I have encountered a couple of spam related issues this week. The first, shown in the image, was spam being added to message boards. The message itself was a long list of spam links, and then at the end of message it said this:
2admin,moderators: If you dont want to see us anymore click here
If you clicked on the link (or, perhaps wiser, copied the link and then pasted it into a new browser window so as not to leave the referrer information on their site pointing back at you), you found the page shown in the screen capture, which reads:
We are not looking for your traffic or attention,
We just want to obtain links to our sites from abandoned internet resources.In order to add your domain to our global stop list, please write it here.
If you have more than 1 domain, add them separatly.This is “unsubscribe” form, not the place for personal messages. Send them to those who
dont provide you with unsubscribe forms, you can easily reach anyone by domain whoises.
I doubt it works.
Then, this morning my mailbox was full of bounce messages. All addressed to email addresses that were a random string of letters @bluedonkey.org. I guess one of the spammers out there has latched on to my domain and will be using it to mask the sender address of their crap. You know, I don’t have a problem with advertising. I do have a problem with spammers though because they do two things which single them out as criminals rather than advertisers:
a) They use fake, and usually stolen addresses to send their crap out (strongly suggesting that they know what they are doing is something that they don’t want traced back to them).
b) They spend a long time trying to defeat the filters I put in place to stop their junk getting to me. If I go to the effort of adding a filter for their type of product, it is probably because I don’t want it. No amount of spam is going to change that. People who do want those services will presumably not install filters to block the ads.
The root cause though is that the companies making the products are willing to turn a blind eye to the techniques that their affiliates use to get ads into mailboxes. What should happen is that the companies making the products or providing the services should be fined each time their affiliates use fake addresses etc. That would pretty soon stop most of the crap arriving in my mailbox since it would cut off the revenue stream to the jerk sending the crap out.
If you received spam from a random looking address @bluedonkey.org, please understand that it did not come from me, nor from this site. Believe me, it has probably been much more annoying for me too since I have already received several hundred bounce messages, mailbox full messages and spam detected messages in response to this abuse of my domain name and it doesn’t look as though it is slowing down yet.
typo on the first line: you’ve encountered a couple of spam related “issues”.
as to “garbage”@bluedonkey.org, i’ve always wondered why you allowed any username @bluedonkey into your inbox. if it’s not a name you defined, you should just let the usual bounce mechanism to send it back into cyberspace where it belongs. (an ex-colleague nicknamed “frac” was believed to have a worm hole directed to his nutt into where all the space garbage from the internet would go … an irrelevant aside.)
Bloodnok wonders why one might allow any username to be accepted, well my reason is that some of my email contacts mis-spell the correct address ( some suffer from dysleksyer ?sp? ) and I wish to receive their messages, but the random return address that spammers are using on mail that is bounced to my domain, ( I guess that they have ‘who-ised’ my domain), are being very distructive to us ‘decent’ users. We built the Internet in the first place. Maybe we were naive to believe in the goodness of people, but it was the 70’s and hope sprang for goodness beating evil, and the programming community that built DNS etc worked to make the most of the ‘chips’ and not to be secure against malious attack. These years later, when we have given up most of our ‘freedoms’ we can expect that in return, what may be called ‘spam-orrism’ should be tackled by those that delve into each of our email, phone-calls, snail-mails, airline flights and more. If the ‘proper organisations’ cannot stop spam, drugs, global organised crime and the like, what hope is there that the Intenet will survive for the use of decent types. Many ordinary email users I know are returning to the old telephone system for communications, as they cannot be bothered with this hassle.
I am looking to GPG (aka PGP) to tackle the validation of email at a client level, as the ISP’s have failed me, to date. It is a hassle to set it up, but maybe not as much as maintaining spamlists.
Mike
With my sympathy