Sudden Increase in Spam With Change in Forum

[Brian Ellis]

I normally receive almost no spam at all in my primary mailbox, maybe one message a month maximum (partly because I use a second mail box for anything commercial). Now all of a sudden my primary mailbox is flooded with spam. This began on Saturday and Sunday with maybe five or six spam messages (a huge increase for me) out of twenty or thirty, now when I opened my mail box this morning I had perhaps fifteen spam messages out of the thirty or so total. I note that this sudden increase in spam coincided almost to the minute with the change in the way this forum works. This could of course just be a coincidence but it seems an odd one if it is. Is there any possibility that somehow this new system allows spammers to grab our email addresses? Has anyone else experienced anything like this?

[Ralph Barker]

That's strange, Brian. None of the user information is incorporated in the body of the forum text that spiders crawl, however, so I don't think your sudden increase relates to the forum.

[Greg Tims]

Ralph, I'm experiencing it this morning the same as Brian is and you just fixed my login/registration problem late last night.

[Ralph Barker]

Strange, indeed. I haven't seen any increase. But, perhaps Tom may have some ideas.

[Tom Westbrook]

My volume is about the same as usual (annoyingly high). I would be very surprised if they are getting the address from us, since the address isn't displayed to anyone on the site--I don't think you could dispay it if you tried to.

If you want, send me a PM with all the headers from two or threee example spams and I'll see if it sheds any light.

[Oren Grad]

No increase here.

[Capocheny]

Mine's about the same too... just the regular crap!

Cheers

[Brian Ellis]

"If you want, send me a PM with all the headers from two or threee example spams and I'll see if it sheds any light.[/QUOTE]"

Thanks for the offer Tom. I deleted all of the ones I got this morning so I don't have anything immediate to sent. I looked in my mail box a few minutes ago and didn't see any new spam. So maybe this is just an odd conincidence that won't be repeated. If it does though I'll forward a few on to you. I

[Michael Graves]

I've received 11 notifications from 9 different countries that my PayPal account was being used in a suspicious manner and if I'll only follow this link and give them all the information they need to empy my Paypal account and the associated credit card and checking account, then all will be well. I've used the WHOIS utility to locate the originating server and sent copies of the headers to the ISPs involved. They won't do anything; but it sure makes me feel better.

[Emrehan Zeybekoglu]

I haven't experienced any increase in spam so far.

[Terence McDonagh]

No noticeable increase on my account.

[Frank Petronio]

1000 a day, just like normal

It does ebb and flow as the spammers try new techniques. I'll get 50 of one type for a few days then it gets "learnt" by the filter and gets junked.

[robc]

options state that allowing vCard download will provide your email address to receivers so don't switch vCard download on.

Brian, have you used vCard?

[Kirk Gittings]

Interesting. I have noticed a dramatic increase in spam. I did not make any connection to the change though. Maybe?

[Tom Westbrook]

Thanks for that tip. I turned all vCard downloads off for all users. I'll see if I can't just remove the option altogether from being selected, or add some warning text about SPAM. I'm not sure who had it turned on (26 users did, though)--it's in some proprietary code format in the database.

[Tom Westbrook]

I should add that I'm not sure that it caused any problems, but it's a definite possibility.

[Kirk Gittings]

This raises another question. Which email program filters spam the best. I use Eudora which does a pretty good job but as the years go by and I build up more and more specific spam filters, Eudora seems to take forever to load as it has to load so many filters. Any thoughts?

[Ralph Barker]

FWIW, I use Mozilla Thunderbird as the user agent, and its spam filter seems pretty efficient. It shifts what it thinks is spam into the usual junk folder, and "learns" quickly.

[Scott Rosenberg]

This raises another question. Which email program filters spam the best. I use Eudora which does a pretty good job but as the years go by and I build up more and more specific spam filters, Eudora seems to take forever to load as it has to load so many filters. Any thoughts?

i get about 100 spam messages a day, and the only effective screen i've found is this...
http://popfile.sourceforge.net/

after a day or so, it will become > 99% effective.

[robc]

This raises another question. Which email program filters spam the best. I use Eudora which does a pretty good job but as the years go by and I build up more and more specific spam filters, Eudora seems to take forever to load as it has to load so many filters. Any thoughts?
spamassassin is very popular with ISP's

With a good ISP you should also get spam filtering at the ISP and have options to either delete, re-route, or tag the subject line so that you can filter incoming spam to a different mailbox. Spamassasin allows low, medium, high risk etc and also it can switched to learn. Also options for allowed or disallowed domains/email addreses.
Check with your ISP or get your own copy.

[Wolfgang AM]

I am an IT professional. In my experience this strongly depends on the browser you use. There are a lot of sites, that are capable of spying out your email. Of course just to for selling it to third party os use it for own spam purpose.
Just use a professional firewall which blocks your email literal string (after a warning) and you will see when your browser trys to send this information.
A good strategy is to keep browser and mail programs apart, which is definitely not possible with IE. But even this measurement I think does not beat every attack from hostile advertisement inserts in some web page. For instance ebay gives your email to "friend" sites like paypal just on the fly.

[Keith Pitman]

I thought I noticed an increase in spam getting by my two filters a couple of weeks ago. No observable change since the forum changed formats.

[Jerry Fusselman]

I get almost two spams per week, and that has not changed for me in the last few days.