MontanaXVI

I know this is probably just a waste of bandwidth but I need to vent. I have had spam problems in the past and after installing Spamihilator and using it for quite a while I have actually seen an overall decrease in the amount of spam I get on a daily basis, not to mention the filter is kick ass and catches over 99% of what does come my way.

now to my problem, I was down to about 15-20 per day until 3 days ago when all hell broke loose. I have not signed up for anything new, nor have I given out my e-mail address to get put on this "new spam" list.

1st screenshot here is of the spam filters spam stats for the last 30 days, you can see this huge jump in spam, when all my problems started.



See the nasty spike

2nd image here is the actual filter in action, it leaves all the spam on the server then will delete it at an interval you set (I have it at 3 days so every 3 days it will delete spam that is still on the server) I include this one so you can get some sort of an idea this crap I am getting, and see if any of you are having the same problems or seen this type of spam before.



I get this stuff literally every single time I check my mail, I can check it and 30 seconds later have 20 more spam mails get caught by the filter. I love the filter and the program works great, none of it has gotten through to me, but the spammers are relentless and I hope none of you get hit by this stuff.

If you wanna check out the program itself it sits on your computer and works between the mail server and your mail client, leaving all spam on the mail server so it never even gets to your machine to worry about a virus or bad links etc. http://www.spamihilator.com/

Has anyone seen spam like this before? I am used to the viagra and horse sex ads but this stuff is just jumble and annoying as hell because I get so much of it. I don't want anyone to think this is just my ad pushing for spamihilator, but the program really does work great, I just want some kind of a resolution to this damn spam.

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Spank you very much

AquaFox

i would assume maybe you could have a virus, did you scan your PC for virus and adware?

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...AquaFox...

MontanaXVI

AV scanner in regular use and up to date, as well as spybot and ad aware



These guys are relentless, I know headers are usually always forged but this looks to originate from some jumbled random .jp addy then through some gmail relay or proxy (probably forged) but as you can see in the screen shots it does not look like anyone is closing the open relay up any time soon if it is indeed an exploit in googles systems.

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Spank you very much

cyrnel

That looks like a corrupted mailbox or index, or spamihilator is dying. What type of mailbox is it, POP?

Try disabling spamihilator, grab everything like you did pre-filtering & clear out the inbox, then re-enable spamihilator.

__________________
There are a vast number of people who are uninformed and heavily propagandized, but fundamentally decent. The propaganda that inundates them is effective when unchallenged, but much of it goes only skin deep. If they can be brought to raise questions and apply their decent instincts and basic intelligence, many people quickly escape the confines of the doctrinal system and are willing to do something to help others who are really suffering and oppressed." -Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, p. 195

cyrnel

I'm betting spamihilator is choking on the unicode or extended mime in some of the .jp spam. Some of the single messages are showing up as multiples. If you can access your mailbox normally (without the filter) try forwarding one of the .jp messages to the spamihilator guys with a question about how well they handle international email.

__________________
There are a vast number of people who are uninformed and heavily propagandized, but fundamentally decent. The propaganda that inundates them is effective when unchallenged, but much of it goes only skin deep. If they can be brought to raise questions and apply their decent instincts and basic intelligence, many people quickly escape the confines of the doctrinal system and are willing to do something to help others who are really suffering and oppressed." -Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, p. 195

MontanaXVI

so, cyrnel, you don't think this is actually spam? judging form the headers though it is all jumbled up random .jp and it all follows the same pattern as far as random text, as well as the headers all being very similar. All my other normal mail comes through just fine. I do not want any Japanese mail, I do not know anyone in Japan nor do I care to, but I do find it terribly odd that I would out of the blue all of a sudden after an actual decrease in spam activity over the last 10-12 months see such a huge jump.

It is a pop3 mail account, it is my home e-mail addy on my roadrunner account, I can turn off spami and check my mail like normal if I so wish to do so, but I do not think this is a spami or outlook issue, I just think I managed to attract the attention of the worlds worst spammer somehow. Also the bad thing about spami is that the program is/was written by a german gentleman and the help forums are in German with just one small thread for english speaking users, not to mention there have been no updates and everything is kinda supported by the kind folks who manage the forums, I do not think there really is any kind of tech support for it.

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Spank you very much

cyrnel

Yes, it looks like spam, and you may very well have been targeted, but it also look like spamihilator is choking and possibly misrepresenting the contents of the mailbox. (as in POP mailbox on the server, not the outlook mailbox on your system.) Hard to tell just from the screenshot. The timestamps do look like they're all individual messages.

Today is going to suck. I can't look into spamihilator right now. Can you leave it off and let outlook grab and clear out your mailbox from the server? Once it's empty go back to using spami and see if the problem repeats over the next couple days?

Since I don't know what they're doing these days, it might be worth investigating the filters offered by RR.

__________________
There are a vast number of people who are uninformed and heavily propagandized, but fundamentally decent. The propaganda that inundates them is effective when unchallenged, but much of it goes only skin deep. If they can be brought to raise questions and apply their decent instincts and basic intelligence, many people quickly escape the confines of the doctrinal system and are willing to do something to help others who are really suffering and oppressed." -Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, p. 195

MontanaXVI

I can disable spami and I am assuming it just pulls the mail off the rr mail servers, I do not want to uninstall it right now, so I will try today with it disabled and see what happens, no spam yet, but I just checked it about 30 minutes or so ago with spami and I had ended up wiping the server after I was done just to clean up space, wish me luck today.

I was never aware that rr offered any kind of filtering....I do know they have an av scan that mail goes through as sometimes I get something that said rr scanned it and it had mydoom or some other virus in it, but that is all I was aware of, not to mention I have had my symantec scanner here catch stuff that rr missed.

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Spank you very much

jujueye

Kind of...Actually the display of default glpyhs like the box or question marks means that the application doesnt know how to treat extended characters, so it just punts. So it IS choking, but it is working as expected. What I mean to say is: the app is not barfing it's code, that's real email.

Sorry to hear your spam has increased. *sigh* Do they think we'll ever read it? I just don't get it. I've had spikey increases on and off myself over the last year. I do nothing, and one day: boom, 25 extras. wtf?

Good luck.

MontanaXVI

As you can see from the spike, I wish it was just the normal 25 or so

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Spank you very much

MontanaXVI

ok, that was a blast. Checked my mail and got hit with about 15 more spam mails, totally fubar'd outlook express, guess it is time to fire spami back up.

oe was hanging and dragging like there was no tomorrow, it barely would open up hung like all hell and I had to ctr-alt-del 2 times before the system would even respond for me to close it.

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Spank you very much

cyrnel

Sorry for the adventure. BTW, how large are the messages? Any attachments?

Did the OE problem happen when outlook was fetching the messages or when you were viewing/previewing them?

Anyway, it really sounds like you could use a filter at the mail server. Anything removed at that end is one less thing to download and fight, for you and spamihilator. (nice little program, btw)

Did you find any tools at RR? They should at least have a simple "on/off" switch for protection. If they don't provide anything at all you could make use of a third party filter. There are paid services, but a simple cheat is to use something like gmail or yahoo to grab and filter your mail, then have OE get your mail from their cleaned results.

__________________
There are a vast number of people who are uninformed and heavily propagandized, but fundamentally decent. The propaganda that inundates them is effective when unchallenged, but much of it goes only skin deep. If they can be brought to raise questions and apply their decent instincts and basic intelligence, many people quickly escape the confines of the doctrinal system and are willing to do something to help others who are really suffering and oppressed." -Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, p. 195

cyrnel

Talking past each other.
Good god, I hope so. The only production code I recall seeing leaked into email were errant procmail or sendmail rules.

__________________
There are a vast number of people who are uninformed and heavily propagandized, but fundamentally decent. The propaganda that inundates them is effective when unchallenged, but much of it goes only skin deep. If they can be brought to raise questions and apply their decent instincts and basic intelligence, many people quickly escape the confines of the doctrinal system and are willing to do something to help others who are really suffering and oppressed." -Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, p. 195

MontanaXVI

no problem at all cyrn, the mail would download into oe but when it came time to display it, it killed me. It probably was the same type of deal as listed above the mail program choking on the .jp text. Also the messages range in size from 2.5 KB through 98.X KB, and none have had attachments on them.

I looked around on RR website and I really could not find anything about any spam or filters that I have an option to use, I know one time they were offering some eTrust EZ Armor Security Suite, but I don't need that I have enough knowledge and my own protections installed in the form of av programs and a nice little concotion of anti spyware tools and tricks.

I will just tough it out with Spamihilator and hope it decreases sometime, but this shows no signs of letting up I am running about 300/day now, spami is working great, and yes it really is a nice little program, I recommend to anyone I know who has spam problems. The learning filter is excellent, and there are some great plugins for it that allow you to classify empty mail as spam, mail with less than XXX words is spam etc etc etc, spam with white, microscopic, or "invisible" text, the program is great, I just wish the author was still updating and working on it I do not think there has been any updates for about a year but the message board is very active with programmers making plugins and I think the author still does pop on there from time to time to help answer questions.

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Spank you very much

cyrnel

Yep, I noticed some of those plugins. Many are identical to server strategies for spam reduction without the advantage of keeping the junk completely off customer systems. Does the job when the ISP isn't doing enough.

EZ Armor is a CA product like Norton IS, and it's something of a monster in its own right. I'd be cautious too.

It looks like RR subscribes to RBL & friends. (Shared blacklists used by admins & ISPs around the world.) Your sudden increase in junk may be due to a change in RR's participation in those shared systems, whether by design or screwup, or the shared systems are having issues. I haven't noticed any recent issues about the lists so have to assume it's a RR thing, or as you suggested, you're just really unlucky right now.

Good luck with this junk. Evil stuff, spam.

__________________
There are a vast number of people who are uninformed and heavily propagandized, but fundamentally decent. The propaganda that inundates them is effective when unchallenged, but much of it goes only skin deep. If they can be brought to raise questions and apply their decent instincts and basic intelligence, many people quickly escape the confines of the doctrinal system and are willing to do something to help others who are really suffering and oppressed." -Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, p. 195