Tech: Stopping SPAM?

Subject: Tech: Stopping SPAM?
From: Mr Happy
Date: 20 Apr 07 - 06:56 AM

Just seen this tip on someone's site:

'In an attempt to make it hard for automatic email address collectors to find my current address I will substitute [at] for the normal symbol. Please edit the above before using.'

Might it work?

Subject: RE: Tech: Stopping SPAM?
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 20 Apr 07 - 07:37 AM

Mr H.

It won't hurt anything, but it's unlikely to do as much good as simply not giving your email addy to people you don't know.

Iff you are going to do that in the hope that it will prevent a crawler from picking up your address, you should also replace with dot for that symbol as well.

An automated search will look for the @ and . symbols, but there's nothing stopping one from looking for the pdqATqrsDOTzip pattern just as easily. Any "word" that ends with com, org, gov, edu, etc is likely to be an email addy. The search could harvest all occurances of "words" that contain xx...xxATxxxx...xxxDOTxxx and automated processes could separate out the ones that "convert" to an email form with simple character replacements.

Anything that you do to be different - if it's the same thing that 20 million other people do the same way so they also can be different - can be harvested and "cracked." It's only really worth doing the harvesting if enough people use the same "method," so you need something unique to you.

My suggestion would be to replace the first symbol with splat and the second with zip and then write the whole thing backwards.

It's impossible to say just how the spammers get their address lists, but the appearance is that they get enough from bots that get onto people's machines and just send the whole address book home to the botmaster, or by cracking into large databases where they know that they'll find lots of stuff to steal, or when people "register" to get into that porn site.

You might want to ask anyone who has your address in their book and who doesn't run good AV and keep it up to date to remove your name from their book.

John

Subject: RE: Tech: Stopping SPAM?
From: folk_radio_uk
Date: 20 Apr 07 - 07:40 AM

Not familiar with that one. Although I think they are fighting a losing battle by giving out an email address in the first place. If this becomes a common practice spammers will just change how they harvets details and include "[@] and @". I use a contact form so that people can contact me. This way my email remains anonymous unless I respond to a query. I would encourage the website owner to maybe look into changing this. The fact that they have chosen to do this means they are obviously inundated with spam or they have no effective or no spam filters.

I also use a spam blocker on my website that uses a range of filters, like HTTP known headers, IP lists, user-agent strings, and robots.txt conformance to determine if the requesting host is a spambot or a harvester. It seems to work very well.

Was you thinking of using it yourself as a host?

Subject: RE: Tech: Stopping SPAM?
From: treewind
Date: 20 Apr 07 - 08:09 AM

There's lots of tricks like that for hiding your email address but they are of limited use.

As soon as you send an email to anyone, or give them your email address and they put it in their address book, you start running the risk of spammers picking you up. If anyone who has received an email from you or from anyone else that was cc'd to you (or vice versa) gets a virus that harvests email addresses, yours will be in the wild. Sooner or later it's going to happen.

Get some good spam filtering software (or get your ISP to do it) - it's the only safe way. My experience of ISP's spam filtering is that it isn't very good though.

My email address is widely publicised, and I rely on spamassassin to kill hundreds of emails (literally, to me and to @heddwch.com which is Mary's domain) per day.

Mozilla Thunderbird is a perfectly capable mailer with *very* good built in junk (spam) filtering. It's free and it runs on Windows, Linux or Mac OSX. There's no excuse for not using it. If only it became common knowledge that every one filters out spam, they'd stop sending it.

Anahata

Subject: RE: Tech: Stopping SPAM?
From: folk_radio_uk
Date: 20 Apr 07 - 09:05 AM

There are many ways you can become a victim of spam.

I'm aware that those I contact or reply to may let it out of the bag. But using a contact PHP form does deal with bots etc. i.e. those sweeping my site. It's just another good practice measure. I don't believe there is a perfect solution.

I second the comment from Anahata about getting good spam filtering. If you receive spam and open it you are letting them know your email is live. I also use Spamassassin which kills most spam emails before they reach me. I also use Thunderbird (Mozilla) which has very good junk filtering. If a spammer does email you and you don't open the email you will be eventually removed from their records. Until the next one...

If you run a website get some good security on that end to tackle harvesters etc. and ensure you have a good filter on your email software. And yes, if we all made some effort to filter it and not open it we wouldn't be so overwhelemed by it today.

Re: ISP blocking, yes it is limited in that someone can bypass using a proxy server but it depends on what you're dealing with. I have one domain in particular that was continually attempting to register at my site. In this instance blocking that domain did work.

The long and short of it is there is a lot of measures you can use, but alone they are not fool proof. Even junk filtering has it's limits, but is probably the most effective, if only we all did it. Going back to the original thread, I don't think it will make much difference.

Subject: RE: Tech: Stopping SPAM?
From: Mr Happy
Date: 20 Apr 07 - 09:11 AM

'Was you thinking of using it yourself as a host? '

Heck no - I'm not a spammer!


But seeing as my 'nom de guerre' may appear as a 'come-on' to some of the simple minded, I no longer use Outlook Express.

Subject: RE: Tech: Stopping SPAM?
From: folk_radio_uk
Date: 20 Apr 07 - 09:19 AM

>>Subject: RE: Tech: Stopping SPAM?
From: Mr Happy - PM
Date: 20 Apr 07 - 09:11 AM

'Was you thinking of using it yourself as a host? '

Heck no - I'm not a spammer!
___________

lol, I meant are you a webhost and was you going to publish your email on your site as you suggested.

Subject: RE: Tech: Stopping SPAM?
From: Waddon Pete
Date: 20 Apr 07 - 11:01 AM

Hello,

Much good advice here...could I add that "Mailwasher" is very effective? A quick search with Google will find a free download. The other alternative is to use an e-mail provider such as Yahoo that has a fairly effective spam filter. It also shoots all the junk into a separate box for you...that's useful!

Like everything else it is the few that spoil it for the rest of us!

Best wishes,

Peter

Subject: RE: Tech: Stopping SPAM?
From: treewind
Date: 20 Apr 07 - 11:18 AM

That's ironic - Yahoo has been notorious as a wholesale address harvester and spam source.

I have to whitelist all the "Yahoo groups" mailing lists I subscribe to, or they get marked up as spam.

Anahata

Subject: RE: Tech: Stopping SPAM?
From: Waddon Pete
Date: 20 Apr 07 - 11:31 AM

I wouldn't know about that, Treewind....all I know is that they keep the spam away from my inbox!

Best wishes,

Peter

Subject: RE: Tech: Stopping SPAM?
From: kerryguy7
Date: 20 Apr 07 - 11:44 AM

One word of advice.
If a spammer sends you an email message and suggests to you that you "click the link below" to be removed from their mailing list....NEVER DO THAT!
That is a common practice for spammers to acknowlege that your email address is a good one and they will then continue to bombard you with more spam!
What are you using for an email client (program)?
Outlook, Microsofts email/calander/scheduler program is very good at intercepting and seperating "spam" from your normal desired incoming email messages.
It. like just about all other email progrtams uses a spam "filter" in order to intercept the spam as it comes in. You do need to "train" it to do so. It really just means to flag certain mailers and to basically "tell" Outlook to ban this mailer from your incoming mail.
Also...
There are alot of good all-in-one internet security suites that will also include a spam filter as well as anti-virus protection and firewall.
McAffe and Symantec lead the bunch in terms of reliability and ease of use.
Just surf on over to their web sites to get an idea of what they have to offer,their prices, etc.
Spam is an ongoing problem for us all....but it can be tamed, at least some what, if you set up the proper tools with the use of filters built into your email client or internet security software.
Hope that helps you!

Subject: RE: Tech: Stopping SPAM?
From: Simon G
Date: 20 Apr 07 - 11:58 AM

I gave up protecting my email address, it gets out one way or another, mostly via other peoples address books. I use google mail to filter the spam. I just forward all the mail to google and then get it to forward the good stuff back. I average 500 spam a day and 20 or so genuine messages. The occasional spam gets through, and if I ever think I've lost a mail I can go and look through the spam at google mail and take advantage of their search engine to find the mail I'm looking for. It rarely gets it wrong maybe once every couple of months a genuine message gets categorised as spam. Google mail is free and it does mean the spam is getting anywhere near my computer, I'd much rather fill their servers with it.

After signing up with google I found their spam filter so good I opened my domains to accept any address before the @, which multiplied the spam 3-4 times but it doesn't get to me, but I do get the occasional email with a misspelt address which makes it worth it.