Taking care of one of my regular Monday morning routines. Doing a quick scan of my email Junk Mail folders and trying to figure out if there’s anything in there important. A very rarely get false positives in my spam filters, but every now and then it does happen so I’ve got to scan quickly.

As I’m scanning I usually do a couple of things to make legitimate messages pop-out a little bit from the rest of the junk in the folders. I’ll sort by name first and quickly delete patterns of emails, then switch to sorting by subject and do …read more

I’m hitting a little bit of a theme with my posts. Can you tell it’s that time of the week when I go through my spam filters and check for false positives? That’s what I’m doing and I’m reminded of something that to me is extremely easy to identify. I’m not sure why messages fitting this scenario aren’t immediately flagged as spam and never seen by the user.

I don’t know how many times I’ve gone into my email and noticed messages with a weird date and time. In my opinion if an email is sent to me with a …read more

I manage a number of email addresses on a daily basis. Some of the servers have great spam checking filters while others get legitimate emails caught in the filters by mistake on a regular basis. Regardless of the filters I setup or whitelist and blacklists I edit and update, I find myself scanning my junk mail folder for some services at least weekly.

I will regularly sort my Junk Mail folders by "Subject" which for me makes it very easy to scan through subject lines that are usually very similar and the only difference is the spoofed email address they’ve …read more

I’m not sure what gave me the idea to do this but it was interesting the way it turned out. I’ve been tweaking our spam filtering settings for our domains for work and was a bit in awe of the collection of blacklisted words we had collected for our spam traps.

My first thought was to share my list of blocked words with everyone, but I wasn’t sure the best way to share it, so I have the way I’ve embedded it below as code will allow you to hopefully cut and paste it into your own filters. This will let …read more

I got an email last night that I’d been waiting to receive for quite awhile.  I received notice that my subscription to eWeek would be cancelled if I didn’t respond. We’ll see. I’ve actually been trying to unsubscribe from my subscription for quite some time. I click on all the unsubscribe and remove links I see in the various emails.
Hopefully they’ll do what they say they’re going to do and cancel my subscription. It’s not that it’s a bad email newsletter, just trying to adjust and prioritize what’s getting put into my Inbox on a regular basis.
What’s been your experiences …read more

Gmail is a pretty good mail service provided by Google which strives towards accurately catching spam, and is very successful in catching the phish. One thing that empowers the people behind Gmail is the volumes that Google sees.
The Google Enterprise Mail is apparently a much-in-demand service too and it has a Google Enterprise “spam squad” who welcome spam so as to analyze and counter them. Nearly a month after the new year started, they have posted a retrospective post “2008: The Year in Spam” which you may go through if you have time. Otherwise this summary will suffice.
Closing the McColo Network …read more

While the 12 Days of Christmas start on the 25th night, I believe the 12 days of Christmas spam start 12 days before that night. Because spammers know that this is the time when shopping is at a peak and the actual 12 days are “duller” with people celebrating and taking vacations more than shopping.
Around this time last year, Symantec released the 12 days of christmas spam song. It is not as popular as it should have been but is worth watching again. It is a bit outdated because of changing trends. Help me edit it. I can’t let go …read more

Microsoft released a huge security update, its biggest in five years, containing 28 packages of which 23 are marked “critical”. You better run the Windows Updates immediately; I am right now.
There is a Firefox trojan that is trolling around stealing passwords. Read the Larry Seltzer’s post for the story and a suggestion.
Friend Brian got numerous cases with a variant of Win32/FakeSecScan virus in the last couple of weeks and so compiled a helpful one-page PDF called “Beware of Fake Antivirus Programs” (PDF link warning). I have one more thing to add. When you see that popup message, open the taskmanager and kill the …read more

I received a spam mail in my inbox. It was from a friend. I can’t now remember what it exactly said, but it was something about how eco-unfriendly the Intel Pentium 4 processor is. The mail ended with a warning that a bird would come and get me if I didn’t throw my processor into fire. I, of course, reported it as spam and went on with my normal routine. One couldn’t expect me to really throw it in fire; the processor is as important as my heart.
Later that night as I switched off all the lights and went to …read more

While spammers are getting more innovative by the day, most victims still fall prey to the primitive types. I suggest three thumb rules to defend yourself against the seven common types of spam mail that I’ve recently mentioned. They are all common sense, but if common sense were abundant among all of us all the time, the world would’ve been a tiringly boring place.
First thumb rule is to keep your mouse away or tie your fingers from accidentally clicking on the links within the message or downloading the attachment.
Second thumb rule for any kind of spam (apart from cheesy forwards, I …read more