NTL Junk Mail

[Stuart W]

WOW!

TWELVE hours ago I went to the ntlworld e-mail setup page and added a nice new e-mail.
I added the details to Outlook and it all worked straight away.

I have not used this e-mail address ANYWHERE yet, so I am the only person who knows it even exists.

Odd then, that I get up thismorning to 12 new e-mails sent to this e-mail!

Now, I can do one of the following:

1: Inform NTL of the abuse and leave it in their hands
2: Add each mail to my blocked senders list in Outlook
3: Remind myself how inept NTL are and just delete the mail account

I'm thinking that option 1 would have absolutly no impact whatsoever. Option 2 will end up with outlook telling me I cant add any more names at some point, so I guess it's option 3 for me.

Unless anyone out there knows anything I can do?

[At a loss]

I had a similar problem not too long back and contacted CS who basically went on about the big wide web and it the spider waiting to catch its prey.
In other words they was not interested and I just block each mail has it arrives. I get less spam with my hotmail account but thats life.

[bob_builder]

Originally Posted by Stuart W

WOW!

TWELVE hours ago I went to the ntlworld e-mail setup page and added a nice new e-mail.
I added the details to Outlook and it all worked straight away.

I have not used this e-mail address ANYWHERE yet, so I am the only person who knows it even exists.

Odd then, that I get up thismorning to 12 new e-mails sent to this e-mail!

All I can think of is that you chose a common email name and these junk emails are just selecting it at random and have been doing so even before it existed.

I have had my NTL email address for over 3 years now and have given the address out (although I do not use it as my main email account) and I think I have not yet received 12 junk emails in total. The username is fairly long and probably not that common.

On the other hand, my main email account is on Yahoo and has a 4 letter username and I receive over 100 spam emails a day (luckily Yahoo's filter catches 99% of them)!

[SMHarman]

If you've decided to stick with NTLs firstname.lastname+number format, then junk mail generators will churn their way through the perms and combs of this and when a mail does not get bounced stores that as a new valid address.
so joe.bloggs27 @ntlworld.com is likely to have junk mail delivered quickly
SMH125793495 @ntlworld.com is not.
(BTW I use Iweb for email so neither of these is a valid address AFAIK).

[Neil]

Stu-I really thought you would have known better!

Why don't you do as SMHarman does, & use i-Web?

[ikthius]

can you not make message rules/filters, so that when you get some dodgy mail, it gets deleted immediatley.

ik

[Stuart W]

TBH Nizza, I would normaly agree with you... but somehow, NTL managed to set me up in a false sence of security....

My primary mail account hasn't had one piece of spam since day 1, so I thought maybee they had sorted the junk problems.

Guess I was wrong eh? lol.

As for the filters.... I'll keep the mail for as long as Outlook lets me add junk to the blocked senders list.
Once it tells me the list is full, I'll forward the list to ntl who will then be in a position to do something about it.
I'll also post it here so people can just add the lot in one go if anyone thinks it's needed?

Addition:
In all honesty, whilst I can see why the firstname.lastname problem exists, I can't see why it seems to afect NTL mail so much more than any other ISP I have used.
My BT account was first.last and had little to no junk.

[SLM]

I have zero trouble with junk emails and I have the most common name going so with the 1st.last+numbers@ntlworld.com getting hit hard with junk could be in the past, fingers crossed.

[SMHarman]

Originally Posted by ikthius

can you not make message rules/filters, so that when you get some dodgy mail, it gets deleted immediatley.

ik

Hmm or do as I use I web and server based spam filtering, all my spam gets delivered with {spam} at the front so if you want to make sure I never read your mail put that at the start of the subject .

AFAIK NTL are installing brightmail junkmail filtering. If like when Demon did this it is a phased implementation newer mail addresses may not yet be benefitting from it, so you may find junk mail drops away from this address in time. Almost worth waiting to see for the benefit of the community .

[scrotnig]

Once again, I will explain that an unless a company is specifically passing on email addresses to spammers (which ntl don't), they are NOT responsible for spam that comes to your address.

As has been pointed out above, harvesters will come up with plausible combinations of names and domains and throw spam at them, if you throw enough this way some of it will get there.

There are many people, such as myself, who DO NOT WANT our email 'pre-vetted' by a service provider and prefer to filter it at our end.

Blaming ISPs for spam is like blaming the post office for junk mail. They just deliver it.

[SLM]

Originally Posted by Mark B

Once again, I will explain that an unless a company is specifically passing on email addresses to spammers (which ntl don't), they are NOT responsible for spam that comes to your address.

As has been pointed out above, harvesters will come up with plausible combinations of names and domains and throw spam at them, if you throw enough this way some of it will get there.

There are many people, such as myself, who DO NOT WANT our email 'pre-vetted' by a service provider and prefer to filter it at our end.

Blaming ISPs for spam is like blaming the post office for junk mail. They just deliver it.

[birchyboy]

Originally Posted by Mark B

.... Blaming ISPs for spam is like blaming the post office for junk mail. They just deliver it.

The Post Office can stop junk mail. There is the Mailing Preference Service and landline telephones have the Telephone Preference Service. I activated the MPS and TPS. Junk mail and telephone selling stopped altogether. Why can't I ask ntl to do the same?
Mailing Preference Service
Telephone Preference Service

Originally Posted by birchyboy

The Post Office can stop junk mail. There is the Mailing Preference Service and landline telephones have the Telephone Preference Service. I activated the MPS and TPS. Junk mail and telephone selling stopped altogether. Why can't I ask ntl to do the same?
Mailing Preference Service
Telephone Preference Service

True only to a point. The Post Office will still deliver generic circulars which count as junk mail in my book (and, of course, unlike ISPs they get paid per item for doing so). TPS only works to a point too - my mother in law has just changed her number because of nuisance calls and gone ex-directory. Within a day she had a call to let her know she had won yet another holiday which she could claim simply by calling a premium rate number to claim (she sure is lucky). In the same way I have Norton anti-spam plus, ahem, NTL's new anti-spam measures and yet aparently my penis is still both too small and flaccid, my head is severely in need of Vicodin and my wrist a replica Rolex. C'est la vie.

[ian@huth]

Spammers tend to target the domains that have the largest number of customers hence NTL accounts are near the top of the list for spamming. Because of the way that some spammers work SMH in post #4 is correct in saying which of the two examples he quoted will receive the most spam. However spam can further be reduced by putting a number in the first three characters of the email addy. Some spammers have built up dictionaries of surnames and use these to target the bigger domains. They will prefix the surname with all combinations of 1 and 2 letters and then for each will add up to four numbers at the end. This will result in millions of emails being sent but quite a number of correct email addresses will be caught. Spammers can send out millions of emails a day through zombie and proxy systems and only get a small percentage through but they use techniques that tell them the ones which more than likely get through which they then use themselves and sell on to others. If only a few hundred out of say 10 million a day get through and only 1% of these get fooled and order from them there is the potential for massive profit.

[Toto]

It is also worth mentioning too that virus writers are creating programs at the request of spammers that collect, AND transmit the contents of address books. Although this does not solve Stuarts annoying problem, it is another crafty way in which spammers are yet again one step of the technology to beat it.

Mark B's post though is right, we've been here before, ntl are not passing on email addresses to spammers, otherwise all my accounts with ntl would get spammed, and they don't, honest guv

The good news Mark B is that in the second phase the control of how spam is dealt with will be down to the user to a large extent where the email has not been blocked because the source IP is on an RBL, I'm sure somebody will confirm that for me.