Doing my bit to fight Spammers.!

[Chris Reiss]

Sniffing out the spam bots.
please, spammers email me here -

s_pamtrapper@hotmail.com

thanks for your unwated shitty junk.

go catch a virus :twisted:

[TheUDE]

Er ... 'scuse my ignorance, but what happens if somebody here clicks on that out of sheer idle curiosity?

[Chris Reiss]

its just a valid email address set up to catch spam bots that prowl forums etc & extract email addresses to either spam to death or add the email address for bundled sale.
i know its not going to stop spam, but im sure i can rid a few anoying bastards.

trouble is, allot of bulk emailers have set up or use isp's in other countries who have no spamming laws, so complaining to there isp is often ignored.

if everyone did something about things that pissed them off, im sure allot less things would piss us off in life.
peace

[kamina]

Currently about 95% of the spam being sent is by normal end users computers without them knowing anything about it. There's a huge amount of people running win2k and xp without any admin password, and their hardisks shared. Knowing this spammers developed Randex, and about 50 variants of it. It spreads to large ip-ranges, and infects all computers like that. These computers go to an irc channel to announce they are ready for action, and receive orders on what spam to send and where. All this happens on the background, and there's really no way for a user to notice it. (apart from what seems to be problems with the internet service provider as the connection is slow)

While the computer is not sending spam it's spreading Randex to more computers...

The way to stop spam right now, is to inform people that they should take care of their computers. Set a proper password to all usernames on the computer, install a firewall, disable network-sharing of their hardisks, and scan their computers for troijans.

Not that what you are doing isn't theoretically a good idea, it's just that the search engines used by spammers can't generally read these modern messageboards. That's also the reason you'll never find any results from this messageboard while searching from google. It has been made impossible for the searchengines to retreive the information for the sql database that stores it.

[TheUDE]

OK. It was this bit that got me a bit twitchy:

go catch a virus

Interesting stuff, Kamina.

[Chris Reiss]

the last time i put one of my email accounts on a message board (not this one) it was swamped with spam, no matter how many custom filters i set up. which drives me insane as i waste my time tracing and reporting them.

nowadays when i sell a new custom built PC i include documentation on keeping computers safe & emails spam free. thanks Kamina for the interesting info, always good to learn something new.

it seems there are tonnes of programs out there for keeping pop3 access email accounts spam free, however, have never found anything for fully protecting free web based email accounts free of this crap.

it also seems to be harder tracing ip addresses from email headers. not quite sure how they're making this so, maybe ip spoofing?

seeing the words 'generic viagra' & 'penis enlargement' now make my blood boil!

[kamina]

the last time i put one of my email accounts on a message board (not this one) it was swamped with spam, no matter how many custom filters i set up.

It really depends on how the message board is made. If you can find threads in google or other search engines, then the spammers search engines can probably find your e-mail address too. The reason most modern boards don't support search engines is, that they usually slow down quite alot once they are big even without robots crawling all over them.

it also seems to be harder tracing ip addresses from email headers. not quite sure how they're making this so, maybe ip spoofing?

You could use something like spamcop to do it for you. I was working for the abuse department of an isp for a while, so I was mainly reading spamcop reports, and trying to track down places the infected machines report back to. (and only did it for a very brief time, so I'm not really an expert)

seeing the words 'generic viagra' & 'penis enlargement' now make my blood boil!

grrr

[TheUDE]

I'm hearing good things from quite a few folks about Yahoo's free e-mail system at the moment. They seem to be taking the spam issue seriously, have put in place quite effective filtering, and encourage users to report spams that get through the net, so they can upgrade the filters. Might be worth a look. If this is true, they deserve encouraging.

I terms of this board, yes, it eems there's been some harvesting going on. Red a while back advised us either to remove our e-mail addresses from view or to disguise them by listing them as soandso AT whatever.com, rather than soandso@whatever.com.

[Chris Reiss]

on a plus, my main email account 'mail.com' agreed to work with me by setting up a folder in that account to put all spam in and let them analyse the emails to do some filtering of there own.

[robbiusa]

i have a "mail.com" email account. not the paid subscription service. is that a lot better than the free account?

(mail.com is really getting aggravating with all the advertising in the free account and the new page between almost everything that you do that forces you to choose to proceed .... i've had the account for a few years just for junk and registrations, it's always been slow and for a good while it was down while they were "upgrading" it)

mostly i use hotmail and yahoo and have no problems along with my isp accounts that come from earthlink.

haven't had many problems with spam with any of my accounts... i am really careful who i allow to contact me and if i get the occasional piece of spam i ignore it (and never open anything unless i am sure of who sent it... definitely don't reply or ask to be "removed" from their lists) and eventually whoever sends it gives up.