Prince

Ok, this is really pissing me off.

I get these emails about 5 times a day, typically two emails back to back. The first one is an "email from Microsoft" offering me a bogus update patch. Sure, Microsoft ALWAYS sends executable files to its valued customers... Whatever.

The second is an obviously fake mail daemon report of a failed delivery to an address that's just scribble... like skjduwh@netmail.com or something. Oh, and of course there is an executable for me included, for some odd reason.

Spam is spam, we all get it, and we grow numb to it. But these emails are typically between 140 and 500 kb per email. It wastes a lot of my time on a daily basis to download emails of that size over my dial-up connection.

What I am asking is, is there any tools you are aware of that you can reliably use to try and track down these emails. I don't want to start blocking email messages that are of greater size than, say, 100 kb, because I get legit emails with sometimes big attachments. I don't mind legit emails, obviously.

Do these analmonkeys really think I would bother opening any of these unsolicited executables? Geeeez.

__________________
Who is John Galt?

rubicon

Why don't you use a spam filtering application? There are plenty around. Even the spam filter built into the newest version of Outlook is solid.

I changed my email address about 6 months ago and used a number of aliases for non-private email. I don't get any spam on my personal email account. In fact, I don't get any spam on my aliases either although I do get some on my info@ address for my business. The spam filter takes care of 99% of it.

As for tracking down the emails... You can try www.SamSpade.org for some standard tracing tools. I'm not aware of email tracing tools but I know they exist.

If you you find the source of the spam, not good odds, what then? If they're not in the U.S. you've got no options. I recently read an article about a guy in the US suing a Pennsylvania-based spam company after they wouldn't meet his "out of court" demands ($250 per spam message). He had logged quite a number of spam messages.

__________________
How you do anything is how you do everything.

sailor

Yeah, there are some damn good blocking applications out there. The Mozilla suite includes Bayesian filtering that is supposed to work pretty well, or if you feel like going hardcore, you can set up something like SpamAssassin. Also, get another email (at yahoo or hotmail or something) to use to sign up on lists and sites and things, it helps cut down the spam.

__________________
"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws."
--Plato

ballze

SPAM SUX!!!!!

I get 40-50 a day......

Rawb

Doesn't look like the spammers think you are that stupid yet, it is actually a virus: http://www.networksmm.com.au/modules...article&sid=42

You might not have it, but chances are, someone who knows your email address does. Finding out who involves a bit of detective work. You can turn on a view all headers option, and try and match some of the Recieved: lines to someone you know, and unfortunately, it may be the only way to go, because it looks like it pretty well mangles the from address.

Well, best of luck to ya!