Stop Email Gibberish???

[Guest]

If this is the wrong forum, please redirect me. I have been getting
"gibberish" emails for some time. It's gotten worse, to the count of 15-20 a
day. They are usually "to" some email address that is not mine, or anyone
else that I know of. I have Norton Antivirus (inside System Works Premier)
running "Live Update" and screening all my email accounts. I have AdAware and
Spybot (the free versions) running and I do a full system scan with all 3
once a week. Comcast is my ISP, and I understand that they have an active
screening process to thwart spam. What's going on? Someone suggested that my
machine might be a "zombie" sending out spam mail, and I am getting the same
in return. Is this likely? If so, how do I clean my machine up? Any other
diagnoses would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Lab Man

 

[Guest]

When you get a response - please email me - I too have been getting 20 a day
- mine all have ROLEX watch ads or Cialis/Viagra Ads - neither of which I am
in the market for!

 

[.]

It's like someone released a spam bomb in the MSN hotmail servers.

I wouldn't know. I have never received spam to one of my Hotmail accounts.
After letting the other one die, I resurrected it, then set the spam
protection:

Junk E-Mail Filter:

"Exclusive - you will only receive e-mail from addresses appearing in your
Contacts, service announcements from Hotmail, and messages you have
consented to receive from MSN."

It has been a while since I had to train that filter. I also have an
account protected by Yahoo!'s SpamGuard (more, when you count the fact that
my pacbell.net accounts are also filtered by SpamGuard); Yahoo's SpamGuard
is working very well.

AFAIK, MSN Hotmail makes use of Brightmail, which is very labor intensive.
I can also tell you, from working up my own scratchbuilt filters; filtering
spam is a non-trivial task. Spammers constantly work as hard to write their
ad copy in ways to evade the filters as we do, who write the filters.

I have noticed, lately, that SpamGuard has flagged a higher percentage of
goodmail as spam than previously (false positives), while the Netscape mail
client filter has missed a lot of spam (false negatives). The only filters
that have improved are my own.

http://www.spamcop.net/sc?id=z808701736za155550197fc85a42b893259c2c4e09az
http://www.spamcop.net/sc?id=z808290651z51a49fe60f789aff8c611fe96b903f63z

Each of those links represents a spam item received through MSN Hotmail
mail servers. You can see that Hotmail abuse received reports on each of
them. I have the autoresponse option turned off, so I don't get to see what
nonsense the MSN Hotmail autoresponder offers.

One of the items does not show an originating source outside of Hotmail,
one does. Either way, Hotmail servers are passing spam, and that will get
them listed.

laura

 

[Watsonivegotit]

OMG, 2005? is that a bug?
Anyhow there are two ways you can do this in MSN mail...
1. go to filters and reporting and down at the bottom of the page select block attachments, pictures and links.
2. go to rules for sorting new messages and create a new filter for an email address that contains utf and UTF.