spam mail

[stu]

Okay, so this is a little off topic, but there's no where else to post this really..

Does anyone else find they are getting ridiculously large amounts of spam mail sent to their powweb mail accounts? I'm getting on average 8 to 10 emails a week from various companies, all sent to a mail.powweb.com account - which I'm assuming would be all members. I unsubscribe and they still come through - usually from various excite.com accounts. I wrote excite, and I've responded to a few mails in complaint, but it doesn't appear anything has been actioned. Any thoughts on why this is? Cause I sure would appreciate not receiving them.

[Starr]

Folks, if you send an email to someone and leave out the "to" and "cc" fields, it will come into you as from "undisclosed-receipeients@mail.YOUR-MTA.com" (in this case, YOUR-MTA is "Powweb"). Try it on yourself and see.

Powweb absolutely does NOT sell, give, trade, or barter away your email addresses. The ONLY time we do send you email is for our own notices.

[keyplyr]

Each week I get about a dozen SPAM addressed to: UndisclosedRecipients@Powweb.com Can't we fix this?

[Vern]

I made a spam box for nothing but junk mail which you will recieve after submitting to any search engines. Sometimes I'll get 200-300 a week!!!

If you submit to any places that also submit to FFA pages....LOOK OUT!!!! Your e-mail box will explode!

Spammer Companies also have a *NEW* tactic. Called a SpamBot! I scours the net and spiders websites for e-mail addresses because most people leave a valid one on websites, for obvious reasons.

A spam box doesn't eliminate spam in your regular e-mail, but Sure cuts down on it. Selecting ALL then delete is a REAL quick way to go on a spam box!

Also, NEVER unsubscribe to Spam e-mail.... All you are doing is validating your e-mail isn't just a delete box and a person actually is reading it, which they then sell to others at a higher price as a valid e-mail address because someone responded.

If PowWeb doesn't allow spamming by it's members... Why does it give Spammer's the tools to do so by allowing the "undisclosed-receipients" (bulk e-mail) to work, Blocking "undisclosed-receipients" and changing it to "pwusers" or something else would be better for all! (Or even better, Password Protect it!)

[stu]

Got this reply from PowWeb about the spam mail thing yesterday:

Unfortunately we can not (follow the spamming incident up), however you can go to website such as http://spamcop.net and report your spamming issues to them, they will be able to help you.

[Skunkboy]

Originally posted by Vern
If PowWeb doesn't allow spamming by it's members... Why does it give Spammer's the tools to do so by allowing the "undisclosed-receipients" (bulk e-mail) to work, Blocking "undisclosed-receipients" and changing it to "pwusers" or something else would be better for all! (Or even better, Password Protect it!)

Good question.

With Outlook and such it is near impossible to force this to happen but it can still happen in webmail... I've done it on accident to my self a few times. Isn't there a way other than making everything go to bit-bucket?

I've gotten rid of clickable links and plain view addresses on pages; so, that part of prevention is used but there's a million ways to spam out there (unfortunately). Blocking all spam may never happen but there's at least ways to somewhat protect the boxes.

[Rick_E]

One way to insure you get lots of spam email is to post your email address on a web page as text or as a clickable link. The email address harvesters will find your address and it will be added to their lists.

One way to prevent this is to create a GIF image of your email address and place the image on the web page. It won't be clickable, however people can still see what your email address is.

[stevel]

A much simpler way is to replace the @ in the e-mail address by @The spammers' "web scrapers" don't bother looking for this. I've done it and it works. To the user, there's no difference, but the spammer reading the HTML won't find the address.

[Skunkboy]

that's a cool idea... never brought that to mind. Knowing that spaces are %20 there should also be something for @ hmmm... then it allows the webmaster to let a user still e-mail but yet when they read the mailto line it runs as one part instead of user@domain.

the only thing I would have to say to it though is that the link should then NOT have the @ but rather change the text to something like "e-mail us"

[stevel]

The link can have the alternate code for @ too, though "e-mail us" works fine. I have a new domain for which I did this substitution right from the start, and it has not once received spam.

[toastmaster]

Try this:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/botproofemail/?topic_id=28%2C90%2C93

I use it here:
http://www.digitaltoast.co.uk/contact/botproofemail2form.php
and here:
http://www.digitaltoast.co.uk/addguest.php

Keeps both email spammers and guestbook spammers at bay.
Your choice which you use....

[stevel]

Oh, I hate those CAPTCHA things, and they cause problems with folks that are vision-impaired. It really isn't necessary in most cases to go to such lengths. I can see it for guestbooks, though, if you must have such a thing.