Anyone heard of SPAM?

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carson

carson

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Joined
Sep 1, 2006
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Location
Florida, USA
I am a little bit befuddled.

  Believe it or not, I have  literally gone for a few years without getting a single line of those dreaded SPAM E-mails. Have always wondered why that was.

    Over the last couple of months they keep on coming daily. Many of them are duplicate lines.

  Insurance, educational opportunities, some weird stuff. Now how can that be?

I put a lot of their addresses in "Block sender" mode, to no avail.

The only thing I have done differently lately was that I had been logged onto "Facebook" for a while, but have discontinued that site.

    Any ideas are there? Is there a possibility the my ISP has made changes? Using Road Runner (Bright House/Time Warner? I spoke with them about it, but was unable to get a sane answer from them.

    Would love to hear a few comments.

carson FL
 
Did you give your email address to Facebook?  How about other web sites?  It's also possible that someone with your email address has had their computer botted and the bot now has all the email addresses in their address book.

Blocking the from addresses won't help as those are almost always bogus.  They're either made up or belong to some innocent victim.  If a friends address book has been compromised, then your email address is probably the from address in some spam too.  All you can do is change your address.
 
Ned, yes ,I had my address listed in Facebook. An old friend invited me on and I fell for it.

Can't think of other areas that I have recently created. I wonder if eventually they will disappear. (Wishful thinking :)

I have a second E-mail address which is clean. Eliminating my prime address will be a pain, such as notifying everyone and all others.(Companies I am dealing with,etc) I'll try sticking it out for a while.Good grief.

What about the 2 identical mails, one right after the first? Never seen that before. Is that a new trick of the Spamsters?

carson FL
 
I often get multiple copies of the same spam email.  You can either just delete them (they won't go away by themselves) or get something like Mail Washer and report them to people that are fighting back against the spammers.  Places like Spamcop and Knujon want to see the spam and in the case of Knujon, they track down the source and attempt to put them out of business.  Knujon has had some success in this.
 
My E-mail host is actually Yahoo, so I get oh, a couple hundred spam a day.  I've used the same E-mail now for some years.

Yahoo nails most of it, I get the dozen or so that make it past their filters.

Personally I'd like to see spammers sued for steeling our computer time and bandwith and so tied up in court that they can't type a single stroke for the next... 10 years longer than they live.

 
carson said:
Ned, yes ,I had my address listed in Facebook. An old friend invited me on and I fell for it.

Can't think of other areas that I have recently created. I wonder if eventually they will disappear. (Wishful thinking :)

I have a second E-mail address which is clean. Eliminating my prime address will be a pain, such as notifying everyone and all others.(Companies I am dealing with,etc) I'll try sticking it out for a while.Good grief.

What about the 2 identical mails, one right after the first? Never seen that before. Is that a new trick of the Spamsters?
Click to expand...

May I recommend Only My Email a spam filtering service ?   They are really very good at weeding out the spammers and fraudsters.   They use a learing mode so that you can rescue real mail from the spam pile.  Nothing need be lost from false positives.  I used them for several years as my old CIS address became a spam magnet.   I finally dropped them only when I converted to a Gmail address.  Good value for the money.   They have a free 30 day trial.   See them at http://www.onlymyemail.com/services/
 
Thanks for all the replies, guys.

  Have a better idea idea now about what is happening .I started out here in Florida with Earthlink ISP and the spam was horrendous. Many other things went wrong with them too. I then switched to a small local ISP (modem at that time); he was using the Barracuda system and my spam went away.

  Then I went to Road Runner cable. Also no more spam for the last two years. Now it is coming back. Unfortunately, RR does not support windows 98se anymore with some of their newer updates. Maybe that has something to do with it also.

    I'll check out some of your suggestions when I get inundated some more.
Maybe Santa will recognize that I have been a good boy all year and reward me with a miracle :)

    In the meantime, a very Merry Christmas to all my new-found friends here on the forum.

carson FL 56.1F
 
The sad fact is that spam can't be stopped. All you can do is learn to live with it and delete. Yes, you can change your email address but that is an annoying process involving alerting all your personal contacts and believe me, many of them will fail to make note of your new address. The spammers will catch up with you before your friends do.

Until technology and law get on the same page and come up with a foolproof way to stop this stuff we as citizens can help. I just delete most of the spam I get but when I get one of those phishing scams or any emails that appear to be trying to coerce or trick me into parting with my bank account, I alert the Federal Trade Commission and my state attorney general. Both have email addresses for reporting spam. You can learn more from the FTC here: http://www.ftc.gov/spam/
 
Thanks for the info, cricketdaddy.

I looked at the ftc website; sounds like something to explore. Unfortunately that site never stopped down-loading. Will try it again later.
carson
 
Yeah, I had the same problem with the government's website this morning. (Go figure.) But here's the email address: [email protected]

I just put it in my addressbook. Then when I get an offensive or suspicious spam I simply hit "FORWARD" insert the address and hit "SEND." They don't want you to alter the spam in anyway. Make sure the full header is included.

The website says they collect the information for investigating rip-off artists. No telling how effective it is but it's a simple thing to do and if we flood the FTC with these spams maybe congress will get serious about it.
 
The head of Google's anti-spam team was on TV briefly a few days ago; He said that 80% (or was that 90%) of all email is spam.
 
Jerry did something recently using Yahoo and was not very pleased when he discovered they were tracking his internet usage.  He discovered it because of a Norton Antivirus alert.  He immediately removed Yahoo from the computer and everything related to it.  So I'm guessing that maybe Yahoo is directly or indirectly related to your spams.

ArdraF
 
Ironically, I guess, Yahoo mail also does a good job of catching spam and putting it into a separate folder. You can look at it, delete it all or just ignore it and they'll delete it for you after awhile. If they're tracking my emails they're bored to death looking at stupid jokes and You Tube links I send to my underworked friends.  ;)
 
I use multiple email addresses.

I have one for friends that I don't give out to anyone I don't personally know.
I have one for places I buy things from and trust them (Amazon, New Egg, etc)

I keep one on yahoo for things I'm pretty sure I'll get spammed with and it's amazing how may emails it gets a day.

And sometimes I just make up a temp one for the places I need one email back from and never need to contact again. I use my web sites hosting service but you can do the same thing using Yahoo or Google.

The best (and weirdest) spam email I ever got was from the "Sexually Transmitted Disease" dating service. They matched people who had the same STD's.  :)



 
We cancelled all of our email accounts except one private work acount I use and a personal account for MArsha and I all hosted through our ISP "Go Daddy".  We pay one annual fee for the ISP which hosts are web page and all of our kids email and so far NO spam since inception (~1 year).  This may change over time but between going to a less visible host and changing email accounts has virtually eliminated spam.  .....tim
 
I think I have discovered why my SPAM mail started again.

On my current ISP account (RR) I have always had two (2) E-mail addresses. One of them was the "default" the other standard. Until recently I only used the default one and there was zero spam.

  Then I used my secondary address one time only and the Spam started. On careful checking I noticed that all SPAM was addressed to my secondary account. (Curiously, I used it for the newsletter of a political candidate only -- Did they sell my address? Can a politician be trusted?)  ::)

    I think though that the ISP is only "scrubbing" the default address and not the secondary.
Since I deleted the secondary a couple of days ago, no more SPAM. Hence Facebook is in the clear.

    Pure conjecture; does that make sense?

carson FL
 
You probably never enabled the server based spam filtering on the secondary account.  A good ISP will allow the user to choose whether to use the server filters or not.  Do you check for false positives on your filtered account?  No filter is perfect and you may be missing some legitimate emails if you don't check the spam flagged messages.
 
Thanks, Ned. Guess I have to learn some more.

Haven't got a clue where to check for "false positives" on the computer. I am using Outlook Express. Am I overlooking something or will that too have to be arranged for the filtered account? Your comments please.

carson FL
 
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