Why the sudden spam increase?

February 22, 2006 8:47 PM

Why have I suddenly started receiving a TON of spam - all with the subject line "Software" from what sounds like Groucho Marx characters (ie Unknowing G. Bottomfeeder)?

Up until today, my spam was nothing to worry about - only a few a day. The BAM - they started arrriving like mad (likely thousands today). I'm filtering so they aren't being downloaded from my mail server but I'm curious about this long term. Will it just continue? Advice anyone?

posted by davebush to computers & internet (10 comments total)

Ug. Same thing happened to me (much smaller scale). If you have a learning spam filter you can just start marking most of them as spam... eventually you'll see a decrease.

Just make sure you're not opening/previewing them.. if they have images that you're downloading they'll know you have a live account.
posted by dentata at 9:05 PM on February 22, 2006

Oh, you mean these assholes? They're one of the few spammers that got past the obfuscated address on my website.

From: Headlands C. Premarital (platin@[dumbasses].com)
Subject: Software
Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2006 00:24:48 -0600
To:

Learn to build simple and clean websites that can bring in the dough...
Best software prices.

New software on our site:

Actobat 6.0 Pro - $79.95
Windows 2000 Professional - $59.95
Painter 8 - $59.95
Premiere 6.5 - $89.95
CorelDraw Graphics Suite 11 - $59.95
Office 97 SR2 - $49.95
Freehand MX 11 - $69.95
Creative Suite Premium (5 CD) - $149.95
Flash MX 2004 - $69.95
Plus! XP - $59.95
Director MX 2004 - $69.95
Norton System Works 2003 - $59.95
Encarta Encyclopedia Delux 2004 (3CD) - $89.95
Photoshop CS $99.95

Our site:
http://[dumbasses].com


Fortunately it's consistently the same crap... I just filter for "Software" in the subject line and "Photoshop" (and/or some other software) in the body. I don't see it anymore.
posted by chef_boyardee at 9:09 PM on February 22, 2006

Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatownthe Internet.

It could really be anything ranging from "you just signed up to a less-than scrupulous website" to "you posted your email address someplace and a bot finally found it." As usual, the best course of action is filter and ignore. Any kind of a response is a win for the spammer.
posted by jenovus at 9:29 PM on February 22, 2006

I have an email account that gets an actual metric shitload of spam, which is now redirected to a gmail account. The "spam" folder has thousands of message, but a few get through, invariably the message bodies are surreally bizarre, as if they are running through some kind of strange automatic synonym replacement filter.

Anyway, spam happens. For a while I tried giving a different email address @my_domain (forwarding everything to one account) whenever I signed up for something, figuring that if one of the address got out, I could just filter out those address.

Then, some spammer started sending Spam with forged from addresses like random_word@my_domain so I started getting tons and tons of bounce messages at tons of random domain names. Even though I haven't had a machine or anything at that domain for years, I still get tons of Spam at that address.

I just wouldn't worry about it. The messages should be easy to filter since they all have the same subject and contents. What mail system are you using?
posted by delmoi at 10:21 PM on February 22, 2006

I've got things under control via Outlook Express' filters. I'm not overly concerned about this, just kinda baffled by the volume and "out of nowhere" aspects of it.
posted by davebush at 10:41 PM on February 22, 2006

Chances are these guys just bought a mailing list that had your address on it, and they're being a bit overly zealous with their mailings. I'm surprised I haven't seen anything from these guys yet, as I normally get a metric asston of spam from every conceivable source. Although, I just found out that my hosting provider is using spamcop (which I'm incidentally not that impressed with, since one day it was blocking ALL OF GMAIL) so perhaps they are already blocking these guys?
posted by antifuse at 1:26 AM on February 23, 2006

I get a lot of spam too, and I figure at least I get some minor pleasure from the hilarious names in these ones.
posted by tomble at 3:39 AM on February 23, 2006

I have a still-active email account that dates from 1987 and I recently started getting these Software emails. It seems like someone is being quite pro-active.
posted by meehawl at 6:36 AM on February 23, 2006

I've just started getting these too- at my work email, which I have never published on-line. We have a major spam filter and firewall here (bank), so I was very surprised when I started getting these a few weeks ago.
posted by Four Flavors at 9:35 AM on February 23, 2006

I have a dedicated server doing spam & virus filtering. it has every available SpamAssassin ruleset known to man. It has a very VERY well trained Bayes database. It's even using realtime blacklists. The score is set to 5 points.

Yet every day, a few spams do slip through. It's a whole hell of a lot less than the spams that get caught, though. that's the thing about spam filters.. when they don't work, we get mad, but we need to sit back and think of how much spam they *are* catching.
posted by drstein at 10:27 AM on February 23, 2006