SPAM corruption

[blackwave]

Has anyone noticed that spam is getting worse? I don't mean by frequency of spammage, but of the content of the spam? The subject lines alone are riddled with corrupt data where you may see something like

HiwTherew,wwNeedwawFr?aw

... and the content may be garbled as well? It sure looks like if this keeps up that people will just be getting blocks of unreadable crap rather than the annoying readable crap they currently get...

How does this corruption occur? Is it all this spam trading that spam sellers gather and resell without bothering to check the content of the spam?

How about those spam databases for sale? I recently saw one that had so much crap at least 20% out of a few hundred thousand were unusable invalid emails right off the bat.

Hopefully for the users of the Internet the spam will kill itself off since there is no centralized spam control aka spam kingpin, combined with the anti-spam mechanisms (such as the spam-math, and human-readable-ocr, return-receipts, and various other methods of spam filtering) ... spam decay is a lot faster than most other forms of spam out there.

... back to your regularly scheduled program ...

[murakami]

I assumed that the crap was to foil subject filters at the mail client level, the message seems to be intact. The other thing is the use of gifs in the body of the email. Gawd, I can't stand all that crap with images and html in email. That crap automatically gets filtered into trash.

What amazes me is the amount of spam I get on a free hushmail account.

[blackwave]

yeah, I have both free and premium, I have two free accounts that are pure spam, I just keep them around to analyze the latest spread of trojans and the 'secret messages'... but it really blows on the premium accounts to sort through all that crap... I have played with their filtering system a little bit, but much is left to be desired, they are adding new things all the time which is one of the fun parts :)

Basically anything that is html only gets dumped, though I do jot down all the ips and links that the html offers, surely made to count who actually reads this crap, luckily hushmail doesn't open html as html...

one other thing is that a lot of the response to 'unsubscribe' are really just methods to make sure your account is active... in the past i used to make sure to unsubscribe, but it would seem that it went away for a month but then came back with a furor... so fuck that... no replies from me ever... once i enable the crypto only accepting filter, I wouldn't put it past the spamming crowd to start looking up public keys and wrapping spam.. but that will certainly be the day... too much trouble and not a large enough user base.

[murakami]

Originally posted by blackwave
yeah, I have both free and premium, I have two free accounts that are pure spam,

What is truly frightening is the spam velocity. I opened a free account, and found five pieces of spam the next day. We are entering the age of hyper-spam.

[blackwave]

Originally posted by murakami
What is truly frightening is the spam velocity. I opened a free account, and found five pieces of spam the next day. We are entering the age of hyper-spam.

yes and it is interesting to know that even accounts that aren't knowingly applied to anywhere - say I never gave the email out to any form... spam still comes in FAST. Some techniques use brute force guessing of an account name such as test1, test2, teset3... but even still using a name that is uncommon cannot thwart these evil spam machines. die spam! die!

... also I am not sure if other hushmail users have noticed, but certain ISPs have hushmail block because it is considered to be a spam haven, I talked to one isp spam filter operator and she declared that hushmail accounts were contained an unwanted crowd of spammers, and pornographers... wtf?... she also mentioned that they had an open relay to allow spammers to spam to their heart's content... all this out there... though out of the hundreds of emails I have sent since I have created my accounts I have only recieved about 30 bounces because of this propaganda... and the sad thing is that since the email is blocked, no one can communicate with this domain address to advise them of alternate information...

[encrypt31945]

I have a free hushmail account but I havent had it long enough to get any spam yet. I have made sure never to give the address out when signing up. But sadly there are still random email address generators that just send emails to random addresses. I mean it seams you cant get a spam free email address now. I have found a way to instantly sort through junkmail. It may not be the best, but just have people that send you mail put a certian word in the subject line and have your email move it to a folder that way you only read emails from people you know.

[astcell]

My hushmail gets spam, I will not renew it. When I get spam that is for an outside agency that has, say, an 800 number, then I call that number every time I see a pay phone. I also sign them up for spam.

[jetforce4004]

Yahoo's free service does a prety good job of sorting it out for you. about 95% of spam goes to my bulk folder so all i do is delete it all in that folder. should try it.

[blackwave]

Originally posted by jetforce4004
Yahoo's free service does a prety good job of sorting it out for you. about 95% of spam goes to my bulk folder so all i do is delete it all in that folder. should try it.

Last time I tried yahoo, I didn't see any advantages over hushmail at all... have they recently changed jetforce4004? I am certainly willing to put up with a little bit of spam and have more security.

[Soybomb]

I encourage anyone running their own mailserver to try out spamassassin, its awesome and catches all the attempts to foil filtering like that.

Heres a snip of its scoring if you haven't seen it before, its pretty accurate:

Subject: 4 . 3 7 5%Transformation^Åright here; right now
Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2003 11:34:52 -1100
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="----=_NextPart_2B7_E06F_931C1565.E5D35761"
X-Priority: 1
X-Spam-Status: Yes, hits=7.7 required=3.5 tests=HTTP_ESCAPED_HOST,
FORGED_HOTMAIL_RCVD,FRONTPAGE,PRIORITY_NO_NAME,HTM L_50_70,USER_AGENT,
HTML_FONT_FACE_ODD,X_PRIORITY_HIGH,SPAM_PHRASE_03_ 05,HTML_FONT_COLOR_RED,
BIG_FONT,HTML_FONT_COLOR_GRAY,MIME_LONG_LINE_QP,NO _REAL_NAME
X-Spam-Flag: YES
X-Spam-Level: *******
X-Spam-Report: 7.7 hits, 3.5 required;
* 0.7 -- URI: Uses %-escapes inside a URL's hostname
* 1.5 -- Forged hotmail.com 'Received:' header found
* 0.4 -- BODY: Frontpage used to create the message
* 1.0 -- Message has priority setting, but no X-Mailer
* 0.3 -- BODY: Message is 50-70% HTML tags
* -0.5 -- Found a User-Agent header
* 0.3 -- BODY: HTML font face is not a commonly used face
* 0.4 -- Sent with 'X-Priority' set to high
* 1.1 -- BODY: Spam phrases score is 03 to 05 (medium)
* 0.3 -- BODY: HTML font color is red
* 0.3 -- BODY: FONT Size +2 and up or 3 and up
* 0.3 -- BODY: HTML font color is gray
* 0.3 -- RAW: Quoted-printable line longer than 76 characters
* 1.3 -- From: does not include a real name

[encrypt31945]

I would like to check that out is there a website?

[blackwave]

behold the power of g00gle!

Originally posted by encrypt31945
I would like to check that out is there a website?

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&i...=Google+Search

http://spamassassin.org/

[encrypt31945]

Thanks bw I can't believe I forgot google. Damn I mean it is even my homepage.

[Gadsden]

It does work well.. along with the built-in features of Postfix. Here is a good link for it..

[astcell]

What about spamcop dot net?