Spammed -Help

[richie00boy]

I have just 2 days ago registered a .com address. Today I received a spam email as a result of that address. The address is purely registered not a website yet. How did the spammer get the email address? Do they have a system that collects all new domain registrations and strips out the contact email address that you have to put in? I need to know how I can protect myself against this garbage

[Bill Fitzpatrick]

Probably. Or, the company that registered you sells the information.

What ever you do, don't put you email address on your site without disguising it.

I used the following format. The numbers indicate the ASCII code for the letters preceeding the @. The 64 is the ASCII code for @.

<a href="mailto:&#119&#117&#109&#112&#64kbacoustics.c om"><img src="images/mail14.gif" border=0>

So, we have: wump@ preceeding the domain name.

Not there aren't spiders that look for this technique and get around it but it worked for me.

[richie00boy]

The company I registered with is UK based and of the 3 domains I registered I only got a spam as a result of the .com one, thus I am wondering if whoever controls .com addresses (I believe they are US domains) publishes a kind of electoral role of them all, or 'new registrations notice' which spammers harvest. The spammer was American.

Thanks for the tip on hiding my email address. I had already planned to just use an image to display the address on screen without any 'clickability'. Now I can see a way to hide the address in the source code, but I think I will still be cautious.

[DragonMaster]

hey, richie.

type the site address, sometimes there's a message including your e-mail, and if this site already existedm there might be links.


Also :
-Mozilla Thunderbird, integrated spam filter(Don't know if it works)
-If you sent a message to someone who has Hotmail at the same time, it IS normal.

[richie00boy]

I did a little checking and the web link in the email is werelovingthis.biz/spammersname so obviously if I follow the link the spammer will earn points. I want the spammer to die a slow and painful death not earn points, so I was unable to proceed any further as the werelovingthis address tells me nothing.

There is also a supposed delete page where I can enter my email to be deleted from their list. Yeah right, I'm sure they will I HATE SPAMMERS

[Bill Fitzpatrick]

Going to a link which will supposedly delete you from the mailing list just makes matters worse because they will then know that it is a valid and active email address.

Just ignore the spam. Never open files unless you know the person that sent them. Watch out for fake paypal messages that want you to go to a page and verify your account. The page looks official but isn't.

[motherone]

This is pretty common. A lot of the spammers check for new domain names and pull the contact info via whois queries. I had this same problem with the 8 or so domains I have registered.

Best thing to do is get some good e-mail filters into place. Mozilla/Phoenix will probably do a pretty decent job of taking care of it. I have a fairly old address (9 or so years old now) that gets about 150+ spam messages a day, and mozilla filters 95% of them out for me.

If you are running the servers yourself, you can do some neat stuff with mail packages like postfix.

[richie00boy]

Thanks, I had my suspicions it may have been something like this. Is the registered email actually used for anything? I have now just set it to an old account that I never use. I only use webmail so Thunderbirrd etc. will not help me here.

[DragonMaster]

I don't know what the program name is anymore, but it looks in the source of the mail and finds the "REAL" sender IP.

Post the mail source / header and I'll whois the IP(of the DNS the spam sender is using) to know their abuse report e-mail

[R.G.]

Go get the "popfile" utility. It is currently running 99.87% accurate for my email in sifting the spam out. It takes some setting up, as in the beginning you tell it whether every email is spam or not, but as it collects statistics on every aspect of the email, it starts sorting. It gets more accurate as it goes and you tell it about its errors. Looked at that way, it actually learns what you want to see.

It's free...