Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with Spam

Annoying Facebook gets annoyinger

idiomatika — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 10:24:07 -0800

I'm getting lots (I mean lots - over 50 today alone) of phishing/Trojan spam purporting to be from Facebook, asking me to "update my facebook account". How do I stop it? I use Outlook. I've set up numerous rules designed to automatically delete these spam mails as they come in (based on key words in both the originating email addresses and in the message body), but these rules only seem to work intermittently.

It's getting annoying to have to delete them manually when the rules I set up should have worked.

I wouldn't care so much, but they're going to my always-running work address (self-employed, so no clever IT department to do this for me), and its getting quite bothersome.

Am I doing something wrong, or is Outlook just pants?

Gmail fail! Please help!

genmonster — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 06:37:23 -0800

Gmail shame! My account was accessed and all my contacts were spammed. How do I keep this from happening again? I'm not even sure the spam was really sent from my account:it doesn't show up in my sent folder. However there was an entry in 'account activity' that I'm pretty sure wasn't me accessing my account. I already changed my password (which, I admit, hadn't been changed in years). I use the latest version of firefox on my macbook (i don't even know if this is relevant, but whatever). How do I keep this from happening again??

Best blog platform for easy commenting but little spam

bystander — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 05:12:42 -0800

Best blogging software to allow easy commenting by strangers but avoiding comment spam. I want to start a new non-commercial blog that encourages comments from readers, but avoids as much comment spam as possible. I realise this is tough, but what is the best current solution? I am not up to date on this area, but I want a middle ground that perhaps avoids a registration stage or moderating every comment. Is there possibly a comment option that allows a comment to be written, but it only goes live after a link delivered to a valid email is clicked? Is there a better solution? I feel captchas are not as effective as they have been, yet I want to avoid robot spam, but also make drive by valid comments be possible. Is this a pipe dream?
I can probably install any suitable software, but my preference is a *nix based solution or hosted. Free is better but not essential.

How to prevent crawlers from harvesting your email on a website?

paulinsanjuan — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 09:10:04 -0800

How to prevent crawlers from harvesting your email on a website? This question was asked before in '06. I'd like an '09 update.

Two mailings from Peaceful Mountain Donkey Rescue in less than three weeks was the last straw.

ocherdraco — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 20:31:24 -0800

How can I get off mailing lists for charities (and other non-profits) I never contacted in the first place? I occasionally give money to charities, and/or patronize the arts. They, then, pass my information on to other charities and arts organizations, who send me solicitations. I would like to both:

stop the solicitations I am already receiving, and
prevent yet more organizations from spamming me with their junkmail

I already make sure I always uncheck any boxes on forms that indicate I will be added to any mailing lists; unfortunately, not all organizations are straightforward in their intentions in this way.

How do I make it stop?

How to stop (or make life miserable for) anonymous robocallers?

Creosote — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 16:23:45 -0800

What can be done about a persistent anonymous robocaller who is not easily identifiable and who does not abide by the U.S. Do Not Call registry? I'm guessing that I'm not the only MeFite who has recently received a robocall masquerading as a political survey. From a particular nasty robocaller, as their modus operandi is to leave voicemail if you don't answer saying something like "This was a political survey. We may call back later." And then they call the next day. And the next. And the next... Being on the "Do Not Call" list makes no difference. Calling the originating number results in an Eternal Busy Signal.

Based on googling "202-461-3459 robocall", a lot of people are getting these calls. The surveys appear to be sponsored by different groups, with the common denominator being right-wing politics. Presumably they are all contracting with the robocall company.

My landline phone carrier says they have a service to block calls from selected local numbers, but not from long-distance numbers. Do Not Call registry doesn't apply to political calls. And the originating company seems well enough hidden that one can't complain directly to them. They're as bad as a porn spammer from Uzbekistan. And if this company is getting away with it, others are going to follow.

Long-term, the only solution is to tighten Federal law on telemarketing. Short-term... is there anything to be done?

Modifying Email Header in Exim

siclik — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:47:04 -0800

We have an exim email server that is appending our computer names and ip addresses to all email headers. How can we override this so the server's host name and ip address is the only identification listed in the header? Occassionaly, our emails will be blocked by various other mail servers because employees are emailing from dynamic residential ISP etc. which may have a less-than-stellar spam rating. How can I configure Exim to stop appending their personal IP address (and computer name) and, instead, broadcast the server's IP and host name? We are running Exim 4.69 through WHM and cPanel.

Here is a sample header:

Return-path:
Envelope-to: SICLIK@SICLIK.com
Delivery-date: Tue, 25 Aug 2009 14:52:07 -0700
Received: from [11.11.11.11 - SICLIK'S IP] (helo=SICLIK-COMPUTER)
by mailserver.siclik.com with esmtp (Exim 4.69)
(envelope-from )
id 1Mg3wN-0000hs-I3
for SICLIK@SICLIK.com; Tue, 25 Aug 2009 14:52:07 -0700
From: "SICLIK"
To:
Subject: This email will be blocked by some strict email servers
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2009 14:52:20 -0700
Message-ID: <0>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="----=_NextPart_000_00A0_01CA2593.A77D2FE0"
X-Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook 12.0
Thread-Index: AcolzlJX+lOhE5qcQVO7eJb5oJHuFw==
Content-Language: en-us

Possibly Illegal Tupperware Spam

theseampsgoto11 — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 08:39:15 -0800

I have a name and contact info for the individual who's been spamming me. What can I do to report him/get rid of him/make his life difficult? Details inside. I've been getting Tupperware spam for a while now. The email has no unsubscribe link (does that technically make it illegal spam?) so I hit reply and wrote "please unsubscribe me from this list." I was surprised when I not only got a response, but a fairly self-incriminating one at that (full text is below). I could just send it to the spam folder (I'm using gmail), but the audacity of this guy is really getting under my skin. Any suggestions on who/what I can report him to?

from Gregg Kits
to Axxxxxxx Lxxxxxx

Sorry I cant delete or not send email to anyone on the list.

From: Axxxxxxx Lxxxxxx
To: Gregg Kits

I don't want to delete the email - it's spam and I want to be removed from the list.

On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 9:50 PM, Gregg Kits wrote:

I purchased a list from a company and cant pick and choose who I send to it’s the whole list. Just delete my email.

From: Axxxxxxx Lxxxxxx
To: Gregg Kits
Subject: Re: Get It All Set & Super Summer Saving!

please remove me from this mailing list

Does anyone recognize this WordPress plugin? Or know how to effectively the pingbacks it spawns?

arielmeadow — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 17:50:13 -0800

My blog is getting bombarded by a new kind of pingback spam. The pingbacks are produced by a WordPress plugin that appears to mine the web for links related to blog content, which then triggers a pingback notification. Can anyone help me identify the plugin, so I can possibly work to block the pingbacks? You can see the plugin in action here. (Scroll down to "Related Blogs" under the post.)

The issue isn't that the plugin is bad -- but it appears to be the new standard for use on RSS-feed scraping spam blogs, meaning that the pingbacks produced are always complete crap.

My question: anyone recognize the plugin? I'm thinking that if I can identify the plugin, I may be able to find a technique to block the pingbacks it triggers.

(Note: manually blocking pingbacks from specific URLs doesn't scale -- there are dozens and dozens of them.)

Should I protect other people's email addresses on my wordpress site, and if so, what's the easiest way?

omnigut — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 08:41:22 -0800

I have a website that has profiles of a lot of artists. At the moment I'm putting their email addresses on the site. But I don't want to be the cause of their receiving lots of spam emails. I found this post, which didn't seem to answer this specific question. I also found this post, which was a little confusing, and I'm not sure if I should just paste that entire code into the html editor of the wordpress post every time I want to put in a new email address. 1) am I worrying about nothing? Are spam filters good enough to overcome this?

2) if this is a problem, and it's worth "protecting" email addresses, is there a tool that will automatically convert an email address into an image (like Facebook seems to do)? [I would have to do this process dozens of times, and don't want to have to photoshop each one, if I can help it]

3) If there is a tool that will do that, is there a plugin that will do that in wordpress?

4) Is that even the best way of protecting an email address?

I'm using a mac osx. Thanks in advance for your help.

How can I prevent Amazon from sending me junk with my purchases?

Solomon — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 12:27:19 -0800

How can I get Amazon UK to quit sending me flyers with my purchases? Anything I purchase directly from Amazon UK (not from a third party seller) seems to arrive with several flyers inside the parcel. Is there any way to prevent Amazon from sending me this junk? An opt-out button I've missed, perhaps? A freepost address I can return them to so that they can be reused?

I realise that I can deal with them when they arrive. What I want is to prevent them from arriving in the first instance. How can I do that?

URL WTF

mattdidthat — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:04:35 -0800

My site is getting a lot of weirdly-formed referring URLs--some with two or three URLs linked with commas--or URLs that do not appear to contain links to my site. What's going on? Here are two examples of URLs in my hit log--the first is one referrer that shows up in my log as three URLs (including mine) strung together:

http://www.lilidaviesnolink.co.uk/457/magic-betty-sing-along-6th-june, http://www.phonogramnolink.us/blogs2/dpdc/2009/05/trek_30.html, http://www.mattdidthatnolink.com/weblog

Another referring URL without a link to my site:

http://www.mp4dunyasinolink.com/index.php

(To make the URLs work, you'll need to remove the "nolink")

What's going on? What are these referrers, and why am I getting them? If this is spam, could someone please explain what they're doing and how I disable/remove it?

Thanks for the pageviews, no thanks for the spam.

tip120 — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 06:26:21 -0800

I have been getting weird Wordpress referrer spam the last 4 days, but there are no injections or anything of the like on my site. I have a site running wordpress. No comments or users, I'm using it as a simple CMS.

I'm using the StatPress plugin to check out who is coming to the site. This morning, I noticed an abnormally large number of visitors the last few days.

People seem to be visiting pages like mysite.com/?myfjkfosljfsfjd (NB : not a string I've seen, just an example). When clicked, it will go to my homepage. Checking the source, there is nothing out of the ordinary (no spam links, etc). If you google that end string by itself, you get one result, to my site, with a summary that lists a whole bunch of viagra type words.

Any idea what is going on, and how I can stop this?

I was running 2.8.2, upgraded to 2.8.3 this morning.

You can get my details from my userpage if you want specifics.

Spammers III: The Takeover

Kirklander — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 09:46:08 -0800

I have a Wordpress site. In spidering the site, and coming up with the little synopsis underneath the title, Google, Bing and Yahoo all believe that it's not a personal Web site but a spammy list of prescription drugs for sale. I don't understand why. My site is described by major search engines as:

"Keftab No Prescription Mentat For Sale Buy Superman No Prescription Buy Trimox Online Buy Online Remeron Avapro No Prescription Lexapro For Sale Buy Flonase ..."

I thought maybe the GoogleAds had overtaken the search hits, so I deleted them months ago. But still with the Mentat For Sale!

Then I tried setting up Akismet controls, because my old blog comments, in my neglect, had become flooded with spam. I also turned off comments completely. I thought maybe Google had mistaken the spam comments for crucial keywords being discussed in the forums. I don't think that was it, either.

Those lists of drugs also show up in Google caches of individual post pages. But when you go to them, they're nowhere to be seen, with a message of "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page."

The creepiest thing yet is that in one cache, a Wordpress post showed up with the title intact, but the body of the post completely replaced by spam.

Could this be an insidious spam takeover that goes beyond just bad SEO on my long-gone GoogleAds, and months-long delays before Google realizes the ads are gone? How do I flush this stuff out?

Attack of the spam

hibbersk — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 10:25:29 -0800

A particular post on my (wordpress) blog just got hit with over 10 spam comments in 3 minutes. I've disabled comments on that post for now, but what's going on? These aren't the typical website-pimping viagra-toting comments - they're all along the same lines - for example "Thank you for this site, such as multi information! Thank you!", "Oh hell yeah", "nice post, thanks for sharing" etc. Also, the authors have similar sounding addresses - either host238-96-dynamic.16-87-r.retail.telecomitalia.it or 84.123.82.200.dyn.user.ono.com with different numbers at the beginning, sorry I don't know the correct terminology.

I have Akismet enabled and can't remember the last time it let through one spam comment, never mind 10 in the space of a couple of minutes..

Why is this happening, and what should I do about it?
thanks!

Please critique my spam

goshling — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 03:42:22 -0800

Received the following email yesterday in regards to my domain name. My first reaction was to hit delete, but I thought I'd just make sure I wasn't ignoring something I shouldn't be ignoring. Is this spam? Are they waiting for me to respond defending my "property" at which time they'll hit me with a pile of SEO crap for a "small fee"? Is it a scam? Legit? My domain name is {suburb}massage.com. I also have {suburb}massage.com.au and {suburb}remedialmassage.com My registered business name is {suburb} Remedial Massage. I'm in Australia. Obviously there are many places called {suburb} and many businesses offering massage in those places.

Dear Sir/Madam,

We are a domain name registration center in Hongkong,mainly dealing with domain name registration and internet intellectual property rights protection. On June.29,2009 we received a formal application from a local company of your country who is applying to register some domain names with the keyword “{suburb}massage ” and register it as their internet keyword. After investigation,we find that you are the original user of the keyword. As this refers to your company name or trade mark, and in order to avoid the confusion and dispute on the internet, we inform you and would like to know your ideas, if you agree about this issue, we will finish the third company's registration, If you don't agree the third company to register, please inform me.looking forward to your reply.thanks for your understanding and cooperation.

Should I respond to this or just hit delete?

Can spammers scrape emails out of vcards posted on the web?

Karmakaze — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 05:55:46 -0800

Can spammers scrape emails out of vcards posted on the web? It's pretty much common knowledge that it's a bad idea to post your email in plaintext unless you like getting a lot of spam. I've been asked to post vCards instead, but it seems to be that .vcf files are just text files and would be pretty trivial for bots to read. Does anyone know if the email harvesters have been going after vCards, or is it reasonably safe?

How do I get a wrongful suspension lifted in fewer than 30 days?

carofowler — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 09:25:17 -0800

How do I get a wrongful suspension lifted in fewer than 30 days? How do I get a wrongful suspension lifted in fewer than 30 days?

A client's account was suspended for no reason and it's essential we get it back up asap!

This problem is very serious for us and our client is incredibly upset, as are we. If Twitter has an automated suspension mechanism, they should really get back to you MUCH faster than this since I'm sure they suspend plenty of accounts are are not really spammers!

Please help. We have already replied to the twitter message, but there seems no other way to contact them. Is there another way to contact them immediately?

Trolling, trolling, trolling, RawHide!

Mitheral — Tue, 26 May 2009 09:47:42 -0800

What is the attack vector on this apparent facebook phishing email? I received the following email (twice actually) this morning:
Hey Foo,

You recently registered for Facebook. To complete your Facebook registration, follow this link:

http://www.facebook.com/c.php?code=520372293&email=FooBar%40googlemail.com

Facebook helps you communicate and stay in touch with all of your friends. Once you join Facebook, you'll be able to share photos, plan events, and more.

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

Where Foo Bar is my real name and foobar@gmail.com is one of my email addresses. I don't have a facebook account and haven't tried to sign up for one. The link text matches the hover over text in Mozilla.

( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

pwnguin — Fri, 15 May 2009 12:18:48 -0800

What's the oldest recorded use of the Spam Solutions Form Response? I've seen a boing-boing post on February 2004, and an AC slashdot posting a day earlier. Was this the first sighting, or is this just an example of USENET culture imported into the web?

Also, any precursors of this joke form response, spam-related or not, are welcome.

Spam No More! How do I convince gmail of this?

darth_tedious — Fri, 01 May 2009 20:53:39 -0800

How Do I Get Hosts to Stop Labeling My Email As Spam? For the last five years or so, spammers have been systematically spoofing my domains, and sending out the usual Viagra and whatnot emails under my name. I finally asked my hosting service the right question, in the right way, and they finally uncovered the misconfiguration that apparently allowed this to happen. Since my domain name rep is now so shredded that even my actual emails to myself get automatically routed into my Spam Box, I'm curious: How do I go about reversing this, so that my actual emails get sent to my customers' inboxes, instead of their spam boxes?

What is this spam?

jacquilynne — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 07:55:22 -0800

What's the scam in my spam? Lately, we've been getting a lot of spam that's in the vein of "How much is a diamond worth?" and "How much does it cost to drive to Canada?" and "How much does it cost to eat in Florida?"

The contents of the spam are always just a few sentences asking a question that makes sense but is quasi-unanswerable without a ton more information, and usually not appropriate to the addresses it's being sent to, an apology of some kind for needing to ask and a single first name signed.

They're grammatical, and not obviously selling anything, and they contain no links, so what's the point of them? Are they just email harvesters trying to confirm that our addresses actually exist?

Damn that spam

Anonymous — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 10:06:00 -0800

Email address getting tons of spam. Email address then disabled, deleted. Spam still happening. How to stop it? A work email address of mine turned spammy (and not just receiving spam but seemingly originating it). When I left the company associated with the email address, I asked them to disable the account and delete it from any site, etc., and they did. It was also deleted from any google apps used by the company. Yet I am still getting spam from this account on a daily basis (emails to my personal email address that seem to be "sent" from the old, now non-existent spammy address). What is happening, and how can I fix it? The spam is annoying, but also annoying is the thought that other people could be getting spam ostensibly coming from me (since the email address it is coming from has my name in it, and the company's name).

Spam through a PDF?

gonzo_ID — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 04:56:27 -0800

Somebody downloaded a file off my server and now they are getting specific spam. How is this? I uploaded file.pdf to www.subdomain.domain.co.uk and sent the http://www.subdomain.domain.co.uk/file.pdf link via email to a friend so they could view or download. They downloaded the PDF onto their desktop and viewed it.

The file.pdf was some 3D CAD renderings and the Meta of the PDF said similar.

Now my friend is getting loads of spam emails to their email address offering 3D CAD services.

Coincidence or have they been botted. If so, what can I do to stop this if I have to send said link to say.... clients / prospective employers, etc.

further information: there is no index.htm file on the subdomain. both emails use mail.app, me with a gApps account and friend with supermarket.com account out in the cloud. all spam messages are coming from supermarket.com addresses and addressed to the same person, a Dorothy something-or-other.

what's going on?

How do I make Firefox go to a page that I choose if I type a bad URL?

farmersckn — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 15:20:02 -0800

How do I make Firefox go to a page that I choose if I type a bad URL? This askmefi post has some potentially useful info but it does not apply in my case.

In Firefox 3.06, if I type a bad URL into my address bar, such as http://blah/ and instead of doing a google search or an error page, or showing me a url that I might have been attempting to reach, like blah.com, it takes me to this spam search page: "http://hwerror.hwpub.com/?ck=esb02oob60&et=1".

I have modified "keyword.url" in my about:config to do a google search on keywords (different than the default I'm feeling Lucky Search), but it has no effect when I type only a single word into my address bar and hit enter.

I have tried to disable "keyword.enabled" and that has no effect on this problem either.

I have run firefox in safe mode and it has the same result.

I have already switched my DNS server to OpenDNS and confirmed that it is working, so I do not believe that my ISP is re-routing my request.

It is interesting to me, that if I view source on the page, it shows a frameset, and only within that frameset does it pull in the url for the search page referenced above.

I believe that somewhere inside the code or configuration files, or possibly an extension, Firefox has been tweaked to do this to me. Is it possible for me to reconfigure it so that it does not happen?

I am already aware that I am causing this by typing a malformed URL, and that I can do keyword searches if I type two words into the address bar, and also that I can hit CTRL+ENTER to magically append ".com" to a single word in the address bar.

I just want to know if there is a way to put this intercept this redirect and put in my own to google or whatever I desire.

Thank you all.