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View Full Version : emails from unknown senders ....



Ken Fitzgerald
03-09-2016, 12:51 PM
Keep your eyes open!

Between the security of my internet provider and my own security I don't see a lot of phishing or other strange emails.

Today 2 got to my email inbox. Both had attachments and I didn't recognize either sender. I trashed them without opening the attachment and emptied the trash.

There seems to be a new surge in this stuff. Take care!

Jay Jolliffe
03-09-2016, 1:04 PM
I do the same...If I don't recognize where they come from they go straight to the trash...then delete

Bruce Page
03-09-2016, 1:04 PM
I don't get many of them either but that is my automatic response. I'll ask LOML if she knows the sender, if not, poof!

Mike Henderson
03-09-2016, 1:33 PM
I never open an attachment unless I know the person and they put some text in that indicates they actually sent it. If it's just an attachment from someone I know but there's no text explaining it, I trash it.

Mike

Jim Koepke
03-09-2016, 1:37 PM
My junk mail filter puts them in a file which allows me to view the text without any HTML links being activated. On some rare occasions it is actually someone I know sending something.

I have one friend who must have about 30 different email accounts. It has been difficult, but he has pretty much learned if he wants to communicate with me he needs to do it so I know it is from him.

He used to send me 'cryptic' texts that I had no idea were from him. He would later ask me why I didn't show up for something. I told him I had no idea what a strange string of letters and numbers meant of from whom it came, so it was deleted.

In a world full of spammers and scammers we have to drop our cute screen names when we send something important to folks who may not know your cute screen name.

jtk

Lee Schierer
03-09-2016, 2:27 PM
When spam gets past the earthlink filter and shows up in my inbox, I click the flame icon in thunderbird and send it directly to trash. It gets deleted automatically from there. I never open attachments from unknown sources, they also go straight to trash.

Jim Koepke
03-09-2016, 2:41 PM
When spam gets past the earthlink filter and shows up in my inbox, I click the flame icon in thunderbird and send it directly to trash. It gets deleted automatically from there. I never open attachments from unknown sources, they also go straight to trash.

My email's junk file has a bounce option. It allows me to return an email as if it was never viewed and went to an invalid eddress. It doesn't work with email from a spoofed eddress.

This has been more effective at stopping spam than clicking on unsubscribe in emails from spammers.

jtk

Roger Feeley
03-09-2016, 4:07 PM
For what it's worth, I like Bill Gate's suggestion about spam. Each email should cost 1/100th of a cent to send. The money would be exchanged between ISPs to cover the cost of charging us. There would be a way to whitelist someone so they wouldn't be charged. Your ISP would give you a dime's worth of emails each month for free. After that, you pay.

That wouldn't hurt any of us little guys and if a business truly wants to do business with us, it wouldn't hurt them either. But it would kill the spammers that depend on millions of emails to find one sucker. Additionally, we would receive an accounting if we go over our limit which would shut down trojan emailers too.

Dave Anderson NH
03-09-2016, 5:05 PM
I just received 2 today allegedly from my ISP warning me about closing my account and with the "last notice" verbiage. When I checked them out under properties both were from email addresses in Russia. Go Phish!

glenn bradley
03-09-2016, 5:12 PM
I use very easy rules; if I am not expecting a particular email it automatically gets trashed :)

Steve Peterson
03-09-2016, 7:55 PM
I have a close email name to a marketing person that must get a thousand spam emails per day. Around 20-30 per day get directed to me, often with his middle initial. Many are trying to sell me a mailing list or get me to watch their companies webinar.

I don't understand why they keep sending me emails every single day. I ignored the last 364 emails. Why do they think the next one is going to get through. My junk email filter has over 2500 names on it and this is after the company filters out most of the obvious spam.

I like Bill G's approach to charge a token amount per email. It seems like it would cut down on the junk emails.

Steve

Brian Elfert
03-09-2016, 8:41 PM
I help run the company mail server and something around 95% of all of our email is deleted as spam. We still get complaints about too much spam. I keep saying we should let all email through for an hour so users see how bad it would be without filters. Spammers come up new ways to send spam faster than the filter can block them.

Dan Hintz
03-10-2016, 7:48 AM
I started blocking IP ranges. Surprisingly, US servers are the worst... they're set up as bots and spam the crap out of folks. When I started blocking certain ranges (CA and NJ hold two of my worst offenders), the spam dropped from 100s/day to a handful/month.

Myk Rian
03-10-2016, 10:38 AM
This has been more effective at stopping spam than clicking on unsubscribe in emails from spammers.
You actually do that? All it does is confirm an active email address.

Rick Potter
03-10-2016, 11:02 AM
In the last couple days I have gotten at least half a dozen new ones, indicating I am now a 'Mystery Shopper'.

Jim Becker
03-10-2016, 11:16 AM
Some new bot-nets came online recently and the uptick of nefarious, attachment laden emails (many of them with CryptoLock type treats), has bee huge. Don't open them for sure.

Dennis Peacock
03-10-2016, 11:18 AM
There is a drastic climb in effort via email for phishing attacks to gather more current info for valid accounts. Do NOT click on "unsubscribe" in most cases due to this only confirming a valid and working email address. I operate on the rule that if I don't know you and I'm not expecting an email from you? The message gets deleted. Plain and simple. :)

Tony Zona
03-10-2016, 11:21 AM
I started blocking IP ranges. Surprisingly, US servers are the worst... they're set up as bots and spam the crap out of folks. When I started blocking certain ranges (CA and NJ hold two of my worst offenders), the spam dropped from 100s/day to a handful/month.

Dan,

What OS do you use, what mail app, and how do you determine and then block IPs?

I have opened the mail to find IPs. Is that what you do?

Curt Harms
03-10-2016, 11:34 AM
I use Thunderbird as an email client. Both it and Firefox will, when hovering over a link, show the url associated with the link without activating anything. We then forward anything claiming to be from Chase, Bank of America, Verizon or whoever to their email abuse/fraud address. I often add a note about it being too bad that a Fortune 100 company can't afford their own email service but must use one in Russia, Eastern Europe or China.:D

Brian Elfert
03-10-2016, 6:48 PM
Our corporate email server includes a subscription to a continuously updated list of bad IPs. At least two thirds of all of all of our email comes from IPs on that list. Those emails are immediately rejected.

Dan Hintz
03-11-2016, 7:04 AM
Dan,

What OS do you use, what mail app, and how do you determine and then block IPs?

I have opened the mail to find IPs. Is that what you do?

All blocking is done at the ISP level... since my mail comes in through my web hosting service, I merely set up a list that does not allow those IPs access. If someone were to surf to my website using one of those IPs, they would get a "cannot connect to website" error. Mail from those IPs gets bounced back as if my server doesn't exist, so they can't even collect my emails as being active just from not getting bounced back.

As new junk mail gets through, I look at the originating IP and add it to the list. As I said, I'm down to a few junk emails/month. It is probably the lowest level I've seen since setting up my website 10 years ago.

Chuck Wintle
03-11-2016, 7:39 AM
There is a drastic climb in effort via email for phishing attacks to gather more current info for valid accounts. Do NOT click on "unsubscribe" in most cases due to this only confirming a valid and working email address. I operate on the rule that if I don't know you and I'm not expecting an email from you? The message gets deleted. Plain and simple. :)

I use thunderbird email client and it seems to work well after it has been "trained" to reject bad/suspect email. I never see the email as it goes automatically into the junk folder which empties when thunderbird is closed. My rule of thumb is to delete any email that is requesting info. If you think an account has some kind of issue then login in via the normal method and see.

Dan Hintz
03-11-2016, 9:46 AM
I use thunderbird email client and it seems to work well after it has been "trained" to reject bad/suspect email.

I totally disagree... I love TB (what I use), but it's quite dumb in its methods of junk mail detection. Its basically using "same email" and "same image" detection. If you want even remotely useful detection/rejection, you have to spend a lot of time writing rules that look for specific titles, body text, etc. A properly built Bayesian filter would be 100x better, but for whatever reason they refuse to include one.

Chuck Wintle
03-11-2016, 3:42 PM
its a consumer grade email client but for my needs it works well.

Bill Cunningham
03-15-2016, 9:26 PM
I block all of those New top level domains. I.e. .top,.xyz,.download,. Etc. There must be a hundred of them an all I have ever got from any of them is spam

Dan Hintz
03-16-2016, 5:42 AM
I block all of those New top level domains. I.e. .top,.xyz,.download,. Etc. There must be a hundred of them an all I have ever got from any of them is spam

Interesting... don't think I've received a single spam message from any of them yet. Everything comes from a .com.