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FIB - Scams 101 - Ye Olde Archives
Posted By: The Roadie <wcarton@flash.net> In Response To: Spam (DaveB)
Tuesday, 15 March 2005, at 10:07 a.m.
> Up until recently I rarely received spam but all of a sudden I'm being
> barraged and it's getting worse! What is the process for reporting spam.
> How and to whom? Any help would be appreciated.
1) Avoidance - maybe too late, depending on what address is being hammered, but I see you post a mailto: link on your web site. You should obscure that using one of the tricks available at http://www.healyourchurchwebsite.com/obfuscator/ There are plenty of technical tricks, but if you're not very technical, then just change your address into an image. Less convenient for the site visitor, but only you know how many people use that link anyway. Also change your site registration address to one you don't care about much, because it will get harvested by certain spammers who target site owners.
Oh, and use longer addresses with a combination of numbers and letters. Your current short addresses are being guessed by automatic spamware that tries every possible combination of letters. I've seen evidence they try as high as 8-10 character strings. Since the criminals never see any bounce messages (they're not looking for bounces) if even 1 out of 10,000 guessed addresses get through, they're ahead of the game. This is called a "dictionary attack".
2) Filter - my favorite free one is Spam Pal: http://www.spampal.org/ or move to an ISP that has better filters. Ask yours to add some if they don't already use them. It's a competitive advantage nowadays for an ISP to have good filters.
3) Fight back - read everthing on their site and start using http://www.spamcop.net/ Other tools are for the more experienced user, since if you read the headers and get fooled by forgeries, you could be complaining to innocent people who are being inundated with mistracked spam reports. You could also be fooled by a spammer which has a spamhaus for an upstream provider, and your report to the upstream provider will just be passed to the spammer for listwashing. The spammer might stop spamming you (if they're ethical - how many spammers are ethical. :-) or they might just sell your address to all their buddies as a verified live one who might respond to THEIR offers even if you ignore the spammer's current crap-ola.
You've probably heard: NEVER reply directly to ANY spammer asking for a removal service. They lie. It will increase your spamload to the point you may need to abandon the address.
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