Conference gyro::internet_toolss

    The frequency of these junk mails seems to increase... I don't receive
    enough of them on my Digital account for them to be a real nuisance, but
    it's annoying nevertheless.
    
    I've noticed all the big directory services have my (Digital) email
    address - probably because I was so careless as to post a message or
    two on Usenet _years_ ago... (and not in any of the alt.sex.* groups!).
    
    I have a Compuserve account, and I disabled Internet mail completely,
    because I was receiving so much junm mail there. The spammers simply
    use synthetically generated numeric Compuserve addresses, which is all
    too easy (and has apparently caused Compuserve not to send replies to
    mails to non-existent/disabled IDs).
    

    I guess I'll slowly have to take back what I said in the first
    paragraph in .14... the number of junk mails seems to increase
    exponentially lately, and they are really becoming a nuisance.
    
    Most of them use fake Sender/Reply to addresses, so just replying is
    useless... and I'm not an expert in reading the full Internet headers
    to find out where it really came from.
    

Yes, and half of them seem to be ads for XXX sites.

				Steve

    ...and the other half explains how to make a lot of money without
    really working.
    
    I'd guess filtering anything with "money" more than 3 times in the text
    (or strings like "over 21") should get rid of most of them... (and
    anything sent by debbi, sherri, suzi, etc... ;-)
    
    One I received today was so ridiculous I actually went to their web
    site (well maybe they achieved what they wanted ;-)
    
    The piece about using "Pheromones" to increase your income was
    especially hilarious.
    

    Add me to the list of annoyed employees who find junkmail in their
    accounts almost every morning.  I've since (months ago) disguised
    myself as best I know how - but some old mail/notes/postings whatever
    have been spammed and re-spammed.  I've written a semi-threating
    boiler-plate-nasty-gram and reply/edit nastygram.txt to each of the
    junkmails that come in. It seems to help some - but not enough. Plus
    I'm storing everyone of these messages so that when Digital decides to
    really do something about this incoming crap, they can have my files
    for evidence.  (This file is growing - rapidly!)
    
    Any suggestions about how to further avoid spamming would be greatly
    appreciated.
    
    d.

    
    	Someone somewhere suggested Inbox Assistants in Exchange to "repel"
    	the known spamming addresses.  However, this obviously won't work
    	too well if you aren't getting multiple messages from the same
    	source.
    

I've changed my "from" address for some newsgroups to an invalid 
address, with my .signature having some text with the real address 
and also am playing with using Outlook/Exchange's inbox assistant 
doing some filtering.  Only limited success so far, but anything's 
better than the normally-full mailbox.

I'm glad I'm not the only one getting the XXX mail. I was beginning to think my
reputation as a dirty old lady had gotten out. I guess they must figure most
folks on the internet are men. Or maybe my unusual name fooled them. Amy and Erica
are getting on my nerves. Does anybody really think women are sending these? liesl

	I had over 5 of these stupid emails in my inbox this morning.

	This is getting ridiculous.

							mike

    
         And they certainly don't care whether your a guy or a girl...
    
         Heck, I'd even go so far as to say they don't even care whether
            they annoy you or not! (tongue firmly in cheek)
    
         And you know its getting ridiculous when you get spam from
            some company selling "ways not to get spammed"!
    
                                                              Oy!,
                                                               Mike.

... or the spam I got promoting a call-in survey about whether or not spam
was good - just call 1-900-.....

				Steve

...or the spam I got today asking me politely if they could spam me.

Paul

    I'm waiting for Hormel to start mass-emailing.

    
         RE:-.1
    
         Well at least you can eat their SPAM, or, well, maybe not, but
            it sure tastes better, well, then again, maybe not. (!?) :^)
    
         The ones I particularly like, NOT!, are the ones that treat
            you like old friends, saying "I just found this great
            web site! Go check it out..."
    
         BTW, I'm up to 98 unsolicited solicitations, heck, let's call
            'em unsolicitations. And I'm only on one external mailing list!
    
                                                      Spammity Spam,
                                                       Mike.

    I made an entry into a newsgroup several years ago (from my
    workstation, fortunately).  I received two or three spamails as a
    result over the next year (meaning the last one came almost a full year
    later - obviously culled from an archive).
    
    For the second time in my life, I made an entry in a newsgroup several
    weeks ago.  I received one email response to the article, and I have
    received over eight spams.
    
    Thats an 8-to-1 noise ratio, and I'm still over 45 weeks short of the
    previous measurement cycle!
    
    Do you think legislation could be crafted to successfully prevent (or
    outlaw) spam?  Do you think it would help?  All these counter-spam
    things are well and good, but frankly I have better things to do with
    my time.  I'd rather have the justice system start putting my tax
    dollars to work for me.
    
    jeb
    

    I haven't posted anything in a newsgroup in the past 5 years or so - I
    get at least 10 spams weekly...

    The message I have, from the Corporate Information Security Group, is 
    that they're aware of the issues and are working actively with the
    telecom group to limit the "access" of these types of spam mailings...

>    The message I have, from the Corporate Information Security Group, is 
>    that they're aware of the issues and are working actively with the
>    telecom group to limit the "access" of these types of spam mailings...

	That probably means that they're doing nothing.  It's almost impossible
  to stop these messages since you have absolutely no idea where they'll be
  coming from and what the content will be.  In addition, if we start to filter
  mail into the corporation we'll end up with a HUGE backlog of mail waiting
  to get in.  It's easier, cheaper and more effective for each employee to use
  the delete button on whatever mail client they're using.

		Danny

	8 this morning.. 7 from the SAME address with the SAME content!

	Sigh..

							mike

:	8 this morning.. 7 from the SAME address with the SAME content!

   Time to forge some no-such-user bounce messages.

While we're at it, can we do something about the spam from MILRAT::CORADMIN?

					Steve

    
    Re: ::CORADMIN
    
    It took me a few mail messages on my part but they finally gave up 
    and stopped the junk mail.
    
    Kevin
    

Yes, they did for me too - for a while - then it started up again.

			Steve

Steve, OpenVMS Engineering (hoffman@xdelta.zko.dec.com.enet.dec.com) wrote:
: Title: Internet junk mail sighted
: Reply Title: Two Can Play...


: :	8 this morning.. 7 from the SAME address with the SAME content!

:    Time to forge some no-such-user bounce messages.

Don't; spammers don't use sendmail-based MTAs. Your bounce will just
clog up the queues.

If all the gateways with mail relays took Paul Vixie's anti-spam BGP
feed, we could cut down on a lot of this (http://www.vix.com/spam/).
By the time the mail reaches hosts that the Telecom people control,
it's much too late.

Stephen
--
- -----
Stephen Stuart				stuart@pa.dec.com
Network Systems Laboratory
Digital Equipment Corporation
[posted by Notes-News gateway]

and not all of it *looks* like it came from outside!

  from: mailer-daemon@mail1.digital.com
  to:   WholeWorld@654651.com
  subj: This is cool...
  
  Dear friend,
  
  The following income opportunity is one you may be interested in taking a
  look at.  It can be started with VERY MINIMAL outlay and the income return
  is TREMENDOUS!
  
  <>  <>  <>  <>  <>  <>  <>  <>  <>  <>  <>  <>  <>  <>  <>  <>
  You are about to make at least $50,000 - In less than 90 days
  Read the enclosed program...THEN READ IT AGAIN!...
  <>  <>  <>  <>  <>  <>  <>  <>  <>  <>  <>  <>  <>  <>  <>  <>
  ...


the header looks like this...

Received: from decatl.alf.dec.com by mrohub1.mro.dec.com with SMTP (Microsoft 
Exchange Internet Mail Connector Version 4.0.994.63)
	id JCB8528L; Sun, 20 Apr 1997 20:11:38 -0400
Received: from mail1.digital.com by decatl.alf.dec.com 
(5.65v4.0/1.1.8.2/29May96-0321PM)
	id AA28062; Sun, 20 Apr 1997 20:08:48 -0400
From: <mailer-daemon@mail1.digital.com>
Received: from [205.199.212.34] by mail1.digital.com (5.65 EXP 4/12/95 for 
V3.2/1.0/WV)
	id AA32508; Sun, 20 Apr 1997 17:02:03 -0700
Received: from "Cyber-Bomber" - Details at http://www.cyberpromo.com
X-1: The mail you received from this server did not originate from
X-2: Cyber Promotions.  This server only relays mail from other sources.
X-3: To report abuse, please send email to abuse@cyberpromo.com
X-4: The easiest way to remove yourself from a mailing list is to
X-5: hit reply and type "remove" in the subject field or message body.
X-6: The mail from this server does not correspond in any way to
X-7: Cyber Promotions' send and remove lists.  If you want to filter
X-8: unsolicited commercial email, you may wish to check out e-Filter.
X-9: Details are available at http://www.cyberpromo.com
Message-Id: <199704202351.TAA19199@ispam.net>
To: WholeWorld@654651.com
Date: Sun, 20 Apr 97 17:25:57 EST
Subject: This is cool...
Reply-To: jerry@654651.com

    
    	"Cyber-bomber"?
    
    	Well, at least they're not trying to hide anything, eh?
    

    Re: .31
    
    Nope, I don't buy that argument. Lots of ISPs and the commercial
    services filter mail today and they aren't suffering huge backlogs.
    
    It is neither easier, cheaper, nor more effective for me (and every
    other fellow employee afflicted with this offensive deluge) to manually
    delete all of the crap I get in my electronic mailbox. It is much
    easier, cheaper, and more effective for this crap to be filtered out or
    have some automated agent do it for me. Adequate tools do not exist yet
    for Exchange or VMSMAIL--they do for filtering at the gateway. Tools
    for either will require manual maintenance from time to time as
    techniques change. I'd love to have a tool right now that would accept
    mail only from certain domains and individual addresses. It would take
    me about fifteen minutes to set up and I'd be free of that crap.

>    Re: .31
>    
>    Nope, I don't buy that argument. Lots of ISPs and the commercial
>    services filter mail today and they aren't suffering huge backlogs.
>    
	There is no easy way to do this.  Yes, ISP's and commercial services
  advertise filtering, but there's a big penalty to pay to do so and you will
  find that in reality they only block a few addresses like CyberPromotions.
  Spammers regularly change Email addresses to get through the filtering so
  that's not easy to accomplish.  What happens if (as has happened in the
  past) that the address they give is aol.com?  Do you want to filter out all
  messages from AOL?

>    It is neither easier, cheaper, nor more effective for me (and every
>    other fellow employee afflicted with this offensive deluge) to manually
>    delete all of the crap I get in my electronic mailbox. It is much
>    easier, cheaper, and more effective for this crap to be filtered out or
>    have some automated agent do it for me. Adequate tools do not exist yet
>    for Exchange or VMSMAIL--they do for filtering at the gateway. Tools
>    for either will require manual maintenance from time to time as
>    techniques change. I'd love to have a tool right now that would accept
>    mail only from certain domains and individual addresses. It would take
>    me about fifteen minutes to set up and I'd be free of that crap.

	I have filters set up in Eudora, it's pretty easy.  Exchange has filters
  too.  With VMS mail, you can select by address and then delete, admittedly
  after you've received the mail.

		Danny

Any idea why only one email address of mine at work gets all this 
SPAM?  My external email addresses do not get it.  The only thing 
different about my account that gets SPAMmed is that I gave it to 
Microsoft so I could be on one of their mailing lists.  Is Bill 
Gates building demand for a new anti-SPAM product???

	Roger

    
    
    Are there any tricks to reading a mail header to find out where
    it actually came from?  That is, which parts are faked and which parts
    are likely to be correct? 
    
    Kevin
    

Re: .43

See URL cited in .11.

		Steve

    
    
    Thanks, this lead to some good info:
    
    http://spam.abuse.net/spam//howtocomplain.html
    
    Kevin
    

As ugly, and as costly as it really is, it would be wise if someone is working
on putting in the content based filtering now.

Maybe DEC is safe if people know how we worked to get what's his name put in
jail ages ago.  But that's a long time ago and DEC never played up its
involvement.

At some point some spammer is going to send out a very large number of message
to an uncertain mailing list with "from" and "replyto" set to something@dec.com.
And they will send it by connecting to an sendmail server belonging to someone
like IBM, unless their server validates the incoming connection against a
list of valid addresses.

DO NOT REPLY TO SPAM.

Doing so will only hammer some innocent ISP who is already being hammered by
undeliverable mail.

    One for the list, just arrived:
    
    bigprofits@savetrees.com
    
    Cheers, Laurie.

In case you don't have a <something>@digital.com alias, I'd recommend
getting one.  For some reason, tunnel@digital.com has been pegged as
a dirty old man who needs to know about all sorts of pornographic sites :-).

Despite some news group and mailing list presence, all my spam comes to
this address, which only appears on our web site and a couple of autoreplies.

j.

>In case you don't have a <something>@digital.com alias, I'd recommend
>getting one.  For some reason, tunnel@digital.com has been pegged as
>a dirty old man who needs to know about all sorts of pornographic sites :-).
    
    Well, you know what Freud said about tunnels.

>>In case you don't have a <something>@digital.com alias, I'd recommend
>>getting one.  For some reason, tunnel@digital.com has been pegged as
>>a dirty old man who needs to know about all sorts of pornographic sites :-).
>    
>    Well, you know what Freud said about tunnels.

	No, what did he say?

		Danny

    Re: .41
    
    I just reviewed AOL's list last night, it's well over 150 domains and
    more are added all the time--I contribute my input every time I receive
    a new spam, which is not that often anymore. In the last two weeks or
    so, I got over fifty pieces of crap in this account. On AOL, I got TWO.
    And I also got about thirty pieces of mail that I did ask for, with no
    visible performance penalty to me. And if Digital just blocked all of
    Cyber Promotions known domains, lists of which are already available on
    the net, you'll stop over 80% of the crap that I got. Including one of
    the two that arrived today (cf. 47). 
    
    [Is the "penalty" you keep talking about simply "performance"? Or are
    you saying there's something special about Digital's mail gateways?
    What is the real resource cost between a) having the gateway take a few
    microseconds to bounce a mail message based on its domain and b) having
    the gateway accept the message, store it locally, queue it up to the
    next internal link, transmitting, storing it there, and so forth, until
    it arrives at an employee's mailbox, who then has to take his valuable
    human time to read it, get annoyed, and delete it?]
                                               
    Regarding filters: I'll take your word for Eudora, but the PC-based
    mail system provided by this corporation is Exchange. Exchange DOES NOT
    provide adequate functionality, as I described in .31. The procedure
    you describe for VMSMAIL is EXACTLY what I do NOT want to be FORCED to do.
    Oh, and worse, if and when they drag me kicking and screaming from
    VMSMAIL and that account forwards to my Exchange account, I still can't
    stop the crap because Exchange will show the forwarding account (mine)
    as the sender.

Has anyone created an anti-spam rule for MS Exchange?


Greg

	RE: .52

	If someone does, and they use the Rules Wizard available at
	the Microsoft Outlook site, they can export the Rule to a 
	text file (.rwz) and others can import them.

	Maybe I'll start collecting my SPAM mail and come up with one.

							mike

I've been using the "inbox assistant" but a)didn't know there was a 
way to export the rules and b)don't really have *that* many rules 
collected yet.  

yet.

downloading (or trying to) the rules wizard now... maybe I'll see how 
much work it would be to import one of these lists and plop it on an 
ftp server here for everyone.

    
    I think the only way to really stop email spam will be for charging
    to start for email.
    
    Suppose everyone had to pay a nickel for every email adr they send
    to.  Just like postal mail.  In other words, an estamp would be
    required on every piece of email.
    
    I'm not implying I know how to implement such a system.  But it seems
    to me it would curtail the spam if we could figure out how to enfore it.
    The reverse thought is, imagine the postal mail you'd rcv if it were
    "free" to send like email is.
    
    /Eric

         
    The "make money quick" msgs are showing up on radio now too.
    
    On wbz here in boston, an ad i've heard twice now sounds something like
    this:
    
    		The following is a commercial announcement.
    		Would you like to earn an extra $600 or $1000 a month,
    		or more, possibly A WHOLE LOT MORE ?  Dial this phone
    		number for more information
    		etc etc
    
    It's scary to me that such ads are allowed.  The ad doesn't say
    anything about WHAT work you'll be asked to do, or even WHO the
    ad is paid for by !
    
    /Eric

    
    	Not to mention the $3.95/minute that the phone company charges just
    	for you to make the call, eh?
    

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...

 Internet - Congress to take up legislation to ban spam (junk e-mail)
	{The Boston Globe, 7-May-97, p. D4}
   Congress will take up legislation this summer.  America Online users alone
 eat up 5,000 hours of connect time per day deleting spam, according to the
 site.  The Coalition Against Unsolicited Junk E-mail is putting the finishing
 touches on a legislative proposal that it hopes would add spam to an antijunk
 facsimile law already on the books.  The law says unrequested solicitations
 levying a charge to recipients are illegal.  When businesses got flurries of
 junk faxes that, for example, were from office supplystores asking if you
 wanted to buy more fax paper, Congress passed the anti-junk fax law.

...

No one will fax internationally on a large scale because of the cost.
But spam across borders is virtually zero cost.

Until there is a spam treaty with Canada, it would be easy to setup
shop in Canada sending spam only to sites located in the USA (ie. foo.COM).
Your Visa card is just as good in Canada as it is in the USA.