Spam emails

Pete Allen

Pete Allen

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Pete (really)
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Getting fed up with having to delete 50+ spam emails every morning, seems to be getting more common lately, went down to a few per day until the last week or so.

Surely there could be a system of some sort put in place to stop emails being sent from spoof addresses.

Rant over.
 
Don't use generic addresses, all supplied by my website hosting Co.

Thought about putting up a non-clickable address, like: "me at mywebsite dot co dot uk" but, I'm sure I'll lose enquiries if I do that.
 
stop giving your email address out, thats really the only way to stop spam.

e: having your email address on your site wont help as it will get trawled. consider swapping to a contact form.
 
Yea, thought of that as well Neil but, when your business depends on it, it's difficult.

I know if I go to a website and, there's a form as opposed to an email address, I'm less likely to respond but, maybe that's just me.
 
Pete Allen said:
Surely there could be a system of some sort put in place to stop emails being sent from spoof addresses.
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SMTP is a trust based system. You can say your address is anything you like and it won't prevent it (it may check the domain exists in DNS, depending on how the MTA is configured). The nearest non-internet analogy I can think of is if I were to post a letter to you via Royal Mail and say I was "D.Cameron, 10 Downing Street, London." The Royal Mail can't stop that.

I want to be able to say I'm mark@<my work email address> even when I'm not at work, because sometimes I respond to customers in the US from my home computer in the evenings. Even for my personal address, which is a demon internet address, I don't send while connected to my Demon TAM dialup account, but when I'm connected to ADSL (provided by a different ISP) or on my mobile telephone etc.

Mail servers often no longer respond to VRFY commands because spammers use them to find real addresses, so there is no simple, automated way to test an email address is real.
 
Very detailed Mark, thanks.

I realize there's not much I can do, just needed to get it off my chest more than anything. ;)
 
I've had a spate of spam this week. Stupid skype fake voice mails and barclays transfers. I'm sick of spam. I use thunderbird and have a spam reporter. I report every single one.

I have sender verify switched on and various other things including domain keys. It keeps away a lot of the rubbish. If I check my mail logs I see how much crap is binned before I even see it. One is still one too many!
 
srichards said:
I've had a spate of spam this week. Stupid skype fake voice mails and barclays transfers. I'm sick of spam. I use thunderbird and have a spam reporter. I report every single one.

I have sender verify switched on and various other things including domain keys. It keeps away a lot of the rubbish. If I check my mail logs I see how much crap is binned before I even see it. One is still one too many!
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I think you're getting my Skype messages :D
 
Why not use Gmail? It's very, very good at identifying spam - very few false positives or false negatives. It puts spam into a separate folder and deletes it automatically after 30 days. So in practical terms you never need to worry about it at all.


Sent from my HTC One using Talk Photography Forums mobile app
 
StewartR said:
Why not use Gmail? It's very, very good at identifying spam - very few false positives or false negatives. It puts spam into a separate folder and deletes it automatically after 30 days. So in practical terms you never need to worry about it at all.


Sent from my HTC One using Talk Photography Forums mobile app
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Well for one, it doesn't look too professional using a generic email address and two, I'm opposed to having all my emails spied on!
 
Plus the majority of spam emails are from gmail addresses in the first place so google clearly doesn't give a rats about filling the world with bilge.
 
On my websites I always use javascript to dynamically write in my email address so it looks normal to humans, doesn't look like an email address to an address harvesting bot. It helped no end, but unfortunately registering for any service that needs an email address is likely to end up getting you spam eventually, even sending emails from it as you'll eventually end up in other people's address books and spyware etc can harvest such address books and get your email address, even though the spyware is not on your computer!

Thunderbird does a good job at filtering, I have 4 email addresses, only 1 is subject to regular spamming but I never see it because it automatically finds it's way to my junkmail folder where it's automatically deleted weekly, the other addresses are clean.
 
Pete Allen said:
Well for one, it doesn't look too professional using a generic email address and two, I'm opposed to having all my emails spied on!
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Aside from Google failing on their "Don't Be Evil" tagline, there's no reason for anyone to know you're using Gmail.

I use it for all my emails (personal Gmail account, and two separate photography websites) tell Gmail to check your work emails, and use the 'send email as' function to appear as though you're sending from your work emails.

I'd say Gmail catches about 98% of spam I receive and it's easy to have one window open checking for all my emails rather than three separate windows and interfaces.
 
Pete Allen said:
Well for one, it doesn't look too professional using a generic email address...
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You don't have to. We use Gmail at work for all the lensesforhire.co.uk emails and nobody is any the wiser, unless they spot the characteristic Gmail approach to quoting and replying.
Pete Allen said:
... and two, I'm opposed to having all my emails spied on!
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Yeah, well, I think that's pretty much inevitable these days. I mean, I'm typing this on a phone where the keyboard app "spies on" everything I type so that it can better predict what I'm likely to write next.
 
srichards said:
Plus the majority of spam emails are from gmail addresses in the first place so google clearly doesn't give a rats about filling the world with bilge.
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... So you're saying Google should read every email that every Gmail user tries to send, and should only allow the ones it thinks are "worthy" to be sent?

How would that work?
 
StewartR said:
... So you're saying Google should read every email that every Gmail user tries to send, and should only allow the ones it thinks are "worthy" to be sent?

How would that work?
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They could easily introduce automated security so that their users can't send floods of emails from bogus from addresses. Outgoing email could easily be passed through automated spam checking so that users sending spam could be shut down. Using gmail you can put in any from address it seems and gmail doesn't check you have access to that mailbox and that it is legitimate.
 
unfortunately you can add in all of the security you like, as someone else said earlier SMTP is about as secure as a wet fart. nothing will change that beyond a massive change to email infrastructure worldwide.
 
I got so fed up with spam the other day. I switched on my providor's spam filter. Overnight it caught three genuine enquiries and no spam! LOL!

Switched it off again now, and I only have a form on my site (no email address).
 
srichards said:
Using gmail you can put in any from address it seems and gmail doesn't check you have access to that mailbox and that it is legitimate.
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The reason Gmail doesn't do that is that it is't possible.

Any more suggestions? Maybe Google should impose a limit on the number of emails its users can send per day?
 
srichards said:
Using gmail you can put in any from address it seems and gmail doesn't check you have access to that mailbox and that it is legitimate.
Click to expand...

The underlying mechanism for email delivery (SMTP, orignally defined in RFC821. Note that this does not define the format of the message, only the delivery mechanism) has no mechanism for verifying that the address in the MAIL FROM command is one owned by the originator of the message, nor should it have. Further, the MAIL FROM line is not necessarily the same as the From: , Sender: or Reply-To: lines in the header of the message, indeed unless one of the MTAs that the message traverses as it wends its way around the internet writes an Envelope-From: or similar line into the headers, the actual address supplied in the MAIL line by the sender may never appear in the message on the recipient's computer.

The fundamental design of email transport is unchanged in the last 30 years. While the specification has been tidied up, support for domain names added and some extensions added, it works just as it always did. I cannot see how it can ever be changed in its core functionality without catastrophic consequences.

Basically, anyone can install an MTA on their computer and use it to send emails without needing to relay them through their ISP or Gmail or yahoo etc. No one, not even google, can restrict the number of emails that are sent bearing a From: something@gmail.com header or MAIL FROM: <something@gmail.com> line in the SMTP envelope, because google do not control every MTA on the planet.

The best MTAs are open source and the tools to build them are also open source, so any sender checking that might hypothetically be included could just be patched out anyway. The people that develop and maintain this stuff absolutely do not want things to go closed source, commercial and proprietary, so they won't.
 
Should I go on Mastermind, my chosen specialised subject might be "The simple mail transfer protocol" :coat:
 
Pete - have a look at Google Apps - it is Googles professional product which allows you to use your own domain for email. I use it on all my accounts and the anti spam is absolutely superb. £3.50 ish a month per mailbox.
 
I've used gmail as my primary account for years, saves changing email addresses when I change ISPs, never received much spam through it and the only time I had it blocked was when it was hacked and seems I sent out a load of spam emails and got flagged. I contacted them and got a reply explaining why and asking for my mobile no. so the could send me a security code to reinstated it and they insisted on a red password level , no problems since.
and yes a few of my contacts did confrim receiving the mails
 
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