The birthplace of spam

heretic

Unfortunately, one proven source is The Wall.

How can I prove it?
Yahoo recently offered up what they call 'disposable' addresses. They let you create hundreds of them. You can use these in the place of your 'real' email address. If they generate spam, you can simply toss the address, or even catch the vendor who sold you out. Perhaps you can even prosecute under new laws.

Anyways, my disposable address dedicated to The Wall has generated copious quantities of spam (and growing).

It's not Dan's fault. Someone is 'scraping' email addresses off this board, and selling them. This is annoying, but not unusual. Happens on public boards everywhere.
Anyways, thought you all should know. It would be terrible if this discourages participation, and that is certainly not my intent in sounding the spam alarm.
Your email provider may offer multiple addresses as well, so you can beat this game.

John Starcher_7

My solution, which I can't take credit for....

...because I saw someone else here do it.

Notice in my email address the instead of "#####.com", I have inserted "#### - dot - com"

Anyone wishing to email me will have to substitute ".com" in place of the "-dot-com". I assume this prevents the email address scavengers from "finding" me.

The only downside is that I can't ask the board to notify my by email about replies posted to a thread, but I can live with that!!

Starch

DanHolohan

The other downside

is that if you're listed in Find a Pro the doctored email address won't be able to link to your ad from your Wall posts.

I've actually gotten some pretty good ideas from spam. It's annoying, sure, but I always try to make the most of things.

Mark Eatherton

Email mining gobots

are cruising the net and public boards, mining e-mail addresses and then being sold to spam agents.

I wonder what computer geeks do in their off times....

Just ONCE I'd love to catch one of these geeks that generates destructive viruses... Just once.

ME

John Starcher_7

My biggest concern with spam....

...is the potential for virus laden messages. I use an antivirus program, etc, but it still scares the heck out of me. Most spam doesn't really bother me, I just delete it, after adding the sender to my "junk senders" list (like that might actually do any good). The ones that irritate me the most are the viagra ads, and the ones that are in some completely foreign text that I can't make heads or tails of!!!!

Didn't know about the find-a-pro issue, may have to rethink my strategy!!

Starch

John Starcher_7

10 minutes alone......

...in a locked room with a pipe wrench and a spammer!!!!!

Or maybe a piece of Entran tubing - now THERE'S a thought!!

Starc

John R. Hall

Inventor

Didn't Al Gore invent SPAM?

Floyd_5

In a dark alley.....

you KNOW which one of us would come out alive......

Floyd_5

Nah,

The internet will be JC's next claim to fame....

Robert O'Connor_3

Our email addresses

Should not realy be listed right on the threads. Maybe have a seperate button to bring a person's profile where the email address is listed. The programmed scrapers are not that smart and the loosers doing it by hand couldn't be bothered going to another screen for each user. Most other boards do it that way.

Kal Row

heatinghelp.com

is now unfortunately blacklisted, i know, because my email forwarding and spam filter provider “pobox.com”, is pre-filtering msgs with heatinghelp.com and I am not getting them anymore and I want your auto thread responses – I have sent their cust service a notice , waiting for reply

heretic

Blacklisted

I know why. Some of the spam items have a bogus reply address @heatinghelp.com

Happens all the time. Recently received spam sent to hundreds of other folks with my own address as the reply to. Then I got hate mail. Great. Nothing can be done about this.

Some filters are better than others. At least Yahoo keeps your spam around in a folder so you can decide for yourself. At least a couple of legitimate messages get filtered every day.

jim sokolovic

Too bad we don't have a list...

of THEIR names and address, like they generate ours. There could be a listing by town, and category of #%*&-bag. Then if we have a bad day or receive something we don't like, we could knock on their door and give their snoz a couple of turns with a 2' pipe wrench - you know, that nice cartalidgey noise from the 3 stooges (oww-owww-owwww)!

heretic

Slammin' spammers

I have worked in the email marketing industry (not spam, the legitimate opt-in kind).

Because I have the tools, I will occasionally take pleasure in simply 'slamming' their sites with millions of requests. Shuts them down for some time, and forces some human to go in and manually pull the plug on me. Annoys them, and increases their operating costs.

Sort of a virtual three-stooges slap...

Dan R

Even backlash in the real world sometimes

A while back there was a pretty high profile spammer that ended up getting a bit of real world backlash... probably one of many but this is the one that I remembered.

http://www.freep.com/money/tech/mwend6_20021206.htm

heretic

Spammers

You too can contact Mr. Ralsky about this matter if you like. I'm sure he would like to hear from all of us. Looks like a fellow who could use some v i a g r a, or a manhood extender.

Alan Murray Ralsky
6747 Minnow Pond Dr,
West Bloomfield,
MI 48322
Telephone: 248-926-0688
Last known email address: amr777@comcast.net

DaveGateway

spam

coreys,
Who is Alan Ralsky & why would I contact him?
BP

coreys

Ralsky

He was from the link that DanR posted. He was described as the world's top spammer.

ken D

ironic

wouldn't it be ironic if coreys and DanR? were spammers, having a conversation with us, and luring us into more spam?
One even said he knew how to slam spammers, maybe he is one himself, infiltrating a website talking against them!

Why email/visit a website/link of one of the top spammers?

Is that wise?

Beware

Dan R

ummm...

It wasn't a link to a spammer, it was a link to a web site that had a story about a spammer. More specifically, a story about folks signing a known spammer up for more paper based junk mail and other nicely harrassing things than you could shake a stick at. Sorry if I didn't make that clear.

No spam from my house... but I'll be happy to serve you a beer if you ever visit scenic southwestern NH.

Constantin

I can confirm the same

Since I own a domain, I can invent e-mail addresses at will and do so for every site I visit on the internet. That way, if a site is corrupted, bought, etc. I can simply tell my mail program to auto-delete any mail going to those addresses (Hello carprices.com!)

Within hours of first posting on the Wall, I started getting spam directed towards that e-mail address. However, this is preventable and I wrote to the folks at invision.net asking them to take simple, preventative steps to stop folks from scraping e-mails here.

For instance, you can ban many known e-mail scraping bots simply by adding them to the "deny by user agent" list. On apache-based servers that's done with .htaccess controls. Presumably, IIS has similar capabilities (I hope).

Next, you can create honey-pot traps for bad bots. Then shut out the ones that fall into it. Even more sophisticated system look at user behavior on the site. If every page is being looked at sequentially with 0.5 seconds between clicks, you have a pretty good idea that this is a bot, not a human (no one can read that fast).

For an exhaustive discussion, follow the three excellent threads "a close to perfect .htaccess ban list" over at Webmasterworld.com. Not only do they give you a great introduction to how .htaccess works, they also give you a good idea how to set up a effective .htaccess-based counterattack.

At the end of the day, such an approach is good for the users as well as the owner of a web-site. I'd like to think that Dan hates folks abusing his site and its users... Furthermore, by shutting out bad bots and the like, the web-site caters more content to real humans instead of bad bots.

And on a dollar and cents level, a web-master has to pay for all transfer (regardless of where it goes), it is in the interest of the webmaster to curtail transfer to non-productive folks like e-mail scrapers, site suckers, and other miscreants.

However, it is up to Dan and the folks at Invision to take the steps to protect the site. Throwing up your hands and saying it can't be done is simply being defeatist. I use most of the tools above on my hobbyist web-site and while I have not cut out all spam (which is impossible if you actually use e-mail) I have cut it down to a trickle.

Surely I'm not nearly as sophisticated a web-master as the folks running the data centers at Invision?

Constantin

Brilliant!

I just had one of those "Doh!" Homer moments what I realized that Invision actually automates the scraping process for spammers. Simply sign up to be notified of new posts and Invision will send you them.

Once I posted the above missive, I received two failure notices in my mailbox from Invision's qmail program stating that messages could not be delivered. One was to john at starcher, the other was directed at the rather more cryptic unknown@alder.invision.net.

For what it's worth, Invision seems to make it exceedingly easy to spam folks. On the other hand, I'm sure some here love the ability of Invision to notify them of new posts to a given thread.

Now who is this unkown at alder.invision.net?

Firedragon_4

Break down and buy SpamKiller from

McAfee, it works, FACT!

Constantin

How about SpamAssassin?

If you run your own server, this is the package to go with IMHO. Not only is SpamAssassin free, it also works great for all users of a server, not just an individual account. You have options ranging from deleting to simply flagging spam. While I like McAffee, et al, I prefer free open-source solutions.

On the Mac, you may also consider SpamFire, a package similar to SpamAssassin but made for the desktop. It's Baesian filter worked very well for me with few false positives.