[Merged] NTL spam

[Stuartbe]

That member has been dealt with by the team. Please delete it.

[Tezcatlipoca]

Originally Posted by david.ewles

I got this in my cable forum email

In a Private Message (PM)?

As Stu has just said, that member has already been dealt with.

Originally Posted by david.ewles

"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)

selfcare.ntlworld.com *is* genuine & is owned by NTL. It's the page you go to to set-up forwarding or auto-replies if you have an @ntlworld.com email address.

However, that is no guarantee that the email address you would be asked to enter into it to forward your NTLWorld emails to for the "spam service" would be genuine.

[APS]

Can anyone "in the know" say when the promised upgrades to the NTL email service are going to come to fruition? We were promised a more reliable service with anit-spam and even AV options using all new reliable, commercial server software. Clearly this is not in place yet as NTL even managed to run out of disc space earlier this week.

What is the hold up, please? Originally someone said it would be online in June.

APS

It's coming soon

No one has notified us of any dates - it will happen but only ntl know when.

[chopsmcp]

Originally Posted by cookie_365

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.

Well, no. Firstly, there's the issue of download time, secondly, there's the issue of inboxes going over quota. My experience is currently this:

On an average day, up to 250 spam messages hit my inbox. 150 or so are from the wanadoo porn dialer spammers, the rest from assorted other *******s and sleazeballs. Even running the fantastic spampal and an aggresive set of OE rules which kill 80%+ of the crap on the server, downloading and filtering a day's worth of spam on dial-up takes rather more than a few seconds. But worse, if I go away for a couple of weeks, how long before my mailbox goes over quota and I start losing legit messages that way?

Actually, properly implemented server side spam filtering would almost certainly save ntl bandwidth and resources. For a start, the bandwidth wasted by users downloading spam would be saved.

The issue will inevitably be forced soon anyway. Think about the wanadoo dialer spammers. Presumably their strategy is to send so many messages to maximise the probability of one opening in an insecurely configured OE/IE preview pane. Just one outfit doing this has managed to come close to rendering my addy unusable. What's NTL's strategy for dealing with 10 outfits doing the same thing?

[Stuart]

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.

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,<snip>

We use spam filtering at work, and as I understand it, the extra load on the server is a small percentage of the load from running the email service, and is considered a small price to pay for the loss of problems due to spam.

On the other side of that, we cater for about 25000 users, not the millions that NTL cater for.

[cookie_365]

Originally Posted by chopsmcp

Well, no. Firstly, there's the issue of download time, secondly, there's the issue of inboxes going over quota. My experience is currently this:

On an average day, up to 250 spam messages hit my inbox. 150 or so are from the wanadoo porn dialer spammers, the rest from assorted other *******s and sleazeballs. Even running the fantastic spampal and an aggresive set of OE rules which kill 80%+ of the crap on the server, downloading and filtering a day's worth of spam on dial-up takes rather more than a few seconds. But worse, if I go away for a couple of weeks, how long before my mailbox goes over quota and I start losing legit messages that way?

Actually, properly implemented server side spam filtering would almost certainly save ntl bandwidth and resources. For a start, the bandwidth wasted by users downloading spam would be saved.

The issue will inevitably be forced soon anyway. Think about the wanadoo dialer spammers. Presumably their strategy is to send so many messages to maximise the probability of one opening in an insecurely configured OE/IE preview pane. Just one outfit doing this has managed to come close to rendering my addy unusable. What's NTL's strategy for dealing with 10 outfits doing the same thing?

Point taken, but I was thinking about bb rather than dial-up, this being the cable forum after all Maybe I'm just being a bit blinkered since I don't get much spicy ham and my OE rules seems to do the trick ... famous last words, perhaps ?

[Hom3r]

On Sunday I check my inbox after returning from a to week holiday on Saturdayand discovered 2100 emails in my inbox which took over two hours to sort and delete <20 were valid.

Having seen NTHellworld fornt page it looks like the spam problem may start to be resloved, I'm not holding my breath though.

All so 1.5Mb Whoo hoo

Your Connection

Direction Actual Speed True Speed (estimated)

Downstream 1451 Kbps (181.4 KB/sec) 1567 Kbps (inc. overheads)
Upstream 241 Kbps (30.1 KB/sec) 260 Kbps (inc. overheads)

http://www.adslguide.org.uk/tools/speedtest.asp

[goldoni]

Originally Posted by david.ewles

On Sunday I check my inbox after returning from a to week holiday on Saturdayand discovered 2100 emails in my inbox which took over two hours to sort and delete <20 were valid.

Your lucky I had a week away and had 1,879 emails and only 5 were valid emails. I just hope the email problem gets sorted

I get lots of spam to one addy only.I've set it up to be my spam,sign on addy so I expect it.I use Cloudmarks Spamnet.

I deal with none of my spam as this application filters it straight into a Spam inbox for me.All I do is check that nothing legit disappears,if it does I just unblock it.Any that aren't filtered I block myself.

Every two days I upload the details of all the spam I've had to Spamnet,takes about 10 seconds

I regularly update it too so I get all the details of new spam so my spamnet can automatically block it for me.Yes I pay for this service but it is worth it not to be so plagued by it any more.No one else is going to do it for me.SO I don't need NTL to do it for me.

All I need to then is open and read my legit mail.

[goldoni]

Have a look at this link born in the USA

[goldoni]

I have today received a spam email stating: 28 million people will see your ad for free...This was sent to my NTL account so I had a look at the header and surprise it was sent to a block of NTL email accounts starting with To: frances.xxxxx@ntlworld.com, francesco.xxxxxxxxx@ntlworld.com, francis.xxxxxx@ntlworld.com, francis.xxxxxx@ntlworld.com, francis.x@ntlworld.com, francis.xxxxxx@ntlworld.com, francis.xxxxxx@ntlworld.com, franciscoxxxx@ntlworld.com, francishowxxxx@ntlworld.com, francishxxxxx@ntlworld.com, francisxxxxxxxxxx@ntlworld.com, francisxxxxxxxx@ntlworld.com, franco.xxxxxxxxx@ntlworld.com, franco.xxxxxxxx@ntlworld.com, francoisxxx@ntlworld.com, frankxxxxxx@ntlworld.com which as you can see is a block of NTL email addresses my question is how did they obtain them? Has NTL got a leak??

I phoned CS and basically they donââ‚Âà ‚¬ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â‚¬Å¾Ã‚¢t want to know. The only advise they could offer was one: change my email address Two: block the sender. So some real good advise.

The company this came from is situated in Seattle, WA 98111

Having said all of that, I don't actually have any answers to the problem. Has any CF members got any advise????

[poolking]

They probably ran a program to generate those addresses, or harvest then.

[goldoni]

But if it was a harvest why are they not all mixed up? I bet if other CF members (those that are with NTL) check the header if they get the same email it will have another block of NTL email addys. Seems strange to me. What I know about how they get the names can be written on half a postage stamp so you just may be right but your first option just can't be right as the names I have crossed out do not follow on.

[paulyoung666]

yesterday i finally had enough of spam mail , i changed my e-mail address , so far i aint got any spam , i suppose time will tell if it starts happening again