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Increased Spam Mail Since using Mailwasher

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Author: Ogi, Location: Uk

Posted: Wed Apr 23, 2003 8:50 am Post subject: Increased Spam Mail Since using Mailwasher

Hi,

Has anyone noticed their Spam Mail go up since using MailWasher?

I got it when ZoneLabs sent a special message out about it, I thought at the time that it would be a good idea, but I'm not sure now!

I seem to be getting more and more, yet process all my mail and bounce all of the spam mail but I seem to be getting more and more!

To such a state, I'm thinking of changing my mail address!

Any others see this?

Cheers,
Carl.

Author: TimeGhost, Location: USA

Posted: Wed Apr 23, 2003 2:10 pm Post subject:

The reverse is true for me, and I'm not auto-deleting. But I'm using Earthlink's spaminator as a first line of defense.

Author: IP: 68.68.*.*,

Posted: Thu Apr 24, 2003 3:30 am Post subject:

You are essentially saying: "I am getting more spam now than I did at date X in the past when I installed MailWasher."

Me too.

And, all reports I've seen show that the total amount of spam being transported is increasing.

I value MailWasher, and plan to keep using it, because I find that it is a fast automatic tool for dealing with this increase in spam.

I have it auto-blacklist likely spam, and auto-delete blacklisted messages. I also have it check mail against spam databases, so that it is building the blacklist as it goes.

I can't know if MailWasher's "bounce" feature can help prevent spam. My guess is, probably not: even if spammers make any effort to prune bounced addresses from their list, the rate of spam is increasing so fast, that new spammers will probably outnumber ones who remove me.

Author: TopDog, Location: USA

Posted: Thu Apr 24, 2003 4:07 am Post subject:

Not me I was getting hammered with spam, hundreds a day. And I was getting virus via some of that spam. Now that crap is wiped off the server before it ever touchs my machine. I just paid for the MailWasher program and as far as Im concered it was well worth the money.

I dont bounce mail though. I found that most of the mail I bounce created messages coming back from the servers that the mail was bounced to saying it was invalid. Another nasy trick by the spam people. The ammount of spam has gone down a bit, but I think after some time will really start killing it. From what I understand there is code in your spam email that transmits information back the sender telling them all kinds of information about and confirming that the email address is valid. So killing it on the server should serve to cut down on spam in the long run.

Just my thoughts I dont really know that much about spam except it was driving me totally insane and now its not a problem. Laughing

Author: Ogi, Location: Uk

Posted: Thu Apr 24, 2003 5:40 pm Post subject:

Hi,

Thanks for your comments, I'm going to keep using it as I was only using Popcorn before MailWasher!

I will however, stop bouncing mail and see if it goes down a bit!

Cheers,
Carl.

Author: Gambler_FEX_online, Location: Norway

Posted: Tue May 20, 2003 12:15 pm Post subject:

I too got increase in spam when I started bouncing it as far as i can remember, but it didnt go down when I stopped bouncing. Seems im in the "active valuable" list now... i think. maybe they can detect fake bounces.

At some time mailwasher was extremely valuable to me (at least I felt it), 95% of all spam I got was blacklisted, ready to be deleted. Only 1 spam not marked every now and then (of about 20). I was so happy it was so efficient, the last few days I've gone back to checking with blacklists because the CFS system im testing is not very efficient yet and im tired of manually checking "probably spam."

But now its 2-3 spam not blacklisted, and theres a blinkin tray icon and the min/max animation this program no longer give me much good experience sigh. I reccomended it a few places and to some friends too.

Author: 2mcabre, Location: USA

Posted: Tue May 20, 2003 3:33 pm Post subject:

To be honest the increase (IMHO) in Spam has nothing to do with starting to use MailwasherPro.

Instead this phenomenon is due to increased activity in the "Spammers" world, as they get more and more desperate to generate business.

I do know from having eavesdropped at "Spammers" blogs and forums that when you bounce a message back to a some servers the original "Spammer" just for shits and giggles will resubmit your address to a multitude of other mailing list maintainers. Lots of these folks actually make money BY submitting email addresses to list providers.

So there is "some" validity that when you bounce a message it "could" increase your spam. But I don't think its fair to say that it's Mailwashers fault.

Author: mole, Location: Afghanistan

Posted: Tue May 20, 2003 4:53 pm Post subject:

"I do know from having eavesdropped at "Spammers" blogs and forums that when you bounce a message back to a some servers the original "Spammer" just for shits and giggles will resubmit your address to a multitude of other mailing list maintainers. Lots of these folks actually make money BY submitting email addresses to list providers."

Shocked

Some wannabe spammers don't have a clue. Best thing is to play dead with absolutely no feedback using MWP. Remember, web-bugs or spam beacons can trigger verification a million times better than bounces. I used to report a lot of spam via Spamcop and Nucem. Then I started noticing a funny pattern in where my reports were being sent to, China, South America, European countries. God knows, if my email lands on just one report-triggered spammer honeypots, that could chain translate to 100+ emails a day very quickly.

Let the ISPs and government agencies with their increasingly sophisticated monitoring of spam storms and tracking abilities deal with spammers. I believe the heat is upping. When people's tolerance hit the tipping point, when ISP juggernauts like Microsoft and AOL say they had enough, when whole governments vilify spam and make it federal offences, then let's see what happens.

Spamming is now a spawning ground for hacker activity. Intelligence agencies realise that. Let their tools go to work on this criminal activity.

Bouncing? No way, I'm dead.

Author: stan_qaz,

Posted: Tue May 20, 2003 10:02 pm Post subject:

Using MailWasher to process my spam mail and keep from activating any web-bugs and diligently reporting to spam cop has gotten me list-washed from a lot of spammers lists.

My spam load is half of what it was when I got started. I just went to my websites and encoded all my contact information so e-mail harvesters can't scoop it up and that should help too, hasn't had time to make much difference yet.

An interesting thing to do is go to Google and search the web and newsgroups for your e-mail address. One friend had hundreds of hits, answered his "why me" question.

Author: Ikeb,

Posted: Wed May 21, 2003 6:25 am Post subject:

stan_qaz wrote:

Well I checked and so far (knocking on wood) my email address doesn't show up when using a simple search.

Call me paranoid but I wouldn't doubt that SPAMers generate (or at least monitor) those touchy, feely send-this-to-ten-friends "chain letter" emails just to harvest the email addresses after a several forwarding iterations. There's nothing one can do about such nested msg header extracts being sent to others in the same or subsequent email lists. I ask friends to email me with a blind copy if they send to a list and suggest they send the whole list via blind copy.

Author: stan_qaz,

Posted: Wed May 21, 2003 4:07 pm Post subject:

This is where I find the bounce feature nice... Friends that send my address all over the net soon remove me from their contacts as I bounce everything back to them.

If they were really friends after the first couple times I asked them to stop would stop.

Author: greycloud, Location: New_Zealand

Posted: Thu May 29, 2003 2:39 am Post subject:

I agree, since starting to use mailwasher and having activated the bouce tab on all spam I seem to be getting more and more each day.
My ISP always says never to unsubscribe or bounce as they (the spammers) will still know it's an active address.
I can only assume that mailwasher, simply by giving us the option to bounce, must think it's OK to do so and wouldn't be responsible for increasing our spam. I however remain unconvinced.

Author: MacDuff,

Posted: Mon Jun 02, 2003 10:59 pm Post subject: Increase in spam since installing mailwasher

I read messages that say that Mailwasher crashes, that people get more spam after installing it than they did before and I wonder if I am on the same planet?

Mailwasher has never "acted up" on any of my machines and MailWasher is always on.

A year ago I had so much spam that I changed all my e-mail addresses. The spam stopped but within six months I was re-discovered. Since notifying all your addressees of a change is a pain and if they are not diligent about making the change to their address book, an address change can really mess things up, I decided to research e-mail filters. After much reading I tried MailWasher. I was getting about five Spams a day before installing MailWasher. Since installing it about two weeks ago I have seen only ONE. It certainly works for me and I have not had to install custom filters yet.

Just wanted to advise that there are people (like me) who are very pleased and satisfied with the product.

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