Spam From Tom At Tom Freakin' Smith Online Dot Com

[filkertom]

A few months ago, people started telling me that they were getting "message undeliverable" notices when they tried to e-mail tom at tomsmithonline dot com. Thing was, I was (and am) receiving those messages. Which is what's supposed to happen, as I've got it set up to do nothing except forward to my Yahoo account.

It's gotten more fun. Over the past three weeks, I must've gotten two hundred messages from Admin, Sysadmin, Account Services, Sales, and a dozen other permutations of somebody-or-other at tomsmithonline.com. Needless to say, I haven't got a spambot that's gone berserk.

I kinda need to reiterate this: [a] If you're trying to send me e-mail, please use filkertom at yahoo dot com; [b] if you're getting anything from anybody at tomsmithonline.com, it's not me, and I apologize for the trouble and flood of stuff in your inbox.

Hahhh.

So. Apart from that, how's your weekend? What's the best spam subject you've seen lately? Today's is "Sweet virgins love hard sex", which immediately begs the question "... But how do they know they love hard sex...?"

Comments

[netpositive.livejournal.com]

Just because they haven't had it doesn't mean they don't know they love it. *innocent look*

(And first off, one needs to define "virgin". Where is the virgin line? I.e.: What causes one to no longer be a virgin?)

[tropism.livejournal.com]

I assume that 'hard sex' is one of those things that would cross that line. ;)

[realtegan.livejournal.com]

Funnily enough, I got a spam apparently from my husband this morning. As he just went on a trip, I almost opened it before I realized that he, as an Apple user, wouldn't send me a zip file. D'oh. I blame it on reading my mail first thing in the morning.

I've also been getting tons of spam from my ISP, except they aren't from my ISP, they're all spoofed. I hate spammers.

[gazerwolf.livejournal.com]

The company I work for once lost two domains to spam.

Our hosting service started noticing that we were getting A LOT of email so they kept shutting off incoming mail. (something on the order of hundreds per MINUTE and 99.9% was spam)

They were free tarot reading sites and the readings were/are done through email...so this didn't work too well for us.

We were told in no uncertain terms that we had to cut down the amount of incoming mail or they would have to shut us down all the way. We scrambled for over a week to try to figure out SOME way to stop mail before it hit our server....found some prefilter companies but the cost was prohibitive.

We finally figured out the simple solution..move the websites.

Since the only valid incoming mail would be from clients (in response to readings) and from our distribution system (assigning the readings) all we had to do was set the old mailing system to reject EVERYTHING as if it didn't exist (which was how they kept shutting off our incoming mail to begin with) and set the websites to redirect to the new one.

Spam goes to brick wall and bounces, website visitors get sent to new site invisibly and our incoming mail dropped back to normal proportions.

[arensb.livejournal.com]

Welcome to the wonderful world of joe-jobs.

You may want to consider SPF. The basic idea is that you publish the IP addresses of your outgoing mail servers. Then recipients (like AOL) can compare the IP address of the host it's getting mail from, and the list of tomsmithonline.com mail servers. It's the email equivalent of "Hm. The return address says Muncie, IN, but the postmark says Seoul, Korea. Something's fishy here."
Point your network/mail/DNS guru at the SPF link above, and he or she should be able to set it up in short order. If your situation is as simple as "tomsmithonline.com never sends mail", it should be as easy as adding

tomsmithonline.com. IN TXT "v=spf1 ~all"

to DNS. Then AOL, Yahoo!, and whoever else is using SPF will refuse mail claiming to be from tomsmithonline.com (until you change the record to something else).

Secondly, unfortunately there's next to nothing you can do to prevent such bounces from arriving. The best thing I can think of is to filter them out. When I had this problem, I set up a filter that said "if it's from postmaster@anywhere or mailer-daemon@anywhere, and it isn't sent to arensb or postmaster or abuse or a handful of other local mailboxes, then put it in the `Joe Job' folder." That got rid of most of the noise.

which immediately begs the question

Thirdly, if I may put my pedant hat on for a moment, the expression "to beg the question" uses an archaic meaning of "beg". It really means "to assume one's conclusion". I think what you really mean is "which immediately brings up the question" or "prompts the question".

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

I never argue with a pedant -- it wastes my time and annoys the pedant. ;) It's a figure of speech I've known of for forty years. Old habits etc.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

The talklikeapirate.com addresses have been suffering the same epidemic. It's irritating as hell, but there's not a damned thing we can do about it, short of not making our addresses invisible to people we actually want to have them. )-:

This weekend

[janet-coburn.livejournal.com]

We finally went to see the latest Star Wars. As breaks from furniture shopping go, it was one.

I am still trying to talk Dan into the queen-size comforter with the picture of Depp as Jack Sparrow on it. And despite the fact that West Nile has been found in Ohio, he's not keen on the mosquito netting I want either. Go figure.