Grandaddy of all Spam!

[gmattson]

Anyone else being bombarded by spam from a morgage finding company, emailing through virtualweb.org and free-virtualweb.org?

I've received over 700 email from them today, every email addressed with a slightly modified version of the address.

No way to contact them, except by filling out a morgage application form. I'd really like to find out how to send the company a bucket of "Tia-spam" for mucking up my mail today!

[gmattson]

Amazing. . . Received about 50 spams this morning from this same jerk company. This abuse really goes beyond the realm of "spam" and enters the world of "virus". With so many messages bombarding my server, it has to be screwing up something.

[gmattson]

Return-Path: <ooo@free-virtualweb.org>
Received: from bob.xpres.net (bob.xpres.net [216.237.97.19])
by mail.xpres.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id FAA01949;
Wed, 20 Nov 2002 05:54:58 -0500
From: ooo@free-virtualweb.org
Received: from free-virtualweb.org (CE136221.user.veloxzone.com.br [200.164.136.221])
by bob.xpres.net (8.11.6/8.11.6) with SMTP id gAKAs7s28882;
Wed, 20 Nov 2002 05:54:16 -0500
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
Received: from free-virtualweb.org by 9JW1PX.free-virtualweb.org with SMTP for kahn@uechi-ryu.com; Wed, 20 Nov 2002 05:57:08 -0500
Date: Wed, 20 Nov 2002 05:57:08 -0500
Message-Id: <39NO9O2.NPWT0X933NYB4I473I0.ooo@free-virtualweb.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Subject: kahn, would you be mad at me if I didn't tell you about this?
Reply-To: kahn@free-virtualweb.org
To: kahn@uechi-ryu.com
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by mail.xpres.net id FAA01949
X-UIDL: fe7"!PK%"!X;Q"!%W&!!
==================================

Looks like they have some sort of "harvesting" technique, to send their junk mail to me, using names somehow gotten from my address book or others who have communicated with me by email!

[Tony-San]

George,

You need to talk to your ISP and ask them about spam filtering. RoadRunner does a good job at filtering spam but not good enough. Yahoo! kicks ass at getting rid of the crap. I hardly get any at all. That is why they are hosting my domain.

[gmattson]

Our existing server provider tells me they can't block anyone because some legitimate email might get blocked. I tried to explain that the URL which operates the site and sends out the spam deals with one product and a hell of a lot of spam. Why can't you block this single URL?

"Can't do it" they reply!

Well, hopefully I'll be rid of the provider along with the spam soon!

[s f b]

Get another ISP for your email George. Many providers offer a variety of filters. The filter I selected from my ISP still sends the email, but marks the begining of the title line of a suspicious email with the caption "***spam***". I tell my email program to dump everything it finds with that caption directly into the trash. It does a good job too. I quiclky check the trash folder before emptying it to insure that nothing important inadvertantly got snagged.

Verizon may have similar attributes as well George. However for where I'm at, as soon as the special promotion expires [one month free, two additional months 1/3 off] I'm dumping them for reliability reasons so I haven't bothered to explore their services.

[gmattson]

I've been using a freeware program called Mailwasher. Instead of clicking on your email program, use Mailwasher to "look" at your mail and categorize it as "normal" or "poss spam". You can then double click on questionable mail to preview it, then, based on what you see, mark that email as "friend" or "blackball".

Mailwash remember the email you mark and labels all spam, based on the extensive Mailwash database, as "Poss spam".

You can scan all of your mail before your regular email program actually picks it up.

It identifys most viruses as well.

"Blackballed" mail get deleted and "bounced", which means some of it might get sent back and hopefully gets your email address of their spam list.

After you've previewed all mail, click the "process Mail" button and Mailwasher opens your regular email program, which then collects your legitimate email.

In theory, using the program should help eliminate spam, assuming the spammers won't continue sending email to dead accounts. In practice, this hasn't happened.