NOTE TO TAIWAN READERS: “Jennifer 8. Lee” is a Chinese-American newspaper reporter whose real middle name is the numeral “8” followed by a period. You don’t want to know why. Maybe you do.
New York Times online
SAN FRANCISCO – AT 2 a.m., the red squiggle begins to rise. Sharply.
The workers sitting in the dimly lighted room barely look up at the white screen on the wall that tracks the deluge of unwanted e-mail to millions of In boxes. They already know it’s happening.
Their computer monitors are filled with e-mail meant to appeal to the lonely and insecure: Free XXX video. Debt consolidation. Breast enhancement. Viagra. Work from home. Beat cellulite.
I’ve edited the above post for copyright reasons. We can’t publish an entire article or even large parts of an article that we don’t have permission to do so with. I’ve left the teaser intact and encourage those who are interested to go to The New York Times Online.
The best way to avoid spam is to keep your email a closely guarded secret. Only give it to friends and business associates. For anything posted on the internet use a separate email address. This can just be a free email service like Yahoo!
If you have a website and your email address is on the website you can write the email address like this name@NOSPAMyahoo.com or similar. The machines that pick up the email address can’t distinguish it from a valid email address. Anyone who actually wants to send you an email can work out the small change to the address that is necessary to make the email work.
This is the address of a company in Taibei that I believe sells e-mail address lists for spamming. They have been doing it for several years with impunity, it seems.
I am also using mailwasher and its great! You can check your mail, delete mail, bounce mail, and blacklist sources you dont want to receive mail from.
In a nutshell, you can really limit viruses and spam. The program also has “filters” that recognise and label spam/viruses/friends for you.
I registered a domain recently and promptly received an email addressed to admin@. webmaster@ etc offering to sell me mailing lists for spam purposes.
Worse still is the associated problems caused by spam filters - if you’re using a web hosting company then your emails may be bounced because they originate from a server that has been associated with spam in the past. I moved from iPowerweb last year because of this but the domain was on everyone’s list by then and I still got messages from mail handling software telling me that I was blacklisted because of this tenous link.
Try this BBC story on how extreme these people are getting (if you can stand the shameless ‘special report’ plugs) Apparently they’re now hijacking computers to host web sites.
Surely a properly motivated government could crack down on the sources of funding for these people? Back in the 60s the British government combatted ‘pirate’ radio - broadcasting from outside their jurisdiction - by making it illegal to advertise with them. Why not do the same for Viagra?
I have used mailwasher without any success. It bounces back spam but I still get more and more spam. Actually, a friend who uses Linux suggested that most spam are sent from fictituous addresses, so “bouncing back” accomplishes nothing.
He suggested spamassassin but that is Linux based. A Windows equivalent seems to be bloomba, so I downloaded that but it won’t run . . . . . . I contacted support and they said if you are using a non-English language based PC bloomba won’t work . . . . . and of course I have installed CHINESE SYSTEM . . . . . .
What is another good suggestion for combatting spam??? The spamassassin is supposed to use a very good algorithim for detecting spam . . . . . . and is supposed to be the “cutting edge”, so I was very interested in that . . . . . but no dice.
Any suggestions?
My email address is on ms2.hinet.net, so of course I am on every spam list from here to Nigeria, and have been for many years. However, I have this address registered at a number of places, and printed on all my namecards, so I would prefer just to get a good spam program, as opposed to getting a new email address. Thanks.
Did you pick up the extra FILTERS for MailWasher? I’m not sure if they are available on the website or somewhere else…
My Dad sent me like 20 (he might have programmed them himself).
I can email them to you if you’d like.
I generally don’t bounce from mailwasher. I think spammers can tell that the client (mailwasher) rather than the mail server (easyspace, in my case) sent the “user does not exist” error message. That confirms to them the target (you) is active. Just let mailwasher delete them and they disappear into the ether.
I have on occaision asked Easyspace to block certain spam on the server side, and they have done that. Very good of them. (I received email through Easyspace servers because they are my domain registrar.)
Spam is a problem for everybody everywhere. Even the filters are failing to do the job because the spammers adapt so quickly.
This will work for the robots, but will people really delete the NOSPAM part of the address? Experienced surfers will know what to do but I reckon that less experienced people will simply try to email to the whole address.
If you have a web site and you want to allow people to contact you then put up contact form page rather than using the emailto: tag.
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Another possible choice is to try Mozilla or its dedicated mail client, Thunderbird, both of which use Bayesian filters to reduce spam.
For anyone who doesn’t know: a Bayesian filter first requires that, for a week or so, you tell it what messages are spam and what aren’t. It analyzes the messages and notices differences between what you consider spam and what you don’t. For example, you hardly ever want mail that contains the phrase “enlargement pills”. Within a short while, it can get pretty reliable in how well it recognizes spam as spam. Someone at Netscape (a flavor of Mozilla) wrote about their experience with Bayesian filters.
A really good Bayesian filter is CRM114 ( the obvious Dr. Strange Love reference ) which can be found at http://crm114.sourceforge.net/ and Paul graham , the guy who organized The Spam Conference at MIT , wrote his exp. with it. http://www.paulgraham.com/wsy.html
To be honest, for the small cost involved, I would advise anyone to set up a domain name through Easyspace (I think .co.uk is the cheapest) and use their domain as the email (acme@domain.co.uk and you start getting spam to that address, you know it was Acme Ltd who sold your address to spammers.
Interesting article in yesterday’s NYT on spam-fighting champion, Steve Linford of the Spamhaus Project. Excerpt below.
Mr. Linford says he has intercepted chat-room conversations between spammers and crackers, the name for malicious hackers who write computer viruses and steal credit card numbers. The spammers have been seeking ways to send their messages to avoid the blocking systems created by Internet providers.
"In the last six months, the cracker world has joined the spammer world,’’ Mr. Linford said. Aided by crackers, the spammers have secretly infected and taken control of thousands of computers around the world, most of them owned by home users with high-speed Internet connections.
These machines - called zombie drones - relay mail for spammers and serve as hosts for the Web sites where people are sent by spam, all without the computer owner’s knowledge.
Since last June, zombie drones have also been subjecting Spamhaus to what is called a distributed denial-of-service attack, perhaps the most virulent weapon in a hacker’s arsenal. Tens of thousands of enemy machines have simultaneously deluged Spamhaus’s computers with so much meaningless data that they can barely perform their intended missions. Similar attacks have put several smaller anti-spam organizations out of business.
This month, the crackers took the attack to a new level: they released two computer viruses that have already spread to hundreds of thousands of machines. The purpose was to attack Spamhaus and two similar groups. “For the spammers to actually manufacture and release a worldwide virus specifically to attack you, you’re probably making quite some impact on them,” Mr. Linford said.
i usually keep one email address for close family and friends and one for general use and one for signing up online subscriptions (eg Ofoto, etc) just in case they sell you out. the weakness of using a separate email for a select number of persons/family is that it is as weak as your weakest link. if your friend or brother’s address book is compromised, your address may be too.
This has been workable, and not that complicated. i have a hotmail account that i set to exclusive ie only addresses that I have explicitly allowed get past the filters. downside is you have to monitor the junk mail for email that you actually want and havent had time to add to the list. but it’s not hard or that time-consuming as it sounds.
another danger is that many sites have third-parties that, without your knowledge, will set cookies. you can set your browser to reject this, but manual cookie handling might get tedious for some. most of these cookies claim only to track usage, etc, but who knows what data is there and who sees it. i’ve had good experience with ad-aware in combating these lurkers.
I like Mozilla for various reasons. someone mentioned the filters. also it has a anti-popup feature which can be convenient.
and people tell me never to answer those emails which ask you to unsubscribe. apparently that lets them know you pay attention which is what they want and verifies your email etc. i did unsubscribe to a few and never heard back from them. guess they were reputable enuf. and i was lucky.
You tech-savvy people probably know why this is, but I have noticed over the last couple of weeks that my Hotmail account has been conspicuously clear of spam. Not completely free of those “Re: What you didn’t seekiygnieti iyt” but nearly so. I wonder what happened. It is a marked improvement, whatever happened.
