Fishy Email Service

[Paul McKenna]

I have been a regular user of a particular free email service for over 4 years now. At the beginning there was no junk email and the email service was excellent. Lately I receive over 150 junk emails a day and this is hardly the fishy part.
Some of the junk emails that are being sent to my inbox have extremely familiar last names. I mean they use the last names of people on my address list to give the appearance of being an email from someone I might know. Sometimes even the first name is same. Has anyone else experienced anything similar?

[shankar vembu]

same here. for around 4 yrs, i have been using this email service and i get a lot of junk mails nowadays. For me the subject appears interesing, for example "Hi", this is a common subject, atleast I use it on many occasions. But then I delete the mail if the name is not familiar to me, atleast I can make out from the name that it's a junk mail unlike yours
now this service has stopped registration for new users. i dont wanna change to some new service, its like my pet service and i have some important mails in different folders , mebbe i should move this to somewhere. who knows, now they have stopped new registrations, hope they dont kick out old users
shanks

[Jim Yingst]

Oh, definitely. There are viruses out there which raid the victim's address book and then mail themselves out to all the addresses, prehave faking the return address so you have a hard time seeing who it's really from. I suspect some such viruses also send a copy to an e-mail harvester, who gets a list of e-mail addresses of people who are likely to know each other. So then they can spam you at their leisure (after the virus itself has been removed), masqueading as one of your friends. Very annoying. Though yahoo's sapm filtering seems to do a decent job of screening it out nowadays. Note that it's worth remembering that in order for you to be a victiim of this, all that's necessary is that someone you know was once a victim of the virus. So if you get this stuff, it doesn't mean you have a virus, or even necessarily that your friend has a virus - but probably someone who knows both of you did catch a virus at some point. It's probably not worth spending a lot of time tracking down who it originally came from; there's too much misdirectio involved. I just learn to ignore stuff from "friends" which doesn't seem to be about any subject I'd normally be interested in.
Now having said all that, if someone else has good suggestions for how to deal with this sort of thing more proactively, I'm all ears.

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

My 2 cents: for this reason, if you email me and the subject line is "Hi" or "Hello" I guarantee you I'll never see the message. It will be deleted unread. This is a horrible subject line for an email message; seeing such a header is an effective spam filter in its own right.

[shankar vembu]

Originally posted by Ernest Friedman-Hill:
My 2 cents: for this reason, if you email me and the subject line is "Hi" or "Hello" I guarantee you I'll never see the message. It will be deleted unread. This is a horrible subject line for an email message; seeing such a header is an effective spam filter in its own right.

ok got it. i will stop using "Hi" from today onwards. i better leave my mail without any subject. i dont want ppl. to delete my mail unread.

[shankar vembu]

BTW did anyone of you face the situation where the email service you are using is shut down "permanently" !!! i know famous email services will not do this. but i am having nightmares that mine will get shut down one day.

[Michael Ernest]

Moving this meaningful conversation to General Computing.

[Jim Yingst]

i better leave my mail without any subject.
No, blank subjects aren't that uncommon either for spam or viruses. If I dont recognize the sender, I'll often assume that a blank subject is just more spam, and ignore it. If I do recognize the sender, well it may still be spam, but I'll probably at least glance at it. It may be a relative who just doesn't know how to use e-mail properly. But one way or another, if you're sending mail to someone like me, you're better off having a subject of some sort. Preferably something which gives a clue what the topic of the e-mail is. And no repeated exclamation points!!! Those are always a warning sign.

[Richard Hawkes]

Originally posted by Ernest Friedman-Hill:
if you email me and the subject line is "Hi" or "Hello" I guarantee you I'll never see the message. It will be deleted unread. This is a horrible subject line for an email message
Unless you're just saying hello. I use it quite alot!

[Jeroen Wenting]

Originally posted by Richard Hawkes:
Originally posted by Ernest Friedman-Hill:
[qb]if you email me and the subject line is "Hi" or "Hello" I guarantee you I'll never see the message. It will be deleted unread. This is a horrible subject line for an email message
Unless you're just saying hello. I use it quite alot![/QB]

It would still not be seen. Spamfilter will kill it unless you're on the addressbook and the headers are not suspicious

[paul wheaton]

I route all of my e-mail to yahoo. It has a lot of really nice spam filter stuff. Their regular spam filter works pretty good. Currently, I sent about 100 spams a day directly to the trash because they contain words like "penis" or "viagra". Another 200 a day makes it into the bulk e-mail box. About 25 spams a day make it to my regular inbox. Unfortunately, 1 valid e-mail per week makes it to my spam box: The weekly JavaRanch mailing. I read all of the subject lines in the spam box each day to see if there is anything else that errantly makes it to the wrong box.
Yahoo also has a new optional feature that I really like. You can have all e-mails filter out all images. When you do this, it offers a "show images" button. So now, if I read a valid message and go to the next message and it happens to be spam, I don't load an image from their server that verifies that my e-mail address is valid. As an added bonus, I don't have some image of boobs pop up while at work.

[Jeroen Wenting]

Originally posted by Paul Wheaton:
I route all of my e-mail to yahoo. It has a lot of really nice spam filter stuff.

The moment I started blocking all Yahoo domains (except some specific individuals and mailing lists) the volume of spam that made it past my filters dropped by about 50%.
Guess they just reroute all that spam they filter out to others outside their network?