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Date: Fri, 28 Jun 2002 20:47:03 -0700
To: agathiyar@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [agathiyar] Junk and Spam
Cc: tamil-ulagam@yahoogroups.com
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From: "Mani M. Manivannan"
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Friends,
I empathize with Dr. JayBee. For the past several weeks I have been under severe attack from spammers and virus programs. Since I am using Eudora, Iam reasonably safe from executing viruses automatically. The real problemthough is that the viruses are huge files and at one time they were filling up my mail box so rapidly that new mails were bouncing. This is called aDenial of Service (DoS) attack. I traced the viruses back to specific addresses in Chennai and in Malaysia. But my complaints to those e-mail adddress and the webmasters of those domains went unanswered. In desperation I looked for a solution and found one that is working for me so far. It is called "Mail Washer" You can see a screenshot of the program and an endorsement at the URL http://www.pcmedixwebs.com/mail_washer.htm The program itself, a freeware program, can be downloaded off of: http://www.mailwasher.net/
Basically it is a throwback to the old BBS days when you first download theheaders of the e-mails and filter them. When this program downloads the headers, it has the ability to auto-detect the spammers. One problem is that it identifies several of the well-known Tamil netters that we love as spammers as well. So, we need to make sure that the program does not automatically tag their mails as spam. With this running nearly all the time, I amable to clear my mail box of the offending viruses. And in quite a few cases where the "From" address is correct, I was able to bounce the spam backto the originators. Unfortunately, quite a few of these viruses had been programmed such that the real sender's e-mail address is not in the "From" address. The "From" addresses contained familiar names of people who won'topen let alone send the types of e-mails that I was getting. Either this or through luck, I was able to reduce the virus attack frequency from once every 3 minutes to 3 per day.
I also have a second filter mechanism with my Eudora. In addition to that I had switched to web only mode for several mailing lists to reduce the burden of manual filtering of e-mails.
However, none of these techniques work with hotmail or yahoo addresses since they have their own filtering mechanisms. Complaining to Hotmail or Yahoo administrators get just sympathy. I think they are happy that these viruses are filling up my mail box so that I will be forced to subscribe to their larger mail boxes.
Whatever you do, remember this one bit of advice. Don't ever respond to any "lottery" type of e-mails that tell you that you have either already won something or eligible to win something even to request them to take you offof their mailing lists. Just responding to them allows them to add your e-mail address as a "live" address that they turn around and sell to other spammers.
I think that the end of the free, best effort, internet is nearing. Even the mailwasher program has one fundamental security hole - like all the e-mail clients it also knows about my username and password. And unlike Eudoraand Outlook Express programs it is not made by huge corporations that willlose a lot more by manipulating my username, password information.
And finally, the time has come for all watchful users of the e-mail programs to acquire their own personal e-mail digital signature from a service such as http://www.thawte.com At least for U.S. residents they give a free digital ID for personal use. With that, we will be able to digitally sign oure-mail so that the content cannot be tampered with. With that we can alsoprove our identification. And for critical e-mails that contain sensitiveinformation such as credit card data or personal identification data, we can use this digital signature to encrypt the information. Of course that requires one to have the digital signature of the receiver. Again, rememberthat on the internet, in the mailing lists or fora, one should NOT give away too many personal data such as the date and place of birth, names of parents and relatives, passport number or other identifications. If you do, you can bet that your e-mails will be harvested for data that will be used by crooks for identity theft.
As the desk sergeant in the TV show "Hill Street Blues" used to admonish his officers: "Let's be careful out there."
Regards,
Mani M. Manivannan
Newark, CA, USA.
At 6/28/02 04:47 PM, JayBee wrote:
> More than half of the emails that I receive in the
>two addresses - jaybee@... and jaybee555@...
>are junk and spam. The number is increasing day by day.
>At present its around 70 percent in the tm.net.my address.
> Every day, I am hard pressed to clear all that.
>If the subject lines says something like 'increasing certain
>organs sizes', debts, lotteries, etc., I can trash them
>without opening. I can filter them if I know who its from
>and familiar words in the subject-line. But the senders are
>getting too smart. They use other sentences and wordings.
> Its like the old saying, 'If you go under the mat,
>he will slip under the kOlam' - 'நீ தடுக்குக்குக் கீழ பாய்ஞ்சா,
>அவன் கோலத்துக்குக் கீழ பாய்வான்'.
> I receive viruses at the frequency of one every third
>day. This is what I know - whatever is not trapped by Norton.
> Are there any suggestions, please?
