Charter.net email

[NutmegCT]

In the last day or two I've been receiving a *lot* of junk mail (watches, jewelry, stocks, chems, etc.) on my charter.net email account. Much more than usual.

Anyone else getting more junk mail than usual on their charter.net email?

I've heard that 95% of public email is junk/spam. Is it now 96%? /bcforum/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/spam.gif

Thanks.
Tom

 

[Basil]

In the last day or two I've been receiving a *lot* of junk mail (watches, jewelry, stocks, chems, etc.) on my charter.net email account. Much more than usual.

Anyone else getting more junk mail than usual on their charter.net email?

I've heard that 95% of public email is junk/spam. Is it now 96%? /bcforum/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/spam.gif

Thanks.
Tom

The last few days I have been getting quite a bit of spam into my main home Comcast account - and what is odd is it is usually addressed to someone else in the "to" line.

My email address for forum business used to be just Basil @ --- But I made the mistake of having that email address visible on many forum pages. This meant that Spambots that crawl the internet could harvest my email address (which they did). So now I am phasing out that email address and have a new address and also I now use "Contact Me" form here instead of just a link to my new email address. If your email address is visible anywhere on the internet where the spambots can see it, then they WILL get it and you WILL get spam.


One of the things I did on this forum to protect members was to modify the forum software code. I developed my own modification that hides any email addresses from spambots. It works differently depending on how you enter the email address. If you type in an email address directly to a post like this:

someone@someaddress.vom

You will notice that the at sign I typed has automagically been replaced with a small .gif of an at sign. This does not look like an email address to a spambot. Of course the down side is, you can't click on it to send email, but at least you can see it.

However, if you use the "Mail" icon

in the full post editor to add an email address to a post, the mod works a little different. For example, if you now use the mail button to enter the same email addreess as above:

someone@someaddress.vom

You will notice that, if you are logged in you can see (and click on) the email address. But if you were to log out, all you would see is: [log in to view email]

This way, any member who is logged in can see the email address but the bots, who don't typically know how to register for the forum, can't harvest that email address.

Also, if you have a "public" email address listed in your profile here, the bots can't get to it because only logged in members can access the Users List.


Basil

 

[NutmegCT]

Maybe we should all just cancel our email accounts and use a "post a comment" script on our personal webpages. Any attempt to post a comment (send a message) would require the typing of a graphic symbol randomly generated.

I've heard that most junk mail is sent via non-USA ISPs and/or mailservers. Is there any "list" of those IPs and/or domains? If we knew that, maybe we could add that info to a filter list. As most spam "return" addresses are bogus, the ISP would be the target instead.

Tom

 

[DrEntropy]

SPAM seems to occurr in 'waves'. A couple months ago it was 250+ a day on my primary account. it slowed after about a week, now it's going up again. Not nearly as bad yet tho.

Seems we get hacking attempts from servers in eastern Europe and China a lot. I've checked the "malicious attempt" IP addys in my firewall logfiles and that's what most of them are.

 

[Bret]

Not familiar with the spam listed above but because I’ve had the same email address for about 10 years now I get a lot of stuff these days. Recently the bulk seems to be Canadian Pharmaceutical stuff.

You know “Get your meds up here – Ahe”.

But I’ve learned to keep my spam blocker on the highest setting. Annoying for the occasional legitimate first timer sending me an email. But I scan the incoming suspect spam “on line” before it gets on my computer and “allow” emails I want and report everything else as spam.