Anti-Spam

One thing that I’ve certainly noticed over the last week is the high number of emails from Westpac warning me that I need to update my details or my accounts will be suspended or I will lose services. Firstly, I’m not a Westpac customer so immediately I knew these emails were a scam. Secondly, Mailwasher displays the emails in plain text so I can see where the links are actually.

Most of these ‘phishing’ emails look convincing on the surface as the link is usually typed out in full but points to a completely different website. When a link is written, it has the basic structure of What is the destination website this link is going to and then What are the words that will make up the link. For example, a link might say Click Here or More Information but in the case with these spammers, they will type out the REAL address as the text for the link but then when you click you’ll be taken to their bogus site.

Unfortunately with any spam message, there will always be a small percentage that click the link and end up giving away their private details to their bank accounts. The main people this affects are the baby boomers who aren’t as tech savvy but have a good stash of savings put away for their retirement.

The best thing you can do when you get an email from your bank is not click any links. ALWAYS type in the website address of your bank or use a bookmark to make sure you are going to the correct website before providing ANY information.

British businessman Nigel Roberts has won a landmark damages case for being sent unwanted email after he sued Media Logistics UK.

Roberts, who had just earnt his law degree, is a recognised net expert and after lengthy correspondence, the company offered £100 in damages but claimed that they couldn’t disclose the name of the company that had bought his email address for legal reasons. Eventually, Media Logistics relenquished the name of a long-dead company which Roberts took to court in October and won with damages to be decided at a hearing on January 4 but a final settlement was reached of £300 just before Christmas.

The case sets a precedent for any EU company involved in sending unsolicited email and is interesting because the out of court settlement will not be binding on future cases.

Roberts is now making available a series of legal templates based on his case which will be available for free on his website. www.spamlegalaction.co.uk

According to America Online, ads mentioning real estate tycoon and star of the NBC show “The Apprentice”, Donald Trump, and those hawking “Penis Patch” body enhancements were among the top 10 junk emails of 2005. Noticeably absent was Porn.

More than half a trillion items of spam were blocked by AOL filters only marginally above 2004 levels while the number of spam reported by their 26 million members is down about 75 percent since 2003.

During 2005, AOL blocked an average of 1.5 billion spam messages per day while 80 percent of all email received at its gateway is deemed junk and blocked.

Source

Symantec’s Norton AntiSpam 2005 filters out all of that unwanted email, making your online activites far more enjoyable. Not only does Norton AntiSpam 2005 filter email messages coming into your favourite POP3 email program, now it also filters messages coming to your Yahoo! email account. It even blocks intrusive online ads.

The McAfee SpamKiller 2005 6.0 employs a technologically superior, multi-layered filtering engine to prevent that spam from making it to your inbox. Unsolicited, fraudulent and inappropriate email messages require a strong defense so make a stand against the unwanted junk now with the McAfee SpamKiller 2005 6.0.

I recently talked about how when sending email you should always use your ISP’s SMTP server to ensure that your email is delivered and not blocked by Spam Filters. Unfortunately this week I have had to deal with a client whose emails have been blocked because their ISP has been blacklisted in SORBS.

The blacklisting occured on the 11th of December and so far has taken 9 days for the technicians at this particular ISP to do anything. Considering this is Christmas, I suspect that there are thousands, if not millions, of dollars worth of sales being lost due to emails being discarded by Spam Filters everywhere. The unfortunate thing is that most Spam filters don’t bounce email because the majority of the time the return address has been faked and doing so would increase internet traffic exponentially. We only caught this one because we noticed emails weren’t arriving internally. If it were orders for Christmas presents then Aunty Mavis might be missing out this year.

One website you can use to check whether your ISPs mail server has been blacklisted is www.dnsstuff.com. The website has many useful tools but in particular you want to look at the Spam Database Lookup in the centre of the middle column. You will need to enter in the mail server IP address that your ISP is using which can be found in the headers of your email and look something like this: Recieved: from proxy.google.com (proxy.google.com [216.239.57.4])

If you have any red lines come up once you run the DNS Stuff tool then I would recommend informing your ISP immediately and ask them to address the issue by getting themselves removed from the Spam Database they are listed in as early as humanly possible.

I have had a few discussions with people recently as to why they haven’t been able to recieve emails from genuine senders when the sent email is bounced back. Was it a problem with the receiving email server or is it an issue with the sender?

This is a question that seems to pop up from time to time. When an email is bounced normally people will assume that it is the recipient who is at fault but in reality this may not be the case.

Having investigated this a little I have discovered that the majority of cases where legitimate email has been bounced is due to the email being sent via a free email service such as hotmail, yahoo or gmail.

The reason why email tends to be bounced is because the recipient mail server will be using one or more blacklists including http://www.ordb.org, http://relays.osirusoft.com/ or http://spamcop.net/bl.shtml?. When an email is sent via a server listed in one of these blacklists, the recipient server will automatically bounce any email with a matching ip address.

How does a mail server get listed? It tends to happen when a mail server is repeatedly flagged as sending spam. If that server is known as one responsible for delivering spam then it will automatically be bounced from any recipient server.

What can I do to get my email through? If you absolutely must use a free email service like gmail then have an account set up for it in your email software but make sure you use your ISP’s SMTP server. Failing that, if your email is being bounced and you’re actually already using your ISP’s SMTP server then it might be time to change service providers. If your ISP hasn’t made sufficient effort to prevent spam being sent via it’s servers then you should be worried about what else they are neglecting security wise.

ISP’s can get delisted once they have proved to the organisation to which their IP address have been blacklisted that they no longer enable spammers to relay their spam through them. Normally there is a small fee involved which is more of a nusiance to ISP’s than anything and in the case with some, they prefer to blame the recipient server than address their own problems.

Just remember to always use your ISP’s SMTP server when you are sending email to ensure your important emails aren’t disappearing into cyberspace.

In terms of unwanted email, Spam can only be defined as such if it is both unsolicited and bulk.

According to spamhaus.org:

Unsolicited means that the Recipient has not granted verifiable permission for the message to be sent.

Bulk means that the message is sent as part of a larger collection of messages, all having substantively identical content.

We get unsolicited email all the time from people legitimately trying to contact us without us necessarily knowing who the sender is. This is completely fine.

We also receive bulk email in the form of subscribed services which too, is also fine.

While we all hate the flood of emails urging us to purchase pharmaceutical goods, spam isn’t an issue of content but rather of consent. If your personal identity and context is irrelevant because the message could be equally be applicable to anyone else and you haven’t granted explicit permission then the message can be deemed as spam.

PC Magazine recently awarded Spyware Doctor 3.2 with the “Editor’s Choice Award” as their pick for the best anti-spyware product in the world.

Firetrust are offering a 35% discount on Spyware Doctor but be quick as this offer expires on the 29th of July.

Discount code: FireTrust20

Symantec has released a public beta of their Norton AntiVirus 2006 software for Windows 2000/XP and is available for download. Symantec are offering a FREE copy of the software to the first 60 beta users who can submit undocumented bugs.