RootsChat.Com

General => Technical Help => Topic started by: Hackstaple on Sunday 09 October 05 11:54 BST (UK)

Title: Spam
Post by: Hackstaple on Sunday 09 October 05 11:54 BST (UK)
I have just received over 600 spam messages in a few minutes. Despite having 3 types of Spam blocking in use they poured into my Inbox although about 450 were immediately diverted to the Spam folder which I have on my Outlook Express. It took me 10 minutes to remove the others from my Inbox. they virtually all took the form of Undeliverable Messages returned or "Your Enquiry Received". Most seemed to have the .de identifier for Germany. :o
Title: Re: Spam
Post by: RJ_Paton on Sunday 09 October 05 12:10 BST (UK)
You could try Thunderbird from http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/

It won't stop the spam but its filters are far more efficient than Outlook Express and can be "taught" to identify new sources of spam.
Title: Re: Spam
Post by: kerryb on Sunday 09 October 05 12:12 BST (UK)
Falkyrn

Ditto - you beat me to it while I was looking for the link!!!

kerryb
Title: Re: Spam
Post by: Hackstaple on Sunday 09 October 05 13:00 BST (UK)
Been there - done it. I found that Thunderbird never filtered Spam to any real extent. That was on a trial lasting 3 months. ???
Title: Re: Spam
Post by: RJ_Paton on Sunday 09 October 05 18:43 BST (UK)
Quote from: Hackstaple on Sunday 09 October 05 13:00 BST (UK)
Been there - done it. I found that Thunderbird never filtered Spam to any real extent. That was on a trial lasting 3 months. ???

That surprises me , I've found Thunderbird far better than Outlook which I previously used ( I have never liked Outlook Express- ranking it next to useless for almost any purpose - personal opinion  :P )
Title: Re: Spam
Post by: 1000xlch on Sunday 09 October 05 22:00 BST (UK)
I tend to use netscape and not ie and never use outlook express.  My mail is at yahoo and it seems to cope very well with the spam and filters most out.

John Rowley
Title: Re: Spam
Post by: PrueM on Sunday 09 October 05 22:03 BST (UK)
THunderbird (mail) and Firefox (browser) for me.  I've got both programs on my PC and also on my (far superior  ;D ) Mac.  The spam on the PC has dropped to almost nothing, and the best thing is that I get NO POP-UPS when I'm on the internet.  That's a big plus.

I personally recommend everyone should use a Mac.  Still virus-free after how many years??

Cheers  :)
Prue
Title: Re: Spam
Post by: Hackstaple on Sunday 09 October 05 22:16 BST (UK)
It seems that I was the only member hit by this sudden avalanche of spam. I receive a large amount of spam each day as I have a commercial email address as well as a personal one but normally my filters throw about 95% of it into the Spam folder and then delete it 24 hours later. This came addressed to both identities that I have to use for email. Some was filtered out , about two-thirds - the rest arrived in my normal Inbox. this has never happened before. I have SpamBully version 3, Norton Anti-virus [updated Friday] and Microsoft Spam filter Beta version. In addition my ISP has spam filtering.
I do not use Thunderbird because I found it had no real spam learning mechanism - even items specifically pointed as spam came through. I do not use Mozilla as a browser as it is not compatible with my eBay selling activities - it will not allow me to use the eBay toolbar which verifies whether messages are spoofs or genuine - same, of course applies to Netscape which uses the same platforms. Thunderbird may be fine for people who have no commercial use of email.
I have never seen what the objection is to the function of Outlook Express - I send or receive about 2000 genuine emails a year and have difficulties with perhaps one a month. ???
Title: Re: Spam
Post by: RJ_Paton on Sunday 09 October 05 22:49 BST (UK)
It is likely that you were hit by a problem at your ISP.

Re outlook express ..... I personally find it one of the worst Microsoft products ever to have graced a computer ..... although I have used outlook for a number of years the two programs share nothing except a partial name.

Thunderbird is used by a great number of commercial organisations and is just as suited to that area of work as its counterparts.

Re Firefox as a browser ... many of the add ons for such things as ebay are becoming available as it gains market share ..... (many of these add ons are rumoured to be unlikely to work when Internet Explorer itself is updated.)

While I use several browsers for my commercial design work my personal preference is to Firefox.
Title: Re: Spam
Post by: MaryA on Wednesday 12 October 05 11:42 BST (UK)
If you want a specific grievance against Outlook Express I can give you one.

I had a large amount of old mail stored in OE folders, as I suspect many of us do since this is where we tend to keep information received, yes? like me just for storage, but yet also important.

Approximately 18 months ago I opened OE to check my mail and could see the highlited numbers adding up as the message rules sent the incoming mail to the various folders.  When I clicked on a folder to read the mail, there was nothing in it, and the number of new mails received beside the folder was gone.

I tried to find everything on my computer and re-import the emails to OE but they were not there.

Microsoft said that there was a patch to stop this happening.  I installed the patch.   Within 2 weeks exactly the same thing happened again.

I now use Incredimail as I can enjoy the fun backgrounds for the benefit of my friends and it seems a lot more stable than OE. 

Internet Explorer tended to crash on a regular daily basis - especially when typing a response to a posting on Rootschat, I used to have to either type it in a Word doc. and copy and paste into here, or continually copy what I was typing so that if it crashed I wouldn't have lost all of what I was typing, just some of it.  It became too frequent so I tried Mozilla Firefox and not only has it proved to be a lot more stable, I have also found benefits such as increased pop up protection and working with tabs - great for having many Ancestry pages open all at once.

You wanted specifics, hope they will do you.

Mary
Title: Re: Spam
Post by: Zeb on Wednesday 12 October 05 16:14 BST (UK)
If you receive any unwanted spam don't reply to it whatever it is, even if its just to reply "unsubscribe" or "stop" as this just confirms that your email is valid and in use.

Create a mailbox to use when signing up for sites or ordering products online.  There are a lof of sites out there with a little box saying something like "tick me if you don't want to receive" but not all of them obey this little checkbox.

Unfortunately, your email address could mean money to someone selling them on for advertising purposes
Title: Re: Spam
Post by: Hackstaple on Thursday 13 October 05 10:07 BST (UK)
I just went back to my Thunderbird and opened it. It downloaded 276 spam messages of whch 72 went to Trash and 204 arrived in my normal Inbox! As I said I found that Thunderbird had no Spam learning system worth talking about and my normal add-on spam handler which is SpamBully 3 will not work with Thunderbird.
My email address for my maps and prints business is on the web site for obvious reasons so it is being picked up daily by hundreds of devices. If I keep it secret I can do no business. I have tried concealing it with email access only through a reply form but many non-adept computer users are shy of such forms and will not use them. I have a Mozilla browser purely so that I can see what my web site pages will look like when viewed in Netscape.
Title: Re: Spam
Post by: PrueM on Thursday 13 October 05 11:02 BST (UK)
Hi Hackstaple,
What about putting your email address in a graphics format?  Write it in photoshop or some such, then save as a jpg and insert in your webpage.
Just a thought.

Prue
Title: Re: Spam
Post by: Gamone on Thursday 13 October 05 11:31 BST (UK)
Hi Hackstaple,

When spam starts to reach a massive level, the only solution is to complain about the problem with your ISP (Internet service provider).

Like many people in France, I have an email account with the national service called Wanadoo. And I send them spam complaints periodically at the following email address:
<abuse at wanadoo dot france>
Incidentally, you might notice the way I've just written this address. It's understandable by human readers, but could not be picked up easily by a robot.

 ;) Now, there's another thing that might be playing a role in the fact that you are apparently a prime target for Internet pranksters and gangsters. They might be interpreting your delightful profile image as an imperative button. ;)

William
Title: Re: Spam
Post by: Nadine Moore on Saturday 15 October 05 12:03 BST (UK)
Have you tried any of the tips in this thread for concealing your email address?

http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php/topic,47479.0.html

Dinie
Title: Re: Spam
Post by: Hackstaple on Saturday 15 October 05 13:09 BST (UK)
Thanks folks - I am very aware of all of these ideas but I am unable to implement them in practice for reasons too boring to expain here. Thank you for your input - I must just suffer. I might add that my Spam filter very nicely diverted two emails from my youngest son but delivers emails from ?????? subject ???? [exact quote]as dutifully as a Labrador bringing one's slippers. I also receive all emails written in Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Arabic, Sanskrit or what have you. Before you all rush, I have instructed all of my email attendants not to deliver anything which is not in Western characters. What is happening is that these intensely irritating parasites have an industry based on bypassing all of these safeguards. Stopping them is not so easy - Yahoo was shut down for 48 hours by them last year. :'(
Title: Re: Spam
Post by: kerryb on Saturday 15 October 05 14:17 BST (UK)
Hackstaple

Hi, I really sympathise with you!

I use Wanadoo Webmail which is a really good system and filtered much of the mail.  However I have noticed just lately some emails coming through with subjects that look like they are for me such as Your family (how do they know I am into family history?)

Also more worryingly my partner who does not (as yet!) share the same surname has started receiving emails with my surname in them??????

Spam is becoming as much an irritant to me as Junk mail through the door.  Apparently however, I cannot adopt the same system whereby I mail junk back to them!  Shame!!!!

Kerry
Title: Re: Spam
Post by: Gamone on Saturday 15 October 05 14:39 BST (UK)
Kerry, I fear you've got a bigger problem than "ordinary" spam. I don't know a lot about such things (because I've always worked in the luxurious environment of a Macintosh), but I have the impression that your machine is infected by so-called spyware.  I'm sure that lots of RootsChatters with PCs and Windows will rush in to give you advice. Maybe you should start another thread on this problem because, as I say, it's worse than mere spam, and it's a rather nasty phenomenon. Recently, a friend of mine started to get email that seemed to be coming from my son, but they don't know one another. I believe that I was, unwittingly, the common denominator between these two individuals, not because I actually sent them the infection (unthinkable, coming from a Macintosh), but because the virus thing was able to establish links through emails that both individuals received from me. 

Best of luck,
William