Much spam

[billrv]

I pay for the spam filter on my account but still get 60-80 spam messages per day. All are obvious type messages. I have my own filters in Mailwasher Pro so dumping the spam is no problem but if I am away for three or four days my mailbox is overflowing and legitimate emails are returned to the sender. Any suggestions on how I can make a new start to be free of this problem? Thanks for any help.

[tocpcs]

Are the spam messages a result of a subscription to some sites?

Or do you just have your email address published on the internet?

Solving the cause of spam is a better way to handle issues like that. I have domains that I have setup for a long time, and there's no to minimal spam inbound.

[Gidget]

Hi billrv

From this thread

If you find an email is wrongly tagged with [SPAM] in the email subject (false positive), please forward it to ham@exetel.com.au and, similarly, forward any false negatives to spam@exetel.com.au as an attachment (you must send as an attachment to ensure correct processing).

If you haven't yet done so, it would be worth your while to send samples of the spam messages to spam@exetel.com.au. Also, as tocpcs said, not publishing your email address on the internet is important to stop spam at its source.

Cheers

Gidget

[billrv]

Many thanks for the quick responses. Pardon my ignorance but what constitutes "publishing my address on the internet"? I do receive a number of regular newsletters from various sites such as genealogy sites etc. which I have subscribed to.

[CoreyPlover]

Pardon my ignorance but what constitutes "publishing my address on the internet"?

The largest source of spam comes from when your email address is publicly visible on websites for whatever reason. There are programs that regularly trawl the web, very similarly to Google's search engine, looking for email addresses on pages. As an example, this page has your mailto link in the footers of your posts and these forums are publicly readable any person or computer program.

Subscribing to things using your real email address is another, albeit less likely, possible source of spam because there is nothing stopping those companies from forwarding their email lists on to marketing lists for money.

Edit: Having your email address on these pages is not actually too much of an issue, because any spam sent to it is likely to be sent to a whole lot of other exemail addresses as well. This increases the chance that it is tagged as spam because no genuine email (not originated from Exetel) would mass email itself to lots of exemail address.

[daggy]

my churn to Exetel was completed this afternoon about 6.00pm & by 6.30pm I had set up my exetel email addresses, 3 of, 1 for myself, 1 for my wife & 1 for the last of our offspring to remain at home.

By 6.35pm I received my 1st spam email.

How could someone know our email addresses so quickly???

I haven't subscribed to anything yet.

could it be that because I was previously with exetel about 3 yrs ago & that I am using the same variation of email names? or is there such an advancement been made in the way email add's can now be collated that your targeted almost instantly.

[tocpcs]

Your spam could have originated from anywhere really.

Is it a common name? Is it one you had active before (the same one?).

On my mailserver I see constant attempts to hit addresses that don't exist. Some of them are close, but for example: "mailtosales@" - was a recent one I saw.

[austdata]

On my mailserver I see constant attempts to hit addresses that don't exist. Some of them are close, but for example: "mailtosales@" - was a recent one I saw.

@daggy: Spammers hit domain names with any type of account name prefix they can think of or probably auto-generate. If they get a response, the e-mail is on-sold in "spam e-mail lists".

@tocpcs: If the spammers get a real one and keep hitting it, screw the unwritten rules and turn on BoxTrapper! It's almost stopped spam on my personal address.

Cheers,

Mike

[daggy]

[quote="tocpcs"]Your spam could have originated from anywhere really.

Is it a common name? Is it one you had active before (the same one?).

no it's not a common name, more a combination of mine & my wifes names.

yeah, the names were active a few years ago as I mentioned but i'd figured that seeing they had been out of circulation for that long they'd be safe to use again, not that we had spam issues with these names previously.

I might make up a random new email address & see if it gets spam hits.

[SysAdmin]

my churn to Exetel was completed this afternoon about 6.00pm & by 6.30pm I had set up my exetel email addresses, 3 of, 1 for myself, 1 for my wife & 1 for the last of our offspring to remain at home.

By 6.35pm I received my 1st spam email.

How could someone know our email addresses so quickly???

If it's the email address I suspect (the one that is currently slated for deletion) then we have been getting spam for it since well before you created it, on a daily basis, multiple times a day.

We get a lot of spam not destined for mailboxes that exist. I estimate around 2-3 times the actual level of email (and spam) destined for legitimate mailboxes.

Andrew

[daggy]

my churn to Exetel was completed this afternoon about 6.00pm & by 6.30pm I had set up my exetel email addresses, 3 of, 1 for myself, 1 for my wife & 1 for the last of our offspring to remain at home.

By 6.35pm I received my 1st spam email.

How could someone know our email addresses so quickly???

If it's the email address I suspect (the one that is currently slated for deletion) then we have been getting spam for it since well before you created it, on a daily basis, multiple times a day.

We get a lot of spam not destined for mailboxes that exist. I estimate around 2-3 times the actual level of email (and spam) destined for legitimate mailboxes.

Hi, yep that's right. it's the email address i've deleted. surely it's not that much of a common name, my guess is that it was targeted from when we used it 3 yrs ago.
Dags

[egort]

I had the same problem today. Just churned back to Exetel and set up an email address (admittedly one that I was using with Exetel when I was with them before), and immediately I got 2 emails, one confirming my new email address and a Spam email which was not addressed to me but just had a random name eezb7ATexemail.com.au. I have deleted the new email address and will stick to using my other email account I set up with my hosting service. Obviously it seems that there is no filtering whatsoever on a standard account.

Evert

[Gidget]

Obviously it seems that there is no filtering whatsoever on a standard account.

There is an opt-in service at $2 per month per email account. Check your User Facilities for details.

Gidget

[James]

I had the same problem today. Just churned back to Exetel and set up an email address (admittedly one that I was using with Exetel when I was with them before), and immediately I got 2 emails, one confirming my new email address and a Spam email which was not addressed to me but just had a random name eezb7ATexemail.com.au. I have deleted the new email address and will stick to using my other email account I set up with my hosting service. Obviously it seems that there is no filtering whatsoever on a standard account.

Evert

There is no filtering on the standard accounts, that's why there is the spam filtering option.

[Jeff]

I get spam from email accounts that I do not own. I suspect exetel just dumps it in my box because I don't pay the 2 bucks.
It really does not bother me as I have a very good filter in place. I would get 40 a day, hit the shift/delete key and they are gone.