Email spam - a new low
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Not content with emailing me about 'performance enhancing drugs', the low life spammers seem to have adopted a new tactic this week, and I haven't seen this before. Its incredibly sick.
Subject headings today have included; "Clinton found hanged", and "Elton John shot dead in London". Do spammers seriously believe that people are going to open such emails, realise its a lie, then order a love-muscle extension on a whim?
There have been others too, relating to children, so I don't care to repeat them here. Spam was bad enough before but now the morons that do it seem to have no scruples left at all.
Why can't the world be normal? :/
No kid of mine is ever going to have their own email address as long as I get a say in it.
It is getting worse.... at least my companys spam filter works quite well and i seem to miss out on most of this trash......
It is getting beyond a joke...
enlarge your tennis
It's shock tactics like that, that get people to open an email, thus confirming their address. It would be nice if there was a way, to reply to the spam emails, in such a way, you could overcrowd their mailbox and render the whole exercise pointless.
I hate spam email. Everyone does. :o(
Quite right about the email address too.
Yeah I've been getting those sort for a while now, just made up news like Angelina Jolie dies in childbirth type stuff. I also got one today saying "They are fraudsters" which talks about Nigerian scams but then says "this lawyer is OK, he'll get you some money transfered safely, use him" haha, yeah right.
I don't get spam, woohoo!
clearly you don't have an email account ;-)
Nothing like the way they tried to bring some excitement in my life...
actually, I almost never get spam on gmail (that isn't thrown into the spam folder automatically), and when I do, it's never that kind of crap...
Well, gmail's spam filters are very strong though (even too much if not properly trained).
I think one of the main reasons they are using this technique is that a news like e-mail has more chances of getting through bayesian filters... at least for now (I just got a "Alligator attack savages 3 students on school trip" which was recognized 98% as spam, for example, which is just enough to slip through with my criteria).
clearly you don't have an email account ;-)
4 actually, our family's, hotmail, gmail, and yahoo.
The only one that does get occasional spam is (ironically) my now defunct family email.
lol @ Doiron. Reminds me of a megadeth song about that very topic.
There have been others too, relating to children, so I don't care to repeat them here. Spam was bad enough before but now the morons that do it seem to have no scruples left at all.
Yes, I got one of those today. It's amazing how low these sleazeballs will go.
Umm, I thought they wanted you to at least open the email so the HTML viewer pulled ImageX or dataY from their servers which was setup as a trigger to show your email address was a valid one.....
All they need is one good hit from one of their image engines to show your email address has a user looking at content then BAM, they send you the really good stuff (IE "how to enlarge your <blank>", "Singles in your area" etc). The odds of you clicking on one of the other ads is low, but still they have a shot of 1 in 1000, so all they need is 1000 good email address that read their mail.
I wish someone would make a spam account, that spams anyone who spams it in the first place. It would be funny :D.
I get 200 per day (-mostly filtered).
Is there no way to bounce them back to where they came from?
Is there no way to bounce them back to where they came from?
Nope! I mean you can, but most cases are that the email address of the sender is spoofed. Even if you look at the header info of the email you'll find that the address it actually came from is different from the address they show in the reply (from) field. Even the from address differs from the domain where it originated from.....
It's an evil that cannot be cleansed.... There was a local company that had an oc<something> piped into their building, had a full room of server racks, and all they did was send out emails for companies (all day, all night). They offered me a job, and even though it is dishonest and that 10% of the emails they sent out were probably valid, I had the urge to blow the building sky high and do the world a service...... I tend to ignore those urges though...
It's interesting the extremes people are going to in dealing with the spam problem.
I just sold a proxy site to a guy on the Digitalpoint forums. I sent him an email with the website files attached and a message confirming that the domain had been transferred to him. I then got an automated email back, asking me to click a confirmation link to prevent my email from being deleted as spam. I then had to fill in a CAPTCHA on the page that appeared (which put my email address on a whitelist, so I wouldn't have to do all this again if I needed to email the guy).
I wonder if we'll see more of this sort of thing as spam becomes more of a problem.
I also wonder how long it will be before the spammer scum start sending similar confirmation emails to trick people into confirming their email address is active. Not long I expect.
I also wonder how long it will be before the spammer scum start sending similar confirmation emails to trick people into confirming their email address is active. Not long I expect.
That is just what I was thinking while reading... I would likely avoid to open a link from such an e-mail in the first place, so I don't expect this method to grow strong in the future (as soon as it becames more common, it would die by the same hands of spam and scam e-mails).
I think the best way to handle the problem is to use e-mail addresses from competent and focused providers who run advanced spam filters and blacklists on their whole userbase: considered the amount of repeated spam e-mails they receive, the filters can always be up to date and almost sure proof.
I am 100% spam free. :-)
Guys, I just heard Elton John died in a rocket ship!
If not for spam, I would never have known that.
Cygnus - how?
Spam seems to target some people only. It's wierd, it's like the people with the most spam were almost "deemed" worthy by the spam overlords.
I really only get one or two every month or so. And even then it's only online casino and dating stuff.
It just depends on the use of the address, including proper uses.
For example, just using an e-mail from your domain will eventually generate spam since spammers use the WhoIs database in order to gain addresses (unless the proprietary is masked, of course).
Man: Morning!
Waitress: Morning!
Man: Well, what've 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 bacon spam tomato and spam;
Vikings: Spam spam spam spam...
Waitress: ...spam spam spam egg and spam; spam spam spam spam spam spam baked beans spam spam spam...
Vikings: Spam! Lovely spam! Lovely spam!
Unfortunately it will never end until the whole world scraps the current email system and replaces it with (drumroll....) email II.
Email 2 will have no free unauthenticated sending, every address is registered (unfortunately privacy would be gone), ISPs block and filter all traffic to ensure the sender matches the customer.
Until then the ol learning filter is our best friend and may all spammers burn in hell for spoiling a nice 'free' system.
It would also help if people stopped using hi-jackable zombie-capable systems like 98/2K & improperly unsecured XP. The world must eeither
secure XP properly or go with Vista (so far so good), Linux or OSX. Otherwise we are likely to see email as we know it become clogged with digital beaurocracy!
i wondered how long it would take for the spam song to appear ;)