Rant: OK Spammers, Enough is Enough!
Usually spam does not bother me. Very little of it ever gets to my inbox because I use MailWasher. It will download the headers only from my mail server and I can see the spam, delete and/or bounce and blacklist it before it ever gets to my inbox. If I'm not sure if it's spam or not, I can also preview the message in MailWasher. I wouldn't go without it now.
Anyway, I about a month ago I started getting hundreds of bounced messages daily. Usually I would delete them as they were just spammers spamming my autoresponders and the autoresponder were replying back to the spammers' invalid email addresses. They rarely use a good address in their spam. After all, they don't want you replying back to them and asking them to stop spamming you. They don't want you to complain to their ISP about their unsolicited emails.
Since the amount of bounced email I was receiving had more than tripled, I decided to preview some of them in MailWasher. to see if I could tell who was heavily spamming my autoresponders.
What I discovered was not what I expected. A spammer was sending out bulk email and forging my website domains' main email address in the "From" line. Of course I was furious!
The spam was selling all sorts of medications and using several different websites. I did a "whois" search on the sites and they all belonged to the same person. I sent an email to the address he had listed in his registration information. It came back as undeliverable.
I sent an email to their webhost. It came back as undeliverable. I guess this webhost must cater to spammers so they also don't want anyone emailing them to complain.
Since all contact information must be correct when you register a domain, I decided to make a complaint to the company where these sites, as well the webhosting site, had registered their domains. As of yet, they have not responded and my complaint ticket is still open. It does say that the domain contacts have until Nov. 24, which is today, to respond. If they don't, and their contact information is still false, the registrar will cancel their domain registration. This will probably be the case as the registering company is probably unable to contact them to tell them to provide valid contact information. I would assume that where they used false email addresses in their contact information, they probably used false mailing addresses and false telephone numbers as well.
I did contact my webhost, Host Assured, and as usual Mike got right back to me immediately. He said he would see what could be done about this abuse.
Unfortunately, there wasn't much he could do as it was impossible to contact the spammers and their websites all traced to servers in China. Mike did set my domain's email account to automatically delete any bounced messages as soon as they come in. So that took a big load off the amount of email I was receiving.
It's important to contact your webhost immediately if you find that a spammer is forging your email address. Your webhost will then know ahead of time what is going on before they start receiving spam complaints.
In the meantime I had to deal with angry people emailing me and asking me to take them off my mailing list, which of course I never even had. I had to write emails explaining that my address was forged and I was doing everything I could to stop the abuse. I had to deal with ISPs telling me that I was blacklisted for spamming. This incident has cost me a lot of time and money. There were much more important things that I could have been doing rather than having to clean up behind idiotic, low-life spammers.
Spam has become such an enormous problem that ISPs have spam filters set up which actually blocks a lot of your legitimate email. This I totally disagree with as I am no longer receive many of my favourite ezines and even email from friends and family. They are being blocked by the filters. I think that each person should have the right to decide whether they want the spam filters on their email accounts. If they do, that's fine. But I would prefer not to have them on my account and use my MailWasher to filter out the spam myself.
The ISP's filters are far from perfect. They block a lot of legitimate email but still let some spam come through. But there is not a thing we can do about it. The ISPs are trying their best to help stop a problem that costs everyone time and money as well as overloading servers. It's probably safe to assume that the spammers have pretty much ruined email.
Anyway, I about a month ago I started getting hundreds of bounced messages daily. Usually I would delete them as they were just spammers spamming my autoresponders and the autoresponder were replying back to the spammers' invalid email addresses. They rarely use a good address in their spam. After all, they don't want you replying back to them and asking them to stop spamming you. They don't want you to complain to their ISP about their unsolicited emails.
Since the amount of bounced email I was receiving had more than tripled, I decided to preview some of them in MailWasher. to see if I could tell who was heavily spamming my autoresponders.
What I discovered was not what I expected. A spammer was sending out bulk email and forging my website domains' main email address in the "From" line. Of course I was furious!
The spam was selling all sorts of medications and using several different websites. I did a "whois" search on the sites and they all belonged to the same person. I sent an email to the address he had listed in his registration information. It came back as undeliverable.
I sent an email to their webhost. It came back as undeliverable. I guess this webhost must cater to spammers so they also don't want anyone emailing them to complain.
Since all contact information must be correct when you register a domain, I decided to make a complaint to the company where these sites, as well the webhosting site, had registered their domains. As of yet, they have not responded and my complaint ticket is still open. It does say that the domain contacts have until Nov. 24, which is today, to respond. If they don't, and their contact information is still false, the registrar will cancel their domain registration. This will probably be the case as the registering company is probably unable to contact them to tell them to provide valid contact information. I would assume that where they used false email addresses in their contact information, they probably used false mailing addresses and false telephone numbers as well.
I did contact my webhost, Host Assured, and as usual Mike got right back to me immediately. He said he would see what could be done about this abuse.
Unfortunately, there wasn't much he could do as it was impossible to contact the spammers and their websites all traced to servers in China. Mike did set my domain's email account to automatically delete any bounced messages as soon as they come in. So that took a big load off the amount of email I was receiving.
It's important to contact your webhost immediately if you find that a spammer is forging your email address. Your webhost will then know ahead of time what is going on before they start receiving spam complaints.
In the meantime I had to deal with angry people emailing me and asking me to take them off my mailing list, which of course I never even had. I had to write emails explaining that my address was forged and I was doing everything I could to stop the abuse. I had to deal with ISPs telling me that I was blacklisted for spamming. This incident has cost me a lot of time and money. There were much more important things that I could have been doing rather than having to clean up behind idiotic, low-life spammers.
Spam has become such an enormous problem that ISPs have spam filters set up which actually blocks a lot of your legitimate email. This I totally disagree with as I am no longer receive many of my favourite ezines and even email from friends and family. They are being blocked by the filters. I think that each person should have the right to decide whether they want the spam filters on their email accounts. If they do, that's fine. But I would prefer not to have them on my account and use my MailWasher to filter out the spam myself.
The ISP's filters are far from perfect. They block a lot of legitimate email but still let some spam come through. But there is not a thing we can do about it. The ISPs are trying their best to help stop a problem that costs everyone time and money as well as overloading servers. It's probably safe to assume that the spammers have pretty much ruined email.
posted by Sue Norrad @ 12:15 PM
<< Home