Re: [ql-users]Decent ISPs (was: QPC2 vs Word 97)
However, once Ive divested myself entirely of this account, I should be virtually spam-free! (I'll miss the scams, though. Ive always wondered how people who are smart enough to have learned to read can be dumb enough to get caught up in them!) Because the scam authors are usually great con merchants and how many times do you hear of people falling for con-men, be it smooth talkers who con lonely old ladies, or doorstep salesmen selling you things nobody in their right mind would buy. [ As if to prove my point while I was writing this my doorbell rang - double glazing salesman :-( ] In my opinion, spammers etc are actually causing real damage to the internet both in terms of knackering it with all the millions of useless spam emails flooding it, damaging its reputation as one of the great tools of modern times, and generally destroying my faith in humanity as I realise just what a percentage of the world's population are frankly idiots. In the long term, this problem won't by solved by individual ISP's or individual governments. It's up to all of us to urge our politicians to press hard for worldwide control of these types of things and worldwide consistent hefty penalties for abuses on this scale. After all if it can be done it will be done by someone. Much as I hate to praise M$, I see in Computeractive this week that their big financial rewards caused someone to grass on some virus writers who are likely to get a significant jail sentence. Good, one less to worry about. Right, back to that QL virus I was writing ;-)) -- Dilwyn Jones ___ QL-Users Mailing List
Re: [ql-users]Decent ISPs (was: QPC2 vs Word 97)
P Witte wrote: Robert Newson writes: Im trying to get rid of my Tiscali account as Tiscali are obviously not interested in my custom. Ive tried a few other ISPs, but they have so far not proved reliable or decent - apart from Freeserve, now Wanado. You must have a different definition of decent than I do. About 60% of the spam I get arrives from WANADOO.fr hosted sites. I think our definitions are the same; only our experiences differ. Ive had about 300 spams since March 15 (lucky me, some might say), virtually all of them addressed to somename.tiscali.co.uk, ie tiscali let them bombard me even without the correct address! Most of my spam arrives at a freeserve email address that got harvested from usenet. The rest arrives at spurious userids at the same domain. The amount of spam arrives has a kind of exponential growth: inyear Month Total 32 32 - Jan 2003 . . - Jan 2004 ) Lost data, inc 58 91 - Feb 2003 . . - Feb 2004 ) Mar 01-20. 143234 - Mar 2003 1213 1213 - Mar 2004 (21-31) 254488 - Apr 2003 3915 5128 - Apr 2004 365853 - May 2003 4406 9534 - May 2004 (01-29) 316 1169 - Jun 2003 540 1709 - Jul 2003 482 2191 - Aug 2003 676 2867 - Sep 2003 1274 4171 - Oct 2003 2168 6309 - Nov 2003 2316 8625 - Dec 2003 Ive had my freeserve address for a couple of years now, and it isnt hard to come by on the internet, yet I get no more than about one spam per week via my PAYG account with them, mainly legitimate service announcements from freeserve/wanadoo. I got my freeserve acct in 2001. spam to it is via usenet eaddr harvesting. Really stupid thing is, as I pointed out, about 60% of the spam that it receives is spamvertising sites hosted by sibling company WANADOO.fr. If that sibling company was to deal with these 141 unique sites, that would have been 4,139 less emails that I alone would have received (between 21 Mar 29 May - a period of just over 3 months) - I'm sure I'm not the only one on that spammers' list. The ironic thing is that it is a sibling company and they don't seem to be able to do owt about them: their sibling company's inactivity/lack of due care is flooding their mail servers with spam. Ive no idea where the spam comes from, as I dont bother to find out anymore since theres precious little I can do about it. The only thing that concerns me is which mailbox they arrive in. Ditto...my program just spots WANADOO.fr for the simple reason that when I was moaning about the spam, I noticed too much of a recurrance of WANADOO.fr that I decided to see how much they were generating. Ive previously written about the devious tricks I suspect tiscali of using to bump up their revenue at my expense. Forcing me to download all that rubbish is, I must assume, just another of their little ploys. Bah! Although I use freeserve mailboxes, I actually connect via another ISP - just once a month I dial-into freeserve to keep the mailboxes active. ___ QL-Users Mailing List
Re: [ql-users]Decent ISPs (was: QPC2 vs Word 97)
P Witte wrote: Tony Firshman writes: ... Im trying to get rid of my Tiscali account as Tiscali are obviously not interested in my custom. Ive tried a few other ISPs, but they have so far not proved reliable or decent - apart from Freeserve, now Wanado. You must have a different definition of decent than I do. About 60% of the spam I get arrives from WANADOO.fr hosted sites. I did an analysis of 3,783 spam messages that were received over a month (March-April) this year; 2,022 were spamvertising WANADOO.fr hosted sites. There were, among this number, 141 unique sites (something.site.voila.fr) - a mean of 14.3 spam per site, or roughly one every other day spamvertising each of the sites. (Of the 3,007 that arrived in March 58%, or 1,475, were spamvertising WANADOO.fr hosted sites.) After getting a message from Freeserve/Wanadoo that they were installing SPAM message markers, I emailed them back with my stats and suggested that they ought to scan for sites ending with .voila.fr. My program that collates my stats then began to notice a drop in the count for WANADOO.fr hosted sites. I thought my moan had been successful until I then found out why: the spammers had started to hide the url by using percent escapes (...%2evoila%2efr, etc), and hiding the messages in encode64 messages - neither of which my program was written to handle. I've adjusted my program to handle percent escapes, but I think it is still missing a few; encode64'd messages are not being processed. When I get the chance/time, I may re-write the program to pass the email messages properly. ___ QL-Users Mailing List
