Spam - Query

[Mom]

OK, so I am a self confessed numpty on how these wankers get to send me crap spam mail. SO can someone pleae explain how my email can receive this shit?

" Islamic actually realized by In the by educated rose by before processor global as museums projects player RPS should The that replacing of Database Vasnetsov down to on Tanks

pages
much arms in Essendon Although Mezlekia The appointment significant Website Tallest in Natural salt including such Sony period Indo can the Milan Holder municipalities Middle a a Barney Cuban disambiguation in possibly religious as Belgae doctrine and nuclearin temple census b Gastornis Road President of two the superfaculty pistons "

I thought "pistons" was a good place to stop, but the email goes on and on and on with more of the same. It came into a family email attached to the main @xtra one I have had for YEARS.

I thoughjt I was well protected and my ISP wanks on at how efficient their spam filters are. How come I end up getting this shit?

[CookMySock]

Usually what happens is someone who has you in their outlook addressbook gets a virus, and that virus can be used for a range of stuff, including large spam runs. It uses their Outlook addressbook as a list of people to email to. It will often include a .zip, .pif, or .exe and try trick you into opening it so it can infect your computer as well.

There are a few technical workarounds. One is called "greylisting" - when the incoming mail is being delivered it spits a temporary error and tells the virus sending the email to come back and try again later, at which point a "real" email server will do just that, but the virus will just give up right away. There isn't really a huge amount you can do, except join the exodus away from using Outlook and Explorer. At least then you are part of the solution and not part of the problem.

Theres a huge underworld behind viruses - they are not just here to piss you off and fuck your pooter, they are there to make someone else money.

Steve

[peasea]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_eYSuPKP3Y

Am I helping?

[Mudfart]

im getting stuff from heaps of game sites cvoz my little ones know my email, and haf to reigster an address.
im also getting loads of pharmaceutical spam, and when you try to unsubscribe, it wont let you. talk about illegal, but we astill get it?

[Virago]

im also getting loads of pharmaceutical spam, and when you try to unsubscribe, it wont let you. talk about illegal, but we astill get it?
Never ever respond to spam - you've just confirmed that it's going to an active email address, and that you're reading it. Clicking Unsubscribe simply says to them that you're reading their emails, and your email address is now a more valuable target.

Most people get the viagra / penis growth type spam, although most spam filters will send it to junk mail. Even KB gets it...

[davereid]

Aunty Maureen. Sent my super-secret, family-only email address an "e-birthday card". Now the Russians know my email address, my real name, my real address, my date of birth.. cos the nice website asked for Aunty Mo to fill it all out so they could send me an "e-card" for my birthday.

And just by filling in my DOB it would remind her of special birthdays.

She could store my address FOR FREE just by filling out the form.

Good old Aunty Mo !

[MIXONE]

What you mean it's not real?
But I've got billions of dollars coming to me and my penis will be 10 in. long and stay standing all night long.

[JimO]

penis growth type spam, although most spam filters will send it to junk mail. Even KB gets it...

last thing KB needs is bigger cocks

[Jonno.]

im getting stuff from heaps of game sites cvoz my little ones know my email, and haf to reigster an address.
im also getting loads of pharmaceutical spam, and when you try to unsubscribe, it wont let you. talk about illegal, but we astill get it?

10 minute mail was invented for this.

[Ronin]

Usually what happens is someone who has you in their outlook addressbook gets a virus, and that virus can be used for a range of stuff, including large spam runs. It uses their Outlook addressbook as a list of people to email to. It will often include a .zip, .pif, or .exe and try trick you into opening it so it can infect your computer as well.

There are a few technical workarounds. One is called "greylisting" - when the incoming mail is being delivered it spits a temporary error and tells the virus sending the email to come back and try again later, at which point a "real" email server will do just that, but the virus will just give up right away. There isn't really a huge amount you can do, except join the exodus away from using Outlook and Explorer. At least then you are part of the solution and not part of the problem.

Theres a huge underworld behind viruses - they are not just here to piss you off and fuck your pooter, they are there to make someone else money.

Steve

How about you give some useful info? I have seen no difference what so ever between machines using IE and Outlook than the ones using Firefox and Thunderbird.

Basicly Mom, your spam filter does it's best. Train it tell it that that piece of mail is spam and it will learn and the spam will decrease... a little. Failing that use gmail to get all you mail. I get zero spam now. I can give you a hand with that if you like.

[Winston001]

How about you give some useful info? I have seen no difference what so ever between machines using IE and Outlook than the ones using Firefox and Thunderbird.

Basicly Mom, your spam filter does it's best. Train it tell it that that piece of mail is spam and it will learn and the spam will decrease... a little. Failing that use gmail to get all you mail. I get zero spam now. I can give you a hand with that if you like.

Wot he said is spot-on.

[Pedrostt500]

And I thought this was going to be a Spam recipe thread.

[Gubb]

last thing KB needs is bigger cocks
One DangerousBastard is enough thanks.

[Winston001]

<script language="JavaScript" src="http://www.stlyrics.com/songs/uptext.js"></script><script type="text/javascript" src="http://srv.clickfuse.com/showads/showad.php"></script> <script language="JavaScript" src="http://www.stlyrics.com/songs/ringup_song.js"></script>http://www.stlyrics.com/songs/tel.gifSend “Spam Song” Ringtone to Your Cellhttp://www.stlyrics.com/songs/tel2.gif (http://www.ringtonematcher.com/co/ringtonematcher/02/noc.asp?sid=STLros&artist=Monty+Python&song=Spam+Song)

<!--Artist: Monty Python--> <!--Song: Spam Song--> Customer:
Morning,

Waitress:
Morning.

Customer:
What have you got?

Waitress:
Well, there's egg and bacon,
egg sausage and bacon
Egg and spam
Egg, bacon and spam
Egg, bacon, sausage and spam
Spam, bacon, sausage and spam
Spam, egg, spam, spam, bacon and spam
Spam, sausage, spam, spam, spam, bacon, spam tomato and spam
Spam, spam, spam, egg and spam
Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam and spam.

(Choir: Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam! Lovely Spam! Lovely Spam!)

Or Lobster Thermidor aux crevettes with a mornay sauce
served in a provencale manner with shallots and aubergines
garnished with truffle pate, brandy and a fried egg on top and spam.

Wife:
Have you got anything without spam?

Waitress:
Well, the spam, eggs, sausage and spam
That's not got much spam in it

Wife:
I don't want any spam!

Customer:
Why can't she have eggs, bacon, spam and sausage?

Wife:
That's got spam in it!

Customer:
Hasn't got much spam in it as spam, eggs, sausage and spam has it?

(Choir: Spam! Spam! Spam!...)

Wife:
Could you do me eggs, bacon, spam and sausage without the spam, then?

Waitress:
Iiiiiiiiiiiich!!

Wife:
What do you mean 'Iiiiiiiiiich'? I don't like spam!

(Choir: Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!)

Waitress (to choir):
Shut up!

(Choir: Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!)

Waitress:
Shut Up! Bloody Vikings!
You can't have egg, bacon, spam and sausage without the spam.

Wife:
I don't like spam!

Customer:
Shush dear, don't have a fuss. I'll have your spam. I love it,
I'm having spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans,
spam, spam, spam, and spam!

(Choir: Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam! Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!)

Waitress:
Shut Up!! Baked beans are off.

Customer:
Well, could I have her spam instead of the baked beans then?

Waitress:
You mean spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam,
spam and spam?

Choir (intervening):
Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam!
Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!
Spam spa-a-a-a-a-am spam spa-a-a-a-a-am spam.
Lovely spam! Lovely spam! Lovely spam! Lovely spam!
Spam spam spam spam!

[Gremlin]

Mom, most of it is technical, but basically, spammers try very hard to make their emails look legit, while normal people often don't bother one way or another. In short, spam emails can "look" more real to a spam filter than a normal email, and hence, get through the system. If a system is too harsh, you won't get the real emails from friends. If it is too soft, you get spam. It's a massive balancing act.

The email address the email comes from can be faked, made up, etc. I could write the software necessary to send out an email appearing to be from anyone I liked. Guys, bear in mind she is using the ISP's spam filter, giving her very little control over a lot of anti-spam features that businesses have.

I manage several private mail servers for companies, processing at least 1000-2000 legit emails every day, and spam would make up 80-90% of emails. Public mail servers would have a much higher rate of spam. In short Mom, getting the odd spam (less than 10 a day) is not too bad. If spam stopped existing... it would be great (and make my days a lot better).

[CookMySock]

The email address the email comes from can be faked, made up, etc. I could write the software necessary to send out an email appearing to be from anyone I liked.You don't even need to write software.. (which of course you will know..) ;)

C:\WINDOWS>telnet someserver 25

Trying xx.xxx.xxx.xx
Connected to server.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 someserver.com ESMTP Postfix (Ubuntu)
helo dell01
250 someserver.com
mail from: madeup@bogus.com <--- ficticious
250 2.1.0 Ok
rcpt to: anyone@anywhere.com <--- ficticious
250 2.1.5 Ok
data
354 End data with <CR><LF>.<CR><LF>
subject line goes here
Dear Sir,

Please buy our spam!

bye

.
250 2.0.0 Ok: queued as 0327B406049
quit
221 2.0.0 Bye
Connection closed by foreign host.


I manage several private mail servers for companies, processing at least 1000-2000 legit emails every day, and spam would make up 80-90% of emails. Public mail servers would have a much higher rate of spam. In short Mom, getting the odd spam (less than 10 a day) is not too bad. If spam stopped existing... it would be great (and make my days a lot better).coughgreylistcough...

Steve

[Gremlin]

greylist has big downsides. We've found other people's servers are configured to try again in a few days, not 5-10 min. SPF records are great, if everyone was able to put hard fail records on their domains...

[CookMySock]

greylist has big downsides. We've found other people's servers are configured to try again in a few days, not 5-10 min. SPF records are great, if everyone was able to put hard fail records on their domains...woh.. I see retry times of 15-20 mins. They should configure their server properly.

Greylisting IS a pain though, business customers' new contacts are always delayed by 20 mins - that's just the way of it. Once they have emailed each other once, then it is all go, but not until. Still, the total lack of spam here is breathtaking. I don't tell them about the delay, and no one seems to notice it, and correspondingly no one seems to notice the lack of spam, but yeah 90% reduction in traffic, zero permanent failures, zero false blocks, and zero virus spam is pretty hard to turn down. If everyone greylisted then the bot writers would fix it, and we don't want that now do we. :niceone:

Of course, it is possible to whitelist all .co.nz et all inside greylist, and that does cut back the delays.

Can the virus just use the ISPs' gateway to circumvent? Surely it could look up that information in outlook?

edit: postgrey comes with loads of whitelisting already done, and its trivial to add your own.
$ grep -v "\#" /etc/postgrey/whitelist_* | wc -l
199


Steve

[Gremlin]

grep? linux? ewwww :bleh:

.co.nz isn't nearly enough for me however. I work with .com, .net, .co.uk, .com.au, .co.jp etc etc every day. I manage most common TLD's as well (always amusing having a .co.uk, registered in NZ, managed in NZ, mail servers in NZ etc :lol:). Also, best to not drill massive holes in your defence by whitelisting .co.nz, only takes one spammer to fake email addresses on that...

A while ago, had massive problems with viagra/pfizer emails going right through. Put in a custom rule with great success... until a while later a client started dealing with Pfizer :crybaby:

[CookMySock]

A while ago, had massive problems with viagra/pfizer emails going right through. Put in a custom rule with great success... until a while later a client started dealing with Pfizer :crybaby:Thats why server-side greylisting is cool.. it's not about the content, it's about the relationship between sender and receiver. All the common stuff is whitelisted so theres no delay, but anything that has never been seen before gets the run-around just to make sure it's serious. 90% of spam doesn't even get to the server.

On what month in the following graph was greylisting installed?

<img src="http://users.aber.ac.uk/auj/spam/aujspam.gif">
*from http://users.aber.ac.uk/auj/spam/greyperf.shtml

Steve

[Max Preload]

People who bulk email jokes without BCCing are often to blame for the reasons DB spoke of - email address harvesting through worms on any of the recipient's machines and they have all the email addresses the email was sent to.

If you set up another email address (most ISPs will give you at least 5 free with your account) that you never use, it'll never get spammed. So the spammers are not just brute force emailing random addresses.

[Tank]

Bullshit - do not read

Seriously - you should have that as a header for all your post.

[Tank]

Upshot - 'ol (as opposed to old ;-) ) Mom is techie light.

Thus the simple answer is - just have your mail with a ISP that has reasonable spam filtering. They get 99% of it - but the odd one will always get thru. When they do - just delete them. It only takes a second.

No need to do anything - no need to configure greylist, no need to run linux commands. Simple.

[Max Preload]

Thus the simple answer is - just have your mail with a ISP that has reasonable spam filtering.

Xtra used to be fantastic. Then when it became YahooXtra it turned to shit. But now, after training it by logging into webmail to mark SPAM that made it to my Inbox and to retrieve email wrongly marked as SPAM it's back to being pretty damn good again.