Paging plus. net and F9 newserver users.

WTF is going on?

 

I know.

It is all to do with the new news server having a different numbering
sequence from the old news server and me using "some" as a newsreader.
My fault for being a user it seems.

 

Did I read somewhere that they sold out to BT?

 

How can you sell out freeware?

 

**** me I must be getting some really high numbers of spam to my F9 addy
then cos after all this compulsory filtering you mention I still get to
see about 2000 a day. I wonder how many they are deleting?

 

Erm, if you're using your own domain for that, you should be able to
move that pretty much anywhere else. Heck, I've got server that's used
by people doing exactly that.

 

I know their web mail service was hacked and that F9 were very concerned
about users who may have been logged on and using web mail during the
attack.

Not ALL. You cannot harvest the same thing twice, the spammers had mine
already and have done for years.

This is sadly very true. Since the attack the amount of spam I see on F9
hosted stuff has risen sharply, if anything elsewhere has dropped a
little.

No it is most certainly not a new idea to reduce spam. It is an old idea
called delete and ignore and is well proven not to reduce spam and even
their implementation of it is not that new either but it will be equally
effective.

But they do have an opt out option. I do actually know how many of the
emails sent to me are deleted by F9 and the number is zero. It is that
from my personal choice because the bastards won't auto forward to
spamcop direct from their servers so if I want to report spam I have to
download the lot and turn it straight round again.

Not if you opt out it doesn't. I get perhaps one or two spam emails a
week to my nominated addy. The other 15,000 or so are mostly to various
made up addresses.

No you don't. I don't use web mail because I don't need it but when
they first offered the service I played with it for a bit to see what it
offered using good old reliable T'bird. It did exactly what they said
it would and offered me no additional features but did involve less
automation for me so I went back to the way it was.

Oddly enough the spammers seem to respect postmaster and a few other
admin type addresses and the only mail I get to that is the once a month
demand for money from F9.

F9 is not the first ISP I have used, nor will they be the last, which is
why thecow and other things are hosted independently. No hassle if/when
I move.

 

I report to various destinations not just spamcop. I 100% report to
spamcop in an attempt to get some of the zombies taken out of the loop
and selectively report to various other agencies depending on the
content. An average spam email sent to me generates three and a bit
back out.

 

LLU is **** all to do with your ISP, don't blame them for that.

They all seem much of a muchness to me, you just spend your money on the
right bundle of services for your needs, the name of the supplier is
largely irrelevant.

 

Does that actually do anything for you? You said that deleting/ignoring
spam doesn't work, but if you're still getting thousands a day does
your approach work? If so, how?

 

Neither delete and ignore nor report, delete and ignore appear to work
in the sense that spam numbers are actually going down. Anybody who
says otherwise is a ****.

Except... Spam comes in two forms, "genuine" business trying to sell
you some goods or services and viral/phishing attacks. It varies from
day to day but overall is fairly well split 50-50 in what I see.

The late Blue Frog Project, which involved aggressively tracking down
the destination for "genuine" spam and giving them pretty much as good
as they gave us in the shape of a single request to **** off and die for
every request to buy they sent to us, actually worked. It worked well
enough that two things happened, the first was a significant drop in
"genuine" spam and the second was an attack on Blue Frog by the spammers
which eventually brought it down. There is a lesson or three to be
learnt here and one is that spammers are very vulnerable to certain
forms of pressure.

The viral/phishing spam is something else entirely. Pretty much blind
in it's targeting, delivered by huge zombie networks and so fucking easy
to get caught by, the two ways of addressing it with any chance of
effect are reporting to spamcop/similar to get the infected machines
identified and cleaned up and by nerds in darkened rooms pursuing the
means of zombie propagation in order to find out the source. Neither of
these is achievable by delete and ignore.

The only way to beat the spammers is to make their efforts uneconomic.
More reporting means more work for them and more work for them may
eventually lead them to the conclusion that the business simply is not
worth the effort but that won't happen until they are losing sleep or
have been imprisoned. Delete and ignore will not achieve this either,
more people becoming engaged in reporting will though.

The biggest problem with report delete and ignore is that not enough
people are doing it, yet.

 

To what, copper laid exclusively for you? You don't know how it works
do you? One minute a bloke being getting his pay cheque from BT
Openworld or whatever they call themselves today is working in the
exchange for BT, the next minute Zen, the next Tiscali, the next F9, the
next Plusnet and all of it on the same physical kit. I don't know for
sure but I am confident all the data I send and receive goes out of the
county and probably to the Isle of Dogs before it gets carried by
anything that can be considered remotely exclusively reserved for use by
F9. I am also fairly confident that it would have to travel to
Sheffield before it came into contact with anything that was actually
*owned* by F9 as well.

The differences, such as they are, are the contracts BT Openworld have
signed to maintain the systems that BT installed and operate on behalf
of other suppliers. Differing levels of service agreed between BT and
differing suppliers will affect the service you receive but that is not
the fault of BT, they are only doing what they are paid to do or not, as
the case may be.

 

How does reporting it make more work for the spammers? They get the
zombie networks, and if a few die there seem to be plenty more when the
next virus goes round.

That leads me to think it's not an easy process. If it's a case of
forwarding to an email address then great, if it requires more human
intervention than just clicking a button then it's more work than
deleting. Significantly more when you consider you can highlight all
the spam and then click delete.

 

Theirs is a system, or collection of systems and systems need
maintaining. Somebody has to write the virrii, somebody has to set up
the injection process, somebody has to register the domains that offer
goods or do the phishing. Even if the spammer employs others to do it
on her behalf she still has to arrange holiday cover, the office
Christmas party, pension fund contributions and all that other shit.
The more we can batter away at her systems the harder she will have to
work for less and less return. The more information we can give the
Feds the quicker they will be able to track her down and make her
business nonviable. By standing together and saying "no" we win, we are
Spartacus. The alternative is to hide our heads in the sand and pretend
it will all just go away of it's own accord. Better a live Spartan than
a dead ostrich imho, although I do accept that those with Welsh ancestry
may see it differently.

It is a piece of piss.

Depends on the tools you use and the numbers you have to deal with. For
my f9 domain, except for trying to see if there is any pattern to it,
the identifying, reporting and deleting part of it is entirely
automatic. The mere fact a mail arrives addressed to a user at it makes
that mail spam and then it is dealt with according to the many filters I
run it through before deleting it.

I do admit that my real email addresses, that only see a dozen or so
emails a day at worst, actually do cost me more time and effort simply
because spam isn't so downright easy to identify which makes the odd
false negative inevitable and as I am paranoid about getting a false
positive that wastes more of my time as well.

After the F9 webmail thing they offered us all new domains at their
expense, I shall be announcing a new domain to the world in due course
but there is no way I am going to have auvache.f9.co.uk turned off.
50,000 automatic spam reports a month may only be a drop in the ocean
but it is individual drops what wear away rocks.

 

What tools though. Is there a simple plug-in that'll give me an extra
button that says "Report highlighted spam!" (or a nice little picture)?
If there isn't then it's more effort than I want to be bothered with
and the bulk of people won't bother either.

So my idea of running it all through gmail first is a bad idea? That
seems to get most of the spam straight off.

 

Depends dunnit. If you take dont_spam as an example and if I assume
that no fool in their right mind would expect me to ever check that real
mail was waiting for me then a simple filter in Thunderbird that says
forward any mail addressed to dont_spam to the spam reporting agency of
my choice and I can forget it forever. Mail to steve@ is a different
matter.

Then you and the bulk of people will continue to get an ever increasing
amount of spam to deal with.

As far as I am aware the gmail system is delete and ignore and you still
pay a small amount for the infrastructure to carry what gmail don't
deliver so that you can continue to pretend it doesn't exist. Sticking
your fingers in your ears and saying "tralalalalalala I can't hear you"
doesn't stop folks from calling you a ****.

 

It certainly is with a spamcop email address. I have a spamcop address
in my Thunderbird address book to which I forward all spam. I get an
email back from spamcop with a link to click to send the reports and
that's it.

Not a button, but very little effort (see above).

I used to run all my email through gmail for that reason. Nowadays I
want to receive all the spam so I can report it, so I've cancelled the
gmail account.

 

Well not necessarily so, and not just an exception that breaks the rule,
the branded tesco, virgin and whatever services and now virginmedia
services were of course ntl available to non-cabled areas, I think they
called it ntl:freedom. I've had dial-up ntl, cable modem service from ntl
and for a couple of years since moving to a non-cabled area just straight
ntl adsl over a bt phone line.

In 2 years of adsl service from ntl over a bt phone line the service has
been to my knowledge 100% up, as reliable and it was remarkably reliable
as their cable modem service was, so the faults with this other lot,
whoever you are describing are probably not attributable to bt but to the
lower in the food chain providers concerned.

Oh yeah, billing and customer service and support are industry standard
abominable, I've heard. We expect nothing less than to put down the phone
to them a bit sadder, wiser and grayer than before. 512kbps (64K) down
256kbps (32K) up for £17.99 per month doesn't seem that competitive and
past offers to to upgrade to 1M at no extra cost were declined in order to
avoid re-negotiating or entering new contract terms which would tie me to
them for a set period, probably one year, rather than having the freedom
to cancel in order to switch elsewhere at will if desired, this has
backfired in the long run for me now as even the first year of a new
contract would have by now long expired and the situation would be exactly
the same but with the higher speed.

Having forgotten whatever the original topic was here, I'll just say this
is spectacularly OT, well done.