Celestia Forums

The following numbers were communicated today to me from the mailmaster of my laboratory:

today (a completely normal day) we had


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What a HORROR, just in order that some useless people can make money...

Bye Fridger

Only 50% spam? That's impressive...

I only get a few (And they're all nigerian/south african banking scams)... Strange, since my website email address is all over the net!

At least yours get mostly stopped before they get into your inbox- I have no such luxury here...

JackHiggins wrote:Only 50% spam? That's impressive...

I only get a few (And they're all nigerian/south african banking scams)... Strange, since my website email address is all over the net!

At least yours get mostly stopped before they get into your inbox- I have no such luxury here...

Jack,

unfortunately the SPAM entry only refers to identified SPAM mail. I actually had complained about the dramatic increase of SPAM mail penetrating our blocking filteres again during recent weeks. In the course of our discussion, I received the above figures...On average, I again get 15-20 SPAM mails/day penetrating the filters, which is a huge increase compared to a month or two ago!

Bye Fridger

Fridger...Jack..I'm getting at least 120 plus spam every day...even after asking my ISP (Freeserve) to filter my mail...mostly porn, some free holidays (vacations to you yanks) and printer offers.

Apparently this is normal...so they tell me!

Spam City Arizona or what!

Bloody internet...still...I wouln't be here otherwise!

Regards...bh.

Sorry to interject, but I thought you might like to know that I'm getting 0 - that's ZERO spam emails while using Earthlink. The service they offer is inexpensive and worthwhile. At least thus far.

Now I've done it though, haven't I? A challenge for them...

Take care, Bob

Bob wrote:The service they offer is inexpensive

But most people want free email...

Fridger wrote:On average, I again get 15-20 SPAM mails/day penetrating the filters, which is a huge increase compared to a month or two ago!

Still, only 15-20 a day in your inbox isn't all that bad- a company which i work for on & off, even with their filtering system, everyone there gets about 10% - 20% spam every time they open their inbox. My neighbour's spam filter stops about 75% of his junk, but only after he's downloaded it all...

Do the idiots sending all these mails not realise how much harm they're doing to everyone? I hate the way they think they can make a "fast buck" at the expense of everyone else...

Hi,
I understand that you get spam if you leave you email address on web forms etc. One thing I have tried is a dedicated spam-only account (that I dont often look at), a lot of forms etc just need you to fill the box, before you can proceed, without having anything useful to send, also I read a tip in Webuser mag suggesting that you remove mailto:links from links on websites and convert the link into code using ASCII encoding, (the ASCII tables are on http://www.asciitable.com )this puts it beyond the reach of spiders apparently, but I havent got round to that yet, would it be worth doing ? I suppose prevention is better than cure, but if your address is already harvested, you can only filter etc.

Anonymous wrote:Hi,
I understand that you get spam if you leave you email address on web forms etc. One thing I have tried is a dedicated spam-only account (that I dont often look at), a lot of forms etc just need you to fill the box, before you can proceed, without having anything useful to send, also I read a tip in Webuser mag suggesting that you remove mailto:links from links on websites and convert the link into code using ASCII encoding, (the ASCII tables are on http://www.asciitable.com )this puts it beyond the reach of spiders apparently, but I havent got round to that yet, would it be worth doing ? I suppose prevention is better than cure, but if your address is already harvested, you can only filter etc.

My WEB presence is unavoidable for professional reasons. As an author of many scientific papers, that must be accessible via a global WEB data base, my name and address necessarily appear in unencoded form. Furthermore, as participant in many international meetings, my 'data' are necessarily 'visible' through the standard WEB administration of those meetings...Finally, I cannot influence the central mail administration strategies of my laboratory. Don't forget, we talk about 160000 -200000 mails coming in per day rather than a comparably tiny amount in case of private mail.

Bye Fridger

t00fri wrote:My WEB presence is unavoidable for professional reasons. As an author of many scientific papers, that must be accessible via a global WEB data base, my name and address necessarily appear in unencoded form. Furthermore, as participant in many international meetings, my 'data' are necessarily 'visible' through the standard WEB administration of those meetings..

That's the ransom of success :-)

For my part, although my address is available on several websites and is in the whois database and although I don't filter any of my mail, I only get a couple of unsolicited messages on bad days.

Christophe wrote:That's the ransom of success

correct, of course;-)

Christophe wrote:For my part, although my address is available on several websites and is in the whois database and although I don't filter any of my mail, I only get a couple of unsolicited messages on bad days.

This is amazing Christophe! How come? What's your theory for this? Nobody wants to sell you something, use you as a secret transfer agent of $100000000000 from Africa;-), no girlies who want to talk to you seriously....?

Bye Fridger

t00fri wrote:This is amazing Christophe! How come? What's your theory for this? Nobody wants to sell you something, use you as a secret transfer agent of $100000000000 from Africa;-), no girlies who want to talk to you seriously....?

Yeah, no-one wants to talk to me :-((

Seriously though, I have no idea. The only thing I can think of, is that I almost exclusively deal with French or European merchant sites, and I avoid 'big name' web services (MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, e-Bay, Amazon, AOL...) I suspect those sites to be rather liberal in their use of the collected personal information.

well my yahoo e-mail acc. gets about 4 /day that don't end up in the bulk file
,but unforchenatly the topic replay from this fourm also end up in the bulk file so i still have to look at it .
Now my comcast.net mail (ooboy!!!!!!!@@###$%^%&) that one is allways full of junk ,and i only use it for a few sites . like Adobe , Symantec, Gimp,...
and Comcasts filters don't seem to work one bit .

Hey John,
Your right about Comcast. They don't seem to care at all. Another reason I have since dumped them. I was starting to get up to 10 a day through them.
I have only one Hotmail account that really gets hit and that’s by design. Most of the time its one or two a day. Than I will be hit by twenty or thirty all at once. Lucky for me all my other email accounts are not plagued by this problem. At least not yet.

Don. Edwards

Just going to check my email (last checked about 7 hours ago.....) and we have.....

79 bits of spam. 2 proper emails. Mailwasher intercepted all but 1.

Doug

I get no spam at all, I think perhaps they have figured out somehow that I haven't got a lot of money.

I once left my address up on a heavily visited music forum, but I used the old "NOSPAM" trick and got nothing. Surfers who wish to leave their email address public could try it (no guarantees though!):

usernameNOSPAM@service.com

...where the phrase NOSPAM should be removed manually by a legitimate mail sender (though any phrase would do).

That's my 2 pence worth anyway. Some people actually like their spam, they make poetry with it, according to this lot of sillyness off the BBC...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3247200.stm

Now then, anybody fancy some free Nigerian money?

BBC article wrote:Grant Hutchinson specialises in three-line subject line spam poems...

Never would have guessed grant!!!

t00fri wrote:

Code: Select all

--128.000  incoming E-Mails
-- 65.000  were SPAM!!!!
--    290  virus were blocked!!!!


Hey, those are GOOD numbers Fridger! You are very lucky!

On an "average" day, I might get 90 to 95 e-mails, with 80 (yes EIGHTY) of them being SPAM! This number increased dramatically about 5 or 6 weeks ago. Must have been a new round of CDs full of e-mail addresses getting sold to SPAMMERS <frown>. My e-mail address was on most of the web sites I created in the past, so it's on every SPAMMER CD now. Getting to be time to change it I guess.

I have an e-mail account at Yahoo that was used ONLY on MP3.com, where I created a couple of artist web pages, and it gets over 300 SPAMs a day. I finally quit using it all together.

Someone, somewhere, needs to come up with a new protocol for Internet mail that can NOT be spoofed, and then the world governments need to outlaw SPAM. Doing BOTH are the only way this waste of worldwide Internet bandwidth, and people's time and money, is ever going to stop.

Just my two cents worth...

-Don G.

One general solution for emails on webpages, known to me, is to convert your email adress text into a small *.jpg pic button which leads to a javascript function that assembles your adress from different variables and calls the 'mailto:' client with the result.
Pictured text can (by now) not be resolved by email collecting robots.

Perhaps that's a way for you too?

greets, maxim.

maxim wrote:One general solution for emails on webpages, known to me, is to convert your email adress text into a small *.jpg pic button which leads to a javascript function that assembles your adress from different variables and calls the 'mailto:' client with the result.
Pictured text can (by now) not be resolved by email collecting robots.

Perhaps that's a way for you too?

greets, maxim.

Unfortunately not, since e.g. my publications (preprints) are handled by a robot in Los Alamos without allowing anybody to interfere. This is necessary, in case priorities for ingenious ideas are at stake;-).

But I recently learned this technique from the Spammers themselves that managed to penetrate our filter: they just included "Viagra" on a jpeg rather than in the mail text;-) This way they even don't have to mutilate the word e.g. like so Vi.a.gra...

Bye Fridger

Spam is a completly horrible thing, and regardless of Microsoft's promises to eradicate it over the next 2 years it's still a big issue if you use the internet at all.

I've got 10 email accounts on the go - 9 of them are for work (info@, content@, support@ etc) and I'm getting about 3-400 spams a day, most of them asking me if I want to enlarge my debts and consolidate my penis. Or something like that.

So it's a bit tricky to deal with. At the moment I'm using a program called Spamweasel (google it) and that seems to handle most of the crap that arrives.

Christ, I wish I could offer some valid advice on how to get rid of spam (apart from hunting the spammers down and breaking their legs - I DONT NEED VIAGRA! EVEN IF I DID I WOULDN'T BUY IT OFF YOU!. Ahem)

I reckon that we should set up a website that offers free mass mailouts and kill anyone who subscribes to the service. To quote Larry Niven, "Think of it as evolution in action"