Oh soo fed up of spam

[spottedcat]

if theres a domain name linked to it, go there get some contact details and set up a new hotmail account. Email them saying Im really really interested in such n such a product,

Shifty, I've got a question for you or someone else might be able to answer. It's not about domain links, but your mentioning them reminded me.

A couple of weeks ago I received a spam email in which the sender address was in the form gobbledegook@NameOfTown.com. Now I know that sender addresses are usually forged, but what was really spooky was that NameOfTown is the name of the town in which I live. It's a small town, and the only one (I believe) in this country with that name.

So I went to www.NameOfTown.com and found it belonged to what looks like a perfectly respectable company in the USA. The company was a construction/house refurbishment one doing swanky interiors and makeovers. The spam was for penis enlargement.

So - apart from the odd coincidence, is the spammer likely to have set up a trojan on this company's server, or have they just pinched the domain name? I was wondering whether to contact the company telling them to see if they had been compromised.

[shifty_ben]

chances are they have pinched the domain name, look at the message source and see what the originating IP is, do an nslookup on the IP address, if you then get their web-address come up then I would contact them, let them know. But be polite otherwise you could end up on some other mailing lists.

[godofthedevil]

lol i cant beleve these teeny-spammers..

got one at the moement just about lets anyone use her email address..

this is her little sis n it aint very funny when u send somebody jokes like
that and she only uses her msn to keep in touch with school friends !!!!

i worry about the school system these days, so much for blairs education thing..

i wonder if this girl lets everyone use her bank details, i need some money

[wyliecoyoteuk]

Some that bother me are ones sent to hxxxxxxx@blueyonder.co.uk
where xxxxxxx is a nonsense string, eg ham3fxdy, but still gets to my email address (hxxxxxx2@blueyonder.co.uk, name changed to protect the guilty)

[shifty_ben]

Yea I get the odd few of those, havent quite figured how they get through.

[godofthedevil]

Spam = Stupid Prats Always Mail

ive noticed that scam spams come from the far east, has anyone noticed that doing an ip whois?

[GMorgan]

Meh sort out a series of mailboxes and have one spam zone where any request for e-mails you may not fully trust goes. Then split the others up between various functions (mailing lists, friends etc.) then at least you haven't got all your eggs in one basket.

[godofthedevil]

Meh sort out a series of mailboxes and have one spam zone where any request for e-mails you may not fully trust goes. Then split the others up between various functions (mailing lists, friends etc.) then at least you haven't got all your eggs in one basket.

thats what i do, but doesnt stop the teeny spammers or anyone who knows your address to stick you on their spam lists

[shifty_ben]

Best way Ive found is just don't give your address out to anyone who is likely to do something like that. I have 4 accounts one of which has only recently been getting spam at all and thats in small quantity. One account is used for everything I sign up for, the other is one people can contact me on and the fourth is for work. I get tonnes of spam but its only to three of those accounts, one of which is a tiny influx.
Much as I hate to say it, this spam problem is never going to go away, as long as there are people who may be interested its just going to keep happening.

[jjmac]

Howdy,

hmmm, iv'e been meaning to something about my own for a while now. This thread has been a good jogger in that regard. I can remember a poster here mentioning a site that acted as an email redirection buffer. A person would register with them and they would give you a number of account names that the person could use as a legitament address if they needed to provide one for any particular reason. Any traffic to that address would be filtered by the site, then sent to their real address. It sounded like a really good idea, i'll have to do a bit of a grep through lxfs' data base and dig that one out.

The good thing about the above facility is that the mail gets filtered before it goes to your server. The thing that gets to me a bit is that even if i did my own filtering set up, the mail is still going to my account on my isp, and so, goes onto my "bytes recieved" tally. Meaning i still have to pay money for it.

Also, most of the mail i get will all be sent via the "CC" option. It will be sent to a whole heap of people having some similarity it there names. I only get a small proportion of mail that is actually addressed corectly (grin).

I suspect my server's account lists were scaned, with the regesterd account names extracted, which, aside from sounding somewhat criminal, it also means that not giving the account out wouldn't have any effect in that case.

I think isps' need to provide "point of departure" filtering. That is, if the return address on a pkt dosen't match its' origin then it should be blocked. For pkts that actually originate from that isp, not routed/in route pkts.

Problem there is obvious, it means the isp is conceding to a "duty of care" concept. Taking SCO as an example of just where the state of corporate integrity integrity is these days ... the legal/scam scramble that probably would result as a result of that would overwhelm a lot of isps'. So, i can see "point of departure" filtering never happening.

Also, how is a group like the FBI in saying that it costs them 25K to instigate an investigation, so unless a company/org/person can prove that some activity has cost them at least 5K in "loss of revenue" , then it's not worth while for them to do anything (ha) ... Hows that fou a nudge nudge green light !

In any case, i think the site interseption idea is a good one, at least the stuff wont be tayyed as part of ones down load allocation, and the site concerned offeres that service for free too !

Haven't got there name handy but it was mentioned latst year, so should be to hard to grep for.

I think it's a good idea shifty, but some what futile in the end. You may be better off looking at an already existing site/org and seeing if you cpuld contribute there someway, if you a that keen


jm

[Nigel]

I think isps' need to provide "point of departure" filtering. That is, if the return address on a pkt dosen't match its' origin then it should be blocked. For pkts that actually originate from that isp, not routed/in route pkts.

That would cause me severe problems. The ISP we use at work is different from the one I use at home, and neither will allow you to use their SMTP server unless you are connecting via their dialup/ADSL lines. So when I'm working at home I send email through my home ISP's SMTP server with a return address pointing to the company's ISP.
Even worse, my private domain is not hosted by my home ISP - again I use my home ISP's SMTP server for outgoing mail and my domain host's POP3 server for incoming mail - the filtering you suggest would cut me off completely !

[jjmac]

I mean filtering on the tcp/ip headers, not the actual payload. But, the duty of care acceptance would leave isp's open to SCO type abuse anyway, so i doubt if that would ever be implemented.


jm

[godofthedevil]

do you think its wrong or right of me to report teenyspammers to report_spam@hotmail.com or abiuse@yahoo.co.uk for sending me chain mail?

the mood they make me i would wanna do something a lot worse if it was legal

[jjmac]

"right"


jm

Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed !

[shifty_ben]

With regards to the ISPs taking some responsiblity, it sounds like that is part of the argument being used by At&T et al in the states to try and allow congress to let them charge differently for the internet. The fact that Yahoo and others is allowing companies to pay for email to avoid their spam filters is terrible, I know they have strict rules about spam etc. but as anyone who has TPS or MPS will know there is always some kind of unsolicited phonecall/mail that falls just outside the category that gets blocked. Same is likely to be true with this.
Think for now as the influx into my main account is currently quite small, im going to do an nslookup on the source IP of every bit of spam I get, and email their ISP with the details, hopefully enough people will end up doing something similar, and it will be more cost effective to deal with the issue than to deal with the emails, letters and calls. Its a while away yet though i think.

Oh and I've started getting the same thing daily

Buy photoshop, XP, Office now!

One can't help wonder if they are a) legal copies and b) whether they are in fact not just blank cds

One day this madness will end