14 Dec
2019
14 Dec
'19
12:58 p.m.
Signed up this new account exclusively for CCtech and CCchat.
Hopefully its working. Why do this? I had to shut off the
other subscription for spam reasons.
Allison
16 Dec
16 Dec
7:33 a.m.
Am 14.12.2019 um 18:58 schrieb crufta cat via cctech:
Signed up this new account exclusively for CCtech and
CCchat.
Hopefully its working. Why do this? I had to shut off the
other subscription for spam reasons.
Allison
How did you manage to subscribe? I have been trying to change my
subscription address for more than a year, and both web site as well as
mail request have been completely ignored so far.
Holger
12:53 p.m.
Simple I unsubed the old address and did a fresh subscription for a new one.
Why I did that is more interesting.
I have had issues with spam for a while and it was getting seriously worst
for the last year.
So I started shutting down any lists I had signed up for and this
(cctalk/cctech) was the last.
For a long while I thought it was yahoo groups but when they went away
there was no drop.
So I unsubed from here and it stopped, hard.
I believe there is a someone or something that is subscribed to the list
and scrape it for active
names. and emails. I have no idea what the specific how it is done but it
is a trivial coding
task to extract emails for sale as known active. It was not coming though
the list but from
bots most likely and used list members names to obscure being
spam/uce//malware.
IT would nto take much to create a subscription and have that go to some
automation
to capture information. The question is how many listen only members are
there that
have never ever posted a comment?
This account is used only for this list. If it gets spamed then I know
its from and outlet
somewhere on the list but not majordomo and I have it cornered in a single
use account
I can ignore or destroy at a moments notice.
Allison
On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 7:34 AM Veit, Holger via cctech <
cctech at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Am 14.12.2019 um 18:58 schrieb crufta cat via cctech:
Signed up this new account exclusively for CCtech
and CCchat.
Hopefully its working. Why do this? I had to shut off the
other subscription for spam reasons.
Allison
How did you manage to subscribe? I have been trying to change my
subscription address for more than a year, and both web site as well as
mail request have been completely ignored so far.
Holger
3:47 p.m.
Allison wrote:
I believe there is a someone or something that is subscribed to the list
and scrape it for active
names. and emails. I have no idea what the specific how it is done but it
is a trivial coding
task to extract emails for sale as known active. It was not coming though
the list but from
bots most likely and used list members names to obscure being
spam/uce//malware.
IT would nto take much to create a subscription and have that go to some
automation
to capture information. The question is how many listen only members are
there that
have never ever posted a comment?
That is bizarre. I've used the address used to post this message only for
this mailing list for donkeys years now and it has received very close to
zero spam. The most recent spam I received arrived on 24th May 2019.
Regards,
Peter Coghlan
5:18 p.m.
It may be that my address got into the local address book of a contaminated
system but stopping this net for several weeks brought
the spam and trash mail from 25-80 a day to zero near instantly (less than
12 hours.). I've bailed from the list in the past for periods
for the same reason. I cannot filter the spam due to multiple reasons.
Its not bizarre as people do want valid addresses for scams and
legit offers for crap I do not want.
It is my belief that we have a user that is farming the list and getting
though spam filters.
If you do not. then great. I've been active here for a very long time
(since I was on WSTD.COM).
It has been a persistent problem that always starts small and grows quickly
and then I start filtering
till I'm killing good mail.
On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 4:23 PM Peter Coghlan via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Allison wrote:
I believe there is a someone or something that is subscribed to the list
and scrape it for active
names. and emails. I have no idea what the specific how it is done but
it
is a trivial coding
task to extract emails for sale as known active. It was not coming
though
the list but from
bots most likely and used list members names to obscure being
spam/uce//malware.
IT would nto take much to create a subscription and have that go to some
automation
to capture information. The question is how many listen only members are
there that
have never ever posted a comment?
That is bizarre. I've used the address used to post this message only for
this mailing list for donkeys years now and it has received very close to
zero spam. The most recent spam I received arrived on 24th May 2019.
Regards,
Peter Coghlan
17 Dec
17 Dec
7:31 a.m.
Allison wrote:
It may be that my address got into the local address book of a contaminated
system but stopping this net for several weeks brought
the spam and trash mail from 25-80 a day to zero near instantly (less than
12 hours.). I've bailed from the list in the past for periods
for the same reason. I cannot filter the spam due to multiple reasons.
Its not bizarre as people do want valid addresses for scams and
legit offers for crap I do not want.
What is bizarre is that one email address that posts to the list is getting
lots of spam and another email address that also posts to the list is not.
What is also bizarre is that your spam stops when you unsubscribe from the
list (if that is what you mean by "stopping this net" and "bailed from the
list" above). In my experience, once a spammer finds an email address,
they don't bother to check whether the address is still active any time
they want to send spam to it. They just keep on sending irregardless.
It is my belief that we have a user that is farming the list and getting
though spam filters.
I think you are jumping to conclusions here. In my experience, spammers
are very lazy people and they are just not willing to put in that sort of
effort. Unless the spams you are getting are very specifically designed
for you, I would discount this theory.
If you do not. then great. I've been active here for a very long time
(since I was on WSTD.COM).
I'm a mere blow in that hasn't been here more than 25 years. I worked for
an email provider for 15 years and for the first 5 years of that, email
spam didn't really exist (unless you count the "call for papers" type of
academic spam). After that, I put a lot of work into understanding spam
and preventing it from getting to or from our customers.
It has been a persistent problem that always starts small and grows quickly
and then I start filtering
till I'm killing good mail.
It is really really difficult to come up with a useful filtering system that
can recognise and stop spam without stopping good mail too. The only ones
I use are DNS based lists of ip addresses which are known sources of spam,
such as those operated by Spamhaus. I also use my own homegrown ip lists.
This approach works for me because I have my own mail server. If you are
stuck with using a commercial email provider, you are stuck with what they
are using. Many commercial providers won't even reveal what they are using.
As for the free email providers, forget it.
The ip address based filtering I use stopped just one spam going to my
cctalk mailbox since April 2019 (there was a spate of it in April). Filtering
is never a complete solution. The best way to avoid spam is to avoid having
email addresses harvested but this is not always possible when people we
correspond with unwittingly get their machines compromised.
Another thing I believe makes a difference is to complain about every single
spam received to the ip provider of the spammer or the compromised machine
used to send the spam. Nobody else I know is willing to put the effort into
doing this though. However, nobody else I know has as good a legitimate mail
to spam mail ratio as I do either. (Obviously this approach can not help
when already getting too much spam to cope with.)
Regards,
Peter Coghlan.
2:17 p.m.
I use hosts blacklisting , but its up to some huge number of addresses.
When I say bailed its an unsub. I suspect its not majordomo or listserve
directly.
The easy way is subscribe and copy the mail and scrape the addresses.
People are starting to see that level of activity on groups.IO.
Compromised machines makes the list activity visible as well.
I wonder of all the subscriber how many have posted something or anything
in
the last 6 month, year, ever? I suspect the never cases.
Short term solution is use Gmail then run for a while and then kill it or
leave it to
as a bit bucket and replace with new Gmail.
Allison
On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 9:02 AM Peter Coghlan via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Allison wrote:
It may be that my address got into the local address book of a
contaminated
system but stopping this net for several weeks
brought
the spam and trash mail from 25-80 a day to zero near instantly (less
than
12 hours.). I've bailed from the list in
the past for periods
for the same reason. I cannot filter the spam due to multiple reasons.
Its not bizarre as people do want valid addresses for scams and
legit offers for crap I do not want.
What is bizarre is that one email address that posts to the list is getting
lots of spam and another email address that also posts to the list is not.
What is also bizarre is that your spam stops when you unsubscribe from the
list (if that is what you mean by "stopping this net" and "bailed from
the
list" above). In my experience, once a spammer finds an email address,
they don't bother to check whether the address is still active any time
they want to send spam to it. They just keep on sending irregardless.
It is my belief that we have a user that is farming the list and getting
though spam filters.
I think you are jumping to conclusions here. In my experience, spammers
are very lazy people and they are just not willing to put in that sort of
effort. Unless the spams you are getting are very specifically designed
for you, I would discount this theory.
If you do not. then great. I've been active here for a very long time
(since I was on WSTD.COM).
I'm a mere blow in that hasn't been here more than 25 years. I worked for
an email provider for 15 years and for the first 5 years of that, email
spam didn't really exist (unless you count the "call for papers" type of
academic spam). After that, I put a lot of work into understanding spam
and preventing it from getting to or from our customers.
It has been a persistent problem that always starts small and grows
quickly
and then I start filtering
till I'm killing good mail.
It is really really difficult to come up with a useful filtering system
that
can recognise and stop spam without stopping good mail too. The only ones
I use are DNS based lists of ip addresses which are known sources of spam,
such as those operated by Spamhaus. I also use my own homegrown ip lists.
This approach works for me because I have my own mail server. If you are
stuck with using a commercial email provider, you are stuck with what they
are using. Many commercial providers won't even reveal what they are
using.
As for the free email providers, forget it.
The ip address based filtering I use stopped just one spam going to my
cctalk mailbox since April 2019 (there was a spate of it in April).
Filtering
is never a complete solution. The best way to avoid spam is to avoid
having
email addresses harvested but this is not always possible when people we
correspond with unwittingly get their machines compromised.
Another thing I believe makes a difference is to complain about every
single
spam received to the ip provider of the spammer or the compromised machine
used to send the spam. Nobody else I know is willing to put the effort
into
doing this though. However, nobody else I know has as good a legitimate
mail
to spam mail ratio as I do either. (Obviously this approach can not help
when already getting too much spam to cope with.)
Regards,
Peter Coghlan.
5:22 p.m.
Allison wrote:
I wonder of all the subscriber how many have posted something or anything
in
the last 6 month, year, ever? I suspect the never cases.
I've made about thirty postings to this list so far this year from this
mailbox. If your theory is correct, I should be getting a whole bunch of
spam now. I've received two spams (I found one that I missed earlier) and
had one other spam filtered going to this mailbox since April 2019. Do you
believe a non-posting subscriber could be targetting your email address with
spam and not mine?
Short term solution is use Gmail then run for a while and then kill it or
leave it to
as a bit bucket and replace with new Gmail.
Google sends legitimate mails (I don't send any other kind) from another email
addresses of mine directly to the junk folders of (as far as I can tell, all)
gmail recipients. These are people who have emailed me from their gmail
addresses that I am replying to, people I have had correspondance with
previously and people who have specified to Google that they want emails from
me. I have asked such people to let me know why Google regards emails from
the email address in question as spam so that I can address the problem in
the event that it is at my end. Nobody so far has been able to extract this
information from Google. I tell them that I don't understand why anyone uses
an email service that systematically blocks them from receiving emails from
particular email addresses and refuses to explain to them why they do it.
I also keep telling them that gmail is worth every penny they pay for it
but they just don't get it.
At one time Google used to publish recommendations to avoid having emails
inadvertently stopped by their antispam systems. At that time, I made sure
that my mail server complied with all their recommendations. I've since
tried to contact Google to ask them about this but I've had no success. Why
should they talk to me if I'm not their customer? Especially when they won't
even tell their actual customers why they are trapping emails for them?
Google is not the solution, it's part of the problem.
Regards,
Peter Coghlan.
8:59 p.m.
> I wonder of all the subscriber how many have
posted something or
> anything in the last 6 month, year, ever? I suspect the never cases.
Well, it is likely that if there is a subscriber harvesting, that that one
is not posting. But there are so many that don't post that you need a way
to narrow it down further. Automagically kicking out everybody who
doesn't post doesn't seem like an appropriate action.
When I Google a topic, I often get hits that are posts on this list. So,
it is obviously possible to get posts from this list without subscribing.
(Sometimes I get my own previous posts on the topic)
I have always assumed that harvesting produced a list of addresses,
probably a lot of smaller lists.
For one type of spam, that with a forged FROM from a friend or associate,
that an address is chosen, possibly randomly, possibly by other criteria
such as frequency of posting, and used for the FROM, and another for the
TO.
Multiple smaller lists means that there is a high probability that the TO
will recognize the FROM since they obviously have some contacts in
common (well, at least the source of the list) and therefore the message
is likely to get through.
I find it amusing that on many/most lists, when it is known that there is
such actions going on, people bombard the FROM with advice that THAT
computer has been compromised and taken over to send spam, should
immediately change passwords, etc. and refuse to believe that the FROM
line of the spam has nothing to do with where it is coming from. People
just won't accept that the FROM of an email is NOT necessarily the actual
source of the email. If you print "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue" on the upper
left of snail-mail envelopes, would they insist that somebody has hijacked
the whitehouse mail-room?
I find that SOME spam lists last forever. I still get quite a bit of spam
for an address that I created temporarily for Comdex 2000.
On Tue, 17 Dec 2019, Peter Coghlan via cctalk wrote:
I've made about thirty postings to this list so
far this year from this
mailbox. If your theory is correct, I should be getting a whole bunch of
spam now. I've received two spams (I found one that I missed earlier) and
had one other spam filtered going to this mailbox since April 2019. Do you
believe a non-posting subscriber could be targetting your email address with
spam and not mine?
They might have further filters, and target you less because they value
your top-level domain (".ie") less.
It is possible, but unlikely, that they may filter to such an extent that
they think that Allison is a better qualified lead than you are?
> Short term solution is use Gmail then run for a
while and then kill it
> or leave it to as a bit bucket and replace with new Gmail.
A partial "solution" for those who can handle multiple email addresses,
snd can run a "white-list" filter, would be to create an address that is
ONLY for posts to and from this list. THEN, any mails that come to that
address get filtered to only pass those that purport to come from this
list. All others being put in a special "probably spam" folder. Glance
at that folder periodicaally to retrieve any that are actually private
messages sent by somebody on the list. Discarding that dedicated address
periodically will lose few valid correspondents.
That would be a valid use for a "white-list" filter.
Other than that, I don't normally find "white-list" useful, because a
significant part of the email that I get, such as about XenoCopy, is from
people I have never encountered before. It would be insane suicide for a
business to only accept contact from their prior contacts!
Similarly, after my mother died, I got phone calls and emails from
relatives I had never met.
At one time Google used to publish recommendations to
avoid having emails
inadvertently stopped by their antispam systems. At that time, I made sure
that my mail server complied with all their recommendations.
As did all spammers, so Google probably found it counter-productive to
discuss their algorithms, and didn't know WHICH parts of their algorithms
should be published V kept secret.
I've since tried to contact Google to ask them
about this but I've had
no success.
It probably went into the Google Tech Support department's spam folder.
:-)
Since this address is on PINE, I often forward emails that I want to look
at, but that need a "modern" client (such as attachments, pictures, etc.)
to my gmail address. A lot of those get sent to the spam folder of my
gmail address. Marking them as "not spam", etc. hasn't helped to convince
gmail that I don't consider anything from THIS other address of mine to be
spam. So, they don't seem to have a white-list over-ride.
I have to have that "modern" account for otherwise unreadable emails.
A friend coming into town emailed me her Orbitz itinerary. Full of lots
of ads and "of interest", and with pictures of text rather than text.
While I was still affiliated with the college, one of the administrators,
who insisted that we were more than adequately meeting the state mandates
for computer literacy and information competency used to compose short
text memos (such as meeting schedule change) on Word-Pervert, with
different color horizontal lines, etc., print them out on a color printer
on letterhead, feed them through a scanner, and attach them to a "FYI"
email. Often, the horizontal lines were a couple of pixels off from being
level.
15 years ago, some idiots started a company with similar name to mine,
with a ".us" extension because I had the ".com" extension. 90+% of my
incoming spam (half of which looks like it was legit offers and even
actual correspondence) is address errors of stuff intended for them.
Google is not the solution, it's part of the
problem.
That's a given.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
18 Dec
18 Dec
3:46 p.m.
Peter,
Its not a google issue in any way or form.
Never mind. If this address starts getting trash not of the list then
I will kill this account and not unsub, and create a new replacement
and subscribe with that one.
Allison
I either have to take up Klingon or tray a different language
On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 6:53 PM Peter Coghlan via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Allison wrote:
I wonder of all the subscriber how many have posted something or anything
in
the last 6 month, year, ever? I suspect the never cases.
I've made about thirty postings to this list so far this year from this
mailbox. If your theory is correct, I should be getting a whole bunch of
spam now. I've received two spams (I found one that I missed earlier) and
had one other spam filtered going to this mailbox since April 2019. Do you
believe a non-posting subscriber could be targetting your email address
with
spam and not mine?
Short term solution is use Gmail then run for a while and then kill it or
leave it to
as a bit bucket and replace with new Gmail.
Google sends legitimate mails (I don't send any other kind) from another
email
addresses of mine directly to the junk folders of (as far as I can tell,
all)
gmail recipients. These are people who have emailed me from their gmail
addresses that I am replying to, people I have had correspondance with
previously and people who have specified to Google that they want emails
from
me. I have asked such people to let me know why Google regards emails from
the email address in question as spam so that I can address the problem in
the event that it is at my end. Nobody so far has been able to extract
this
information from Google. I tell them that I don't understand why anyone
uses
an email service that systematically blocks them from receiving emails from
particular email addresses and refuses to explain to them why they do it.
I also keep telling them that gmail is worth every penny they pay for it
but they just don't get it.
At one time Google used to publish recommendations to avoid having emails
inadvertently stopped by their antispam systems. At that time, I made sure
that my mail server complied with all their recommendations. I've since
tried to contact Google to ask them about this but I've had no success.
Why
should they talk to me if I'm not their customer? Especially when they
won't
even tell their actual customers why they are trapping emails for them?
Google is not the solution, it's part of the problem.
Regards,
Peter Coghlan.
1659
days inactive
1663
days old
9 comments
4 participants
participants (4)
-
cctalk＠beyondthepale.ie -
cisin＠xenosoft.com -
holger.veit＠iais.fraunhofer.de -
ucespamdump＠gmail.com