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Original thread:
Post 2 made on Sunday September 10, 2017 at 09:21
buzz
Super Member
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May 2003
4,366
There are a lot of "entrepreneurs" in Florida. These guys are either generating the marketing spam or have poorly configured servers that have been hijacked. Another dimension is the network of Trojan'd machines that can be leased by the hour to blow out spam. This is a hierarchical scheme where "controller" Trojans (the primary generators are many layers up, scattered around the globe) send jobs out to lower members. If the controllers go down, the lower members, regardless of location, will be quiet. Evidently, there is a cluster of controllers and Trojans in Texas and Florida.

A few years ago a large project, with Microsoft as the point man, tracked the Trojans. Controllers were identified, backtracking to the top. (this is an arduous task because these networks are designed to prevent discovery) When they were satisfied that they had identified the whole pack, there was a globally coordinated take down. Within hours about 70% of spam was gone. I'm not convinced that the spammers have fully recovered. And, I suspect that more and more users are installing anti Trojan software. Another dimension might be better filtering by your email service.

But, I continue to receive messages (with dangerous attachments) from "Hot young Russian girls" who would love to correspond with me -- just open the attachment. Many of these attachments are hostile image files -- don't attempt to look at these.

Years ago I was more actively campaigning against spammers and I would report abuses to the server owners. A couple times I irritated the spammers to the point where they put me on a "punish" list as the sender of the spam messages. For a few days I received thousands of rejection notices (bad email addresses, blocker returns) and irate complaints from regular folk and system admins.

Currently, I'm using an email server bundled with the business web hosting. Here I can install my own "filter". It took a few weeks to tweak, but I'm now down to a low single digit spam leak per week, with many zero weeks. I started by filtering out big words such as "Viagra", "V1agra", any "*.ru" source, etc., and eventually identified a message format that many of the spammers use. When I identify a spam message, I return a message to the sender indicating "bad address". Eventually, their server will remove my address from their list in order to better utilize their bandwidth. There are a few false positives and I'll need to add an exception rule. Overall, I'm down to 50-80 rejected messages per week and this number is dwindling.

[edited minor typo]

Last edited by buzz on September 11, 2017 05:13.


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