1,000 spams a day?

[cliffski]

Is this normal? I use multiple mail re-routings, blocklists, filters and software to cut 99% of my spam out, but if I look at the unfiltered lists its about 1 spam a minute. Is this normal for an established domain name?
Why on earth isn't more done to close down spammers when they *send* mail, rather than waiting for us all to recieve the stuff?
Bah.

[soniCron]

The fact that you've posted the address on your site probably doesn't help things... That said, I get about 100-200 spam messages a day to all of my 18 (yes, eighteen) email addresses, some of which have been in action since the mid 90's. (I keep 'em around juuuust in case.)

I see yours is labeled webmaster2. How many have you got?

[jankoM]

My spam got to the new extreme point few weeks back so I went all drastic. I set up autoreply which says "this email is closed because I got so much spam on it. Please write me to ******@itmmetelko.com, sorry" and I have made an email account which not guesable and I won't post it anywhere...So far I got no spam on this new address

The even bigger problem I see with email is not all the spam (which is huge) but the fact that you can't rely that your email is being delivered and that emails for you really get to you - because all the hectic settings. I mean if nothing else I really can't be sure if I havent deleted few normal emails when I was deleting my 200 spams per day. So if anybody hasn't heard back from me... I don't know what you can do because as I said I am NOT posting my new email anywhere

[oNyx]

Spiders can pick up that email just fine. You have to cloak it somehow. Eg use some javascript to assemble some mailto link. Don't search the net for it. Write something on your own. And show some image in the noscript block as fallback.

[Jack Norton]

The best is usually use a gif/jpg image with the email address... spammer will have to manually write it down.
Anyway, is ridiculous that we arrived at this point, I don't have email clearly written anywhere but still get tons of spam.

"Someone" (hey Bill how goes?) should really do something.

[oNyx]

Every system, which relies on everyone's good behavior is flawed.

Thats why email is so useless.

[KatieL]

"Why on earth isn't more done to close down spammers when they *send* mail, rather than waiting for us all to recieve the stuff?"


Largely because they aren't the easy targets they were anymore. Spammers used to be people who had machines and network connections and they'd be shut down by their ISP shortly after starting to spam, then they'd used another credit card to open another account and get another couple of hours spamming in and so on. They were limited in what they could do in the time between getting started and being shut down.

These days, it's all botnets -- compromised Windows machines in people's homes, infected with programs designed to spam on demand from a remote controller. Who usually turns out to be somewhere where law enforcement has bigger worries than our mailboxes. Eastern Europe is a favourite site. Even if you can trace them, you can't prosecute them.


Long, long ago, when this started, we did try and stop it. If the first ten spammers had been arrested for computer tresspass, do you think there would have been an eleventh? But no-one was interested in listening to a mere few thousand nerds who's 'email' was being 'bulk mailed' (the term spam wasn't coined until later). No-one cared enough to stop it before it became a problem for the world and now everyone has email and there are more spammers than anyone knows what to do with, it's too late to do anything - some estimates put the volume of spam as more than 90% of all email traffic.

I keep waiting for spamming to just get unproductive on the basis that it's the only way I can see this ending; surely everyone who wants viagra knows where to buy it from now? But no. It seems there's still enough stupid people out there to keep responding... so I've sort of come to the conclusion that humanity as a whole is too stupid to ever use email responsibly.

[cliffski]

even if my email was totally unspiderable, id be overwhelemed. I get emails to randomname@domain.com, maybe 200 of those a day. People just do a dictionary spam attack against domains, and I have 4 domains now. And like it or not, you *have* to accept email to support@ or sales@ or webmaster@, because some people guess those addresses for legit emails.

I don't see why mroe ISPs aren't shutting down net access to anyone who is found to be part of a botnet, willingly or not. Maybe the future is some system of authenticated, signed email, like a global whitelist of some sort. Either that, or a 0.01c tax per email.
Either way, something really has to be done about email, blog post and forum spam.

[Jack Norton]

I don't see why mroe ISPs aren't shutting down net access to anyone who is found to be part of a botnet, willingly or not. Maybe the future is some system of authenticated, signed email, like a global whitelist of some sort. Either that, or a 0.01c tax per email.
Either way, something really has to be done about email, blog post and forum spam.

Yeah I agree completely. When I was talking about "Bill" I meant of course Mr. Gates, since is the only one with enough power to actually enforce some "email rule".
There are many ways that spamming could be stopped: mostly checking that every email is legit, not made by a bot. I like also the 0.01c tax per email. Or simply every email address should be clearly traceable, or... don't know - but something must be made, this is making internet a mess.
We actually even lose money - many people change email and maybe forget to re-subscribe to our newsletter so we lose potential sales

[Jeremy Chatelaine]

I must admit that I'm clear from spam since I'm using gmail. Sure my spam mailbox is filling up but I'm not notified of a spam waiting for my review

Only had 1 spam reached me but it was a pleasure to go and report it as spam so other people won't have it.

Of courser that doesn't work if you have a @yourdomain email address.

There is a tool that asked people to reply to email to autotificate themself as human, but it didn't work with mail list. I personnally would like to have that since I can have another gmail account for mailing list and other stuff to consult only rarely.

Please, not the tax on email.... most people will end up paying spam because of a cleaver virus that sends them on their behalf

[Chris Evans]

I'm thinking about having a tiny little Flash app, which links to a mailto. Spammer bots can parse through Flash.

Katie brings up a valid point. As annoying as spam is, the only it has kept going on for all these years is because there are idiots out there who actually buy cheap meds from mail spam or get their latest order of Viagra from forum spambots. Spammers wouldn't go through all the trouble of hacking servers and creating maleware if there wasn't some kind of payoff at the end.

I'm hoping that the spammers will go too far (if they haven't already) and people will be so inundated with junk mail that even the naive and stupid will begin to ignore the spam.

At first I was totally against the idea of having to pay to send e-mail. But 1 cent per e-mail isn't that much. If it was rolled into the ISP monthly fee most people wouldn't even notice it. And if it means e-mail can be saved and once again be a viable/reliable form of communication, I'm all for it. As Jack said, it's getting harder to run online businesses when customers struggle to just get their order confirmation or newsletters. Almost everything gets devoured by spam filters these days and many users are hyper-sensitive to any e-mail that's unfamiliar.

EDIT:

Please, not the tax on email.... most people will end up paying spam because of a cleaver virus that sends them on their behalf

Good point. Though maybe you could set an outgoing limit on mail per day. If your computer tries to send more than the limit, then the ISP will send you an automatic notification e-mail that you've exceeded the daily limit. All you have to do is reply to the ISP message with some coded text to lift the limit.... Um, yeah.....

[JoKa]

Sure my spam mailbox is filling up but I'm not notified of a spam waiting for my review

The worst thing is, that a few non-spam emails are sorted out as spam, too. Of course, VERY few compared to the masses of real spam, but I don't want to miss a customer request or an important answer after requesting some support. Which means I have to take at least a short look at the subject, wasting precious time even with the ability to check between 5-10 emails per second.

[Mike Boeh]

Unfiltered, mine was over 2000/day- and I know someone with nearly double that. It got to the point where I was spending a lot of time trying to block it, so I decided to use an e-mail service instead, fastmail.fm. They use "greylisting" which reduced the amount by an *amazing* amount. Now I only get about 10/day in my junk folder

[Didier]

I get emails to randomname@domain.com, maybe 200 of those a day. People just do a dictionary spam attack against domains, and I have 4 domains now. And like it or not, you *have* to accept email to support@ or sales@ or webmaster@, because some people guess those addresses for legit emails.

That can be easily stopped cliffski! Just turn off the catch-all function for your mail account (or ask your hosting company).
By doing this, you will just receive email to the mail accounts that exist (so no random names anymore).

Didier

[GBGames]

In the past few weeks, I have been receiving a ton of spam. A lot of it is addressed to a random name at my domain, which I can't just block because I depend on getting those emails. Like, if I signed up for somedomain.com's email list or service, I would use somedomain@mydomain so I know that I don't get spam there. I am not going to create an individual account for each site, but I still get the emails.

Unfortunately, I also get the junk sent to randomname@mydomain, but Thunderbird has been good about filtering it.

The worst part is that it appears someone is spoofing my domain and sending spam out as if it was coming from me. I checked my computer, and I had the webhost check the server, and it doesn't appear to actually come from my domain, yet I keep getting all sorts of responses about undeliverable email.

My main concern is that my domain will be blacklisted, but I hope that the people involved in blacklisting would be smart enough to check the full headers of the email.

As for solutions, a lot of people are talking about secure email, which is interesting because 10 years ago there was talk about how dangerous secure email would be. Unfortunately I can't find the article, but it was a good look at how privacy could be compromised in the name of convenience. Email was only one part of it. I think we should be cautious with any solution we can come up with to deal with spam.

[Tom Cain]

I currently get around 10,000 unfiltered per day. Whenever a new emailing virus gets around it will go higher for a time - I've had it spike over 1,000,000 per day. That was a while back, I think that the Internet overall has become better at handling it rather than worse.

I got a VPS server a few years ago. Having control over it all has helped a lot. I installed virus checking at the server and several spam filters. I also set the server to eat incoming spam/viruses instead of keeping them anywhere or bouncing them. Most spam emails I get have spoofed FROM addresses, so bouncing just contributes to the overall spam problem. I have been on blacklists because of bouncing spoofed email. It wasn't hard to get removed once I explained the situation. I believe blacklists are now better at determining who to blacklist.

I have found a server virus check that deletes virus email as it comes in to be the biggest help.

[cliffski]

so its not just me then The thing is, why don't big ISPs like AOL filter all outgoing email? run it through the kind of filters most of us are using etc. Surely that would help?

[Nexic]

I'm currently getting 300/day to my jaggedblade emails. I don't have any sort of spam protection, simply because I don't want to miss an important mail.

But it's getting really annoying so will soon probably use some kind of greylist service like Mike soon.

[sillytuna]

It got too much for me some time ago, so we're using greylisting.

Unfortunately we do lose the odd email and get delays from the odd provider. However, my job would be unfeasible given the junk mail load, especially when on the road and checking over phone or webmail.

I've gone through 4 email addresses trying to avoid junk mail too.

[Nikster]

There's also another side effect to all this, I had a customer email with some questions who was using the att.com email, I tried replying only for my mails to be bounced back, I got in touch with my hosting provider to find out someone had either hijacked an account or setup up an account temporary and basically spammed everyone, needless to say (because I'm using shared hosting) anything that came from the shared hosting was black listed, this has apparently been rectified but goes to show what other problems exist.

[Tom Gilleland]

I was getting about 1,000 unfiltered spams a day. With max filtering it got down to 100 a day. I then changed my main email addresses, and set up the mail server to ignore all other addresses in my domains. Now I only get about one a week to that address. I do notice that the max filtering knocks out a very small percentage of valid emails.

Also, use forms and a PHP script to hide your emails from the bots. I would expect that the image version of your email address has already been hacked by the spam botters. They've already written code to translate captchkas.

It's a good idea to occassionally check your domains for blacklisting. Here's where I go for this (http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx)

Tom

[KNau]

Do web-based forms offer any better of a result at reducing spam?

[mot]

Jeremy Chatelaine: I must admit that I'm clear from spam since I'm using gmail. Sure my spam mailbox is filling up but I'm not notified of a spam waiting for my review

...

Of courser that doesn't work if you have a @yourdomain email address.

Oh yes now it does!

You can forward all your emails to a gmail account, this will get rid of the spam. That was always possible.

And recently they added a new feature to gmail that lets you add youremail@yourdomain to your gmail account and send emails from there and they will appear as if they came from @yourdomain. Before the email is added gmail will send a verification email to youremail@yourdomain to see if you really own the address.

It works well. And the interface is really good too.

[Nikster]

Also it seems if you have anything to do with PAD files, that will nicely get your spam count up

[LilGames]

Cliffski, turn off your "catch-all". That's why you get so much "random" spam.

[GBGames]

I was getting about 1,000 unfiltered spams a day. With max filtering it got down to 100 a day. I then changed my main email addresses, and set up the mail server to ignore all other addresses in my domains. Now I only get about one a week to that address. I do notice that the max filtering knocks out a very small percentage of valid emails.

Also, use forms and a PHP script to hide your emails from the bots. I would expect that the image version of your email address has already been hacked by the spam botters. They've already written code to translate captchkas.

It's a good idea to occassionally check your domains for blacklisting. Here's where I go for this (http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx)

Tom

Oh, thanks for that info! I found that my domain is blacklisted, and the server test said that my host may be an open relay. Well, that's not good.

[Jeremy Chatelaine]

Oh yes now it does!

You can forward all your emails to a gmail account, this will get rid of the spam. That was always possible.

And recently they added a new feature to gmail that lets you add youremail@yourdomain to your gmail account and send emails from there and they will appear as if they came from @yourdomain. Before the email is added gmail will send a verification email to youremail@yourdomain to see if you really own the address.

It works well. And the interface is really good too.

Wicked! I didn't check, I wasn't thinking this was possible. Thanks mot!
Time for some gmail settings

[cliffski]

Cliffski, turn off your "catch-all". That's why you get so much "random" spam.

I can't, I've used too many email addresses over the years, its just too risky ;(

Can't we just execute the spammers?

[JoKa]

Can't we just execute the spammers?

OmG - our politicians are right! Computer games are responsible for violent behaviour and their creators are minions of evil...
Just look at the bright side: whenever I feel lonely, I just look for new mails, so many girls who only want ME

[soniCron]

I can't, I've used too many email addresses over the years, its just too risky ;(

Can't you set up email forwarding for the old accounts? I forward all of mine to Gmail...