New ways of sending junk mail

Posted on Monday, April 21, 2008 8:08 PM
I was rather dumbfounded when I fetched my mail just now: after weeks of relative ease and perhaps one or two spam mails per day (thoroughly training one's spam filter really does help!), I got about 120 e-mails that are clearly not genuine. I could tell, because they were all bounced e-mails from everywhere, rejected because they were sent to unknown addresses, but with mine as the original sender.
Now, I'm quite confident I don't have a spambot lurking in the shadows of my operating system (if I were, my provider would have shut me off faster than you can sing the Spam-song), nor am I the one who is trying to shove that shit, it's a new way of sending junk mail, otherwise known as spam.


You see, spam filters are getting more and more powerful. Seeing that the amount of spam received by me on a daily basis went from over a 1000 to only one or two per day since I started using and training the filter, you could say it's pretty damn effective.

The problem with these "address unknown"-messages is that it's rather hard to distinguish genuine messages from the fake ones. I have been training my filter to the bone, but this is just disgusting.

Now, here's hoping the filter can be trained for this stuff, otherwise, my e-mail address of nine years is doomed.

As for the spammers; I'd really like to get my hands on one, and 5 minutes alone with him/her.

Just five minutes...

Cheers, K.

Feedback

# re: New ways of sending junk mail

4/21/2008 10:01 PM by Cailin Coilleach
Uhm dude, it's not the method that's new: I had this crap over two years ago. What's new here is that apparently somehow your address got on someone's list :)

Know anyone who's been sending mails with dozens of CC addresses? That's where I'd look first ;)

# re: New ways of sending junk mail

4/21/2008 10:18 PM by Kaijuu
Nah, is more a case of "this address has been doomed for years", due to the fact that it has been sitting in plain text on the front page of a frequently visited web site for a couple of years.
With the spam filter in place, I managed to keep it useful, but this is just the pits.

It's the address I asked you to toss in the bin earlier this year.

# re: New ways of sending junk mail

4/22/2008 3:45 PM by niels
Kaj,

It's just spammers picking a normal address as sender in sent from.
The bounce messages are from stupid servers that do not recognise spam for what it is and react to it.

Spam sucks. But it's something you can't do anything about.
Well, you can, but you have to take a random name @domain.com and then not give it to anyone else... But that kind of defeats the purpose of e-mail.

Oh, btw, using Firefox gave me an error on this post. A value being 0.

Post Comment

Title  
Name  
Url
Comment   

ATTENTION: the code you need to copy is CaSe SeNsItIvE and is required to prevent spam.
Enter the code you see: