Email no longer works

[Dave Baumann]

Seriously SMTP is screwed - the W3C need to to something to resolve the email issues we have at the moment, its grinding the net to a halt.

Currently I am getting a log file of about 200 bounced messages per day that are filtered out by my spam blockers - another 50-100 spam messages coming through in a day and a further 50-100 "Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender" because spammers are sending out messages with my address as the reply to!

To add to this, we've started getting the spoof server issue mails that have been targetted at particular sites:

Subject: E-mail account security warning.

Dear user of Beyond3d.com,

Some of our clients complained about the spam (negative e-mail content) outgoing from your e-mail account. Probably, you have been infected by a proxy-relay trojan server. In order to keep your computer safe, follow the instructions.

Pay attention on attached file.

For security reasons attached file is password protected. The password is "74235".

Kind regards,
The Beyond3d.com team http://www.beyond3d.com

Half of the time you are getting slow responses from this site is because there is another virus / email attack going on in some part of the net that is impacting other nodes or this one directly.

Something needs to happen with email farily soon IMO.

 

[AlphaWolf]

It's definitely a problem that's been getting worse not better.

 

[Florin]

I'm generally opposed to capital punishment but I'll gladly except spammers - death by 10.000 paper cuts isn't painful enough for them. If Dante were writing today he'd have a separate layer of hell just for email marketers.

Yeah, I have a domain too and yes some scum sucking pond life somewhere in India has been sending out mass mailings with my name on it for some time now. There've been days with 500 bounces, 'remove me' mails and various insults and threats in my inbox, and there's an infinite number of variations of them, making filtering an effort in futility.

I'm afraid SMTP and anonymity will have to go sooner or later.

 

[Ilfirin]

Yeah, it's getting pretty bad. Check out this msg attached to the top of this week's 'Inside Gamasutra':

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ANNOUNCEMENTS
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
[03.02.04] Alert: Insidious Virus-Laden Spam
If you receive an email purporting to come from "staff@gamasutra" with a
subject line "Warning about your e-mail account", do not open the attached
zip file. Someone is spreading a virus via a customized email that even forges
the signature within the text of the email as coming from "The Gamasutra.com Staff".
Note that variants of this email are spreading, which insert different company
domain names into the email.

Rather disgusting.

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

www.rage3d.com has the same problem. :|

 

[epicstruggle]

Yeah, I have a domain too and yes some scum sucking pond life somewhere in India has been sending out mass mailings with my name on it for some time now.

Facts:
Spam originates from
US 50+%
Canada 10%
China 7%
....
india <2%

just the facts.

 

[PatrickL]

Not really the facts. According to a research made here, if 50 % of spam is coming from USA it is mostly from infected pc and the real spammer are in Russia.

 

[epicstruggle]

Not really the facts. According to a research made here, if 50 % of spam is coming from USA it is mostly from infected pc and the real spammer are in Russia.

whether or not the spammers are russian. The spam is being sent from the US. Simple as that. People need to patch their computers. Im all for viruses that patch computers.

later,
epic

 

[Florin]

Yeah, I have a domain too and yes some scum sucking pond life somewhere in India has been sending out mass mailings with my name on it for some time now.

Facts:
Spam originates from
US 50+%
Canada 10%
China 7%
....
india <2%

just the facts.

Oh surely most scum lives in the US hehe But still, most bounced messages I received were related to a 'business opportunity' aimed at Indians. And sure that doesn't necessarily mean the spammers themselves were Indian (anyone could've used the open relays in Finland and Korea that they were using among others) but the organisation that paid them for their efforts was. :?

 

[dreamin']

Dear user of ******.de gateway e-mail server,Our antivirus software has detected a large ammount of viruses outgoing from your email account, you may use our free anti-virus tool to clean upyour computer software.Please, read the attach for further details.Attached file protected with the password for security reasons. Password is 05610.Cheers, The Vizarts.de team http://www.******.de

That's the latest and greates SPAM that we're getting, funny thing is that we're the admins of the domains, and the domains are hosted on our own server. Our customers seem to get that one less frequently...
But who knows, maybe one of us is schizophrenic and sendimg them out...

 

[covermye]

That's it, epic!!!

People need to patch their computers. Im all for viruses that patch computers.

Some well-intentioned CS god needs to write a goodwill virus that will work as an antivirus and antispam agent on "infected" computers. You could update new versions and release them to spread on their own accord at your own will.

LOL.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Re: That's it, epic!!!

Some well-intentioned CS god needs to write a goodwill virus that will work as an antivirus and antispam agent on "infected" computers. You could update new versions and release them to spread on their own accord at your own will.

LOL.

People tried that with Nimda/Code Red, and the "fix" generated even more traffic than the virus did.

 

[bloodbob]

My Opion is parties that don't take reasonable measures to secure their systems should be considerned criminal negligent and be disconnected and/or prosecuted. We teach our children not to take candy from strangers but for some reason supposedly mature adults run application from strangers. If I called you up and I said I was your bank and I needed your credit card details would you just give over the control of your credit card to me? no of course not but people are doing it every day. My isp is blocking me from sending out .exe files because of other negligent users on my ISP are running viruses on their computers which are of course sending out mass emails with .exe s attached. If I ran a company which produced XYZ hot dogs and I didn't apply security measures and I let people from the street just walk into my factories and someone decided to poison the food should I be partly accountable for all the people who got sick and or died? I'm not talking about a total hard line stance but it is reasonable for most people to apply security patches once every 6 months if they are directly connected to the internet.

Microsoft has the idea of charging the end users $$$ per email ( and they want licencing fees to let you charge the user because they have patents on it ) but frankly that isn't going to work if every ISP implemented it tomorrow the community would start up a new free standard and simply use it.

 

[Saem]

It'd also help if more secure email clients started being used, one of the biggest problems these days is that IT departments can't stop IUs from using OE and the like. The features aren't worth the security risk.

Of course this will only stop some of the spamming, moreover spam propagation.

Messangers are much better in this case -- I'm not talking about MSN, that's complete ASS! I can simply state I don't want to hear from anyone unless they're on my contact list. You can get spammed authorization requests, but that rarely happens -- I haven't gotten any since I'm not in ICQ's directory. The entire white-list black-list idea fairly well implemented. With some more work on the off-line message system you'd have an amazing network. If you look at a multi-protocol IM client like Miranda, it's amazing. It's fully plugable. You can have very secure communication, very smart away system (one that can track processes running and set appropriate away messages such as I'm playing bf1942 serveripxx.xxx.xxx.xxx). Really there would be very little work required and a lot could be done.