This is interesting. According to the London Telegraph, spam has decreased dramatically. Because a few botnets have been responsible for a large percentage of global spam, this leaves the Telegraph and/or it’s sources wondering if spammers aren’t gearing up for something big.
For an interesting look at spam, I recommend the following two books, Inside the Spam Cartel by “Spammer-X”, and Spam Kings by Brian S. McWilliams. Both were very informative, although they account for a period of time in the late 90’s through about 2004. I learned a lot from them.
Disclosure of Material Connection: Some of the links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”
Showing posts with label Spam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spam. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Social Networks and Spam Friend Requests
I use social networks. Doesn't everybody? I have a page on MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Facebook and LinkedIn both require you to have a membership to view my page, so I can't link to an external URL for them. I have found a good use for these social networking sites: friends finding me. I've had several high school friends find me through MySpace. An exchange student that my family hosted my senior year in high school found me on Facebook. I noticed that my mortgage broker is on LinkedIn. I think these sites are useful in many ways. I also belong to some military sites and old shipmates have contacted me that way. I am actually happy with social networking sites in that regard.
I hate them in another regard. I used to have so much trouble keeping up with spam friend requests on MySpace until my wife set my profile to private, but I still get a few rogue friend requests. As you can tell from my picture, I have a family. I'm honestly not in the market to be friends with any 21 year old single females, and yet those are the friend requests I get. Most I expect are spam for porn sites but I have no way to tell. I check the profile of anyone who sends me a friend request just in case I know them from somewhere. I almost denied one friend request who happened to be a girl who went to my church.
This is where I'm not so sure how this friend stuff is supposed to work. It seems to me that we should send friend requests to people that we know, but some people seem to collect them like trading cards. I can understand celebrities like Kevin Rose having more than 10,000 friends, but do I really need that many? I actually don't.
I'll admit I'm not completely immune. I do have one A-list friend, although it's not for social benefit, at least, I'm not likely to meet this person. Robert Scoble wrote in his blog that he posts exclusive content on Facebook and only people on his friends list can see it. I sent him a friend request only to find that I don't really have time to watch his exclusive content. Doh!
One way you can tell that a friend request is bogus is if it refers you to a profile on another site. I recently got one of these through Yahoo! 360, where I have an unused site. Unless the person (single female) gives a reason why I know her, I will probably just leave this request hanging.
Social networks do have some very useful benefits as long as spammers and other assorted dregs of society leave me alone.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
The Entire Point to Buy Owner Is To Not Use A Realtor...
And so it begins. When I got home from work, I found on the kitchen table an envelope hand addressed to me with no return address. I opened the envelope up to find large, bold text with AOL Instant Messenger quality underlining and spam quality writing on a piece of paper with a faint Remax watermark. The text was at least double spaced and and of a font large enough that the small amount of writing took up the whole page. The text said:
4.5%! Thats(sic) right! I will sell your Buy Owner for only a total of 4.5% commission! If Buy Owner sells your home before I can then you pay me 0% commission! You have nothing to lose! Beware of those flat fee real Estate(sic) companies that offer to sell your home for an upfront flat fee combined with a percentage because they are not full service. I take no fees upfront! I will handle the whole transaction from start to finish! Call me, **** ********, Direct at (***)***-****. Remax sells more homes than anyone else in the world!
If you think that was painful to read in a Windows Live Writer blockquote, try reading it on a full page. Obviously, I edited out the name and phone number but I left Remax in there because they rightly should be publicly embarrassed at the quality of marketing of some of their agents.
Well, *****, here's my offer back to you: I will take you up on your suggestion to pay you 0% commission as I will not be using your services. With writing like that, even if I were interested in paying a standard real estate commission (and I have absolutely no problem paying a professional to work on my behalf), there is no way in hell I would want you drafting a contract that my signature might go on. Take some writing lessons at Camden County College. It sounds like you learned how to market from reading your spam folder.
This Realtor doesn't seem to understand the point to Buy Owner. Buy Owner is not a flat fee brokerage; they provide marketing and screening services. I handle showing my house and negotiating with potential sellers, then Buy Owner provides the services of a title company to handle the closing.
Saturday, October 07, 2006
Norton Strikes Again
I got a call from a friend of mine yesterday with a tech support question. He had last used his laptop on a wireless network while traveling, but once he got home and tried plugging it back into his router, he couldn't get anywhere with Internet Exploder. He said the laptop was connected but IE would not connect to anything. He had already called HP and was told it might be a driver problem. It's too bad tech support desks don't hire people with real experience to offer tech support. Of course, how many of us with real experience could stand to do that kind of work for that kind of pay?
I walked him through some of the basics (does the network icon in the system tray have an x on it? etc). Then the answer came to me. I asked him if he was running Norton Internet Security. He said yes. I told him to right click on the Norton IS icon in the taskbar and select "Close" or "Exit". He did. Wouldn't you know that suddenly IE could connect to websites?
I'm not sure of the technical issues behind it. I can pretty much sum this up with "Norton sucks". I can't say I've ever had pleasant experiences with Norton's security products. Several years ago, I was given a copy of Norton Internet Security 2003. The first thing I noticed is that it sucked more than half of my computer's performance capability away in the resources it consumed. I ran it for a couple of weeks before I got home from work to a message that Norton AV had crashed and needed to be reinstalled. I reinstalled the product. Then I started getting messages from Norton Anti-Spam that some emails had been deleted. Funny, this was about the time that my mom started calling me to ask when I hadn't replied to a question she asked. Then Norton IS crashed again and had to be reinstalled. I used the products for a while because don't you know how insecure Windows is? I got tired of emails being deleted with no chance of retrieving them, and I got tired of reinstalling both applications every 3 weeks. I finally shelved the product.
My laptop that I got last Christmas came with Norton Internet Security and a 90 day subscription to Norton Anti-Virus. This time it was the 2005 version. I didn't bother with Norton Anti-Spam for long. I don't think anti-spam programs are very effective and you can read my strategy for dealing with spam here: http://emuelle1.blogspot.com/2006/06/how-i-deal-with-spam.html. I found Norton Internet Security to be about as painful to use as always. I had one program I liked to use that for some reason I could not get Norton to allow. Any time I tried to manually input this program into Norton's allow menu, Norton locked up and I had to force my laptop to shut down and then reboot in order to recover. Whenever I wanted to run this program, I had to manually shut Norton down. When my subscription for Norton AV ran out, I happily uninstalled the suite.
Norton lately is bitching and complaining that Microsoft won't make it easy for users to switch their security center over to Norton's. I see this as a good thing. With the pains that I've been through with Norton's 2003 and 2005 suites, trust me, you're better off with the built in security center in Windows Vista. At least Windows won't suddenly start blocking Internet Exploder for no apparent reason.
If you suddenly find a your web browser not connecting, but Windows says there is a network connection, and you have Norton installed, try shutting down Norton. Then uninstall it.
I walked him through some of the basics (does the network icon in the system tray have an x on it? etc). Then the answer came to me. I asked him if he was running Norton Internet Security. He said yes. I told him to right click on the Norton IS icon in the taskbar and select "Close" or "Exit". He did. Wouldn't you know that suddenly IE could connect to websites?
I'm not sure of the technical issues behind it. I can pretty much sum this up with "Norton sucks". I can't say I've ever had pleasant experiences with Norton's security products. Several years ago, I was given a copy of Norton Internet Security 2003. The first thing I noticed is that it sucked more than half of my computer's performance capability away in the resources it consumed. I ran it for a couple of weeks before I got home from work to a message that Norton AV had crashed and needed to be reinstalled. I reinstalled the product. Then I started getting messages from Norton Anti-Spam that some emails had been deleted. Funny, this was about the time that my mom started calling me to ask when I hadn't replied to a question she asked. Then Norton IS crashed again and had to be reinstalled. I used the products for a while because don't you know how insecure Windows is? I got tired of emails being deleted with no chance of retrieving them, and I got tired of reinstalling both applications every 3 weeks. I finally shelved the product.
My laptop that I got last Christmas came with Norton Internet Security and a 90 day subscription to Norton Anti-Virus. This time it was the 2005 version. I didn't bother with Norton Anti-Spam for long. I don't think anti-spam programs are very effective and you can read my strategy for dealing with spam here: http://emuelle1.blogspot.com/2006/06/how-i-deal-with-spam.html. I found Norton Internet Security to be about as painful to use as always. I had one program I liked to use that for some reason I could not get Norton to allow. Any time I tried to manually input this program into Norton's allow menu, Norton locked up and I had to force my laptop to shut down and then reboot in order to recover. Whenever I wanted to run this program, I had to manually shut Norton down. When my subscription for Norton AV ran out, I happily uninstalled the suite.
Norton lately is bitching and complaining that Microsoft won't make it easy for users to switch their security center over to Norton's. I see this as a good thing. With the pains that I've been through with Norton's 2003 and 2005 suites, trust me, you're better off with the built in security center in Windows Vista. At least Windows won't suddenly start blocking Internet Exploder for no apparent reason.
If you suddenly find a your web browser not connecting, but Windows says there is a network connection, and you have Norton installed, try shutting down Norton. Then uninstall it.
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
How I Deal With Spam
I wrote a post last week about how to deal with corporate spam, which is the same thing as regular spam but with fewer carbs. Just kidding on that part. Spam is a worldwide epidemic that is making telemarketing seem less annoying by comparison. It is disgusting to me to think that spammers sell lists of our email addresses back and forth to each other for millions of dollars. Spam is taking over the web. Spammers are starting to put up blogs and visit discussion forms. Another blog of mine, http://czigan.net/cblog routinely gets spam trackbacks from spam blogs on Blogger. I'm not sure how prevalent the spam trackbacks are, but I'm suddenly happy that Blogger doesn't have that feature.
Have you ever used a so called spam filter? I've tried several. I had one a friend gave me. I've tried Spam Bayes, and I even used the Norton Anti-Spam that came with my laptop (it has long since been uninstalled along with Norton AV and Norton Internet Security). I don't know if anyone has sucessfully used a spam filter, but I've never had much luck with them. They are supposed to be able to identify messages as supposedly spam and put them in a spam folder. They've never been very effective, however. Real spam gets let through and legit messages get put in the spam folder, no matter how many times I've told the program that anything from that email address, or even domain, is not spam. I normally uninstall spam programs and I've given up on them altogether.
I have found a way to deal with Spam that takes less time and doesn't cost anything. You can use Microsoft Outlook or not. What I've found is fairly effective. The first thing I recommend is to get Google's Gmail. Gmail has the absolute best server-side spam filter I have ever seen. I don't even use my Comcast email account anymore. Yahoo is horrible at filtering spam. I will get the exact same spam message from 1000 spammers, hit the spam button every time, and yet Yahoo still will not filter it out of my email list as it comes in 20 times a day. Gmail, however is an amazing spam filter. It's not 100% effective but it's at least 99%. One out of 1000 spam messages might get by it, and that is something I am willing to live with. You can use Gmail all by itself. When I had laptop problems from Office 2007, I couldn't download email to my laptop through Gmail's pop access so I just read my email online. I came to like this and now that I have Outlook working again, I'm not so sure I want to continue to use Outlook for email.
The next thing I do in my spam strategy is set up Outlook. This is less essential if you are using Gmail, but it it still useful. This strategy does require a little bit of patience up front but it will pay off in the end. In Outlook, click on Tools->Options and you should open to the Preferences tab. If not, click on the tab. Then select Junk-email. You can set the tolerance to any level that you like, but I've found the best way for me to do this is to click the radio button for Safe Lists Only. This is where the time investment comes in. Every single email that is downloaded to Outlook will now go into your junk email folder. When you see that you have messages in your junk folder, go to that folder. I normally use the preview pane when reading email because I don't like to mark a message as read until I'm absolutely sure that either no action is required by it or that I have taken any and all actions that are required by it. However, do not use the preview pane in the junk email folder. Turn it on and off as the message requires, for instance, if you're sure the message is safe but you want to view it to verify. If you're satisfied with the message, click "not junk" on the toolbar. You'll get a pop up message asking how you want to deal with the message. You can tell it to add the sender to your safe senders list. Once the sender is on the safe sender's list, any email from that sender will automatically go to your inbox. You can also set up rules. For some reason, some newsletters never seem to come from the same email address twice. Microsoft likes to use a different address for every newsletter, making it very hard to keep their newsletters out of a spam folder.
This strategy is not 100% effective, but over the years I have found it to be the best way to handle spam in my Outlook inbox.
Have you ever used a so called spam filter? I've tried several. I had one a friend gave me. I've tried Spam Bayes, and I even used the Norton Anti-Spam that came with my laptop (it has long since been uninstalled along with Norton AV and Norton Internet Security). I don't know if anyone has sucessfully used a spam filter, but I've never had much luck with them. They are supposed to be able to identify messages as supposedly spam and put them in a spam folder. They've never been very effective, however. Real spam gets let through and legit messages get put in the spam folder, no matter how many times I've told the program that anything from that email address, or even domain, is not spam. I normally uninstall spam programs and I've given up on them altogether.
I have found a way to deal with Spam that takes less time and doesn't cost anything. You can use Microsoft Outlook or not. What I've found is fairly effective. The first thing I recommend is to get Google's Gmail. Gmail has the absolute best server-side spam filter I have ever seen. I don't even use my Comcast email account anymore. Yahoo is horrible at filtering spam. I will get the exact same spam message from 1000 spammers, hit the spam button every time, and yet Yahoo still will not filter it out of my email list as it comes in 20 times a day. Gmail, however is an amazing spam filter. It's not 100% effective but it's at least 99%. One out of 1000 spam messages might get by it, and that is something I am willing to live with. You can use Gmail all by itself. When I had laptop problems from Office 2007, I couldn't download email to my laptop through Gmail's pop access so I just read my email online. I came to like this and now that I have Outlook working again, I'm not so sure I want to continue to use Outlook for email.
The next thing I do in my spam strategy is set up Outlook. This is less essential if you are using Gmail, but it it still useful. This strategy does require a little bit of patience up front but it will pay off in the end. In Outlook, click on Tools->Options and you should open to the Preferences tab. If not, click on the tab. Then select Junk-email. You can set the tolerance to any level that you like, but I've found the best way for me to do this is to click the radio button for Safe Lists Only. This is where the time investment comes in. Every single email that is downloaded to Outlook will now go into your junk email folder. When you see that you have messages in your junk folder, go to that folder. I normally use the preview pane when reading email because I don't like to mark a message as read until I'm absolutely sure that either no action is required by it or that I have taken any and all actions that are required by it. However, do not use the preview pane in the junk email folder. Turn it on and off as the message requires, for instance, if you're sure the message is safe but you want to view it to verify. If you're satisfied with the message, click "not junk" on the toolbar. You'll get a pop up message asking how you want to deal with the message. You can tell it to add the sender to your safe senders list. Once the sender is on the safe sender's list, any email from that sender will automatically go to your inbox. You can also set up rules. For some reason, some newsletters never seem to come from the same email address twice. Microsoft likes to use a different address for every newsletter, making it very hard to keep their newsletters out of a spam folder.
This strategy is not 100% effective, but over the years I have found it to be the best way to handle spam in my Outlook inbox.
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