Spam explosion
Mark Anderson
the years with my email address and I only get a handful a day which has
been pretty trivial to zap manually in pine. In the last week however my
spam has increased by a factor of 10 or 20 making email practically
unusable since it now is a PITA to zap all of these while manually keeping
an eye on the emails I need/want to read.
This all started around 4/22. I had thought that it was due to a website
I registered with around that time but then I checked my canary account,
an account that was compromised many years ago that no legit mail goes to
so I just collect spam in it to monitor spam traffic. I haven't checked
this account in over a year (maybe two) but after recently looking at it,
the spam had pretty much trailed off to a trickle on that account and then
on 4/22, it's getting the same deluge that my main account is getting. So
this leads me to think that the deluge was not caused by something I did.
Is anyone else seeing this? I was wondering if perhaps this has something
to do with that Cornficker worm but I haven't read about any spam deluge
in any of the geek blogs or news.
Also, I played with procmail a bunch of years ago and it seemed to be a
lot of work so I chose to just handle the spam manually. With this
deluge making a .procmailrc file manually seems like a daunting tedious
task since this spam is coming from everywhere. Is there a decent place I
can get the latest and greatest set of rules for a .procmail file?
Adam H. Kerman
>I don't usually complain about spam since I've been pretty careful over
>the years with my email address and I only get a handful a day which has
>been pretty trivial to zap manually in pine. In the last week however my
>spam has increased by a factor of 10 or 20 making email practically
>unusable since it now is a PITA to zap all of these while manually keeping
>an eye on the emails I need/want to read.
>This all started around 4/22. I had thought that it was due to a website
>I registered with around that time but then I checked my canary account,
>an account that was compromised many years ago that no legit mail goes to
>so I just collect spam in it to monitor spam traffic. I haven't checked
>this account in over a year (maybe two) but after recently looking at it,
>the spam had pretty much trailed off to a trickle on that account and then
>on 4/22, it's getting the same deluge that my main account is getting. So
>this leads me to think that the deluge was not caused by something I did.
>Is anyone else seeing this? I was wondering if perhaps this has something
>to do with that Cornficker worm but I haven't read about any spam deluge
>in any of the geek blogs or news.
Is your site doing basic filtering with spamhaus.org stuff? That keeps
track of all of the major spam origination sites for 90% of all spam.
Bruce Esquibel
> Is your site doing basic filtering with spamhaus.org stuff? That keeps
> track of all of the major spam origination sites for 90% of all spam.
Spamhaus helps but 90% effective is a bit optimistic I think.
We use a combination of shit from spamhaus, sav, spamassassin, razor and dcc
and probably are around 90% efffective. The problem is, you can tighten
things down to the point where legit mail starts getting dropped, so there
is always going to be leakage.
The big headache for a while has been trojaned machines sitting on dsl and
cable connections around the world. Most of these are sleepers, not always
active but seem to be under someone elses control which spit outs a few
peices of shit then go back to sleep. With thousands or tens of thousands of
these around, it takes time to show up on the radar.
There is also something else going on that has to be well organized and
funded by some group, kind of hard to get a handle on it being they figured
out all the tricks of staying hidden but it seems like becoming temporarily
legit for an hour or two then disappearing off the face of the earth.
They seem to be able to register thousands of domain names, over time and
secure leased servers or virtual ones for dns purposes. Many of these seem
to be proxies, communicating to something else that isn't visible.
When they attack everything is in place for just an hour or two, then like
magic after the spam run is over, it's all gone. All the domains point back
to bogus registration info, the dns servers (which probably had valid spf
and domain keys) aren't answering anymore and even if you block the ip
addresses that send the spam, odds are they won't be back for months, if at
all.
It's like a disposable cell phone, use it once to make a couple calls and
toss it. It's just on a large scale that takes weeks or months of planning.
I really don't think there is a 100% solution unless you whitelist the
people who normally email you and block everything else. Although that
sounds like a keen solution, over time people start getting paranoid about
missing possible email that may or may not exist and start letting down the
defenses.
I don't really see a solution because this all was set in place when they
started to charge for domain names and ICANN being a bunch of dorks with
how the whole system is managed.
At one time there was a process, these days it's nearly a free for all.
-bruce
b...@ripco.com
Cydrome Leader
I use the zen RBL.
It's easy, needs no screwing around or configuration and works well.
Some spam slips though, but most gets rejected. Filtering is a hassle,
just refusing to accept mail from spamming machines is easier.
Eric
news:gtcjnh$54l$2...@reader1.panix.com:
I use Gmail, and I get almost no spam, maybe 3 since the beginning of the
yar. I use gmail's domain hosting for my email, and enjoy the same spam
free email to my domain - for free. I go into my spam folder and there's
tons of it, and none of it goes to me. I also have not yet experienced a
false positive.
For my domain, I still have all the web services from my host, but I set
the email to be received on my domain/gmail account. It works so well
I've switched most of my domains over there. Again, it's FREE.
Cydrome Leader
So what you're saying is your ability to reliably access your email is not
worth anything to you.
Eric
Do you use Gmail? I'm guessing not, or you'd know better than to make
that statement.
I get my email all day long at work, and on my Iphone when I'm out of the
office. I have yet to be affected by an outage now for over a year on my
own domain, and at least 2 years on my gmail account. The 2 outages that
were mentioned in the news earlier this year didn't affect me. I never
noticed any inability to connect during that period, not that I'm sitting
and watching my email 24/7, and no email was ever lost.
I work with 2 very reliable hosting companies, and they've both suffered
more downtime than Gmail supposedly has.
I used to use Yahoo (sbcglobal) for my newsgroup email address, and I got
a lot of spam. With Gmail, I get no spam. Well worth the price in my
opinion.
Cydrome Leader
No, don't trust google with my data.
> I get my email all day long at work, and on my Iphone when I'm out of the
> office. I have yet to be affected by an outage now for over a year on my
> own domain, and at least 2 years on my gmail account. The 2 outages that
wow, it's like 1995. Can I get my own domain too?
> were mentioned in the news earlier this year didn't affect me. I never
> noticed any inability to connect during that period, not that I'm sitting
> and watching my email 24/7, and no email was ever lost.
And if you do, then what?
> I work with 2 very reliable hosting companies, and they've both suffered
> more downtime than Gmail supposedly has.
Sure they are.
> I used to use Yahoo (sbcglobal) for my newsgroup email address, and I got
> a lot of spam. With Gmail, I get no spam. Well worth the price in my
> opinion.
Since when was yahoo the gold standard in email?
Eric
You're telling me you don't have a clue. You don't trust Google so nobody
should trust Google. Watch out for the black helicopters.
Cydrome Leader
obviously the internet is just a hobby for you.
Eric
Sounds like it's less than that for you.
Cydrome Leader
ok mr @yahoo.com
Adam H. Kerman
>I use Gmail, and I get almost no spam, maybe 3 since the beginning of the
>yar. I use gmail's domain hosting for my email, and enjoy the same spam
>free email to my domain - for free. I go into my spam folder and there's
>tons of it, and none of it goes to me. I also have not yet experienced a
>false positive.
>For my domain, I still have all the web services from my host, but I set
>the email to be received on my domain/gmail account. It works so well
>I've switched most of my domains over there. Again, it's FREE.
Eric, how can it not bug the shit out of you that Google looks for key
words and word combinations in your mail to better target advertising at
you? Google is insideous and creepy.
Eric
news:gtgp52$emq$1...@news.albasani.net:
I really don't worry about that stuff. My mail comes to me in Outlook and
to my Iphone, so I dont see the advertising. Also, it works. I'm spam free,
and it's reliable.
Cydrome Leader
But it's free and better than two really good and unnamed hosting companies!