How to get rid of STOCK SPAM?

[Polycount Productions]

I have pretty good spam system both in the server and in my mail program, but recently I've noticed that I get more and more STOCK related spam. Basically the spam emails use the formula like this:

STOCK SPAM = Utterly clueless subject + some message notes about poems and beautiful skies + image in the message telling about what stocks I should definitely BUY + some message footer notes telling how walking in parks is good

Any good solutions for getting rid of them? I only receive up to 10 stock-spams (maybe 1-5 normally per day), but it starts to bug me.

[Indiepath]

I have pretty good spam system both in the server and in my mail program, but recently I've noticed that I get more and more STOCK related spam. Basically the spam emails use the formula like this:



Any good solutions for getting rid of them? I only receive up to 10 stock-spams (maybe 1-5 normally per day), but it starts to bug me.

I get these also and I've noticed that Thunderbird does not block the images at it normally would with these types of email!

[FlySim]

I read an article where they tracked these stocks and figured out the spammers made 6%. But a friend tracked a recent one and saw a negative return. Hopefully the money and spam will dry up.

[jankoM]

Any good solutions for getting rid of them?
Stop using email? ;)

Thunderbird does not block the images at it normally would
Because these are embeded (into email) images not hotlinked. Thunderbird doesn't show those images because by those htlinked images the sender could nicely see which emails got opened (when, your ip...) which is a general privacy issue - not spam specific.

I get those with images too... and some other breeds...and it's sucking my time away :(

[oNyx]

Over at http://www.polycountproductions.com/ there is a plaintext email address. Also dont use generic ones such as contact, admin, administrator, sales, webmaster, info, accounting, accounts, advertising, billing, feedback, mail, orders, postmaster, root, support... because they get spammed based on guesstimates.

[Jack Norton]

I see more and more email protected by that system "confirm that you're a human person by clicking on this link and writing the correct displayed word".
In the beginning I was pissed, but if the spamming continues to be so high, soon I could be forced to use that... :mad:

[Polycount Productions]

@oNyx: that's true - but some of my other emails like (loota.com) also get these emails... and they are displayed nowhere. I suppose if your friend has a virus or something and you email him... the virus can get your friends address book (containing your email) and you end up getting this emails.

I try to keep the text link emails limited, but that's not 100% fool-proof solution.

Is there no way to prevent this image-spams? (Hey... I smell a business opportunity here for software developer indies... ;))

[JoKa]

Just wait for footer notes that are more interesting! Earlier this year I got nearly the whole Lord of the Rings in english, completely free as footer notes. The only thing I didn't like was sorting them to get the correct order, but on the other side you get much deeper into the story that way :D

[svero]

What you should do is buy hundreds of thousands of shares of every stock they might promote. Then as soon as you get spam for that stock sell everything you have plunging the price into the ground so they lose their shirts. Keep doing this until they go broke or until they figure it out and start short selling.

[oNyx]

@oNyx: that's true - but some of my other emails like (loota.com) also get these emails... and they are displayed nowhere. I suppose if your friend has a virus or something and you email him... the virus can get your friends address book (containing your email) and you end up getting this emails.

I try to keep the text link emails limited, but that's not 100% fool-proof solution.

Is there no way to prevent this image-spams? (Hey... I smell a business opportunity here for software developer indies... ;))

You can of course trash all html emails (its spam in 99.99% of the cases anyways... or newsletters) or all of em which contain some img tag.

And yea, worms/trojans also take emails from the address book. Thats done for more than 6 years by now.

Well, email is totally flawed... like everything which relys on everyone's good behaviour.

[Phil Steinmeyer]

What, you guys aren't investing in these HOT STOCK TIPS?

Why just today, I got an e-mail about a stock at $3.30, with a 5-Day target of $25. That's a 657% return in only 5 days - you can't beat that! Hey, even if they're wrong and it only goes to $22, I'll be in fat city.

:)

[Hamumu]

Besides the various stacks of spamblockers on the server end, I employ K9 on my PC. It eats all the stock spams, no exception (and I get lots, since I have it dump them into a spam folder for my perusal!). It has occasional false positives and negatives, but not many, and never with stock spams. I think there was a recent renaissance in spam content, because all of a sudden occasional spam was getting through, and I had to teach it to hate that spam too. But it learned quickly. I've had to correct about one email a week lately, I think.

If you are trying to combine K9 with Gmail though (or anything that requires SSL connection), you'll need to employ stunnel in between. But that's so easy to set up, even I could do it! 'Cause I did!

[Donavon Keithley]

I've been giving POPFile a try and it catches these spams quite handily.

What's kind of unique about POPFile is that it's a general mail sorter. You can define any number of buckets and train it to sort all your incoming mail into them. For now I use "personal", "work", and "spam". Eventually I'll break these down into finer distinctions -- "casual games", etc.

It's supposed to handle GMail but I couldn't get it to work. Probably just user error...

[Phil Steinmeyer]

Man, just today this stock spam has kicked into higher gear. Had about 6 in the last 2 hours. I get almost no OTHER spam except this stuff.

[soniCron]

For what it's worth: I run no less than 14 email addresses through Gmail, and not one spam message has gotten through in the last 6 months.

[Jack Norton]

I started to use yahoo mail after a few reccomendation from this forum and friends, but I still get quite a lot (15-20 /day) spam messages. Maybe I should switch to gmail too :)

[Phil Steinmeyer]

At my last company, I had a short e-mail address, using my first name only as the prefix (phil@zzz). (i.e. It was guessable by a spambot).

I'd also posted the e-mail address publicly in various forums back in the early days of the 'net, before spam became a real issue.

Needless to say, I got a LOT of spam - 150-200 messages a day as of ~2 years ago. E-mail was useless without a tight spam filter.

[Pyabo]

I created a new email address four years ago and was *very* careful about where I used it and who I gave it to. Now after four solid years without a single spam mail, I'm starting to get these stock spams on a daily basis.

<sigh>

[Tom Gilleland]

I had read somewhere that this stock spam campaign was done as a virus. I noticed the same surge of stock spams about 4-5 years ago. It's probably just another surge of infection. Most of the spam target emails are just randomName@yourDomain.com. The randomName part is taken from other names it has collected off emails in it's database. Just set up your mail server so that it ignores emails that aren't specified in your domain.

Tom

[Polycount Productions]

I looked into some articles and found out information to change the .spamassassin user_prefs.

http://www.math.hmc.edu/computing/support/email/spamassassin/
This was one recommendation to make some modifications.
required_score 5
score HTML_MESSAGE 3.0
score MIME_HTML_ONLY 3.50
score DRUGS_ERECTILE 3.0
score DRUGS_MANYKINDS 2.0
score DRUGS_PAIN 2.0
score DRUGS_DIET 2.0
score DRUGS_ANXIETY 2.0
score DRUGS_MUSCLE 2.0
score BAYES_50 2.0
score BAYES_60 2.5
score BAYES_95 4.0
score BAYES_99 5.0
score RAZOR2_CF_RANGE_51_100 2.0
score RAZOR2_CHECK 2.0
score HELO_DYNAMIC_DHCP 4.0
score HELO_DYNAMIC_SPLIT_IP 3.880

[ManuTOO]

http://keir.net/k9.html

At 1st, you have to manually tag all the emails you consider as Spam, but after a while, it works really great.
I had trouble with the 1st spam containing images, but now, 90+% of these kind of messages are flagged as spam.

You should also create a whitelist containing all your game names to be sure to not lose any important message.

My K9 statistics :

Column 1: Since ven. oct. 14 2005 03:24:42 (369 days)
Column 2: Since mar. avr. 04 2006 01:19:25 (198 days)

Total number of emails processed 10,641 6,056
29/day 31/day

Number of Good emails processed 8,362 5,129
78.58% 84.69%

Number of Spam emails processed 2,279 927
21.42% 15.31%

Percentage of emails that matched whitelist rules 56.64% 64.18%
Percentage of emails that matched blacklist rules 0.00% 0.00%
Number of emails re-classified to Good 1 0
Number of emails re-classified to Spam 76 62
Percent misidentified as Spam (false positives) 0.01% 0.00%
Percent misidentified as Good (false negatives) 0.71% 1.02%
Overall efficiency 99.28% 98.98%