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Joe Jobbing An Entire Spam Mailing List
from the sneaky dept
Joe Jobs, where a spammer spoofs the return address of someone, are very old news these days. If spammers are feeling particularly mean, they may joe job someone they're trying to upset -- as that person will get inundated with bounces and replies from people (yes, they do exist!) who still think replying to spam messages angrily is the way to stop spam. It appears that some spammers with an especially mean streak have come up with a new tactic, as discovered by Rick Klau today. Instead of just spoofing some random email address, the reply-to address is an email list... of everyone who received the spam. In other words, every angry "take me off this list!" email then gets sent to everyone else on the spam list. Rick posts a snippet of the ongoing conversation from a bunch of very confused people: "Why are you e-mailing me?" "Shut up!" "Fuck you!" "Take me off your list or I'll report you to the authorities!" "Stop emailing me!" "How did I get on this list? I never visited your website." "I've reported this to Interpol." "Shut up!" "Stop replying to these messages!" "But you just replied." "You sent me a virus!" "Shut up!" "Who are you and why are you emailing me?" "I'm in Costa Rica, how did I get email from someone in South Africa?" "Shut up!" "Get a Mac!" "Fuck all of you!"
Reader Comments
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Awesome
Wow... that is just awesome! I'm glad I have nice strong filters, keeps me from seeing most of this junk.
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Re: Awesome
I just don't use email...
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Re: Awesome
yeah that new-fangled technology you know... can't trust it. stick with paper mail, it's *safe*. OR... set up email proxies, like any intelligent fellow would do? Never give out your real email address. Keep several, and have them forwarded to the "undisclosed" one, which you would access to read the mail.
Perhaps one address just for emails from your psychotic mother-in-law, one address for your other personal contacts, one for registering at various sites (like thinkgeek!) and one to give away to sites that send you your daily spam (since everyone needs to give their addresses away to such places...)
Seriously though it's a simple solution, and it saves a lot of headaches when one of your proxy accounts gets infected (i.e. discovered by spambots). You don't have to let any of your contacts know that you have deleted that email address, except for those who used that address to correspond with you.
I don't know why this isn't a standard feature in email providers by now. It's not that complicated.
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Re: Awesome
I don't know... I have several email addresses for various purposes, but the most Spam I've gotten (total) is about 5 messages a month, out of about 600 a month legitimate personal, business and list mails. I'm really not sure what the big Spam deal is all about.
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Re: Awesome
You can sort of do this with Gmail currently. If your email address is joe@gmail.com. Any email sent to joe+mother@gmail.com, joe+spam@gmail.com, joe+techdirt@gmail.com all will goe to joe@gmail.com. You then can set up rules to filter this email as it arrives.
Some joe guy is going to be pissed once the email harvestors pick up all those email addresses above.
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Re: Awesome
I was Joe jobbed by the Buffalo spammer.
There were hundreds of bounce mail replies
every day, but not one complaint or request
to be taken off the list. I sent all the
info I could gather to the feds. I don't
know if it contributed to his demise but
I like to think it did.
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Re: Awesome
You did'nt contribute dingus to his demise. Quit dreamin.
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No Subject Given
and thats why I'm putting my email adress right here -----> "getalife@gmail.spam"
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“I survived Bedlam DL3”
It probably wasn't even intentional. He probably though it was just a good, easy way to get the spam out and never even thought about what would hapen afterwards.
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No Subject Given
If I sign up at a site I don't want any response from (read: spam) I use the @uwish.unu email domain. LOL! As in @you wish.you knew!!
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No Subject Given
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Re: No Subject Given
Is that supposed to be like that "what shapes do you see in the cloud game?
I used to get spammed all the time. I could rack up hundreds in a day.
But then I learned a few secrets: encode emails that you put on a website, and email by proxy.
I have since eliminated all email from my email box.
Family has one address, friends have another. And for those friends who send me their silly little anicdotes without using BCC, well, if my friends email address starts getting spammed, they don't get the new address, same with family.
Vendors and listservs get the same treatment.
So there!
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Re: No Subject Given
If you happen to have an entire domain for yourself, and running your own email server helps too...
Give out a unique email address to everybody. If I go to XYZ company's website and they want an email address, I give them XYZ@mydomain.com.
All emails get routed to a single address by the mail server.
This way when I get spam, I can see where the email address they are using came from, and go bitch them out. Then I block that address from receiving email.
I alerted a company that their server was hacked this way.
If I need to supply an address that I know I am never going to want to receive email from I give them an address that always gets routed to the trash, mototrash@mydomain.com.
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Re: how did I...
wait... how did I get on this web site? I don't remember coming to this web site. I'd definitely remember coming to this web site. Stop making me come to this web site! Fuck you. I'll report you to the CPS, NAACP, UNCF, MADD, FBI, UN, and Your mother!
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Re: No Subject Given
I did the email address trick for a couple years, too. I then learned that all the spam I get is just from my original email address, so I stopped.
I do, however, use a different email for my website than I use normally. Makes it really easy to see who got my address through email harvesters.
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Re: No Subject Given
I love your idea! I'm afraid I can't use it because I don't have my own domain, but if I ever do ... I'll definitely keep this in mind.
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Re: No Subject Given
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No Subject Given
This is why I just ignore spam.
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No Subject Given
Sometimes I leave my email address as uce@ftc.gov but I'm not sure the FTC actually does anything with it. :)
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Re: No Subject Given
I've been doing the same lately (well, forwarding spam to it) - I found that address on Microsoft's website. I'm not sure if it does anything either, but I don't get a lot of spam, and it only takes me a second to forward it that way and then delete it.
I will also say that I've seen an example of this joe-jobbing with a "reply-to" list as the original recipient list, though I'm not sure it was intentional in the same way as this was. Either way, there were a lot of "STOP REPLYING MORONS" before it eventually ceased. =)
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Sounds like a bus psycho...
"Why are you e-mailing me?" "Shut up!" "Fuck you!" "Take me off your list or I'll report you to the authorities!" "Stop emailing me!" "How did I get on this list? I never visited your website." "I've reported this to Interpol." "Shut up!" "Stop replying to these messages!" "But you just replied." "You sent me a virus!" "Shut up!" "Who are you and why are you emailing me?" "I'm in Costa Rica, how did I get email from someone in South Africa?" "Shut up!" "Get a Mac!" "Fuck all of you!"
That sounds just like the crazy guy that rides on the bus and screams at squirrels in the park... Well, if he were a techie.
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Re: Sounds like a bus psycho...
We had a similar problem at the last place I worked. It was a large international corporation, with offices around the globe. Someone mistook the global email group for their local email group, and sent an email out to everyone in the company (thousands of people) that only dealt with one small part of the company. So, everyone in the company received this email that didnt have anything to do with them. Instead of just deleting it, and moving on. Everybody started "Reply to all" saying much of the same as the above statements. "I shouldnt have received this." "Take me off your list" "Stop replying to all!"(This guy had replied to all also) and this went on for several days, several hundred messages a day. Finally, the IT department(s) decided just to cancel any email with that or similar subject lines.
We also had a problem with auto-response messages. Someone went on vacation, and set their email client to auto respond with a "hey im on vacation, send email to Bob if you need help" message. Unfortunately, he wasnt the only one on vacation that had an autoresponder. So after setting his email to autorespond, he sent out an email to everyone in the company letting them know about his vacation. Some others were also on vacation and already had an autoresponder set up. The autoresponders were playing a huge game of tag, and all of the email went down. It was pretty comical outside of the ramifications.
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Re: Sounds like a bus psycho...
These could catch on: like Big Brother they are all about people insulting each other they should publish them!
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What to do with spam..
I like to fry my spam in the skillet, add a slice of cheese to it.. throw it between some toast and yummm... a spam sandwich. I really can't figure out why everyone hates spam so much, it's really quite good.
Peace.
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New?
I had a spammer do this to me 3 years ago. I wouldn't say its new.
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Re: New?
That might be why the article starts by saying it's OLD. The first two lines very explicitly say so. How can people who can't read type?
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