Junk Mail
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Firstly, let me start by saying I am asking if anyone else has a problem with junk mail after putting their e-mail address on this site!
To the best of my knowledge there are only two sites on which I have posted my company e-mail address, Amazon and SQL Server Central.
As I use Amazon from my home address I'm pretty sure my problem does not originate their.
The problem is that my works e-mail address is absolutely bombarded with incestuous offers and various other perversions. I don't have the option to change my e-mail address because it is a business address.
I know there are two main ways that spammers grab e-mail addresses.
- Hit every combination of 'n' letters against a domain name and listen for bounce backs.
- spider a site looking for mailto or name@ combinations
I suspect that some swine has spidered the SQL Server Central site and is using the e-mail addresses from the site for nefarious purposes.
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I hope not but I have not had any issues related to this. However, I do know Amazon sells there list to companies unless you explicitly tell them not too. I mess them up by setting up identifying marks on user names or attention lines and have caught serverl companies who sold my info.
Ex.
I use Amazon
in my name I may tack on _AMZ or somewhere in the address. If I get any email or mail with the _AMZ I know it came from Amazon. The trick is find the key fields they use so you can see this.
As for this site I have never received anything out of the ordinary and this is the only place other than a handfull of vendors who have my business email address.
Edited by - antares686 on 04/22/2003 05:09:04 AM
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I havent had much problem either, though spidering isn't out of the question. It's on our list of items to look at when we do the next site revision, our real jobs have pushed that back a few times!
David, I know you're not suggesting, but for other readers I wanted to add this - we do not sell our list! We hate spam as much as anyone.
If you have your own domain, you might try a trick Steve uses - put the name of the company in the email address you give them - SteveJonesAmazon@blah....
Another solution is disposable addresses, either Hotmail or similiar, or true disposable addresses - http://email.about.com/cs/disposableaddr.
Andy
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Hi,
is it possible to spider a dynamically created webpage like this one? If yes, are there any defending mechanisms? The trick with the company name in the mail address should be really worth a try.
I'm asking this because I'm receiving junk mail with virus attachments. Not from this list, of course. It started earlier. I think this came from a SAP mailing list which does not use a database behind to organize itself. Except for this is really annoying what I hate most about this are the stupid question of our network admins like "Where have you been on the net?..."
Cheers,
Frank
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Frank Kalis
Microsoft SQL Server MVP
Webmaster: http://www.insidesql.org/blogs
My blog: http://www.insidesql.org/blogs/frankkalis/[/url] -
Yes you can spider dynamic pages. We use Thunderstone's Webinator as a search engine with a database driven content management system.
One way of blocking the harvesting of e-mail addresses is to write out the addresses as HTML entities so instead of mailto: you write ma....etc, ditto the actual e-mail addresses.
As far as the visible page is concerned you will still see and be able to clock on the mailto but looking at the page source (which is what the spammers harvest) the address is obscured.
Note that you can mix and match case and letters vs entities which means that the spammer has to allow for every possible combination in whatever they use for parsing the page.
At present interpreting the parsed page takes too long to be viable for mass harvesting.
quote:
what I hate most about this are the stupid question of our network admins like "Where have you been on the net?..."I hear you. Spectacularly unhelpful comments like that tend to come from the socially inept. If I suggested to my wife that the e-mail she received offering mothers on daughters action was due to her surfing habits my life wouldn't be worth living!
These spammers are sending their effluent out indiscriminatly without thought to the fact that young children have access to the web! As am adult I feel violated by some of the stuff I receive and I live in fear of my three children (the eldest is only just six) getting hold of it.
Sorry to bang on about it but credit cards and real estate junk is one thing, porn from the seventh level of hell is another thing entirely.
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Sorry, the forum interpretted my HTML entities m etc
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Well, it's not only about porn or stuff like that. If I were not to sit behind a good viruswall and firewall I would be really concerned about spam that is somehow interest-related. I receive mail about SQL stuff from adresses like @sql.library.com or @codeproject2.com or @norton.com. In this cases you cannot see at first sight whether this is spam or not. You don't take a closer look at the mail, open it and ..GOTCHA. That's what scares me!
I'm afraid to say this on a Microsoft product related forum, but my own computers at home I run under linux. Not because I think it is superior, but AFAIK there are only very few viruses out there infecting linux systems. Most of these hackers, crackers... derive only satisfaction if they can beat MS$. And besides I think it's good to live in both worlds
Looking forward to read opinions on this
Cheers,
Frank
Edited by - a5xo3z1 on 04/22/2003 07:14:32 AM
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Frank Kalis
Microsoft SQL Server MVP
Webmaster: http://www.insidesql.org/blogs
My blog: http://www.insidesql.org/blogs/frankkalis/[/url] -
Like Antares and Andy, I've been on this site for a while and have a large number of posts (though the number pales in comparison to theirs). I've not had any problems with SPAM to my email address I use here.
Did anyone send you an e-greeting card or anything of that sort? We're starting to see SPAM coming in being harvested from these types of "services." I know of two individuals in the last two weeks alone who started getting SPAM after they were sent e-greeting cards by loved ones.
K. Brian Kelley
http://www.truthsolutions.com/
Author: Start to Finish Guide to SQL Server Performance Monitoring
http://www.netimpress.com/shop/product.asp?ProductID=NI-SQL1
Edited by - bkelley on 04/22/2003 08:19:54 AM
K. Brian Kelley
@kbriankelley -
no, not yet
Cheers,
Frank
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Frank Kalis
Microsoft SQL Server MVP
Webmaster: http://www.insidesql.org/blogs
My blog: http://www.insidesql.org/blogs/frankkalis/[/url] -
Dave,
Apologies if someone snagged your email from here, but as Andy mentioned, we do not sell our emails. All information presented to advertisers is aggregated, so 20% of DBAs do development, or something like that.
We also only work on SQL Server advertisers, not anything else. IT's been tempting, especially as hosting and expenses have gone up, but we really strive to keep this site free and community based without a lot of entanglements from non-SQL related vendors.
Again, if someone got it from here I wouldn't be surprised, but it didn't come from us.
Steve Jones
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