New "We are not spamming line"

[gsx]

Received an unsolicited email today - 4 times.

The bottom line reads:

ps. This is a targeted email. All email addresses have been obtained from publicly listed web sites. If you do not want to receive further mails, please send a mail to remove@<wherever>.co.uk .

Do these people realise that they are spamming?

[Sinner_G]

They do realise it, they just hope WE don't.

Btw, did anyone else make the experience that clicking that 'remove' link invited even more spam?

[Mike_Mackin]

Spammer know they are spamming!

>please send a mail to remove@<wherever>.co.uk

That will validate your address for RESALE

[deejay]

"Btw, did anyone else make the experience that clicking that 'remove' link invited even more spam? "

Heh... yep. I never reply to these, but I do file them in case, as with one chap, they are stupid enought to keep it up over any extended period.

I did, however, reply to one unsolicited ad today, to advise the person that they were spamming, and receipt of any further unsolicited advertising from them would be reported to their ISP. In this case though it was a local person,
no domain name so the ISP domainname was being used, and obviously a novice/new business making their first foray. I felt positively mean there for, oh, about a second and a half.

[Frank_Rizzo]

deejay,

your too nice. Get 'em toasted early. If they are dumb enough to think spamming works they deserve all they get.

report them asap.

[brotherhood of LAN]

I had one that was pretty funny to me, along the lines of

"this e-mail is in compliance with the american law etc etc"

They say the net has no geographical boundaries but really.....I looked out the window and seen Scotland ;)

[deejay]

Frank_Rizzo

I tend to speak softly and carry a bloody big stick. :)

...which is to say I sat there punching 'send/receive' every five minutes for the rest of the afternoon in case they DARED to try a rejoinder... in the hope that I'd have an excuse to really wallop the bugger *lol*

[Grumpus]

My problem lately has been the fact that my domain provides me a "catchall" e-mail so [e-mail] comes to my secondary e-mail box. I get messages in there address to a blind "all" or "list" and it kindly asks me to reply with all of my e-mail addresses to be removed. Unfortunately, I don't know who you wrote to, nor could I possibly respond with a list of my infinite e-mail addresses.

Brings up an interesting notion, though. I'd like to write a little script that actually does send an "unsubscribe" message from every e-mail address. starting with a@mydomain and going all the way to [e-mail] - That'd be fun. ;)

G.

[gsx]

I also have a catchall address.

Using your email clent, you should be able to create rules to block out unwanted mail. For example, I constantly get requests from Uganda and Ghana for my products. Not worth the risk from these countries. So I have a different folder in Outlook called 'SalesJunk' and 'Sales'. Anything sent to info@... or sales@... is moved to the sales folder, then if it contains "Uganda" or "Ghana" in the message body, it is automatically moved to the 'SalesJunk' folder.

Everytime I set up a new rule, someone gets around it. But I automatically block about 95% of spam and only have to filter a couple of messages per day.

And on the one I got earlier, I did respond. I visited their website and got their sales address, not the remove address.

[Frank_Rizzo]

What I don't like about Outlook Express is

a) You can't turn of HTML. The biggest blunder with this is tha any spam message with a gif that links back to the spammers site PROVES that your email address is valid.

b) The filtering is useless if the message is sent to the Envelope-To: address.

You can block on subject words - but thats not efficient enough. What you can do is to block on old email addresses if you have a catch all but you can only do this if your name is in the To: or CC: fields - most spammers put you in the Envelope To: of which it is not possile to block in OE.

[Lextech]

You all might want to try a free little program. There has been discussion on this board before about Mailwasher. It reduced my inbox daily by about 600 email (spams) on the average. It is free and the kind bloke in New Zealand only asks for a donation (basically, shareware ;-) IT's small, fast - and I sent in my support after being really impressed with it. I'm not in any way affiliated with this guy or product except that I really like it. A lot.

[mailwasher.net...]

[buckworks]

Here's a tip I have found useful: Set up a filter to look for multiple empty spaces in the Subject line, say four or five spaces together. It's common for spam to have a few words at the beginning of the subject line and a jumble of characters waaay over at the end. You can filter such messages to a "Probably Spam" folder or whatever you want to do with them. I put this in my filtering sequence somewhere after the rules that send things straight to the trash.

[martinibuster]

I like to report them to their isp when it's available. But there's also been a rash of formmail hijackings.

For instance, my wife received a number of angry emails at her work asking why is she spamming them. Of course, she wasn't. Someone had hijacked their formmail script. She works at a prominent arts organization in San Francisco, and their webmaster is pretty lazy about these things.

[Tapolyai]

I use Mailwasher. Seems to do a decent job.

[Mardi_Gras]

The biggest blunder with this is tha any spam message with a gif that links back to the spammers site PROVES that your email address is valid.

Frank - do you think spammers really care if your e-mail address is valid? It's not like they are going to delete you from their database if they don't get a validation from the gif.

I'm not disagreeing with you about the lack of ability to turn of HTML - I just don't think it matters to spammers if an address is valid or not. It is not like direct mail where there are printing and postage cost involved in delivering to bad addresses. If an e-mail address is not active today, so what? It might be tomorrow.

[richlowe]

My experience is most of the remove links and return email addresses don't work. It's just camaflauge. I read a study recently (don't remember the source) of a group that extensively tested this and found doing the remove thing does nothing to increase or decrease spam at all. It's simply there to make the email look more legatimate.

Richard Lowe

[wingslevel]

If the spam is really bad - like a forged header, open relay etc. - then the remove is likely to be also....

If the spam has a true "from" address (you can check this by running the numerical ip's through an ip address decoder) then the remove button is likely to be legit.