Joe Jobbing An Entire Spam Mailing List
from the sneaky dept
Joe Jobs, where a spammer spoofs the return address of someone, are very old news these days. If spammers are feeling particularly mean, they may joe job someone they're trying to upset -- as that person will get inundated with bounces and replies from people (yes, they do exist!) who still think replying to spam messages angrily is the way to stop spam. It appears that some spammers with an especially mean streak have come up with a new tactic, as discovered by Rick Klau today. Instead of just spoofing some random email address, the reply-to address is an email list... of everyone who received the spam. In other words, every angry "take me off this list!" email then gets sent to everyone else on the spam list. Rick posts a snippet of the ongoing conversation from a bunch of very confused people: "Why are you e-mailing me?" "Shut up!" "Fuck you!" "Take me off your list or I'll report you to the authorities!" "Stop emailing me!" "How did I get on this list? I never visited your website." "I've reported this to Interpol." "Shut up!" "Stop replying to these messages!" "But you just replied." "You sent me a virus!" "Shut up!" "Who are you and why are you emailing me?" "I'm in Costa Rica, how did I get email from someone in South Africa?" "Shut up!" "Get a Mac!" "Fuck all of you!"Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Awesome
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Re: Awesome
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Re: Awesome
Perhaps one address just for emails from your psychotic mother-in-law, one address for your other personal contacts, one for registering at various sites (like thinkgeek!) and one to give away to sites that send you your daily spam (since everyone needs to give their addresses away to such places...)
Seriously though it's a simple solution, and it saves a lot of headaches when one of your proxy accounts gets infected (i.e. discovered by spambots). You don't have to let any of your contacts know that you have deleted that email address, except for those who used that address to correspond with you.
I don't know why this isn't a standard feature in email providers by now. It's not that complicated.
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No Subject Given
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“I survived Bedlam DL3”
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Re: Awesome
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No Subject Given
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No Subject Given
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No Subject Given
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Re: No Subject Given
I used to get spammed all the time. I could rack up hundreds in a day.
But then I learned a few secrets: encode emails that you put on a website, and email by proxy.
I have since eliminated all email from my email box.
Family has one address, friends have another. And for those friends who send me their silly little anicdotes without using BCC, well, if my friends email address starts getting spammed, they don't get the new address, same with family.
Vendors and listservs get the same treatment.
So there!
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Re: No Subject Given
Give out a unique email address to everybody. If I go to XYZ company's website and they want an email address, I give them XYZ@mydomain.com.
All emails get routed to a single address by the mail server.
This way when I get spam, I can see where the email address they are using came from, and go bitch them out. Then I block that address from receiving email.
I alerted a company that their server was hacked this way.
If I need to supply an address that I know I am never going to want to receive email from I give them an address that always gets routed to the trash, mototrash@mydomain.com.
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Re: how did I...
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No Subject Given
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Re: No Subject Given
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Sounds like a bus psycho...
That sounds just like the crazy guy that rides on the bus and screams at squirrels in the park... Well, if he were a techie.
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Re: Awesome
Some joe guy is going to be pissed once the email harvestors pick up all those email addresses above.
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Re: Sounds like a bus psycho...
We also had a problem with auto-response messages. Someone went on vacation, and set their email client to auto respond with a "hey im on vacation, send email to Bob if you need help" message. Unfortunately, he wasnt the only one on vacation that had an autoresponder. So after setting his email to autorespond, he sent out an email to everyone in the company letting them know about his vacation. Some others were also on vacation and already had an autoresponder set up. The autoresponders were playing a huge game of tag, and all of the email went down. It was pretty comical outside of the ramifications.
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Re: No Subject Given
I will also say that I've seen an example of this joe-jobbing with a "reply-to" list as the original recipient list, though I'm not sure it was intentional in the same way as this was. Either way, there were a lot of "STOP REPLYING MORONS" before it eventually ceased. =)
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What to do with spam..
Peace.
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Re: Sounds like a bus psycho...
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Re: No Subject Given
I do, however, use a different email for my website than I use normally. Makes it really easy to see who got my address through email harvesters.
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New?
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Re: New?
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Re: Awesome
There were hundreds of bounce mail replies
every day, but not one complaint or request
to be taken off the list. I sent all the
info I could gather to the feds. I don't
know if it contributed to his demise but
I like to think it did.
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Re: Awesome
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Re: No Subject Given
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