S=P=A=M ???

The last month or so has been relatively free of SPAM, but this week it all seems to have started up again.

I have several PN / F9 email addresses and all of them seem to be affected.

Anyone else noticed this ?

Dave.

Was just going to post about this myself, had a couple of hundred emails in my inbox this morning, most being out of the out of office reply and undeliverable types. Seems to have calmed down now, started around 00:40 and ended around 04:40.

Same here. There seems to be a wave of them, all from the same source. I believe it has been proven that 90% of all spam comes from a very small number of sources, so you do get it in huge bursts.

Hi guys,

Have you seen this?

Rgds,

Same here.

I hadnt, BUT what's going on as the same thing happened last night.

From 02:54 to 05:29 I recieved another lump of cheap meat. This has only happened the last 2 days. Anybody done something the last few days at PN because I've not changed anything at this end.

Is this still down to the loss of e-mail addresses by PN, or a new problem with junk mail?

I'd say it was a new problem with junk mail, it's only happened the last 2 days and only in the early hours of the morning. Sounds like a maintenance window or someone tweaking things to me

In total for different things I have 10 e-mail accounts (all hotmail) had them for betweeen 3 & 10 years. I get about 5 junk mails a day (only on one account, and that was the one PN had as an forwarding addy), so I don't see junk mail being a problem.
Hopefully they will get it sorted.

I'm seeing a steady stream of spam during the morning and as I monitor 8 or 9 PN / F9 accounts I get the same email to each.

However, other non PN accounts are not affected, accept for the one I have given PN as an alternate contact address and then I get it there too, so I would say it was related to the previous theft of addresses.

Dave.

The trouble with that is, I would have to try and register all 10 PN accounts that I am responsible for and if the right one's don't get selected then it would be a total waste of time.

Dave.

I just checked by email address that PN had/has.In the junk folder is had over 100 messages.
In the other 9 combined I have 5.
Luckly hotmail catches most of it, but think I might end up shutting that one down.
(would be the first time I had to do this in 10 years).

what period are the 100 over david?

over a week, but most of them is the last 2 days

Shows a marked increase then...

difficult to tell on mine.... a lot of spam - mainly self inflicted by members of my family... grrrr

And again the spam hit, not so many, but a few between 01:11 and 05:10 this morning. As it seems to be happening at roughly the same time every morning, perhaps PN should have a quick look to make sure they dont have something going on every morning which is interfering.

Hi there,

Our monitoring doesn't suggest anything untoward. I suspect this is due to the seasonal increase in spam that we see in the run up to Christmas.

If you check our graphing, you'll see that there's been a gradual increase in volumes over the last couple of weeks. These are our mx.last secondary mail servers where most spam gets sent...

http://www.plus.net/support/displayImage.php?strImageFile=MxlastMailQueues1Month.gif

Incidentally this is also being discussed over on our Community Site forums:-
http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,57646.msg470147.html#msg470147

Rgds,

Well I think something must have changed, I'm getting 50+ spams every day now, getting through all the PN filters and they are all very similar to the ones I used to get a few months ago.

Because I monitor several work related PN accounts I suppose I notice it more than most, but I would still say it is a 10 fold increase on previous levels !

Dave.

Dave,

I'm still of the belief that it's just a different wave of spam and part of the seasonal increase in volumes.

Having said that, I suspect that Postini will sort this out for you when it's rolled to the live platform.

As a short term measure try setting up an IMAP folder on your account and move all the unmarked stuff into it. If you don't mind PM'ing me your username, the name of the mailbox, and the name of the folder then I can see if I can make sure your mails go through the training filter.

Rgds,

OK I'll PM you ALL my account names if you like, but we are talking about 6 or 7 that are currently being hit, plus a few of my spare ones that I have created over the years.

Not tried setting up an IMAP account before so it might take me a while to work out what I need to do.

Guess I could just pick one or two accounts for now.

I am currently using Mail Washer to intercept the emails and BOUNCE them before downloading them from your server, that would not have any effect on training would it ?

I know the spammer has probably hijacked someones account but it makes me feel better bouncing them !

Dave

I was just looking at the catch all option in my account set-up.

If I could change that from being [username]@[username].plus.com then I could elliminate 99% of my spam on EVERY one of my accounts !

I tried disabling and re-enabling it but it won't let me change it to anything different, can this be done ???

Regards, Dave

Hi DD,

If you use the Mailwasher Bounce feature it advises the sender your account is active. You can set MW to delete manually or automatically.

Love the prog; it has saved my bacon more than once!

Mmmm....

When I first tried bouncing a message, I sent a test one from a spare account I have, the "reply" I got back appeared to suggest that it was not a valid account and that the email was undeliverable ???/

Is that not the case then ?

The problem is the from is probably faked so bouncing it will probably go to some poor innocent who is totally cheesed off with a mailbox full of bounces for spam he didn't send.

Never bounce spam

It may be a wave of spam, though my belief is that something has changed... I am getting spam that is no longer labelled as spam, which is odd when the word "viagra" is in the title of some..

Imagine you are a pharmacist working in a chemists shop. Do you not think you might send a perfectly valid email with the word Viagra in the subject and wouldn't you be a little annoyed at it being treated as spam? That is why the filtering has to take much more than just one or two specific words in to account.

Since leaving PN my pop3 email account has gone from lots to nots of spam . Email was never plusnet's strong point .

ahh but what about "enormouserection" if memory serves.

Hi DD,

Open MailWasher

I understand that most medical people would use the definition: Sildenafil Citrate, therefore blocking the usual e-mail expressions are not likely to cause concern to professional people.

I would also imagine that anything remotely confidential like that would not be entrusted to an email any how !

Mind you we don't want to return to the dark ages where anything, like ESSEX, was blocked just because it had SEX in it !

Dave.

>> it makes me feel better bouncing them


I HATE the friggin Bounce feature. Please dont use it.

Spammers hardly - if ever - ever use a real email address and they are normally hijacked addresses. All you do is end up spamming some innocent yourself.

Ive seen domains became a target.... and for several days bounce mails can become a nightmare and way more of a dam problem than the PN spam is in the first place.
You think the PN spam is bad??
Then try being on the other end of a hijacked mail address and getting bounces

Oh I know.... I could bounce those back too and we could play everlasting cyberspam ping-pong.

Alright, you've convinced me, I have already gone into my Spam settings and unticked the Bounce option, but if I can't bounce them, then I need to hit someone or something very hard to releive the frustration.

Any suggestions ???

"I HATE the friggin Bounce feature."

Can

Edited by deleted (Wed 05-Dec-07 15:27:11)

I think that when the bounce feature is on it should cc a copy of the bounce to yourself for your own records. That might teach the tw.ts that use it to turn it off!

Like DodgyDave, I have noticed a huge increase in "Spam" over the last few weeks, even with the Plusnet spam filter in operation.

I am also finding that I am having to check through the spam folder, as genuine emails (from abroad) are being blocked.
Is it possible to specify email address's that I don't want blocked ?

Not yet Tetricus, but that's one of the things we're hoping to introduce with the new Postini platform next year. Having said that, the software we're using at the moment to detect spam (Dspam) will probably be removed once better alternatives have bedded in.

Rgds,

Thanks for that Bob

I have to say that on the rare occasion I dip into a discussion about Spam, I am am constantly irritated by the ISP's comments. They seem to be along the lines of "this is the state of the internet today, and unfortunately we all have to live with it"

Well I'm afraid I'm having difficulty agreeing with this. For the following reason.

I have 5 email accounts:

My work account (a fairly public domain - ntu.ac.uk) gets very little spam, maybe 5 a week. This may be down to my company's spam filter, and since I'm in the IT department I do know that our mail servers reject 800,000 spam mails a day (yes, a day) out of a million, for an organisation of perhaps 10,000 employees. I've had this account for 10 years.

My Hotmail account gets no spam. None. Not a sausage. Admittedly I don't use it very much, but still...it's Hotmail, it should get some. I've had this account for 10 years.

Mail.com. This is my web-based spam trap. Any web page that wants an email address for info, or for registration, goes here. My amazon account feeds here, as does ebay. I probably get about 5-10 mails a day in total, of which only about half is unsolicited spam. I've had this account the longest - since 1996 when it was iname.com

Gmail - I've had this one only about 2 years, and I only ever use it to chat to one person. No spam.

F9 - I've had this account for about 2 years. Today I cleared out about 20 spam mails. I never used to get ANY spam to this account. This is important, so I'll repeat it. I used to get NO SPAM to my F9 account. Now I get loads.

So what's the difference between my F9 account and all the others? Well nothing really. I don't use it for business (that's what I use my webmail account Mail.com for), I only ever contact a few friends through it, and yet it's suddenly a spam magnet.

I'll tell you what the difference was. This is a mail address that was hacked into 6 months ago, because PN's mail servers were compromised. That's when I started getting spam on an account I've never had it on before.

So please F9/PN. Stop spouting the same old rhetoric about how we should be careful who we send mails to, and spam is a fact of life now. Just say "our mail servers were hacked, and all your addresses ended up on the internet." That's the reason. Don't treat us like idiots.

I am seriously considering not using my F9 mail address for anything anymore now. Because only a very few of my friends & relatives use it, I just seem to be logging on to download spam nowadays.

Oh, and it's obvious from the nature of the mails that they are all from the same source, which means they've originated from the same copy of the mailing list - the one that was nicked from your mail servers earlier this year.

How about a change of mail address? Could you do that? That would stop it.

- Annoyed Dave

Plusnet are most definitely doing something about the current spam problems:
http://community.plus.net/comms/2007/11/12/wanted-postini-anti-spam-trialists/

You say that at work your mail servers are rejecting 800,000 emails a day. Plusnet have signed up with Postini who are rejecting 50-70% of emails offered for the people who have signed up for the trials - but Plusnet have the settings at the lowest, least aggressive level.. But there are some users who are moaning because they don't like the idea of Plusnet rejecting any of their mail - they think they want all mail addressed to them to be delivered (silly fools!). Whatever they do Plusnet can't please everybody.

The results I'm seeing from the trial are very, very encouraging - the volume of spam getting through has dropped dramatically - although the tagging of what does get through seems to be going in the wrong direction at the moment - but that is nothing to do with Postini as it is still done by DSPAM (that will probably change in the new year).

If you haven't signed up for the trials I suggest you give it a go.

In reply to:

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Plusnet are most definitely doing something about the current spam problems:
http://community.plus.net/comms/2007/11/12/wanted-postini-anti-spam-trialists/

You say that at work your mail servers are rejecting 800,000 emails a day. Plusnet have signed up with Postini who are rejecting 50-70% of emails offered for the people who have signed up for the trials - but Plusnet have the settings at the lowest, least aggressive level.. But there are some users who are moaning because they don't like the idea of Plusnet rejecting any of their mail - they think they want all mail addressed to them to be delivered (silly fools!). Whatever they do Plusnet can't please everybody.

The results I'm seeing from the trial are very, very encouraging - the volume of spam getting through has dropped dramatically - although the tagging of what does get through seems to be going in the wrong direction at the moment - but that is nothing to do with Postini as it is still done by DSPAM (that will probably change in the new year).

If you haven't signed up for the trials I suggest you give it a go.

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There shouldn't have been any spam getting through to my F9 mail account, because I hardly ever use it. Last month I had 10 legitimate emails to my F9 account, and that's quite a lot for me. 5 of them were from a friend, the other 5 were from two subscription lists. I had a lot more than 5 spam mails though, and I can categorically state that it occurred after Plusnet exposed all our email addresses to the world. Prior to that I had NO unsolicited mail to my F9 account. None whatsoever. At all.

Do we know for certain if any completely new PN users are getting spam to their mail account from Day1? I doubt it. I also doubt you would get any spam if you use your account carefully. Which I did. OK, I know about address-harvesting trojans that scan your drive for any idx or doc files with an "@" symbol in them, I'm not stupid. But I managed almost 3 years with no spam until now when I suddenly get loads. And it's not anything I've done, because it's obvious other PN users are getting the same.

Does anyone know if PN will change a username for a new one?

I thought a username change or a free .uk domain was offered to all at the time of the problems,but I may be mistaken.

We do all share your feelings about the Webmail incident. Spam would undoubtedly be less of an issue for our customers were it not for that, even if it was already a pretty big problem before then. We did offer to change people's email addresses or usernames and we also offered a free domain name to replace your old email address, as well as some new admin tools aimed at reducing the impact. If you drop me a PM, I'd be happy to discuss the best answer for your account. You can see more about our follow-up activities to that here.

Our attitude certainly isn't that spam is something we are not responsible for solving, or that the problem can't be solved. Whether a spam attack resulted from the Webmail incident or another source such as someone with you in their address book getting a trojan, it's no less problematic. That's why we are putting the efforts we are into deploying the best possible solution to spam available to us. Like John, I'm pretty hopeful about Postini, and once we've got the integration done so customers can control this properly I think it will be very effective answer indeed.

Ian

In reply to:

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We do all share your feelings about the Webmail incident. Spam would undoubtedly be less of an issue for our customers were it not for that, even if it was already a pretty big problem before then. We did offer to change people's email addresses or usernames and we also offered a free domain name to replace your old email address, as well as some new admin tools aimed at reducing the impact. If you drop me a PM, I'd be happy to discuss the best answer for your account. You can see more about our follow-up activities to that here.

Our attitude certainly isn't that spam is something we are not responsible for solving, or that the problem can't be solved. Whether a spam attack resulted from the Webmail incident or another source such as someone with you in their address book getting a trojan, it's no less problematic. That's why we are putting the efforts we are into deploying the best possible solution to spam available to us. Like John, I'm pretty hopeful about Postini, and once we've got the integration done so customers can control this properly I think it will be very effective answer indeed.

Ian

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I wasn't aware of the offer to change username. Thankyou for the info. I shall certainly PM you.