eBay

shooger · ‎12-10-2003

I used to do business using my regular (family) email address "dbrutter". Over the first year of business, I started getting more and more spam (porn, penis enlargement offers, religious, debt consolidation). The problem is, I'm married, I don't have a problem with my penis, I already go to church, and I'm not in debt! Then, of course, are all the viruses. My wife was getting annoyed with the huge volume of junk - sometimes 5 spams for every real email. I'd block the sender using my email program, and delete the email, but it got worse and worse. They use a new email address every time. I stopped mentioning my email address in my auctions, thinking they got it from there, but it was too late. I made a fresh email account "shooger", and changed my auctions, eBay preferences, and PayPal preferences. My auctions have NO mention of my email address, to avoid it being picked up by scanning programs that search for the "@" and log your address in their spam database. The only place anyone can get my email address is manually in the payment section, where I tell people to pay to my PayPal address "shooger (at) shaw (dot) ca". That was a few months ago. A month ago, I got my first spam. Last week, another, and today there were TWO when I got up this morning. I'm really worried that it's all starting again. My family email address is all but unuseable and it's very upsetting, because we have a large family and some distant friends and relatives who all contact us this way. I really don't want to lose my "shooger" email account, as my customers have come to know it. I feel harassed!

1) How do these spammers get our email addresses?
2) Do they really think I'm going to buy penis pills from an email?
3) What can be done?!?

can-import · ‎12-10-2003

They buy it from ebay and/or paypal...

amberwoodottawa · ‎12-10-2003

shooger
It is unfortunately a way of life on the net. One of the the ways it happens is someone you legitimately emailed using your shooger email address had their computer infected with a virus that spams all their email contacts.

There are lots of things you can do to divert your emails into different folders with potentially spam going into a junk folder so that no one else in your family sees them however you cant eliminate spam from coming no matter how many address you have.

Malcolm

mahsauction · ‎12-10-2003

Currently the best method of stopping spam is at the ISP mail server and not when you are downloading it from your mail server. Some ISPs are starting to realize the amount of bandwidth that is wasted on SPAM. I had a Telus account that I never used and it got spammed. How? Spammers can use a technique called dictionary attack which is basically emailing to every combination of email addresses (a@telus.net, b@telus.net and so forth). When the address is invalid they get a response, when they don't get a response, they save that address in their list.

Telus could stop this form of attack but they didn't and let it go on for months. Now they are implementing spam filtering on their mail servers.

Shaw needs to work on protecting its mail servers from spam attacks. I would start by asking Shaw to filter out Spam and block any well known spam servers from even sending email to Shaw.

ospreylinks · ‎12-10-2003

You do have to be careful about that one. I know a few months ago, our ISP was blacklisted from sympatico and cogeco email accounts, because it had been listed as a possible spam sender.

Created just a huge problem as now everytime someone (read me), sent a legitamite email to a sympatico or cogeco email address, it was bounced....

I also have a huge problem with spam (who doesn't?) and you are right, they are silly, disgusting and many times just plain rude.... I always think, if I didn't buy your product the first five times you emailed me, what makes you think I will buy it if you email it to me 20 times a day for the next month....."

I remember getting a constant email solicitation from some coffee company in the US. It turned into a real aggrevation, however I was able to eventually find a real email address for them, so I just emailed their same ad back to them 200 times....

At the same time, I called the company and I know the person answering the phone was just manning a call center booth, but I yaked it up with her for a good 20 minutes, wasting their time and their dime for the phone call. As it turns out, the girl who took the phone call said they didn't even ship to Canadian address....so why the heck are you soliciting me in an endless fashion then.

I as well have set up message rules, but now I am finding I have so many rules, that legitimate emails are being directed to my delete box, and then I have to go back through the delete box to check for any legitimate emails that got put in there....

But don't give up brave people, I read in the Toronto Star a couple of weeks back that the companies that have been buying the spam services are not getting much of a response to their bombardment of spam ads, and are cutting back or looking at other methods of getting their message out.... click on the link below to read the story.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&call_pageid=971358637177&c=Article&cid=1070233809828

And in the meantime, tell your friends, neighbours, anyone who will listen.... never reply to a spam solicitation as it just encourages them to send more.

Cheers!

Jeff

muminlaw · ‎12-10-2003

... and especially make sure they all know to never hit the "remove me ..." link!

I use mailwasher pro -- it doesn't eliminate spam because of the slightly different addresses every time it's sent, but at least I can see it and delete it on the server before I download it to my own computer (like I really, really need a bigger penis ... I don't think my hubby would approve!!

>> I know a few months ago, our ISP was blacklisted from sympatico and cogeco email accounts, because it had been listed as a possible spam sender. <<

Like shooger, I'm also on shaw.ca (Jeff, you don't say who your ISP is) -- we've had the same problem (being blacklisted) with aol, hotmail and cogego, plus a few others, and I'm not sure it's finshed. Makes me wonder if there's a viable alternative.

Glenda

Glenda

ospreylinks · ‎12-10-2003

I subscribe to a local ISP (while I guess regional as they serve all of northern Ontario) called Vianet.

Jeff

acurael · ‎12-10-2003

Sorry everyone, it's all me. I'm the one who buys everything they email me 🙂

All of the above is good advice. The best advice is to never give out your email to anyone and never email anyone either. Sure, you won't get to communicate with anyone, but atleast you won't get any spam.

We get tons at our ebay address, but it's very easy to see what's legit and what's not as it's only used for ebay, so 95% of legit emails are payment notifications or emails from ebay... Sure it takes a few seconds, but it's not that long to nuke them.

The name of the program escapes me, but it was a form of p2p - brilliant idea in that once someone reports the exact body as a spam message, everyone else with the p2p plugin for their email client will never see this message again - the flagged plugin nukes it before you even see it.

It's a human filter - foolproof!

deltone · ‎12-10-2003

A few months ago I was getting SOOOOOOOO much spam I changed my email address to stop it. It worked for a long time and then that worm virus thing a few months ago........well, I started getting a ton of crap (not typical spam but from actual people.......who had the virus). Once that got straightened out, sympatico (who I'm with) got blacklisted by a lot of ISP's and so many of my emails were bouncing and some still are. It's very aggravating. Spam is such a PITA. Sad thing is many kids (teens) are getting this garbage too. Nothing is sacred........imagine a stranger sending you an email about your penis. Sheesh, such nerve. I wish they would create laws against this cr*p.