Viruses - Tom Ogilvy

[John Wilson]

Tom,

I'm getting some e-mails from your msn address that look like they
might be viruses? You may want to check on this.
Sent you an e-mail directly.

John

 

[Bob Phillips]

John,

This is probably some sort of spamming.

In the past I have received many emails from addresses that purported to be
from various names plucked from the NGs, but none were really believable.

I also get mail from my Bank suggesting that I click to verify my account.
Needless to say, I don't follow that suggestion either.

--

HTH

Bob Phillips
... looking out across Poole Harbour to the Purbecks
(remove nothere from the email address if mailing direct)

 

[John Wilson]

Bob,

Just seems strange???
I got these at work and I don't have Tom's e-mail address in the address
book on that PC.
I did send an e-mail to Tom directly today and posted here wondering if
anyone
else in the ng was had rec'd similar e-mails.
I get all those same bank/paypal/etc. verifications along with a LOT of
spam.
These stuck out because it was from a valid e-mail address.

Anyway, I'm sure Tom will chime in on this later.

Thanks,
John

 

[Bob Phillips]

John,

At the moment I am getting mail delivery errors for Leo Heuser. Like you, I
don't have Leo's mail address in my address book, and I haven't checked if
the address quoted is correct, but I suspect not.

--

HTH

Bob Phillips
... looking out across Poole Harbour to the Purbecks
(remove nothere from the email address if mailing direct)

 

[Frank Kabel]

Hi
spammers / viruses are getting more and more intelligent. As in nearly
ALL cases the sender address is false in these emails that is probably
also true for Tom's email address.

So I would suspect that either a crawler gets yours and Tom's email
from this NG and/or someone else has both of you in his email list.

I also got email mails from Bob's account (and I'm very very sure he
has his virus scanner / firewall up to date). This is one of the
drawbacks if you post in NGs with your email address

 

[John Wilson]

Frank, et. al.,

Tom did reply to me.
He's clean. Wasn't him.

Just very strange that I got 4 viruses from him (albeit, someone faking his
e-mail)
completely out of the blue today.

Take care,
John

 

[JE McGimpsey]

I get a couple thousand spams a day - and at least a few every day have
the spoofed address of a regular poster here...

Never assume that spam comes from the person listed in the From: field.

 

[John Wilson]

Just a point of interest......

I had saved the files from those e-mails I rec'd yesterday and scanned
them with McAfee. McAfeee didn't find anything wrong with them.
When I booted up this morning, McAfee automatically sent me an update.
I rescanned those files again and voila!!! They were a brand new virus
that was only "discovered" today.

Anyway.....you can't be too careful with this stuff.

John

 

[Bob Phillips]

Wow!. I thought a few hundred a day was bad.

--

HTH

Bob Phillips
... looking out across Poole Harbour to the Purbecks
(remove nothere from the email address if mailing direct)

 

[JE McGimpsey]

It's actually *down* to a couple thousand a day...

 

[RagDyer]

Maybe not being in the "business", I miss the obvious, but, what exactly is
the "down-side" of adding a little camouflage to ones address?

--


Regards,

RD

 

[JE McGimpsey]

Not sure there is one, except that it's extremely rare that my filters
don't catch the spam (maybe 3 false negatives a week).

The blacklists send 75% of the spam straight to the trash. The other 25%
takes only a few moments a day to search for false positives - I find
perhaps 2 a month.

OTOH, I get over 50 legitimate messages a day to that address. Requests
for individual free help are more often than not left unanswered (due to
lack of time), but I get inquiries every week from the groups for my
consulting services. I'd rather not miss any of those due to a munged
address.

 

[Bob Phillips]

JE,

That seems like powerful filters. Mine are nowhere near as good. Invariably,
when I add a new filter, it works for a few days but the spammers are always
ahead of me. As an example, how do you filter the mortgage offers, or the
Viagra offers (both of which I get in abundance)?

--

HTH

Bob Phillips
... looking out across Poole Harbour to the Purbecks
(remove nothere from the email address if mailing direct)

 

[JE McGimpsey]

That seems like powerful filters. Mine are nowhere near as good. Invariably,
when I add a new filter, it works for a few days but the spammers are always
ahead of me. As an example, how do you filter the mortgage offers, or the
Viagra offers (both of which I get in abundance)?

I use a combination of Bayesian filters, whitelists and blocklists - a
product called SpamSieve, as well as a few preemptive filters in my
email client.

Over the last 6 months (roughly 500,000 messages) the combination has
been about 99.5% correct, with 32 false positives.

The biggest time-saver is terminating all HTML mail with extreme
prejudice.