For several weeks now my mail box have been overwhelmed by e-mail from people I do not know (names I dont recognise) with odd or unusual headers. Many contain attacxhments but some do not. I am deleting all of them. My virus checker attaches a bomb to some of them others it does not suggest may be bad. I know one other contributor to this forum is seeing the same thing as we have been discussing it off-line. I regularly visit and post on several forums so they may all be under attack.
Any one else notice this?

I wouldn't say that is due solely to this forum. Do you have a well known ISP, like aol, cox, hotmail, etc? If so, people can employ a war dialer of sorts to mail bomb those isp's by sending mail to almost random email address like wiorg@cox.net, wiiorg@cox.net, williorg@cox.net. According to my junk mail I have a small "dobber", I need to refinance my house, I need a date, My xanex, valium, and percocet prescriptions need to be filled, and it wouldn't hurt me to do a little on-line gambling.

As a rule if I don't know the sender I delete the mail. I also never post my email address in any forum for the world to see. Windows is a little on the weak side when it comes to security, a virus writer can and will use personal address books to propigate thier virus using this address book, so if a friend of yours gets a virus it's not unlikely that you will recieve an email from his/her computer containing this virus.

This forum however is run on Redhat Linux Fedora RC1 using the Apache webserver 2.0.48 and powered by PHP 4.3.4 it's unlikely, not impossible, that the user list has been comprimised

I signed up to bid on E-bay items. Immediately, I started getting junk emails. Within a couple months, I was getting 25 to 30 a day. I had to change email addresses. Now, I do not give out my email address and I am only signed up on two forums. So far no problems.

I got signed up for the Democratic party newsletter after posting something on e-bay for a relative, now that's the worst kind of spam! Sort of like a train wreck in motion, the drivel that they produce.... anyway -

There's a lot of ways for your email to get to the spammers / virus senders. Very likely, someone you know got a virus, and the virus got your address from their email. So that's real common.

Some sites you visit will spy on your computer, and, if you ever put your email address out in public, the spam-bots and web-crawlers will find it and then you're on the list.

I don't get a lot of that crap, but some in inevitable. Mostly I can spot it and delete without even opening it. Be sure to report spam to your ISP, sometimes they have a simple way to do this.

I get about 50 a day, and haven't noticed any unusual increase in them lately. Mozilla catchs about 90% of them and sends them to the junk folder automatically.

The best way to get rid of those darn spamers, sorry to say change your email address :( before doing so send out a email to all the people you do want to keep in contact with and give them your new email address 8) been there done that LOL. The big things to watch out for is free stuff on the web, when filling out those forms you may be giving your info for them to distribute to others, almost like a STD's really catchy LOL, before you know it you have thousands of emails being sent to you daily, then you try to un-subscribe, ya write 80% of them are dead ends, what a pain. Aim small hit small. RAMbo.

then you try to un-subscribe, ya write 80% of them are dead ends, what a pain. Aim small hit small. RAMbo.

Those unsubscribe links are usually a method of email verification by spammers. When you click on it your email address is then listed as verified and in turn sold to other spammers as a bonified email address.

Something to try if you're only going to give an email address for a one-time registration or something: When they ask for an email address, type "xxx@mailinator.com". Replace the xxx with whatever you want. Information will be sent to that address, and is deleted automatically after a few hours. Don't use it for regular correspondence; just use a made-up name whenever you need to. There's no registration, and when you want to check for the reply, just go to www.mailinator.com and type in the name you'd made up. Pretty slick...

You are not alone. I get several unknown address e-mails everyday. The first time I noticed it was I opened an e-mail from my wife to me. Looked normal, but when I opened it it was a virus. The firewall alerted me and would not permit the material to open. When she checked into it she found someone had apparently hacked into her e-mail address. My buddy told me someone hacked into his and was sending out porn material. Seems they place a letter or number in front of your normal address and send out this crap. If I don't recognize the account, I delete it immediately.

Az, Good idea, i would not have thought of that.
I guess I have been lucky but I have had very trouble of this kind until these past three or four months. the last month or two being the worst.

DiRL, Thanks for explaining how the forum works in this regard.

Mailwasher let's you preview your mail and lets you delete the spam before you download it into your email program. The free version does preview despite what the chart says, although it doesn't work with Hotmail. I was getting emails with large viruses attached and Mailwasher got rid of them before I spent 5 minutes downloading them, and deleting them from my email.
http://www.mailwasher.net/

Bye
Jack

MikeG, Was that a political statement? ;)

MikeG, Was that a political statement? ;)

Nope - just the truth! :D

Glad you feel that way! :D

To be fair, I did go back and look at that account, to see if any of the Democratic party spam was on the subject of firearms. I know they've sent out emails on continuing the assualt-weapons ban, but the mailbox only keeps stuff for 30 days. So it had some, uh, 'positions' (trying to be polite and stick with the subject here) on other things.

I am going to check it about once a week and see what comes up in their mailings that's related to 2nd amendment issues. I'm sure with the AWB sunset this fall, we'll have plenty to review, whether we want to or not.....

[QUOTE=Jack Monteith]Mailwasher let's you preview your mail and lets you delete the spam before you download it into your email program. The free version does preview despite what the chart says, although it doesn't work with Hotmail. I was getting emails with large viruses attached and Mailwasher got rid of them before I spent 5 minutes downloading them, and deleting them from my email.
http://www.mailwasher.net/

Mailwasher is great; I use the free version as well. It does work with Yahoo, but the free version is only good for one account. Nice part is that it bounces the email back to the server, essentially telling it there's no-one at your address, which can cut down on future spam.

Jack,
Thanks for the link

Hey Guys,

I'm actually experiencing a decrease in spam. I'm at RifleMag.Com, and received a couple hundred last month, but its trailed off to almost nothing at this point.

Lobo in West Virginia

It comes and goes. The ISPs get better filters, then the spammers find ways around them. Stay on the alert.....

I started using K9 (http://keir.net/k9.html) to suplement the Mozilla spam filter this week. In the first couple hours of using it K9 was already catching things that Mozilla was missing. So far it seems like a great tool to help manage the incoming spam.