strange e-mail

[ripper1]

Does anybody get weird e-mail from places like Nigeria or Ghana saying they have fortunes for you. I don't open these but it is a little disconcerting to me. I am wondering why I get these and how to stop them. I am thinking I get these because I look at financial sites. Does anybody else get these and if so is there a way to stop them?

 

[Nodak]

There is an entire web site devoted to that scam:
419 Eater - The largest scambaiting community on the planet!

 

[ripper1]

Thanks, Nodak, I believe this 419 Eater is the culprit. Now, how do I get them to stop. I am getting something about once a week. I just delete them right away. I am just afraid if they accidently get opened I could get a virus.

 

[palomalou]

Hmmm....I got them for years before I started looking at financial websites, and actually think I get fewer now.

 

[Lsbcal]

On Yahoo mail I regularly check the SPAM folder and clean it out. Once in awhile I'll find an email I do not consider spam in the folder. Probably get around 5 per day in there. Most for sex stuff -- and no, I don't visit sex sites. Have gotten plenty of "UPS missed delivery" and email from banks I don't deal with that supposedly want me to fix something in my account.

 

[easysurfer]

I don't think they are related to any sites that you visit but more so at random by the spammers. When I see one instead of just deleting them, I mark is as SPAM with my spam filter. That way when the next time I get one, that email should automatically get placed in the spam folder.

 

[Nodak]

419 eater is not where the scam originates. it is dedicated to baiting the people that employ the scam. lots of info on how the scam works.

 

[james7]

I get at least two a day, but most days it is more like five or ten. The letters come from everywhere, but give phone numbers in the UK, Nigeria, or the country of Benin, which is situated right next to Nigeria. They are obviously written by con-artists who are gramatically challenged and always want your vital info. They don't bother me and shouldn't bother you, as long as you don't click on any links in the letters.

While we are on the subject of con-artists that bother people, the ones that bothered me were the ones that would call and tell me that I didn't show up for jury duty when I was called and that they were just trying to keep me from getting arrested. When they called, the caller ID would show the name as "Washington DC" and the number as "1234567890". These scared the hell out of me until I caught onto the scam. There was even an episode on the news a while back about how these con-artists set up call centers in Costa Rica and arrange their telephone connections in such a way so that it would look like they were calling from Washington, DC. Their scam is that you were not called for "federal" jury duty, not local jury duty. After many local phone calls, I found out that there is no such thing as federal jury duty.

 

[scrabbler1]

My ladyfriend gets them all the time. But I very rarely get them. We have the same email provider so any spam filter the provider has would help us out equally, wouldn't it?

She is not on line much but the one website she visits a lot is Facebook (I have no use for that), so I wonder if the spammers can harvest email addresses from there to target recipients.

We get some good laughs from those emails. But the scam emails from the "banks" asking for your login info because your account has been "suspended" are not funny.

I rememver Chris Hansen doing a Dateline NBC piece a few years ago about those con men, trying to catch some in England on camera and make them sweat (which one did, profusely).

 

[MichaelB]

Thanks, Nodak, I believe this 419 Eater is the culprit. Now, how do I get them to stop. I am getting something about once a week. I just delete them right away. I am just afraid if they accidently get opened I could get a virus.

Your spam filter should deal with these. It may need to be trained a bit. Can you identify this as spam in the inbox so the mail program learns and filters more effectively?

 

[PaddyMac]

At some point you should set set up multiple email addresses. I have one I use for business, one to join lists from various organizations that send regular "alerts" or updates to members, and another for Facebook, another for Yahoo and a few other lists. The first one I'd like to keep as clean as possible, so I use it just for important communication and purchases. At some point one or more of these emails may get too much spam and I'll create a replacement, but by segmenting them I only have to update a section of my email list.

 

[devans0]

DW was looking for some recipes for something sweet, brown sugar, honey and spice. Google helped her out with some interesting 'dishes' and some spammers attention because she was so 'interesting'.

 

[jebmke]

Does anybody get weird e-mail from places like Nigeria or Ghana saying they have fortunes for you. I don't open these but it is a little disconcerting to me. I am wondering why I get these and how to stop them. I am thinking I get these because I look at financial sites. Does anybody else get these and if so is there a way to stop them?

My email reader (T-Bird) is set to delete any email from an address that is not in my address book.

 

[scrabbler1]

I don't think they are related to any sites that you visit but more so at random by the spammers. When I see one instead of just deleting them, I mark is as SPAM with my spam filter. That way when the next time I get one, that email should automatically get placed in the spam folder.

I have found that trying to block the email address does no good because the spammers create unique email addresses for each new spam email. Often the domain name is one from a real business entity which has been hacked.

With my ladyfriend, many of these emails get sent to her "Junk" folder so she can more easily identify them but several get through to her regular email anyway.

 

[jebmke]

I have found that trying to block the email address does no good because the spammers create unique email addresses for each new spam email. Often the domain name is one from a real business entity which has been hacked.

Right, that's why I don't try to block them, just have the reader delete them.

 

[eridanus]

Posting on craigslist also gives you plenty of spam from people who are moving to the area and want to pay for 3 months of rent (plus a little extra to hold it RIGHT NOW). Luckily, craigslist has an anonymous emails.

 

[easysurfer]

I think a good spam filtering software uses bayesian filtering which "learns" which emails are spam and which are not according to marking them by the person receiving the emails. The software I use is SpamBully (purchased it a few years back), when the spam identifiying wasn't as common. Now it seems the ability to mark email as spam or not if pretty common with email readers. SpamBully uses bayesian filtering which doesn't identify an email as spam by the email address but more by content learning the probability whether the email is spam or not. As time goes by and the program learns, the more accurate it becomes.


The approach is pretty interesting...
http://email.about.com/cs/bayesianfilters/a/bayesian_filter.htm

 

[Alan]

I don't think they are related to any sites that you visit but more so at random by the spammers. When I see one instead of just deleting them, I mark is as SPAM with my spam filter. That way when the next time I get one, that email should automatically get placed in the spam folder.

This is what I do. I've used gmail for years and it seems to cope very well with spam. I rarely get a spam e-mail in my inbox.

At some point you should set set up multiple email addresses. I have one I use for business, one to join lists from various organizations that send regular "alerts" or updates to members, and another for Facebook, another for Yahoo and a few other lists. The first one I'd like to keep as clean as possible, so I use it just for important communication and purchases. At some point one or more of these emails may get too much spam and I'll create a replacement, but by segmenting them I only have to update a section of my email list.

I also have an e-mail address (on Excite) that I use on many non-financial sites where an e-mail address is required to register. I occaisionally go in and mass-delete everything. It always contains mostly spam, both in the inbox and in the spam folder. It is this e-mail address that attracts all the phishing and other scams from places like Nigeria.

 

[grasshopper]

I use Postini provided by my DSL provider, it really cleans the spam out.

 

[mh]

My ladyfriend gets them all the time. But I very rarely get them. We have the same email provider so any spam filter the provider has would help us out equally, wouldn't it?

She is not on line much but the one website she visits a lot is Facebook (I have no use for that), so I wonder if the spammers can harvest email addresses from there to target recipients.

We get some good laughs from those emails. But the scam emails from the "banks" asking for your login info because your account has been "suspended" are not funny.

I rememver Chris Hansen doing a Dateline NBC piece a few years ago about those con men, trying to catch some in England on camera and make them sweat (which one did, profusely).

Not all spam filters are equal. I suggest you switch to google's gmail if you are amenable to switching your email It's quite good at handling spam as well as being a very good general email service provider

 

[ERD50]

At this point (as others have said) you need a new address. Spam filters will help, and as others said, they spammers constantly change the send address, filtering that will provide almost no relief.

I've mentioned this before, and I didn't believe it at first, but it is true and it helps:

Just opening an email can verify to the sender that you are a valid email address and a 'real live' person. With that information, I think your email address becomes 'hot property' and gets sold to a gadzillion other spammers.

What to do: Disable any sort of 'automatic preview' of images in emails.

How this works: The bad guys send a billion emails out with embedded images. Those images are displayed by linking to the image on their web server. Every email gets a different randomly generated number attached to that image, and they keep a database of image #'s versus email addresses. So when their site gets a request from that number, they know you actually opened the email. You have just become a target. Did you see the laser beam on your forehead?

So disable previewing. Now.


Oh, the other thing - do people forward you jokes, or political 'hot-button' stuff, or heart-rendering stories, and such and they get forwarded? Unless they did a 'blind CC'; your email address is on that list. Spammers intercept them along the way, and there you are.

If anyone forwards me one of those, 'IMPORTANT: forward to everyone you know', they get an earful from me, and I make 'em clean the cobwebs out of my attic and scrub my septic tank until it shines, while I pour molasses and red ants on them, stick ear-buds in 'em playing 'Honey' by Bobby Goldsboro non-stop. Haven't gotten one in years.

It doesn't make any difference that YOU didn't forward it - other people are forwarding it and it has your address on it. That's all it takes.

-ERD50

 

[Ed_The_Gypsy]

I have three permanent addresses, two for professional correspondence (Yahoo and Gmail--not used much) and one for personal (Yahoo). Yahoo has a pretty good spam filter and built-in Norton virus scan.

I get some stuff that I know I caused myself. We have gone to Vegas and to a couple of local casinos for dinner and give an e-mail address in order to get some favors on the spot, but I get spam from them and apparently some secondary spam--they must share or sell data bases. Yahoo spam filter takes care of all of that now.

A little over a year ago, a couple of my professional colleagues got hacked pretty bad (they told me so) and I have been flooded with Nigerian scams on both Yahoo addresses. I have stopped deleting them and very seldom open them but have thought of putting them into a book. I seem to have won the Microsoft Lottery, the FBI Lottery and the UK Lottery all in the same week! Maybe I will just deletel all of them after reading all this.

I have always been cautious, not going to odd web sites, not opening spam, not opening amusement attachments from anybody. I also have a good firewall and antispyware software and use Firefox. AVG apparently pre-reviews web sites that show up when I Google something, which is also nice. Still, I have several old friends who spend their idle hours circulating amusing stuff (one of whom was one of the two hack-ees above) and I have to be selective about what I open. I never do the chain-letter-type stuff. And I have separate passwords for almost everything.

But it doesn't help when my friends get hacked.

 

[easysurfer]

I got a phishing email today which actually almost tricked me. My spam filtering program put the email in the "unsure" folder which means to manually evaulate the email then mark accordingly.

The email pretended to be from Facebook (with familiar blue and white letterings of Facebook), saying that my Facebook inbox was full, and to click on a link. Before clicking, I realized that the associated email is for not my main email address (the one I have with Facebook) but another email that I use. Ding-ding-ding: SPAM phishing.

Then I marked the email as SPAM with my anti-spam program so any future attempts should go directly to the my SPAM folder.

 

[GrayHare]

So disable previewing. Now.

Good recommendation, but AFAIK in some popular email programs, such as Thunderbird, it cannot be disabled.

 

[Janet H]

Not all spam filters are equal. I suggest you switch to google's gmail if you are amenable to switching your email It's quite good at handling spam as well as being a very good general email service provider

+1

You can even keep your regular e-mail address and simply forward it to your gmail account. it will be filtered as it arrives


Love, love, love gmail.....