Strange!

Matthew van Eerde wrote:

Well, that's a lot easier to explain.  It's popularly known as BCC.