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#1
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Kenni Judd: your email thinks I am a spammer
Al wrote:
RANT warning. About one in 10 emails caught in my spam trap are bounced there from other spam traps because my email address has been spoofed into the return email address. Emails I never sent. I have actually received email from people on my email pass list (Reka among them) that were not sent by the people they claimed to be from. Even a rare event such as this coincidence becomes common given the shear scale of spam flowing through the system. Email is turning out to be a real nightmare when used for legitimate communication. Customers email me questions and then their servers and spam protocols make me jump through hoops just to respond. Recently a lot of hotmail and yahoo users act as if I am not responding to their emails or order inquiries and I am sure a spam trap on these servers is "protecting" them from my replies and order confirmations. And I really can't blame the customers if they don't have time to deal with regular spam trap reviews. It only takes 48 hours for the list of spam in these directories to grow to mid numbing proportions My email address is 10 years old. I get hundreds of spam messages every morning. I have developed a very good spam filter system on my own and have even taught it to recognize real and fake hotmail addresses. Most real emails make it through, but it takes 30 to 45 minutes every morning just to hunt down the one or two legitimate email a week that my spam filter rules mistake for spam. No matter how many clues I give on my website to help people get emails safely by the filters, somehow they never catch on. They manage to find my email address on the website but miss the clues. The buzz word orchid in the subject of an email to me is magic. :-) Subjects lines like "a question about something on your website" is probably going to be missed if it ends up in the spam trap. On the other end. I am always finding, "Did you get my order from a few days ago" emails from people who are wondering if my secure sever is broken when my actual replies (with the word orchid in the subject) are buried in their spam directories. I hate spam. I don't need "Viagra soft tabs" or a new mortgage and I am not interested in updating my bank account info, so just stop it. Now I may be a little different than other people in the orchid world, but for the record all you ORCHID RELATED spammers out there (and some of you are not in China) , I don't like getting unsolicited email from YOU either. Don't tell me I asked for it when I visited your site or bought plants from you. I can assure you I won't make that mistake again. And I can assure you, after the first one, future UCE from your address never makes it passed my spam trap so you'll never know what I think of your marketing techniques. I will not respond with the word 'remove' in the subject. Sorry. *My* email address. *My* rules. AHHHHHHH I suspect that last paragraph touched some nerves, but it's just how I feel. I don't see why I should have to treat orchid related UCE any different than I treat the Viagra pushers. Its all spam. Rant concluded. Peace be with you. I'm with you. I may have over-reacted but I felt it was more appropriate to over react than under-react. I deleted the OrchidSafari email list from my computer because I was suddenly getting spam from people on the list. I *believe* it was a coincidence, the same people being on the similar lists (like the OGD or whathaveyou), however I chose to be conservative. Rather than have the list attacked I chose to delete it. Another fellow is trying to rebuild it, he uses mac gear,so maybe he'll have fewer bot attacks. We'll see how that goes. It goes further than email attacks, I'm spending time on hold trying to figure out if one of my bank accounts has had my identity robbed. I suddenly realise I haven't gotten a statement since October. [sigh] I'm probably OK, but sheesh, I'd rather not be on hold. K Barrett |
#2
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Kenni Judd: your email thinks I am a spammer
I remember some while back when we on this board were comparing how many
weird spams we were getting, all around 145 kb. Though I don't remember the subjects, clearly they were related. At that time we set our file size limits to trap the junk. Things have come a long way since then, not all for the good. Frank and I were inundated with crapola, and I would read subject lines off of the server before bringing them into O/E. I will tell you this, however. We changed ISP from Earthlink to Bell South last year. I disguised our return addie with respect to boards like this on both computers, but not for regular email. Other than that, I have not messed with the filters, and we are totally spam free. Frank got a couple not long after we switched, but that stopped. Should it start up again, I'll take pains to stop it, including blocking anyone not in our address books. Clearly, that doesn't work for people like Al or Ray. Spam free and smug in FL Diana |
#3
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Kenni Judd: your email thinks I am a spammer
Just to add my 2c to the discussion....
I've had a very public email address for 8 years or so. I had it on my personal website long before the spam was an issue - and by the time it became an issue, it was too late to take down - it wouldn't have helped, so it stays. I use Outlook and pay MONEY for probably one of the best spam filtering programs out there - Cloudmark Spamnet. It has NEVER flagged a personal email directed to me. It occassionally flags a newsletter, but those are very rare - 3x a year max. I use a Mac at work and the spam filtering built into the MacOS mail program is pretty good. More spam gets through than at home, but it learns and is slowly getting better. The problem I am having is the STUPID real-time spam blacklists. I swear I hope someone figures out a way to sue them for the shirt off their backs. They allow ANYONE to claim that a message is spam and they DO NOT verify before adding entire ISPs to the "spam" lists. Then the spam lists are distributed to thousands of other ISPs. Every few weeks my ISP is added to the blacklists and all of my outgoing mail to people starts bouncing. It usually takes 2-3 days for my ISP to convince the blacklist people that we're not spammers, but damn it's annoying, and IMHO they are as bad as the spam they are trying to prevent. And I refuse to reply to the challenge-response spam systems some people subscribe to. You mean you're sending ME an email and then I have to jump through hoops before my reply is even delivered to you? Nope, sorry, homey don' play that game. Ahhh, that felt good, getting the spam related venting done. =) -Eric in SF www.orchidphotos.org |
#4
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Kenni Judd: your email thinks I am a spammer
Eric, I know exactly how you felt.
I have autoresponder on my system that sends people culture sheets. The send an email to a specific address and the auto responder sends a specific culture sheet. These have outlived their usefulness since recently and the addresses have gotten onto spam lists and occasionally a fake or real return address is spoofed into a spam message and sent to the autoresponder. So I get the spam and a culture sheet gets sent to somebody who doesn't know why they are getting it. I plan to take them down soon. I really do and I already knew they were becoming a problem. Anyway, about mid December a real person sent an email to the Phal autoresponder and the next morning I got one of those challenge-response summons from this guy's spam protection service called SpamCop. I kind of felt the way you describe, Eric, "He asked for this email so why can't he tell his spam service to give him the culture sheet he asked for. Amway, while I was pouting around about this and refusing to comply, SpamCop put my entire domain on one of those real time blacklists. Hawaii.net, and some other large area service providers draw their blacklist from SpamCop or maybe SpamCop can influence these blacklist providers, I don't know... I do know my communications with vendors and customers started coming back as undeliverable with a message that told me my domain was a known source of Spam. The blacklist website had some odd wording about how everybody claims they are not spammers and they would be the final judge of who they blacklisted and I about popped right out of my skin on reading that. I also read that incorrectly configured mail servers and autoresponders were frequently implicated in spam issues. And a light went on. When I realized the connection to the spamcop summons for this guy's Phal culture sheet I went to the email summons from SpamCop and clicked on the link which took me to the SpamCop website and asked me to copy the letters in the box that only a "real" human can read. Lo and behold, my domain got removed from the blacklist within minutes. It was so fast and efficiently reversed that I thought surely computers must be handling it. And then Spamcop sent me a message telling me I that my email to this guy would be delivered and future emails to him would not require any action on my part. I have not written him and I don't want to and I hope the culture sheet was helpful. AND then SpamCop sent a message that offered to help ME keep spam out of my email box if I gave them money. ARGHH! Granted it was simple challenge-response system and it would have been so easy to just respond....but the way they went about forcing compliance with their rules when it was one of their customers who initiated the email communication in the first place caused me to get so mad that my antenna got sucked all the way down into my head and then got impacted and one of the little opening got infected.... jeese...just for a culture sheet! Ahhhhh! When is that mothership coming? Didn't somebody mention a mothership? Spam is killing email. ...but I have ten thousand Phals in bud. "Eric Hunt" wrote in message ... Just to add my 2c to the discussion.... The problem I am having is the STUPID real-time spam blacklists. I swear I hope someone figures out a way to sue them for the shirt off their backs. They allow ANYONE to claim that a message is spam and they DO NOT verify before adding entire ISPs to the "spam" lists. Then the spam lists are distributed to thousands of other ISPs. Every few weeks my ISP is added to the blacklists and all of my outgoing mail to people starts bouncing. It usually takes 2-3 days for my ISP to convince the blacklist people that we're not spammers, but damn it's annoying, and IMHO they are as bad as the spam they are trying to prevent. And I refuse to reply to the challenge-response spam systems some people subscribe to. You mean you're sending ME an email and then I have to jump through hoops before my reply is even delivered to you? Nope, sorry, homey don' play that game. Ahhh, that felt good, getting the spam related venting done. =) -Eric in SF www.orchidphotos.org |
#5
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Kenni Judd: your email thinks I am a spammer
Al,
VERY interesting. Read this page: http://www.spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/329.html Scroll down to the Challenge/response spam filtering section. -Eric in SF www.orchidphotos.org |
#6
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Kenni Judd: your email thinks I am a spammer
Just more proof that I may be slightly off kilter and that everything I say
is suspect. I just looked back to December 4th when this all happened. It was a company called SpamArrest.com which sent the challenge response email. It was SpamCop.net that had me on the blacklist. This all happened in one day. By the time my service provider responded to my plea for help all they could do was report that the mail server was no longer on the blacklist. According to the email timestamps, this was about 45 minutes after I completed the challenger response doo doo. It sure feels like there is a direct connection, and there has to be a connection of some sort between the companies collecting spam and the companies creating the blacklists, but I suppose I am wrong to have lumped them into one company. I looked up the two names online and they seem to be antagonistic; chatter from Spamcop that reveals it believes Spamarrest appears to be resorting to spam to promote its services. "Eric Hunt" wrote in message news Al, VERY interesting. Read this page: http://www.spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/329.html Scroll down to the Challenge/response spam filtering section. -Eric in SF www.orchidphotos.org |
#7
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Kenni Judd: your email thinks I am a spammer
Al,
I figured it was SpamArrest that caused you the grief. They don't have a good reputation. *sigh* -Eric "Al" wrote in message ... Just more proof that I may be slightly off kilter and that everything I say is suspect. |
#8
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Kenni Judd: your email thinks I am a spammer
Not sure I'm entirely up with you guys, but I do try to respond to culture
questions -- a few are from actual customers, but most are from people wanting free advice about orchids they bought at Home Depot or Target. I nevertheless respond [politely!] to all of them, if I can get a message through without too much hassle. But when I get a reply back telling me that "in order to reduce [their] spam" I have to go to some website and register to get an email through, then unless I can tell for sure that it's a real customer, I quit. As for incoming spam, I'm pretty happy with the Norton product. It catches about 95% of the spam and very few legitimate emails. Kenni "Eric Hunt" wrote in message ... Just to add my 2c to the discussion.... I've had a very public email address for 8 years or so. I had it on my personal website long before the spam was an issue - and by the time it became an issue, it was too late to take down - it wouldn't have helped, so it stays. I use Outlook and pay MONEY for probably one of the best spam filtering programs out there - Cloudmark Spamnet. It has NEVER flagged a personal email directed to me. It occassionally flags a newsletter, but those are very rare - 3x a year max. I use a Mac at work and the spam filtering built into the MacOS mail program is pretty good. More spam gets through than at home, but it learns and is slowly getting better. The problem I am having is the STUPID real-time spam blacklists. I swear I hope someone figures out a way to sue them for the shirt off their backs. They allow ANYONE to claim that a message is spam and they DO NOT verify before adding entire ISPs to the "spam" lists. Then the spam lists are distributed to thousands of other ISPs. Every few weeks my ISP is added to the blacklists and all of my outgoing mail to people starts bouncing. It usually takes 2-3 days for my ISP to convince the blacklist people that we're not spammers, but damn it's annoying, and IMHO they are as bad as the spam they are trying to prevent. And I refuse to reply to the challenge-response spam systems some people subscribe to. You mean you're sending ME an email and then I have to jump through hoops before my reply is even delivered to you? Nope, sorry, homey don' play that game. Ahhh, that felt good, getting the spam related venting done. =) -Eric in SF www.orchidphotos.org |
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