Topic 'Re: If people are still getting spam..' in forum '' - dslreports.com

Re: If people are still getting spam..

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 08:59:41 EDT

moonpuppy posted : Don't ask him to explain it. He never will. :uhh:

Fact is spammers try all sorts of ways to send out their crap hoping something gets through.

Re: If people are still getting spam..

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 08:57:58 EDT

moonpuppy posted :

said by Time4aNAP:

I see surprisingly little spam in my administrative (abuse, hostmaster, postmaster etc.) accounts. It is amusing to see the nonexistent addresses that they do try to reach, though. Reading the bounce logs can be downright entertaining at times. ;)

Same thing happens here.

Re: Dear "System"

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 08:56:46 EDT

moonpuppy posted : Agreed.

I made the same comment before about mods who will not identify themselves when "moderating" posts.

And before we here anything from phantom system again, I am a mod on another board and I NEVER moderate anyone without identifying myself. :uhh:

Dear "System"

Sat, 23 Jun 2007 23:25:22 EDT

Time4aNAP posted : Because there is no such user as "System", and no facility to reply to comments from "System" in private, I will post it here.

System, you need to learn the difference between "blatant flaming" and a list of very realistic possibilities. How dare you tell me to "Watch it with the personal insults." when it is you who are insulting my personal intelligence.

I'm a paying customer. You owe me an apology.

Re: If people are still getting spam..

Sat, 23 Jun 2007 14:37:51 EDT

Time4aNAP posted : I see surprisingly little spam in my administrative (abuse, hostmaster, postmaster etc.) accounts. It is amusing to see the nonexistent addresses that they do try to reach, though. Reading the bounce logs can be downright entertaining at times. ;)

Re: If people are still getting spam..

Sat, 23 Jun 2007 11:29:20 EDT

rmdir posted : Or they try names likely to be in use such as mail@, webmaster@, sales@ etc. I've disabled my catch all account for now, but I've seen countless spam using all the above when it's turned on.

Re: If people are still getting spam..

Sat, 23 Jun 2007 09:58:09 EDT

Time4aNAP posted :

said by markopoleo:

Try again? Sure. How come out of 10 email accounts I have (3 are gmail), zero spam with 8 years?

Ah...gmail hasn't been around for eight years, for starters.

Frankly I don't believe your claim. I've already shown one reason why it's not true, so it's not even a matter of whether. That leaves "why". Why would you make such a ridiculously bogus claim? Well, you might be one of the suckers who bought a very expensive CD containing e-mail addresses, and now you're using the same quality of judgment to somehow "make a right" by increasing the number of "wrongs". Maybe you're just lonely and crave attention. [CENSORED by "System"]

I personally don't care what your motives are. It's enough that there are many likely motives, and, as I mentioned before, you haven't had three gmail accounts for eight years, period. Neither has your recent Charter Pipeline account been active for eight years, per your own review.

Now, do you want to get real, and join the discussion? Or do you want to persist, in which case many of us will treat your posts like so much spam...

Re: If people are still getting spam..

Sat, 23 Jun 2007 04:40:34 EDT

NormanS posted :

said by markopoleo:

They deserve it.

In this day and age, no reason you should be getting spam still. I think all that spam is filling empty email accounts long forgotten.

So explain this one:

T 20070622 021215 467accbc Connection from 58.121.106.24T 20070622 021216 467accbc HELO -1209063320T 20070622 021216 467accbc MAIL FROM:T 20070622 021219 467accbc RCPT TO:E 20070622 021219 467accbc RCPT from 58.121.106.24 - user  not known.T 20070622 021219 467accbc QUITT 20070622 021219 467accbc Connection closed with 58.121.106.24, 4 sec. elapsed.

That account has never existed for my domain, yet the spammers regularly attempt delivery to the account. I have seen about four, or five spammer creations on my domain; email addresses that the spammer made up on his own.

--
Norman
~Oh Lord, why have you come
~To Konnyu, with the Lion and the Drum

Re: If people are still getting spam..

Sat, 23 Jun 2007 01:57:51 EDT

Time4aNAP posted :

said by moonpuppy:

Spammers will use dictionary type attacks when looking for emails.

aaaaa@aol.com
aaaab@aol.com
and so on.

Actually that's the "brute-force" technique, not dictionary. Dictionary attacks are used most often to guess passwords. The most sophisticated spam engines use a combination of dictionary and brute-force methods, with dictionaries containing more family and given names, and using permutations based on people's names. For example, the traditional first-initial, last-name username, and the more recent first-name dot last-name e-mail prefix are common targets.

Re: If people are still getting spam..

Sat, 23 Jun 2007 01:39:18 EDT

Time4aNAP posted :

said by MooJohn:

It's not the people receiving spam that we should care about. It's the idiots that are responding to it and buying whatever it's got for sale who are perpetuating the problem.

That would appear to be sound reasoning. And it is the prevailing school of thought on the matter. However I have good reason to believe that in fact, the biggest dupes are the spammers themselves, and that few if any spam solicitations are taken seriously.

Anybody who has monitored spam activity over the years has noticed that spam sent to Americans has shifted away from domestic get rich quick schemes, towards increasingly isolated foreign sources. What's more, the pitches are gaining a distinct bumpkin quality that indicates a trend away from spammers being familiar with their targets. Heck, most of the spammers that I see today can't even manage to get the right character set, much less a single word of english!

Back when there was a majority of native US spammers, I had several occasions to engage in conversation with a few who stumbled into mailing lists. Any illusions that I had held about spamming being a slick corporate marketing tool were quickly dashed. They were genuinely baffled as to why a single e-mail address could generate so much retaliation; they were so clueless that they had no idea that a legitimate use for mass mailings even existed. And these were the Americans, the ones who look downright sophisticated in comparison to the current crop!

One common excuse emerged: "I bought this CD that was guaranteed to be full of e-mail addresses of (suckers)." Anyone who has browsed the back pages of computer magazines has seen the ads for these lists. It became pretty obvious to me who the biggest suckers were. These CDs were being sold at prices ranging from several hundred to several thousand dollars apiece! It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to realize what happens when the would-be direct marketing mogul finds out that he's been taken. It's nothing more than a new twist on the old "plans for guaranteed income, send $1 to..." scheme.

So what happens when every shady character in America knows about the latest grift? The last suckers who still want to recoup their losses must look abroad for a fresh crop of dupes. Of course, news travels fast in the Free World, so the next targets, and therefore sources of spam, tended to be ex-Soviet-Bloc countries that have been isolated from the news of the world until just recently, and to third world areas that are flush with drug money, but still mostly illiterate.

The final frontier is Communist China. And, as the chart clearly shows, there's a gold rush going on there. China is the perfect market for peddling spam schemes to. It's still isolated from reality by a well-entrenched totalitarian government. And the same government is fighting the Cold War with a clever new strategy: beat the West at its own game, namely capitalism. Here we have the world's most populous nation that is now wealthy enough to build a large-scale Internet infrastructure that is engineered to keep the truth from flowing in, but allow the BS to spew outwards unfettered, through huge new backbones.

The totalitarian regime in Communist China has the power of censorship, so it will be a long, long time before all six billion Chinese subjects learn that sending spam is a sucker's game. In the meantime, that leaves a whole lot of people with hopes and dreams to be unwitting soldiers in a massive passive-aggressive virtual invasion of the USA for many years to come.

Re: If people are still getting spam..

Sat, 23 Jun 2007 00:04:35 EDT

Time4aNAP posted :

said by markopoleo:

They deserve [spam].
...
I think all that spam is filling empty email accounts long forgotten.

Do you seriously mean to imply that you yourself get zero spam? If that is the case, then I humbly submit that you must be the world's #1 pariah if even spammers don't send you mail.

I myself do use my various e-mail accounts, several of which were created back in an age when robots.txt files were honored 99% of the time, and we didn't think twice about posting e-mail addresses online. My decade-plus accounts do get more spam. They also get more important mail from contacts that I've cultivated over the years. By the same token, the hometown snail-mailbox that I maintained for 25 years after my father's death was usually stuffed full of junk mail. But it also yielded a handful of personal communications from old friends, for whom this was the last known mailing address for my family. In both cases, the few gems warranted the hassle of dealing with unsolicited garbage.

Re: If people are still getting spam..

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 22:32:40 EDT

moonpuppy posted :

said by markopoleo:

Try again? Sure. How come out of 10 email accounts I have (3 are gmail), zero spam with 8 years?

Do do try again.

Sure, I believe you like I believed your statement about Europe using DC power instead of AC. :uhh:

In fact, at my work, spam tries to get through and these accounts are not even a week old. Our filter gets most of them and they are taken care of but the fact that these emails are new and never been used tells me that spammers are using some sort of sequential system for email addresses.

Re: If people are still getting spam..

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 22:05:50 EDT

markopoleo posted :

said by moonpuppy:

said by markopoleo:

They deserve it.

In this day and age, no reason you should be getting spam still. I think all that spam is filling empty email accounts long forgotten.

Wrong as usual, thanks for playing.

I did an experiment. A blank comcast email and a blank Google gmail account. Both had spam in less than a week. Not one thing was sent from either account nor was it used anywhere to sign up for anything. These were entered and left.

Try again. :uhh:

Try again? Sure. How come out of 10 email accounts I have (3 are gmail), zero spam with 8 years?

Do do try again.

Re: If people are still getting spam..

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 15:56:49 EDT

pog posted :

said by markopoleo:

They deserve it. ...

End user inboxes are only the tip of the iceberg. What about the resources required by mail servers that have to receive all mail and then filter out the spam? The signal to noise ratio has got to be very low... I don't have current stats but I remember a few years ago where Hotmail reported over 80% of mail was filtered out as spam upon reception. This is mail that doesn't even make it into a user's spam folder.

Comparing senderbase's list (all mail) with trend micro's...
»www.senderbase.org/senderbase_queries/main Verizon sits at the top of both... but it appears RR does a much better job of restricting outgoing spam.

Another interesting article (perhaps a little dated?) is at »spam-filter-review.toptenreviews···ics.html Most disturbing is:

Users who reply to Spam email 28%
Users who purchased from Spam email 8%

--
My Site

Re: If people are still getting spam..

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 15:18:36 EDT

moonpuppy posted :

said by internetspec:

So what you are saying is that Google & Comcast are selling your e-mail address? Sorry, I'm not buying it. I think it's more likely that your machine is compromised.

Wrong again. Where did I say that Google and Comcast sold my email info? :uhh:

Spammers will use dictionary type attacks when looking for emails.

aaaaa@aol.com
aaaab@aol.com
and so on.

Machine is not compromised and all AV software is up to date.

Re: If people are still getting spam..

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 13:45:06 EDT

MacTire posted : It has a lot to do with easy to guess email account names. I have had an Yahoo account for 3 years and have had only 2 spam messages in this time. It is the same with picking names as it is passwords; don't use word or word-number combo. Use a phrase instead.

Re: If people are still getting spam..

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 13:40:02 EDT

internetspec posted : So what you are saying is that Google & Comcast are selling your e-mail address? Sorry, I'm not buying it. I think it's more likely that your machine is compromised.

Re: If people are still getting spam..

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 13:24:41 EDT

james posted : But they dont just spam for the hell of it. They do it because it makes them MONEY, so if idiots stop buying the crap there will be no MONEY in it for the spammer. This would not apply to virus propagation of course however, since they dont care if you buy any penis enlargement pills or not.

Re: If people are still getting spam..

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 12:44:11 EDT

moonpuppy posted :

said by markopoleo:

They deserve it.

In this day and age, no reason you should be getting spam still. I think all that spam is filling empty email accounts long forgotten.

Re: If people are still getting spam..

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 11:36:03 EDT

DaSneaky1D posted : I thought the news post is stating just the opposite.

Apparently, the outbound bandwidth is the least of Verizon's concerns since the symmetrical connection is mostly inbound, rather than outbound.
--
:: my trivial ramblings ::

Re: If people are still getting spam..

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 11:14:21 EDT

cableties posted : You don't have to respond, you just have to have an image load or HTML embed load, and that let's them know what IP (and domain) to hammer, troll, scan...

Yes, computer buyers (major %) have no idea that:
-The PC they just bought has OS that is 6 months behind in patches.
-The PC they bought a few years ago needs updates and not jsut to the OS
-Just because you are on the net, doesn't mean you shouldn't own a router w/firewall
-Have no clue about BCC lists, forwarding or email procedures
-Don't supervise their children that do have net access

So ISPs take the passive route (aka cheapest) and leave it to the user to filter.

"Spammers need to be executed. And posted on YouTube." -some facist

Re: If people are still getting spam..

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 11:01:39 EDT

Mike posted : That's not the point.

It's all the bandwidth and shady practices that is behind this industry driving the price of service up.

Re: If people are still getting spam..

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 10:55:30 EDT

MooJohn posted : It's not the people receiving spam that we should care about. It's the idiots that are responding to it and buying whatever it's got for sale who are perpetuating the problem.

If nobody bought from a spam or even clicked on it, it'd cease to be a useful tool. Instead, there are just enough dumbasses willing to click on an "enhancement" advertisement, stock tip, or replica watch ad that the spammers are willing to keep at it.

If people are still getting spam..

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 10:50:00 EDT

markopoleo posted : They deserve it.

In this day and age, no reason you should be getting spam still. I think all that spam is filling empty email accounts long forgotten.