Re: Porn Via Email
 

AFAIK the email client downloads a copy of the email's headers (the part of an email that specifies the subject, sender, recipient, and so on). The email body stays on the server. The client doesn't keep trying to download the email. If you select to download the email the client will (should) remove the email from the server and put it on your PC. If you select the "leave [a copy] on server" option, the client downloads a copy of the email and leaves the original on the server.

Yes - all emails within an account, regardless of which folder they're in, count towards the quota.


The way I do it is to specify a default of "leave messages on server... delete when deleted from trash". This is useful if, like alanf617 says, you want to access your emails from elsewhere. Emails are still downloaded to my PC, so when NTL deletes emails after 90 days I still have a copy, and when I delete an email from my PC it's also deleted from the server. I have rules that move spam and emails from various mailing lists to named folders (BCS list emails go in the BCS folder, and so on). As part of each rule I specify that the emails should be deleted from the server - this prevents the account going over quota.

My email client is The Bat!.

Re: Porn Via Email
 

Surely ISPs like NTL are in a unique position to block a lot of spam very easily, as they can see a bigger picture, i.e similar messages being sent to a large number of users in a relatively short timeframe.
How about this simple rule :
If an email contains more than a couple of external links, 'gibberish html' or any potentially executable attatchment, delay it for a couple of minutes.
If, during that delay period, the same IP sends a similar mail to more than a few other users, bounce or bin all similar (i.e matching above criteria) messages from that IP.
Any genuine emails that 'look like' spam will just incur a short delay, but there should be almost no false-positives.
Can anyone see anything other than ISP lethargy that would stop a simple scheme like this being feasable ?

Re: Porn Via Email
 

AIUI, many of the most powerful server-side solutions out there use a scoring system, allowing the user to set the benchmark higher or lower depending on how tolerable false positives would be. Here's the test list for spamassassin:

http://spamassassin.apache.org/tests.html

In practice, it's possible to set a high score that'll block most (not all) spam, with an extremely low false positive rate.

Re: Porn Via Email
 

I have read the posts about PORN spam with interest.

Posting back to the headers is a waste of time IMHO.

I have recently been receiving porn with variations on the theme "Young Teens F***" which display a pornographic image - my concern is that less educated users, possibly children, could be exposed to this filth.

This particular e mail points to a downloadable file (probably a premium rate dialler) which was until recently hosted on wanadoo.es. I have been forwarding details to abuse@wanadoo.es with sample e mails (200+) attached and the hosting was removed! I'd like to think I had some part of that!

Now, they are hosted on gratisweb, another wanadoo host so here I go again!

Re: Porn Via Email
 

I think these are the ones most people are getting, disgusting if you ask me, my 14 year old lad is getting them to. Spam-stop are deleting them at their end so I don't get any porn or spam on my computer at all now

Re: Porn Via Email
 

One of the gurus in nanae did some analysis on one of these for me. Group google "wanadoo porn dialer spammers" if you're interested in what he came up with.

Voila/Gratisweb/Wanadoo's failure to act promptly on abuse notifications about this is a long-running story. I went to the iwf site to complain about it - and guess who they're sponsored by? Yes, that's right, wanadoo. I pointed out to them that taking money from a firm which is effectively hosting hardcore content being sent indescriminately to children is hypocritical - their media woman gave me some BS about it not being a problem because their experts had looked at the image, and the models weren't children so they weren't bothered. Money talks, huh? I guess if a company was putting up porn billboards outside a school, they'd take their money too.

BTW - according to another thread in nanae, some of the sites that these wanadoo redirects lead to *do* contain child pornography of the worst kind. So much for wanadoo's "zero tolerance".

Re: Porn Via Email
 

Just an observation...

Disgusting porn - the viewer didn't ask to receive it, so someone sent it - they know what the viewer is looking at;
Pleasing porn - the viewer actively sought it out and can convince themselves that no one else knows what they're looking at.

Basically, it's about our dated attitudes to sex :) That said, I agree that indiscriminately distributing porn via email is unacceptable given that many children have irresponsible parents who let them use the Internet without supervision, or who abdicate their responsiblities to third-party software products.

Re: Porn Via Email
 

As regards whether we can trust NTL to filter spam - Microsoft can do it, so anyone can do it! Remember the days when hotmail accounts were an invitation to receive spam? I stopped using my account for real email as for every proper email I was receiving several huindred spams. But these days I get maybe 1 spam email every couple of months.

And as regards things like SpamPal - yes, they're all very well but you still have to download the messages to your server, and things like virus-containing mails are about 150K each, that's a lot of bandwidth. MailWasher is better as you get to delete it direct from the server, but this is slow if you leave your messages on the server so you can get at them via webmail.

Whatever NTL do they are going to lose customers. They just need to decide whether they'd prefer to lose them via inaction, or by doing something. I suspect that more people will be lost be allowing spam through than those who would go elsewhere because they prefer to deal with spam themselves.

But I have this theory that NTL want to lose as many email customers as possible, so they might stand a chance of providing a better service without spending any more money...

Re: Porn Via Email
 

In my experience this isn't entirely accurate. AIUI Spampal uses the "TOP" command to get headers to send to DNSBLs. You can then choose to have it add a tag to the subject line based on the result. Using OE it's then possible to set up a "delete on server" rule which deletes the mail without downloading the body. What it comes down to is how much confidence you have in different blocklists. In my case, anything from China or Korea gets tagged CHI-KOR and I never see it. I'm thinking about extending that to the Spamhaus SBL+XBL lists, as I've had such good results with them. (Zero false positives.)

I'm puzzled as to why this works - after all, spampal can only tag the mail on the local machine, not ntl's server - but for some reason it does.

Well, NTL has the option of letting people decide for themselves. They could allow people to opt in to or out of server side spam filtering, then keep the two kinds of accounts on different sets of mailservers.

Re: Porn Via Email
 

That would be nice. Though at the moment I'd be happy if I could just receive any email! What's the betting that when I do eventually manage to log on there are half a dozen 'your mailbox is over the high water mark' messages in there too...

Re: Porn Via Email
 

AFAIK Spampal does what the email client tells it to do. Spampal is a mail proxy - if your email client requests just the email headers and not the full body, then that's what Spampal will retrieve and process. Likewise, if your email client requests the full email, including body, that's what Spampal will do. Spampal will work with IMAP so you can always use IMAP if you don't want to download the spam.

I've added an extra DNSBL for countries and configured Spampal to use its aggressive "Pre-created filtering strategy". I have Zone Alarm Pro so I've disabled the extra regex filter rule set for viruses and added a few rules to catch quarantined attachments. Everything works great so I'd hope that NTL give me the option to opt out of their attempts at filtering.

Re: Porn Via Email
 

Yebbut... what if the choice was staying on unfiltered mailservers at the current level of service or getting your mail from servers benefiting from filtering? Spampal & OE work fine for me, and left to my own devices I can deal with a spampload of roughly 250 a day with very little inconvenience. And that's on dial-up. My problems (well, my email problems!) currently start and end with ntlworld's mailservers - and I don't see how they can fix that without introducing server-side spam filtering.

Re: Porn Via Email
 

I'd go with another email provider :) I imagine hundreds would do likewise - the mass exodus would result in the level of service dramatically improving for those brave folks sticking with NTL.