My spam's gone crazy!

A few days ago I borrowed Far Cry and installed it, tried to get online, I was told to sign up to ubi.com so I did, and ever since I have been sent about 500 spam emails per day! What am I to do now? I don't want to ditch my email address...

get a spamfilter for you mail..

Yeah, but I'm talking about when I go onto the webmail. My hosting company reckon they've just upgraded their spam filter as well.

BTW what are you guys doing against those new viagra spam mails that are useing hard-to-recognize subjects and things, like via.uag.ra and so on? I have some filters, but none of the mails has a constant signature or something. (guess it's sent by a a trojan)?

I'd like to know how to block those emails also jfk.

That's not the end of it for me. I'm getting a huge amount of spam which gets passed the filter and powwebs filters by having the spam as a .gif image in the email. Stocks & Shares, Viagra, ciallis etc...

Gmail seems to be doing a good job of blocking those. I see a whole bunch in my spam folder and haven't had one in the inbox in a long time.

I assume they're using some sort of bayesian filter plus blacklisting. Since they have a whole bunch of users reporting spam if they ever get it, they probably have a pretty good blacklist database.

I ditched my email address because of spam. I probably get around 30 - 50 e-mails a day. Be really careful what you sign up for with your main email. Best bet is to have a seccond gmail or whatever for you spam/porn/free ipod signups.

the only thing you can do to keep your mailbox relatively spam-free is to be very careful giving it out...

Just make a practice of handing out some hotmail address to these kind of web forms and such, rather than handing out your real mailbox that you care about.

Any potential spam ends up there, and you can just take a look every once in a while when you're expecting something in particular, and not be bothered by it the rest of the time.

But once your email address is 'out there' and the spamfloods have opened, there is almost nothing you can do to make it stop again.

Yeah, I've realised that now, silly boy that I am :(

Pfizer just opened a new drug manufacturing facility in upstate New York...they are calling it viagra falls!!!

I block everything that ends in GRA... I realized that unless someone was writing about viagra or niagra falls...

and it seems to work. OUR email server at work is generating thousands of blank emails a day with no subject and no sender (Mercury mail! I hate it) and all of them go to me.

Holy shit! I'd be taking action against Ubisoft. You'll never stop the spammers. Ubi shouldn't have given out your email address.


I used to get this on my Yahoo account (since practically day 1), I think due to a lot of these spam bots putting random letters together until one combination doesn't bounce. My ISP account used to be fine, but something changed several months ago and now I get around the same amount there as well.

If I get many more stock/shares SPAM, I think I'll go mad! They're even sending them as images now, with the text all randomly positioned, with random shapes/colours in the background, to try and fool SPAM filters with OCR, presumably! :/

No sign of abatement. It seems that all these hundreds of emails I'm getting each day are REPLIES from spam filters, saying that my message has been blocked. So my email address is not being targetted by spam, but has been used to SEND lots of spam. Is there anything I can do about this, as opposed to your normal-type spam?

Unfortunately, there's almost nothing you can do about it, except if you notice that the majority of the original messages that bounced came from the same IP address and you complain to the ISP in question that owns it... but most likely these days they came through some infected botnet which means it's pretty much untracable.

Anyway -- I've been on the receiving end of such a spamflood myself a number of years ago, and we saw this issue pop up a number of times when I worked for an ISP (some unsuspecting customer getting the bounces from some random spammer abusing his domain name in the from: of a spamflood)
On the bright side (if there is such a thing), I've never seen this last more than a week, most likely it will stop any moment now if it hasn't already.

Kind of sucks, but since the email protocols allow anyone to put whatever they want in the from: lines without any form of authentication, there's absolutely nothing you can do to prevent someone from the other side of the planet from exactly doing so.

Well, it's encouraging to know it may only be temporary. It's been about 2 weeks now so I'll just batten down the hatches and hope for the storm to subside soon :)

60 a day for the last 5 months.
Luckily I worked out how to use Outlook Express > Tools > Message Rules > Mail... which traps and bins 99% of it.

Yeh I'd say PEAKS are unlikely to last more than a week. But once you get a steady flow, you've got a steady flow. Only thing to do is change your email address. I'd still have a go at Ubi if you're sure it's connected to their sign up (maybe test another email account if you can).

Another thought: If you do indeed have your own domain and currently have a catch-all set up, consider dropping the catch-all account and just configure the address(es) you actually use.

That's definitely a thought, although annoyingly my friends seem never to remember my address, and prefix the @ with an amazing array of different things!

mine went mad after i published my address on my website repeatedly on several pages. I wrote a simple php script to ask for a code (then used the all contact links to link to that), since then the spam has dropped off a bit after several several weeks. from mabe 100+ a day to 30ish but i think once your on the list youre ON the list! (at least its making it harder to add me to any more lists.

Here it is in action:
www.d-grafix.com/email.php

You can have the php code if u have a site & similar prob. Although, im sure it wont confuse any advanced brute/image reading bots. But seems to be working.... slowly

wont help with ubi soft though :)

Thunderbirds got quite a good spam filter, especially for a catch all, tell everything to go to the bin thats not addressed:
you/support/sales/whatever@...

i think you need to add 'undisclosed recipients' for bcc-ing!

If they start getting bounced emails they're much more likely to start paying attaention ;]

The viagra ones are annoying. Whenever I sign up to a new website I create an email for it, that way I can tell who has shared what information... tellingly, all my viagra spam is addressed to dailyclick[ a t ]gamefreax.fsnet.co.uk, although I can't for the life of me remember registering to Daily Click so I'm slightly stumped.

Between 6pm last night and 10am this morning I got 1253 spam emails! So I've got rid of my catch all. If my mates really want to get hold of me, they'll call...

what to do with hard spam mails:

Put the most well known spam mail hosts on your black list and white list people you know.

Sounds stupid, but its easy and works great.
I've yahoo, gmail and hotmail on my blacklist as well as a few others.

It's not just something I can combat with my Outlook - I use my hosting company's webmail quite a lot, so I have to wade through everything on that. Also, it still downloads to Outlook before being binned with rules.

I use a product from Computer Associate for Anti spam, works great!
It uses your global address list and your personal list, sent emails to create a while list.

check it out,
http://home2.ca.com/DRHM/servlet/ControllerServlet?Action=DisplayProductDetailsPage&SiteID=caconsum&Locale=en_US&Env=BASE&productID=50708500