SPAM From this newsgroup

  • Thread starter Thread starter Matthew Jones
  • Start date Start date
M

Matthew Jones

I would like to THANK the wonderful people
for the tons and tons of SPAM mail which I have traced from this newsgroup.

Since I started posting here my SPAM mail has increased 1000%.
To test this I changed my e-mail addess to a non used address.
Now I see in my gateway e-mail
 
Matthew said:
I would like to THANK the wonderful people
for the tons and tons of SPAM mail which I have traced from this newsgroup.

Since I started posting here my SPAM mail has increased 1000%.
To test this I changed my e-mail addess to a non used address.
Now I see in my gateway e-mail
Click to expand...

Why post a message to the newsgroup about this?
No one here is likely to be the reason for your spam, spammers use
scripts to comb all newsgroups for email addresses.

All you need to do is alter your email address:
i.e. if your actual address is:
(e-mail address removed)
then you'd put your address as:
(e-mail address removed)

Anyone with a brain who actually wants to contact you via email will be
able to work out the actual address.
Spamming scripts will just end up sending spam to non-existant addresses
making it more pointless for the spammers to do.
 
Using your real e-mail address in a public newsgroup has not been considered
a wise thing to do for years.
Spammers have programs to read the newsgroups for them. That is why people
suggest you obfuscate your address and tell people how to decode it or make
a false address up.


However, I feel your pain.

J
 
Greetings --

While it's not possible to completely eliminate spam (unsolicited
commercial email), there are some precautions and steps you can take
to
minimize it's impact:

1) Never, ever post your real email address to publicly accessible
forums or newsgroups, such as this one. For years now, spammers have
been using software utilities to scan such places to harvest email
addresses. It's a simple matter to disguise your posted email address
so that these software "bots" can't obtain anything useful. For
example, insert some obviously bogus characters or words into your
reply address, for example: "(e-mail address removed)."

2) Never, ever reply to any spam you receive, even to "unsubscribe"
or
"remove" yourself from the spammers' address lists; you'll only
compound the
problem. If spammers had any intention of honoring the your desire
not to
receive spam, they wouldn't have become spammers in the first place.
When
you reply to a spammer, all you're doing is confirming that he/she has
a
valid, marketable email address.

3) Be especially leery of any offers from websites for free software,
services, information, etc, that require your email address, or that
require your email address so you can "login" to access the offered
service
and/or information. Many such sites are supplementing their income by
collecting addresses to sell to the spammers. (Of course, not all
such
sites have under-handed motives; it's a judgment call. If the offer
seems
"too good to be true," it's most likely a scam.)

4) DO forward any and all spam, with complete headers, to the
originating
ISP with a complaint. Not all ISPs will make an effort to shut down
the
spammers, but many will. One tool that makes forwarding such
complaints
fairly simple is SpamCop (http://spamcop.net).

4) Another useful tool is MailWasher (http://www.mailwasher.net).
This utility allows you to preview your email before downloading it
from the server. Spammers can even be blacklisted, so that any future
emails from them will be automatically bounced and deleted from the
server.

5) Within Outlook Express, add any spammers to your Blocked Senders
list,
so the their messages are automatically deleted from the server
without
being downloaded to your PC.


Bruce Chambers

--
Help us help you:



You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on
having both at once. -- RAH
 
Back
Top