Sick of spam in your mailbox?

I'm getting really sick and tired of junk mail. Even setting up filters to block it doesn't work because the spammers use misspellings and other tactics to get around my filters so I can't stop them.
I have written to several senders but it turns out that they are just innocent people who's pc's are being used as bots to flood my inbox and I can't block every individual. My mail rules also mean I have actually blocked some mail that I wanted. I was resigned to just living with it until I saw something on one of the news channels the other day.

The report demonstrated how such bots work and in particular it was aimed at drawing attention to a criminal activity which involved blackmailing sites for cash by threatening to bring the site down by flooding it with traffic if payment wasn't made. The reporter went on to set up around 60 bots which targeted a specific site and each bot made several requests to the site every second. The target site was flooded with requests to such an extent that it gave a page unavailable message within minutes and that gave me an idea.

If I was to visit one of the sites that flood my mailbox and just kept clicking on the links on there, and 60 other people did the same thing then it would have exactly the same effect. I do not think there is anything remotely illegal in doing this as I have recieved a spam specifically asking me to visit the site, so I'm only doing what the mail is asking me to do. I do not wish to stop anybody from earning a living but I do want them to stop spamming me and I believe that a coordinated approach to such sites could actually bring this about. It would be such a pleasure to open my mailbox and not see multiple mails talking about penis enlargement, ejaculation enhancement and other blatantly offensive subject matter.

Let me state that I would never jeopardise such a fine site as RIU by using it to organise such a campaign but I would be most interested in hearing if this appeals to anybody else and any suggestions on a method of organising and promoting such an approach without leaving a worthwile site exposed to retribution from angry spammers. Reasoned objections also welcome.

Anybody?

I have a pretty lengthy background in bulk emailing, and I have got to say that while some computers ARE used as zombie mailing devices, this is usually not the case.

What a lot of spammers do is forge the From and Reply-To headers of the emails that they send, so it appears to have come from Joe Shmoe... and when you reply, Joe Shmoe actually responds bewildered about whatever the heck you're talking about.

It's very frustrating...


The best way to catch them is at the sponsor level (monitor where the spam traffic is coming from), or at the mail server level, which would not help much if the spammer is using proxies...

If it means anything to you, spammers currently have a hard time making money due to the over-saturation of bulk email. People are getting smarter about their email.

Also the demonstration you are mentioning is a Distributed Denial of Service attack, and it's illegal.

Additionally, the links that you usually end up seeing in the spam mail (usually) end up going to legitimate affiliate sites... So the bandwidth you are wasting is only yours, and the company that makes an honest living by unknowingly accepting traffic from bulk mailers.

I think the best bet would be to contact the people in your contact list, and let them know your email address is changing, and ask them to update their records.

On the other hand, you are able to sue spammers, and with a little work and maybe some smooth talking the publishers that the spammers advertise, you may be able to get the spammers payment location or method, and serve him with a law suit that way.

Let me start by saying I have absolutely nothing to do with this program, but it sure works for me. It's called MAILWASHER. There is a free version and a pro, but I found the free one quite satisfactory.

It's sort of like setting up a way station for your incoming mail. You can look at your e-mails before they hit your comp. Then you can tell the program whether it is friendly or not. You can also, if you don't want them to bother you anymore, tell the program to bounce it back as a dead address.

Within a month, I stopped spam by almost 100%.

I also get a lot of email which is not spam but I don't care to read. I can delete the email at the way station. So if I receive 50 emails and I delete 25 in mailwasher ( a quick click), when I tell the program to now process my mail, it automatically opens up Thunderbird (my fav) and I receive only the 25 I wanted.
It works, and it works well.


out.

Hey GrowTech
Really appreciate the sage advice and rapid response. I didn't think it would count as a DDOS attack as the company had invited me to visit the site. Please feel free to delete the thread as I wouldn't want to encourage folk to break any laws.
Thanks again.

I don't think it would be interpreted that way, plus it does not appear that you link to any website here, so the discussion can still run on, might even be good to follow Crackers movement and discuss good filtering software.


Keep in mind that in choosing a spam filtering program, not only is the filtering of spam important, but so is its ability to prevent false positives... Nothing more irritating than missing emails because they were in the spam folder.

Agreed GrowTech.

Thanks CrackerJax. I'll check it out

Yeah, check it out. What I like about it is this program will ask you several times if it comes up spam. If you say no its good the next time it comes up with a choice...you can go back to spam status or give it the full green to go. Also you have to check the delete manually.

Whew! besides that you can read the email in its entirety right there in mailwasher, then delete it.

out.

I don't think it would be interpreted that way, plus it does not appear that you link to any website here, so the discussion can still run on, might even be good to follow Crackers movement and discuss good filtering software.


Keep in mind that in choosing a spam filtering program, not only is the filtering of spam important, but so is its ability to prevent false positives... Nothing more irritating than missing emails because they were in the spam folder.
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I second that!!!

While we're on the discussion of mail. I would suggest you turn your "HTML Reading/Preview Pane" off (If you use a client that supports HTML Reading/Preview Panes suchs as Outlook).

This will prevent the possibility of embedded code from being sent to you via email and possibly executing commands from your computer, such as a batch file that will download a file via FTP, execute the file, and possibly open your system up to a series of other problems.