Porn Via Email
 

Over the last few days I've been getting pictures of porn through my Email. I have spam cop but it's getting through. This morning I had 12 pictures all the same on my NTL account.

Re: Porn Via Email
 

sadly 90% of our spam emails over NTL are porn and most get through spam filters.

Re: Porn Via Email
 

Hi Kit's, these pictures were dam right filth I must have had 12 this morning and the same yesterday. I think NTL is getting kicked into touch from me anyway I've had enough of their inept service. Why should the customers have to pay for Spam filtering? The spammers only beat it anyway.

Re: Porn Via Email
 

I dont know how spam cop works, but if you use Mailwasher, it will only read the subject line & the sender from the mail server without downloading the entire email.

You will therefore never see any pictures or attachments. You can then either bounce, delete or blacklist any unsavoury emails.

Re: Porn Via Email
 

I use http://www.death2spam.com it cost $35/year, which I consider fantastic value for money. It learns as it goes along - you train it and so do all the other users. Hardly see any spam now.

Re: Porn Via Email
 

I have been using spam assasin on my domain email address and it has been very good at romoving hte spam from those emails. I am thinking ov redirecting the worst affected NTL address to my domain name so they can start to bounced back.

The pictures that come up on these emails or completely disgusting.. I do use mozilla now to filter the spam but it tends to catch the odd email that it shouldn't so I do have to go through the list before deleting but its still time consuming and the titles are explicit whats inside the emails.

I have heard that you can set up outlook to only download headers and then delete without downlloading the rest. Sounds promising.. The big thing is all these spam emails must take up a lot of NTLs server space when we are on holiday and it does use out bandwidth when we have to access them..... I would be all for a blacklist of domain names that constantly send this type of spam.

Re: Porn Via Email
 

Setup your email client to only read messages as plain text, then the images won't appear. It will mess up things like newsletters that are formatted but at least it will stop the porn ;)

MB

Re: Porn Via Email
 

Why not use a program that i use called k9.
You can set it up along with its own DNS filter to learn which emails are good or bad.
I find it better than Mailwasher as it does not bounce the email message back to the sender who may have had their mail address cloned and knows nothing about this till their mailbox gets flooded with bounced emails.

Re: Porn Via Email
 

Where do I get that from?

Re: Porn Via Email
 

Sorry got my thick head on today.
It would help if I gave you guys the link so try this.
http://keir.net/k9.html
I have been using it for some time with very good results and the other bonus is it is free.

Re: Porn Via Email
 

a quick google found a download site here

MB

Re: Porn Via Email
 

If you switch off the preview pane in outlook, you don't see the images. If you can judge it's porn by the subject, you can delete the email without seeing the images.

Re: Porn Via Email
 

To much of this :beer: ??? :D :D :D :D :D

Re: Porn Via Email
 

Then whats the point of NTL doing it then. Me i dont want them to check my mail for spam i would sooner do that myself just incase. The last thing i want is real emails that i want being stopped before i get chance to do something with them. How would i know that they are not being stopped by NTL ?.

Re: Porn Via Email
 

Don't blame Ntl. I have had a dial up account with Zen for over 8 years as well as NtlBB. I got very little spam on either until a few weeks ago, I now have to run mailwasher on my Zen account as I am getting this type of e-mail, 30 or more times a day. Allowing for the fact that, that e-mail address has been "out there" for over 8 years I guess I have been lucky up until now.

Re: Porn Via Email
 

I personally use my Yahoo.co.uk (pop) account as my main account and I get absolutely no spam from them, its all caught by Yahoo. So far I've not had one single real mail get caught. :)

The only problem is that you cant use it here as you need a non yahoo/hotmail account, so I use a Tiscali one for that, but I get spam on it. I guess its going to find you one way or another :(

Re: Porn Via Email
 

I'm all for fighting back. Check the headers of the email and send it back where it came from (if you can). You'll find their ISPs have an acceptable use policy similar to NTLs which, if you read it, says they're not allowed to do that.
I realise this isn't possible for all of them but I think the attitude of just using spam filters ensures that problem continues to linger. If you think about it, they are actually stealing our bandwidth. Any ISP that receives a message regarding 'theft' isn't going to ignore it.
Hey if NTL can consider uncapping your modem as bandwidth theft then I can regard spam the same. :)

Re: Porn Via Email
 

but then by bouncing the message / sending an abuse report you are using more bandwidth yourself...

Re: Porn Via Email
 

That's true but it is my bandwidth. Spam is forced on you. I choose to do this.

Re: Porn Via Email
 

And it could include html code that points back to an image on the spammer's server, so if you open, or even preview, an html message in html as opposed to plain text, the spammer can see that the message has been successfully sent - and send you some more.

I don't really understand how it works myself, but I'm assured it does. :mad:

Re: Porn Via Email
 

If you view the image in the email (normal a 1 x1 pixel clear image) then you effectively visiting the spammers site; if i sent you an email with an image for example www.mydomain.com/image.jpg and you viewed it, the html would cause your email client to access www.mydomain.com/image.jpg to download the image. The spammer can then view the logs on their server to see the ip addresses that have accessed the site. I am sure they have programs that can automatically log this and so the spamming continues...

hth
MB

Re: Porn Via Email
 

what a good explanation - thanks :tu:

- how do you know you are sending it back to where it 'really' came from?
This seems more trouble than -

- using mailwasher etc, to preview email & delete spam before downloading.
- having e-mail client set to display text not html
- disabling the preview pane in OE

If everyone did that the spammers would get no feedback & it would die out :shrug:

Re: Porn Via Email
 

I'm using Netscape 7.2 and in the Privacy settings you can tell it not to download images from remote websites which means that I don't waste time or risk attracting more spam if someone links a picture into an e-mail.

Frankly I can take them or leave them, but I prefer to leave them!

The only time this causes problems is with the "Daily Dilbert" e-mail cartoon (I have to activate the picture download to see it and then switch it off again after, but that's a small price to pay) and any e-mail newsletters which have embedded graphics, in which case I e-mail the senders and suggest they change their policy or allow "text only" versions.

Re: Porn Via Email
 

I use The Bat! as a mail client because it doesn't open HTML emails, hence it's more secure and you're not likely to be confronted with female bits first thing on a morning :sick: SpamPal flags all the dodgy emails, including porn. For example (pre-written rule):

# ~LINE: 50.0 {\b([manhoo]((<[^>]*>)|(-))?){6}d} [CD_NAUGHTY Hidden word manhood]

Re: Porn Via Email
 

My firewall is set to ban everything other than POP/SMTP for my mail client - the "remote load" trick is VERY common, though it does mess up some newsletters (I'd make exceptions rules for them, if I really cared).

Spamcop reporting a couple every couple of days - pill site pest - sent through a proxy (typically Korean or US cable), hosted in chinese webspace - a server level block on direct from dialup/cable pool address space mail, would nuke 99.9% of the spam, with acceptable casualties.

Content evaluation is fraught - there was a thread a while back about an NTL newsletter getting a 2x threshold spam rating in the Spampal regex filter.


PS. It was your thread, if I recall

Re: Porn Via Email
 

Same here.


Yup - I don't consider it an error, nor a tragedy :D

Most of my newsletters that end up as spam do so because the server has been blacklisted - muppet users for you. Content processing ("evaluation" implies AI) works for me - the regex filter is great. Won't find anything as highly configurable as regex's are.

Re: Porn Via Email
 

Someone must have clipped this spammers wings. They have stopped as suddenly as they started, none for the last 3 days.:)

Re: Porn Via Email
 

Interesting... I've been noticing considerable gaps in my regular spammers, I wonder if measures such as COMCAST's clampdown on excessive SMTP traffic are clipping their proxies - and if their domain names are with a registrar who gives a damn, I make a point of reporting them - Korea and China (major providers of proxies and webspace) don't care about spam, but SOME domain registrars do - and may void the domain due to policy or contact details violations.

Going after their domains is about the only way to hurt them!

Re: Porn Via Email
 

But that way they would have a list of ip addresses, not email addresses do they? So how do they determine the email address exists? (Or am I missing something obvious here?

Re: Porn Via Email
 

I've configured Spampal to flag emails from all countries except America as spam - you can pick the countries you want. The URL plugin also uses the same list when checking URLs within emails. Catches a fair bit of spam :)


Something like this as the image source: www.somespammer.com/scripts/dynamicallygeneratedimage.php?victim=fred.bloggs@n tl.com

Re: Porn Via Email
 

Yes, that explains it. :(

Re: Porn Via Email
 

yep that is indeed how it is done... sorry missed that part of the explanation out :)

MB

Re: Porn Via Email
 

Today is Anti Spam Day according to SKY News. I wish it was. :disturbd: :disturbd: :disturbd: :disturbd: :disturbd:

Re: Porn Via Email
 

As ntl seem not to be as proactive with spam filter's I use the following service www.spam-stop.co.uk its still a free service at the moment and filters all spam been using it for a month and not 1 piece of spam also they have a webmail facility so if you want to view the spam you can

Re: Porn Via Email
 

£5 per month, it says.

PS. The tracker bug need not be as obvious as your email address - it may be a number which is your place on the list, or hash coded - even with no explicit identifier, the server logs would give these vermin an idea of how many views they got, so they can claim to reach so many thousands of people for the price of one run.

If you receive a spam advert for anything even semi-legit, don't buy it, and if it appears to be an affilaite for a company that would not condone such practices, get in touch with the company - but 99% of spam these days is pills, porn, or PC protection - occasional affilites for "Evidence eliminator" - though not seen those for a while - perhaps EE read them the riot act, because it made them look even more dodgy than their own "fright tactics" advertising.

Re: Porn Via Email
 

I'd put in a vote for Spam Pal too - it pops the spam into a folder called Spam if you create a rule in Outlook / Outlook Express,has reduced the porn and offers of getting Viagra without seeing a doctor to almost none, which is useful as I don't need breast enhancers and I can write prescriptions for drugs quite legally, and without seeing a doctor (as long as the mirror is covered up)

the other thing todo is log on to the NTL website, go to the webmail section and delete the obvious stuff - almost everything that is sent from a sender that I don't recognise is spam, and can be deleted without downloading

Re: Porn Via Email
 

Yeah I'm a big fan of Spampal - takes care of all my spam. Coupled with The Bat! it's a mean team :tu:


Absolutely. Identifiers are more useful because the spammer can tell exactly which email you've read from the many they send out. It doesn't have to be an image neither - any script will do, such as one that generates a web page or maybe a blank frame in a frame set (as a spacer).

Re: Porn Via Email
 

"The Bat!" ?

explain please

Re: Porn Via Email
 

Black thing - squeaks a fair bit :D

It's an email client - a bit like Outlook only more feature rich. It has a message dispatcher, though I've not used it, that allows you to manage your emails without downloading them. You can try it for free but the license is about £28. There's some nice images for it if you do download it - ask me and I'll email the file.

The way I have it set up is for Spampal to flag all the spam from all my email accounts. In The Bat! I've created a rule for each account (created one rule and copied it) that moves the spam for that account to a common folder (i.e. a folder that's not associated with any account) and deletes it from the server (so the server doesn't become clogged). I just glance at the one spam folder and delete the contents.

Re: Porn Via Email
 

Ok, I trust you. Can you send it via this website or do you need my personal email address?

Re: Porn Via Email
 

Forgot about attaching things here :D

It needs to go in the main program folder - e.g. c:\program files\the bat!\

Re: Porn Via Email
 

Many thanks, I'll download and take a look later. Goodnight

Re: Porn Via Email
 

No probs :)

Re: Porn Via Email
 

Today is like most days on the spam front I get about 256 to 400 spam emails mostly porn, pills,extensions, and cheap software. I have three domains and my NTL account; I used to use only Outlook to sift the spam that did help, but each day you had another 20 to add to the list. I now have installed Norton Internet Security that has sorted the problem, yes you have to go through the spam folder and look at the subject line, if you find an email thatâ₠¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s been wrongly tagged you just hit the †œthis is not spamâ₠¬Ã‚Â� then just hit the empty spam folder. The ones that it does have trouble with are the emails that have been sent using my name. One thing you must not do is hit the remove me button as this just confirms a valid email address which will get you more spam.

80% of the spam mail I get come from the USA and one porn photo arrives each day from twenty different people.

Re: Porn Via Email
 

[QUOTE=Matth]£5 per month, it says.

Your right they are charging a fiver a month now was free to old registrants but still well worth the money

Re: Porn Via Email
 

I often wonder whether using a .co.uk email address would receive less spam than a .com address.

Since most spam comes from (and is aimed at) the USA, do spammers only target .com addresses?

My Freeserve account (.co.uk) has never received a spam email in over 4 years but my .com ntl account receives over a hundred per day.

Re: Porn Via Email
 

In a word no. My Zen addy is .co.uk and receives loads, my Ntl is .com and gets hardly any.

Useful article here.


http://www.microsoft.com/security/ar.../fightspam.asp

Re: Porn Via Email
 

Well I would like to know what your doing right as my ard.co.uk domain is the most spamed about 200 a day while my NTL account gets about 3 then we have my goldonian.org account which gets at least three viruses each and every day. I also have a .org.uk domain and it gets not one (you note I dont give the full name as I don't want to tempt fate) Can anybody help me with the headers re the person who is sending three viruses a day?????? and how to trace them????

Re: Porn Via Email
 

Well the porn spam continues

I had 75 new emails in my inbox this morning since checking mail yesterday, some of this was other spam but there must have been 30-40 of the same porn spam as before.

Can't believe that NTL haven't managed to filter this out yet and // or the remote sites haven't actually been taken down due to complaints

Re: Porn Via Email
 

Well my .co.uk address still attracts LOADS of porn, it passes through the NTL account, so if Spampal can catch it, I don't see why NTL can't filter it....

AND the porn is such poor quality these days!





Just kidding ;-)

Re: Porn Via Email
 

I would advise 2 things

1 Get rid of OE and use thunderbird which has built in junk filters
2 Use spamcop to report the *******s

Re: Porn Via Email
 

Thunderbird.....?
Is that part of Mozilla? The name rings a bell. Is it free / cheap /expensive?

And I used to use Spamcop, gave me a warm feeling inside to know that I was reporting the b*stards, but then I worked out that a) I was still getting spam from the same people and b) i was spending ages filtering and reporting the spam. Now I use SpamPal, which filters almost all spam into a spam folder, which I empty when am feeling virtuous.

Re: Porn Via Email
 

The issue is more about "do we want NTL to do the filtering?". And this issue has been done to death elsewhere :) In summary, people are divided into two camps: (1) the optimists who, despite NTL failing to run a decent email service and generally being a pretty poor ISP, firmly believe that NTL can run spam filter(s) and not delete all their important emails; (2) the realists who don't trust NTL to do anything right and who would much rather manage their own emails and spam. I'm in the latter camp :) If NTL did introduce spam filtering, and it's a big "if" given the costs and logistics involved, then they would have to give customers a choice of filtered or unfiltered email, otherwise I for one will be looking elsewhere for email provision. There are other fine detail problems such as, "If NTL maintains it's own blacklists, will the blacklisted be able to remove their IP address(es) from the list(s)" Bear in mind that NTL's own customers have trouble contacting them, so how third parties will fare, I don't know :)

If you run Zone Alarm, particularly Pro, you might want to review the virus rules for the regex filter in Spampal. I've removed the include for the virus rules file and added some Zone Alarm specific rules instead.

Re: Porn Via Email
 

It sounds very reasonable, when you put it like that

Cheers

Re: Porn Via Email
 

If only that worked.

I still get two thirds of my spam from comcast. I use SpamCop to report it back to them, and even quote their AUP back at them

May I remind you of your own Acceptable Use Policy point (xi), also Section entitled "Electronic Mail" and trust that your "promotion of good citizenship" mentioned in Section entitled "Violation of Acceptable Use Policy" is implemented.

They never stop though, and personally I don't think they give a flying fig about their users spamming people.

Re: Porn Via Email
 

I used to send an email along the lines of "If you don't stop this spam, I shall activate the "REVENGE IS MINE (tm) program which will sign you up to over 150 internet mailing lists, in the sure & certain knowledge that each of these in turn will pass your name on to other mailing lists. Happy reading!" which made me feel better but didn't achieve anything

Re: Porn Via Email
 

all the "words" i have tagged on the spam i have ticked the outlook option to "delete them from the server".....if i changed the option to "do not download"....do they then become ntlworlds problem or are they still my problem?
ie if they are not deleted or downloaded are they using my mailspace or ntls?

Re: Porn Via Email
 

If you don't download, I presume that they sit on the server, filling up whatever space is in your mailbox.

Re: Porn Via Email
 

yeh i thought that at well.........if i choose to "not download" them and they sit on the server does outlook attempt to download the same emails every time i click send/receive ?

Re: Porn Via Email
 

Yes, unless you move it to another folder. I think you can create a few other folders on NTL, but I presume that they will count towards your total usage. Useful if you want to store something and download it to another computer via the webmail option at the NTL website

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.