daryn Posted July 27, 2007 Share Posted July 27, 2007 a little over 300 Spams just today. Thanks to Spamcop, a good portion of those can be discarded in a single 5 minute sweep. but still, I now have to go to a website log in, sort through a list for anything important, just to throw out spam.... not my idea of a hobby.. then I got to thinking.... Yes, I know the spam theory, send a million emails for free, and if some fool sends you a check for $100 worth of Viagara that you never send to him, you are $100 ahead for free. but... I have to think that anyone that would send me 30 offers for Viagara with practically the same (one letter different) subject line every time, and do it every day, HAS to be up to more than just trying to fool me into sending $100. Doesn't the vast numbers make it more likely I'll know its a scam?? Wouldn't it be MORE profitable to send only ONE email, every couple days and try to distance yourself from the rip-offs??? Wouldn't more people be fooled if there was a shred of plausibility???? So... I gotta think... is there somethign else going on here? Some vast conspiracy to disable and discredit email as a communications media... Some insidious corporate monopoly poised to fill the void. And when I think insidious corporate monopoly in media, only two entities come to mind, (excluding Banks, who don't care who is making money, cause it all goes through them), and those are the cable company, who I blame for pretty much everything, and the phone company, who not only make money off of spam as an industry, but will make even more if spam won out. so maybe that explains it... spam doesn't APPEAR to be a good marketing too... but its a positive cash flow... but the end-game is to push us all back to telephones and then raise the long distance rates again once we've given up on email.... might be something to it.. *wink* Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StevenUnderwood Posted July 27, 2007 Share Posted July 27, 2007 I have to think that anyone that would send me 30 offers for Viagara with practically the same (one letter different) subject line every time, and do it every day, HAS to be up to more than just trying to fool me into sending $100. I know this was tounge-in-cheek type of comments, but are you receiving email from more than one account (catch-all)? I rarely get more than 1 or 2 "identical" spams in a 24 hour period. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
turetzsr Posted July 27, 2007 Share Posted July 27, 2007 I know this was tounge-in-cheek type of comments, but are you receiving email from more than one account (catch-all)? I rarely get more than 1 or 2 "identical" spams in a 24 hour period....When I do, I chalk it up to one of those "get rich using your computer" schemes -- the real money is from selling the spam kit to as many naive souls as one can find. If us victims get 100 copies of a single spam message, you can bet that there are at least 100 such naive souls that have been victimized by the marketer of a single such kit. Who cares that the pour souls make no money? <g> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dra007 Posted July 28, 2007 Share Posted July 28, 2007 If they weren't making money there wouldn't be 100s of companies mushrooming in Asia to make bogus medication.. An Indian friend of mine told me once, his medical doctor dad kept getting these people bringing buckets of bogus viagra to his office.. Someone is making money, as they once did with bogus replica watches and junk snail mail... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Miss Betsy Posted July 28, 2007 Share Posted July 28, 2007 Snail mail junk does the same thing. I spoke to a charity once about it and the person I talked to agreed with me that it seemed like a gigantic waste of paper and postage, but that studies they had done showed that they got more replies with several mailings close together. My theory is that if one is busy one day, the letter goes in the trash. The same with letter #2, but by the time letter #3 or #4 gets there, one may not be busy or decide that it is time to do something and so open it. It may be the same with spam. Though I think that the spam that comes on the weekend is from the wannabe rich who have bought the kit. My theory about spam is that 10% is from people who really work at it and do make money selling rolex watches or spam kits or porn or whatever; 50% is from the criminals like the Nigerian scam or phishers or people who sell bogus goods or don't return goods for money;30% is from the wannabe rich;10% is from the same idiots who create worms and viruses - they don't try to sell anything, they just want to beat the filters. There was no way to stop criminals from mailing fake lottery tickets or Nigerian scams, but there is a way to stop that kind of email from being mailed - if email providers were held responsible. Nobody is going to care if the unresponsible email providers get blocked, if they can't be prosecuted. Miss Betsy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Farelf Posted July 28, 2007 Share Posted July 28, 2007 To share some things I've found out about my ISP. Two facts are evident the amount of spam received really dropped off dramatically a month ago and continues at a low volume the sometimes erratic delivery of emailed submissions to SC dwindled to just about no deliveries a little over a week ago Tackled on the latter, they admitted that if my submissions contained spam they may well have been blocked. Looking under the hood, I then found the default inwards spam filtering was "enabled" and the default handling was "delete" - as mentioned in another post and explaining the first observation. Evidently this has been in place for some little time but is far more effective than it used to be (I had wondered why almost all of the spam I reported lately was from IP addresses not yet listed by SC, quite a different pattern to that which I saw "before"). So, putting the two together, the little spam they do let through they then (apparently) block when I send it back out in a clearly non-broadcast form and to a SC submit address. Their FAQs and information pages point to SC, amongst others, as organizations for users to turn to for further anti-spam action. I await, in eager anticipation, their response to my "Not happy Jan"1 on the subject of their several failings evident in all of this. One of the the things I suggested to them was that an unkind observer might conclude they are profiteering from spam. They are "sweeping it under the carpet", they are effectively encouraging its proliferation by not enforcing their AUP/TOS2(which they must enforce if they really believe that what they are outwards-filtering is spam) and they are hindering the efforts of those who are trying to actively address the spam problem by their (my ISP's) use of asymetric filtering standards. Their revenue is derived from volume and if that volume is not effectively managed then they have the advantage of it. So, there is an instance of an apparently responsible and (I know) responsive provider who is controlling what goes out of their network (despite being specifically exempted from responsibility under the Australian spam Act) yet is part of the spam problem - as I see it. Needless to say, I have offered them a substantial volume of unremunerated advice on how to correct their shortcomings . 1The punch line of an Australian Yellow Pages advertisement - an irate CEO to her Office Manager (as the latter "she" scurries for the safety of the car park/parking lot) on finding the firm is not listed in the lastest edition. 2I think they actually call it something like "Customer Relationship Agreement", it is a little hard to find, the slight frisson occasioned by their use of the term "Relationship" being sadly deflated by the revelation that it was singularly unilateral and completely non-sexual when I did, momentarily, find it. One can dream ... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
daryn Posted July 29, 2007 Author Share Posted July 29, 2007 I know this was tounge-in-cheek type of comments, but are you receiving email from more than one account (catch-all)? I rarely get more than 1 or 2 "identical" spams in a 24 hour period. Actually I have two accounts filtered through to one SpamCop account.. I just processed the held mail folder but since 4:00pm yesterday I had 8 or 9 with the subject like "Your order 1643, Pharmacy ready for pickup" "Your order 1548, Pharmacy ready for pickup" like that.. probably had 7 or 8 "themes" of mailings, with 7-10 mailings each then about 10 others... I have two other accounts, that don't come through here, I just found about 150 spams there. MOST of them were a Pump and Dump or about 5 variants of a Cialis/Viagara ad like above. so yes, many many of exactly the same thing usually with one word or number different Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Miss Betsy Posted July 29, 2007 Share Posted July 29, 2007 Just goes to show that there are many lists out there and not everyone's email address is on all of them. Sometimes one can tell when a list has been sold by the different spam received. However, having two accounts filtered through spamcop is not the same thing as saying, 'I do not have a catch-all address.' Miss Betsy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
daryn Posted July 30, 2007 Author Share Posted July 30, 2007 However, having two accounts filtered through spamcop is not the same thing as saying, 'I do not have a catch-all address.' Hello Miss Betsy, it took me a minute to figure out what you meant, but suddenly the light came on, and you are right. I went back and looked, and all of the spam in question are being directed to one of the specific email acccounts, and not being rolled up to an "admin" or "mailbox[at]" type of thing as might happen to a webmaster of a domain. I just looked again and being sent to a specific "user[at]domain" is 42 ads for "pharmacy" with 5 variations of subject lines, and within each variation one letter or number difference... I get a lot of Buy Viagra Now! Online Pharmacy! Sun, 29 Jul 2007 20:52:11 -0500 Buy Viagra Now! Online Pharmacy! Sun, 29 Jul 2007 20:17:23 -0500 or Re. Your Pharmacy receipt #91310 Mon, 30 Jul 2007 01:22:08 -0500 Re. Your Pharmacy receipt #86693 Mon, 30 Jul 2007 08:58:58 -0500 or Re" Your Pharmacy order # 806471 Re" Your Pharmacy order # 434256 and two or three more, around 8-10 of each Note, those dates are right in the subject line, so a lot of the time the only thing different in the subject line IS the date/time lots of fun. just one day too Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Miss Betsy Posted July 30, 2007 Share Posted July 30, 2007 I think your email address is on a list that is sold to the wannabe rich and that the instructions for sending spam are a little bit unclear about how to send them randomly. So every time someone buys that package, they misread the instructions and you get 10 of the same spam in a row. Possibly some of them never figure it out and they wonder why they never get any answers since instead of sending to the whole list, they just send to the same ones over and over. Miss Betsy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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