Question about spamming

[thrasherfox]

While I work in the IT field, I dont specialize in spam and I have often wondered why most of the spam seems to be just random garbage of phrases and such.

I am also frustrated that spammers have now created tools that allow their bots to spam comment pages.

Instead of putting my email address on my web page I created a form page where someone would have to fill it out and click submit.

This worked well to prevent spamming up until about 6 months ago, I then started receiving spam from my comments and it is growing every day.

I used to get one or two once a week when it started, now I am getting about 10-15 a day. So for now I have taken the comment section down.

I will post an example of what I am getting but I doubt I need to, I am sure everyone knows what I am talking about.


So is anyone familiar enough with spam to know what is the purpose behind spam messages that just contain random phrases and words that make no sense?

 

[Mr Bogus]

Well you can do what most have done, gone to a "verification" image.. it is a 'non-machine" readable image that the human user must interpret in order to submit the message.. most of the code is openly available or you can hop on scriptlance and have someone do the page for you (maybe $10?) I feel for you.. really a pain to deal with this garbage..

I run a bayesian filter on my mail servers, it learns what is spam by these random phrases..

 

[Mr Bogus]

Free PHP image verification script :: DRBImageVerification
Captcha image verification

a couple to get you going..

 

[PandaNin]

They are looking for bounceback messages. Either "this address does not exist", or out of office or a sent message that says "quit bothering me". Either way it confirms the address is valid.

Once it's deemed valid, the address is added to every list that's sold.

The best email defense I've found yet is a Barracuda. It's a dedicated anti-spam via email server and it blocks 96% of incoming mail to the company. Yep, 96% of our incoming mail is spam. Since we don't respond to it in any way they get no verification of address validity.

 

[Busa_Nick]

Yeah all of the above...

 

[Mr Bogus]

They are looking for bounceback messages. Either "this address does not exist", or out of office or a sent message that says "quit bothering me". Either way it confirms the address is valid.

Once it's deemed valid, the address is added to every list that's sold.

The best email defense I've found yet is a Barracuda. It's a dedicated anti-spam via email server and it blocks 96% of incoming mail to the company. Yep, 96% of our incoming mail is spam. Since we don't respond to it in any way they get no verification of address validity.

not always the case.. we force :fail: on this type of mail.. it sends ALL the message back where they came from.. this is done strictly to lessen our server loads.. There is also a process called :blackhole: that swallows these messages up and does not send anything back.. HOWEVER this increases server loads dramatically..

Here is an article of that process Why you should use :fail:

I have used his services for a couple years on my HTTPD/EXIM servers.. With over 1000 active domain accounts, spam is a monster...