[OT] Handling Returned Virus Mail

[Jeffrey Reynolds]

scott,

one thing that has stemmed the tide for me is to start putting your 
email address on all your web posts as a java encoded text (there are 
several schemes out there to do this) instead of straight html. while 
this wont get rid of things immediately, it has slowed the tide a lot 
for me and many clients over the last couple of years since i started 
doing it. spam lists are constantly being generated by spiders all the 
time looking for emails in html, so it does help prevent you getting on 
new ones. im sure there are some spammers out there that are now using 
bots to run the java scripts to see if they get any email addresses 
back, but thats not as easy.

its never ending war... you might also try and forward your email over 
to a hosting account that has a spam filter on it. I use lunarpages for 
several clients and their spam filter has been great at catching stuff 
w/o any nailing any good emails as far as we can tell right now.

DO NOT rely on your ISP for filtering. Two clients just got burned by 
this big time. One had all the forwarded emails that came from his web 
domain to his private email at his isp (he wanted it all in one mail 
box) get bounced by his ISP when the isp changed their spam filter a 
few weeks ago w/o notice. it now thought that ll the forwarded emails 
were spams! He is now picking these up directly from the hosting 
account and the spam filter there is working brilliantly, whereas the 
isp's never did work well.

The other client used Yahoo as her primary client since she needed to 
access it from web browsers a lot and she preferred that web client 
over the hosting companies one. Well a couple of weeks Yahoo changed 
its spam filters and it started sending all sorts of her ISP 
(sbcglobal, in bed w/yahoo), yahoo and forwarded domain name emails 
into the spam. it was very strange what it was thinking was spam and 
what was not. some lists went in while others only had half of them go 
to spam. all paypal email went into the spam pile good or bad. It was 
awful and we didnt figure it out for a week since it was only a partial 
hit and a bit intermittent and she was very busy and not paying close 
attention. All this happened with no notification in both cases and 
really hurt their businesses.

The funniest (well sort of sad), though, was the early days of 
earthlink spam filtering. i was having some good emails all of a sudden 
go into the spam pile. i called tech support to see what was up and 
they said they had just changed the filtering and i should have 
received a notification about it (which i never received) and to watch 
to see if there was a problem. Wanna guess where the notification email 
was? in the spam pile!

oh yes and even clients cgi mailscripts are being hit by bots 
intermittently filling them up with garbage.

I just want to go downtown and scream at some of the reps here (i live 
in the dc area) for overriding the state spam laws that were coming on 
line with a worthless federal law. Virginia was about to institute a 
law that would have pretty much strung spammers they could get their 
hands on up by their thumbs! the official line was that the various 
state laws would be a restraint on interstate trade and hard to 
enforce! yeah right!

sorry [rant] off, i feel for ya scott, many megabytes of spam are 
circling my trash bin all the time...

Jeffrey Reynolds


On Nov 27, 2005, at 6:20 AM, use-revolution-request at lists.runrev.com 
wrote:

> [sigh] Even with filters and spam blockers and rules, these all 
> address the
> symptoms, not the source of the problem. Somebody somewhere needs to do
> something about this.