Targetted Spam

[camerata]

For the past 6 months I've been getting spam about events, products and services in Thailand to an email address that has never been published anywhere. Most are in English, some are in Thai. I reckon some tech-savvy marketing company has done a dictionary attack on all the mail servers in Thailand and is either selling the list or the spam service.

This kind of attack will easily harvest email accounts, such as john, johnt, john3, tjohn, etc, and the result is more targetted spam than the send-it-to everyone variety.

Has anyone else seen an upsurge in Thailand-related spam lately?

What's your experience with spam in general at present and is your ISP helping? Given the certaintly of "false positives," should your ISP be blocking spam for you?

[stumonster]

one thing i always try to explain to people is the use of carbon copy(cc) and blind carbon copy(bcc)

I am sure many email addresses find their way onto lists because someone has just cc 'd to a whole heap of people and then the email gets forwarded..etc

it just takes one person to do a bit of cut and pasting.

[Wash]

I am as distressed as you seem to be about Spam, and just finished deleting 31 of 32 emails that were spam. I cannot however say they are related to Thailand but are mostly more based on the fact that I have reached my senior years. Viagra and medecine sales are the biggest pests.

But, dealing with this junk mail is much like the mail box at home where there would be junk to the extreme in my mail every day. All you can do is throw it away. I do not want any ISP that thinks it is their job to filter my email and consider that to be a despicable act and only consider ISP filtering permissable if I have the option on what is filtered, including nothing.

I support prosecution of the ones they can catch rather than filtering the email and think giant fines or jail are appropriate penalties for spamming the world.

[dr_Pat_Pong]

I get daily spam offering greater length. Is it random, or are the buggers spying on me in the shower ?

[Wolfie]

Dr, are you being offered a smaller debt and a bigger penis?

[camerata]

I am as distressed as you seem to be about Spam, and just finished deleting 31 of 32 emails that were spam. I cannot however say they are related to Thailand but are mostly more based on the fact that I have reached my senior years. Viagra and medecine sales are the biggest pests.

They seem to send the porno and viagra spams to everyone. I don't think it is targetted.

But, dealing with this junk mail is much like the mail box at home where there would be junk to the extreme in my mail every day.  All you can do is throw it away.  I do not want any ISP that thinks it is their job to filter my email and consider that to be a despicable act and only consider ISP filtering permissable if I have the option on what is filtered, including nothing.

I agree. This is the only way I'd accept anyone filtering my mail. Although I'd still like to have access to the mails rejected for a week or so.

I support prosecution of the ones they can catch rather than filtering the email and think giant fines or jail are appropriate penalties for spamming the world.

Yes, but the spammers are rarely caught and prosecuted. After some anti-spam legislation was enacted in the USA (where 99% of the spam originates), the spammers moved their bulk mail software to East European and Chinese servers.

[camerata]

I get daily spam offering greater length. Is it random, or are the buggers spying on me in the shower ?

I don't think anyone is peeking, doc. I reckon the spammers use a blunderbuss technique for porno, viagra, medicine, organ enhancement and cheap finance spams (not to mention Nigerian scams). They harvest the mail addresses from web pages, newsgroups and webboards, as well as dictionary and other attacks on mail servers, and they send it to everyone.

Then there's the spammers who call themselves legitimate e-marketeers. They buy email lists from companies who offer free stuff you download from the Net and in the Agreement you click is a clause accepting promotional mails. This is legal because you give consent and because supposedly you can unsubscribe from the list. They can then target the spam according to your interests, and charge their clients (vendors) more per mail.

I also started getting spams about webhosting services soon after I registered my domain. So someone is harvesting addresses from domain registries too.

[Yohan]

I am as distressed as you seem to be about Spam, and just finished deleting 31 of 32 emails that were spam.

Spam mail is everywhere,

Our headoffice deletes every day over 60.000 emails automatically, but we had days with over 150.000 spams per day.

Here in Tokyo in the branch office, we delete about manually a good part of the emails, which are nothing else but virus, hoax, sales.....

My private email consists of over 90 percent garbage, and my email in the mobil phone even 95 percent....

It is from everywhere, if you try to trace it back....from Eastern Europe, from Japan and China, from Latin America....from Japan...

Addresses are often collected by search-software, which is scanning all WWW pages....sometimes by email trackers, which are searching POP servers, or by virus carrier email, and if opened by the user, email addresses will be stolen from the computer network...and so on and so on....

Beside some filtering you can do very little against it....just delete....

Johann