[Merged] NTL spam

[ntluser]

Lots of innocent people, who never use their e-mail address publicly are hit with SPAM and I suspect that it's a number of things.

First, spammers seem to take a christian name e.g. John, add every surname they can find and put "@ntlworld.com" on the end and then mass mail the e-mail addresses generated.They also note the e-mail addresses of people who asked to be removed from their list, something you should never do as it confirms your e-mail address as valid and real.

Second they obtain, legally or illegally, the database address lists of companies, who are quite happy to sell them on.

Third, they hack sites and obtain their registration lists.

No doubt they also have other ways of obtaining e-mail addresses e.g. through key loggers, trojan horse viruses etc. but get them they do.

I use SPAMPal and the Rules Wizard to eliminate SPAM from my PC and that works fairly well.SPAMPal tags the SPAM and a rule in Rules Wizard consigns the tagged SPAM automatically to the "Deleted Items" folder.End of story.

I use the AVG 6.0 free version (with its e-mail scanner)in conjunction with SPAMPal to get rid of e-mails with viruses.

I use Ad-aware and SpyBot to get rid of Adware.

And I use Browser Hijack Blaster and Spywareblaster to fend off those who try to surreptitiously install ActiveX controls.

Most if not all programs update automatically and so I'm relatively untroubled.

What surprises me is why NTL could not apply similar strategies to e-mail being sent to their servers.

They would only have to eliminate e-mails from known SPAM sites and have some kind of e-mail address verification system to deal with e-mails that are SPAM made from "spoof", non-existent e-mail addresses.

I just wonder if there is something under the Data Protection Act or similar legislation which prevents NTL from doing that. Anyone from NTL care to comment?

[goldoni]

Originally Posted by carlingman

Have you tried this -

Have you tried to telnet it as they may be an offending mail blocking your download etc.

Thanks for that will give it a try next time.

[swoop101]

Originally Posted by AdeRickus

Only NTL know what my email address is, no one else ! ( NOONE ! )

I have just been talking to some people who are very clued up to this.

Can you confirm that this is your primary account?

If it is then it is the consesus that somebody has put a 'bot' on to the 'homepage.ntlworld.com' area and is trawling through the responses, because the username from 'homepage' is the front of your primary addy.

[AdeRickus]

Now that's quite possible,

Many thanks

I Presume then it's possible to do a 'list' or 'directory structure request' on the NTL homepage servers,

Isn't this also a little stupid ?

[swoop101]

I personally do not know what these people can do, but if it is possible they will do it.
There are way too many stupid people that respond to these spam-mails and that is why it goes on.

[Stuartbe]

Good point... My father inlaw has been using mailwasher for months now and gets 1000+ spams a day...

I was helping him with an outlook problem last week and discovered to my horror that mailwasher was not only removing the mails but bouncing them as well !!! --- How stupid can you get !!!

If no body reply'd to these mails then they would have far less spam as most spam mails are generated in the hope of detecting live addresses.

[ntluser]

Originally Posted by Stuartbe

Good point... My father inlaw has been using mailwasher for months now and gets 1000+ spams a day...

I was helping him with an outlook problem last week and discovered to my horror that mailwasher was not only removing the mails but bouncing them as well !!! --- How stupid can you get !!!

If no body reply'd to these mails then they would have far less spam as most spam mails are generated in the hope of detecting live addresses.

That's very true.

Mind you, the SPAM wouldn't get to you in the first place if the NTL servers used a decent filtering system. If they did, each of us wouldn't be in this position of having to find our own Anti-SPAM strategies.

It's a bit like having a useless police force and having to solve crimes yourself!!

Let's hope that someone from NTL can tell us what actions (if any!!) they do take to prevent SPAM reaching us.

[greencreeper]

I've made a note of this thread so that when NTL implement anti-spam software and accidentally wipe inboxes or flag 90% of emails as spam and there's a thread full of people bitching about it and NTL, I can point everyone here and remind them to be careful what they wish for

Interesting about checking the homepage site and constructing email addresses from the directory listing. I just checked now and directory listing is enabled. I turn off directory listing as a matter of basic security. They also have server sig enabled "Apache/1.3.26 Server at homepage.ntlworld.com Port 80" which tells me they're using an old version of Apache. NTL huh

Mailwasher should be banned.

[ntluser]

Originally Posted by greencreeper

I've made a note of this thread so that when NTL implement anti-spam software and accidentally wipe inboxes or flag 90% of emails as spam and there's a thread full of people bitching about it and NTL, I can point everyone here and remind them to be careful what they wish for

Interesting about checking the homepage site and constructing email addresses from the directory listing. I just checked now and directory listing is enabled. I turn off directory listing as a matter of basic security. They also have server sig enabled "Apache/1.3.26 Server at homepage.ntlworld.com Port 80" which tells me they're using an old version of Apache. NTL huh

Mailwasher should be banned.

I think we are wishing for effective and efficient Anti-SPAM measures that eliminates SPAM and nothing else.

Even if NTL just get rid of 50% of real SPAM and leave proper messages intact it will be a major improvement.

From what you say,it appears..as if we didn't know..that NTL is behind the times and part of the problem, not part of the solution. Maybe when someone successfully hacks their servers they will sit up and pay attention.

[chopsmcp]

Originally Posted by greencreeper

I've made a note of this thread so that when NTL implement anti-spam software and accidentally wipe inboxes or flag 90% of emails as spam and there's a thread full of people bitching about it and NTL, I can point everyone here and remind them to be careful what they wish for

Interesting about checking the homepage site and constructing email addresses from the directory listing. I just checked now and directory listing is enabled. I turn off directory listing as a matter of basic security. They also have server sig enabled "Apache/1.3.26 Server at homepage.ntlworld.com Port 80" which tells me they're using an old version of Apache. NTL huh

Mailwasher should be banned.

Agree with you about Mailwasher; its bounce feature is almost criminally irresponsible, and it's not as though they haven't been told. But as to server side spam filtering - in six months time that will be a forgotten argument, because either ntl will introduce it, or their entire mail system will collapse. As other providers implement it, clueless outfits like ntl will be exponentially targeted, and expanding server capacity to keep up will not be a viable option. They only real question is, will they implement it in as cack-handed away as they seem to do everything else? As for losing mail - well, that's already happening during mail server outtages anyway, despite their denials.

Incidentally, a support droid told me on the phone during the May mail fiasco that the reason for the outtages then was migration to new servers and the implementation of spam filtering, which would be complete by mid June. Lies or delays, I wonder?

[greencreeper]

Originally Posted by chopsmcp

Agree with you about Mailwasher; its bounce feature is almost criminally irresponsible, and it's not as though they haven't been told.

Not only that but also blacklisting - it allows mupper users to blacklist willy nilly, which totally undermines the validity of the blacklist.

Originally Posted by chopsmcp

But as to server side spam filtering - in six months time that will be a forgotten argument, because either ntl will introduce it, or their entire mail system will collapse. As other providers implement it, clueless outfits like ntl will be exponentially targeted, and expanding server capacity to keep up will not be a viable option. They only real question is, will they implement it in as cack-handed away as they seem to do everything else? As for losing mail - well, that's already happening during mail server outtages anyway, despite their denials.

Yeah - I'd agree that NTL implementing spam filtering is inevitable. Also inevitable that they'll make a balls of it I just hope they'll give customers the choice - mail or mangled mail - otherwise I'll have to source my email provision from elsewhere.

[cookie_365]

Originally Posted by ntluser

I think we are wishing for effective and efficient Anti-SPAM measures that eliminates SPAM and nothing else.

Even if NTL just get rid of 50% of real SPAM and leave proper messages intact it will be a major improvement.

From what you say,it appears..as if we didn't know..that NTL is behind the times and part of the problem, not part of the solution. Maybe when someone successfully hacks their servers they will sit up and pay attention.

Problem is, no computer algorithm can ever be as good at deciding what's spam & whats not. And how many false positives is acceptable? 1%? 5%? 0%? It all depends on the person, the value of the content of the messages, the chances the content is similar to spam messages blah blah blah.

If you think about how long it takes for your own Outlook/Mailwasher/whatever rules to sort out what's (probably) spam & what isn't, then its probably only a few seconds a day for most people. Any NTL side spam filtering is unlikely to be better at spotting what's spam than your own personal rules, so it's likely that it'll be no more efficient. But multiply those few seconds by every NTL customer & you've got a huge amount of processing power requirement, which to be frank I'd rather see spent somewhere else that'll be of more benefit to most users.

Add in the legal risk to NTL of providing editorial control of customers emails, extra CS time dealing with 'wheres the email my customer sent me..' complaints, etc, and I can't see how it could be better than leaving it to individuals to take responsibility for controlling their own inboxes. Perhaps if it was to be offered as an additional cost service it could make commercial and practical sense, but somehow I don't think many people would be that keen to pay.

I can see the argument for having some kind of filtering for the big show stopper spams with huge attachments that actually stop the service from working, but even for those I'd just like to see them held server side giving you the opportunity to block, delete, or receive based on the header or body text, and I don't think these are that common anyway.

Having said all of that, I don't actually have any answers to the problem itself !

[greencreeper]

Originally Posted by cookie_365

Problem is, no computer algorithm can ever be as good at deciding what's spam & whats not. And how many false positives is acceptable? 1%? 5%? 0%? It all depends on the person, the value of the content of the messages, the chances the content is similar to spam messages blah blah blah.

Cookie makes a very good point - that the decision as to what is spam and what isn't has a personal element to it. So one man's spam is another man's interesting newsletter, so to speak

[Stuartbe]

I often worry about spam emails that have html content. It would be very easy for them to put some code in that send a cookie that confirms your email address ect into the code, and being as outlook likes to run scripts without asking its another way that spammers can confirm an address is live !

[Hom3r]

I got this in my cable forum email


ntlbroadband2 vbmenu_register("postmenu_", true);
Banned

Join Date: Jun 2004
Posts: 3



NTL Anti-Spam
Hi, excuse the apparent advertising nature of this PM, but if you have an NTL address we have setup a service which will route your NTL mail through our servers. You will benefit from 99% of spam being removed before you download it, viruses being removed, legitimate e-mail never wrongly tagged, spam segregated to a seperate folder and all of this can occur instantly (i.e. our anti-spam does not require any user set up such as whitelisting, blacklisting or any other kind of training). I know this sounds too good to be true but reply to this PM and I will setup a free trial account. You can forward your NTL mail to our servers using http://selfcare.ntlworld.com whilst still receiving it in the ordinary way until you are satisified with our server (i.e. less than 1 day to be converted!).

Is this genuine the site looks like NTLs. but i've heard about people copying front pages that ask for password. If it real why isn't it done automatically.

And i've NOT typed anything into it (I'm not that stupid)

Also I posted a note about 1488 emails in four days!! I don't touch porn nor give my email addresses out willy nilly and the following day i received another 250. "burn spammers PC"