April 13, 2004

• i guess a spammer joined mofi, 'cause our email addies should only be viewable to members who are logged in :-( i only use forwarders for my various forum/filter profiles, that way i can delete them easily and still keep the real account that they piggy back on. i'd be happy to create a forwarder (on any one of my domains - katgyrl, geekgoddess, zenn-la, etc) for you Kimberly, and if it ever gets abused we can just delete it and replace it.
• And you didn't even reply, Kimberly.
• At this point I get so much spam anyway I'm just resigned to my daily ritual of deleting 40 unread emails. On a plus note, I'm pathetic enough to enjoy ANY mail, even if it is spam. The subjects are always entertaining (especially the NSFW variety).
• I suppose I should be resigned to it, but for some reason getting the spam at my monkeyfilter address felt like a violation. * sniff * And this comes after the third attack from the same comment spammer on my personal blog yesterday. The guy is spamming every post on my blog with a link to a polish website. It makes no sense. Thanks for the forwarder offer tracy. How do we set that up? :)
• I've been getting lots of spam to all my email addresses recently, though. It might just be coincidence, and random spammer luck (I don't know how unique your email address was, though). And, yeah, the thought that a spammer has joined just to harvest addresses is quite irritating. So much for openness. (Thats what pisses me off most about spammers, I think - the fact that they stop anybody actually leaving email addresses anywhere. The nice thing about the internet used to be that you could actually get in contact with people). Fucking spammers.
• I changed my addy last night. When the Little Demented Blueballers thread started, I got a sick premonition. The only realistic approach to the plague of spamming is the one outlined here.
• I'm at maybe a dozen pieces of Spam a day across 4 email addresses. And I don't munge mine. Anywhere. So... guess I'm lucky or something.
• Bizarrely, I seem to get about one or two a week, if that. And it's not as if I go to pains to hide my address, either.
• i guess a spammer joined mofi, 'cause our email addies should only be viewable to members who are logged in :-( Hmm. Who's up for a spammer hunt? I'll get the rope.
• Instead of a forwarder, why not use spamassassain or any baysenian spam filter? Mozilla Thunderbird has a built in spam filter that filters all the spam that I get.
• And Kimberly, if this spammer hunt is to be successful, we're going to have to see that picture, I think. Know thy quarry and all that.
• Heh. I saved the email so y'all are welcome to it.
• Oh. And also, I just switched my hosting service and it comes with a lot more email options than the punks I'm with now. So I don't need the forwarder after all. And I've been thinking about using Thunderbird for a while (the man does), so maybe this is a great reason to make the switch.
• BBF, if you're feeling left out, you can have some of my spam. Last week it ramped up to at least 50 pieces of spam a day, so I've got plenty to go around.
• I love me some Thunderbird. Yes, the email client, too.
• For those of you with your own domain, check to see if your hosting company allows you to create two things: 1. email aliases 2. email catch-all account The benefits of this are huge -- I can create an alias that I give out 1 time, like if I sign up for a mailing list, or some silly promotion on a website. Let's say I create monkeyfilter@mydomain.com. I set it up as an alias to jim_t@mydomain.com, or whatever your "main" address is. As soon as you start seeing spam sent to the alias, you remove it from your main account, so no more spam from that address. My catch-all account was getting between 150 and 250 messages a day. Seriously. But my main account (along with all of my aliases) would only get about 5 or 10 at the most. So every week or two I purge all of the messages from my catch-all account (after I did a quick search for legitimate email).
• No one ever writes to quidnunc. *cries*
• No one ever writes to quidnunc. *cries* people, I think we have a mission here.
• ps - unlike Kimberly I promise to open your pictures. Just sayin'.
• Kimberly, what was your old email address? You quite likely could have been hit by a carpet-bombing type of spam attack. I find that more likely than a monkey spammer. Obtain degrees from Prestigious non-accredited Universities
• I've got some sexy badger pictures I could send you, quidnunc.
• jim_t, I understand the alias, but what's the catch-all account? Does it just receive any email addressed to any_user_id_whatsoever_here@yourdomain.com?
• My old email address was monkeyfilter@mydomain.com, which makes me think that it wasn't a carpet bombing.
• I think he has his catch as spam@hisdomain.com and the main account he uses is another one, so he uses the spam account as his bulk mail folder.
• Try spamgourmet for creating disposable addresses. I use it a lot.
• My old email address was monkeyfilter As monkeyfilter has been around for almost six months, which is more than enough time for it to get into the carpet-bombing dictionaries, I still like that explanation. Bet you could make it monkey0filter and see spam-no-more. Are you interested?... Nathancarload
• But why would they know to match my domain with monkeyfilter?
• They wouldn't, Kimberly. They'd just ahve a large dictionary of terms - names, names of sites, that sort of thing - to stick onto any domain address. The amount of mail that spammers actually get through to people, compared to the amount that they send to dead or non existent addresses, is tiny.
• If it was a true carpet-bomb, then they tried many, many things at your domain, monkeyfilter being the one that struck pay dirt. They probably tried goetter, too. Or, I could be wrong. Cheap software on CDs, Postmaster.
• If they tried many things at my domain I would have gotten a crapload of spam. My address is a catch all.
• Odd - like Blaise, I get so little spam, and I coldn't do much more to broadcast my address without renting out the big screen in Picadilly Circus. Recently, I've started saving my spam, because the names they use are a great resource for writing - future stories by me are likely to feature such intriguing characters as Mason Valencia, Raleigh Marquez, Weldon Padilla and Hyo Calhoun. But I did get some from a new source today - I might change my MoFi userpage address, just to see if there's a link. All kinda Women Can be Found Here To Satisfy Women Lovers' Eyes
• In the last two weeks my spam count has gone up exponentially for whatever reason. I think I'll be switching back to Thunderbird because Eudora's filters only want to work about half the time and my mail server's spamcatcher isn't working as well as it did. I use the same email address for everything I do, though, relying on my spamcatcher to do the hard work. There's no way a non-member can see your email addresses, so either a spammer has joined or it's some sort of carpet-bombing, like the guys said. I've been looking for you...
• I got that email too. My spam catcher didn't catch it because the only other mofi email I've gotten was for the swap thing. Luckily, I use Mailshell, so I could just change the address if it gets worse. I've also noticed a lot more spams to other addresses recently.
• i hates me some spam. unless i'm camping, in which case i like it fried, with pancakes. and eggs, poached on top of corned beef hash. (hey, camping is no time to eat healthy, you need those empty calories to survive in the great outdoors!) as for spam filters, i tried popfile for a while, with good results until my university upgraded our ancient servers to run SSL, which popfile can't handle unless you do some fancy something-or-other i didn't want to bother with. then switched to mozilla mail (from netscape 6, pre-spam filtering version) to take advantage of the filters; have been doing a great job but still spam would get through. then the U in its benevolence put spamassassin on the mail server - that catches most of it, mozilla finds a large percentage of the rest. 95% of my junk mail now ends up in the trash, automatically. plus i set up a server-side mail filter rule to auto-reject anything addressed to me @(old-mail-server-name).university.edu, as that was the source of most of my spam and that server name has been replaced by me@university.edu quite a while ago. but you expect stuff like that when you've been using the same email since '92. (and i'm not about to change it, just 'cause of you - do you hear me, you spamming bastards?) Propagates B. Homecomings writes: "Can you satisfy her? v!agara, ckialis, cheap!" badger filch mustardseed randomtextstring
• Kimberly - email me at the addie in my profile... you need to have a regular email acct, that i can create a forwarder to piggy back on, one that's never ever been used in public before. if you don't have a sparkling fresh never been spammed regular acct i can also create one for you too. in that case i would need your choice of password as well as a username for the regular account, and a username for the forwarder. so just email me and we will go from there... and sorry i took so long to come back to this thread, i got distracted by a pair of new shoes 8-)
• badger filch mustardseed randomtextstring Ah ha! Even here, anti-badger sentiments can be found. awqgrapple wizened nougat.irt free s3x m0dules
• I've received two pieces of spam (one yesterday, another today) from an address on the cd swap list. I assumed it was a virus and deleted it before opening. I don't know if the sender is doing this intentionally so I feel weird about publishing the address. But I checked and it does match up to monkeyfilter user.
• mandyman, email me the address if you like and I'll check it out.
• mandyman- same here! I have had two pieces of what I assumed was spam, and deleted without opening, sent to my unique to monkeyfilter (and meta) email address. I just went back and looked at my trash, and sure enough, it was from someone on the cd swap email. Mine were from a certain hotmail address...
• You should either email that person, mandyman, or mention them on here, because if it is inadvertant, and they don't realise they are being used as a spamming account, they'd probably like to know they were.
• gah! is it just me, or is it always this time of day that the message-chronological order thing goes kablooey?
• And yeah, I too recieved some email which referenced a monkeyfilter link, which was basically spam. But I deleted them, so I haven't got the address. At the time I didn't realise our emails were hidden, and just assumed it was typical spam
• If it's a hotmail account, I'm guessing shotsy. In another thread (I forget which) he mentioned his email address, so someone may have snagged it from there. And yes, it always seems to be about now that comments go weird, ambrosia. I still maintain that it's the earth's shifting magnetic core -- why yes, it does shift about now. Doesn't it do that for you?
• mandyman! You mean I'm hard at work on a mix for someone who could be spamming all of us?
• I've never had a problem with spam on any of my addresses. I wonder how it is that everyone else always seems to have this problem.
• It sounds like mandyman's correspondent has an address book trojan.
• mandyman, tracicle et al- I just sent my mystery correspondent from the MonkeyFilter CD swap an email alerting him that his email may have been spambotted. (I'm guessing that's what happened, I can't imagine a Monkey sending out "Lesbian and Gay MPEG" to other Monkeys without asking first...)
• Is cock still a member?
• (I'm guessing that's what happened, I can't imagine a Monkey sending out "Lesbian and Gay MPEG" to other Monkeys without asking first...) Is cock still a member? (I don't know what happened to my post above, by the way. Eaten by something evil, no doubt. Probably my inability to close tags, or something.)
• I'd forgotten about our famous-for-being-infamous "Cock." Point taken.
• Talking of spammers: check this out. New metafilter user ChristFollower turns up at Metafilter and posts this. Which turns out to be an email harvester for spamming, run, seemingly, by ChristFollower.
• Predatory marketing is evil.
• Okay this sucks. I just got spammed with an email message that contained a virus. Luckily my AV caught it. Subject line was "HOT MOVIE". Righty. I'm taking my email address off my profile.
• Never mind, I double checked and it's the same hotmail account to which mandyman and ambrosia referred. Virus scan pie for everyone.
• Kimberly, just checked the email address I give for MoFi -- no spam. So possibly the problem may be coincidental...? Hope this helps.
• I didn't get any spam either for my allmail account. Are the only ones hit who joined the MoFi swap? Maybe we can narrow down the perpetrator that way. Spammer! Spammer! Spammer! KILL! KILL! KILL!
• I joined the swap and didn't notice any spam, but most of mine goes straight into the trash folder.
• Sorry you guys, I think its me. Its probably a god idea to take me off mofi and Ill get a new adress as soon as I can and make a new user ID. With a new password. I think it must be the computer at work because I got spammed by someone elses work address. I cant do anything now (since Im at heathrow, where internet is 10p a minute and there are no apostrophes, part of an anti-terrorism program I suspect), but if anyone has any ideas on how to kill a hotmail account Id be happy to hear them. Im really sorry about this.
• Yep. That's the email address it came from. Poor guy. You're forgiven. I'm still not opening the picture though ;)
• Or gal! Make sure to sign up again :)
• Guy. PF's blog is cool. and there are no apostrophes, part of an anti-terrorism program I suspect Heh! Take that, al-Qa[']ida!
• Query: Can trojan email harvesters pick up email addresses off of blind copies? It seems pretty clear now that that those of us who got spammed were on the cd swap email, and I'm wondering if instead of putting all our addresses in the TO: line, if the email had been addressed to the sender, with everyone's email in the BCC: line, would that have kept PF's trojan from hitting us, or would it not have made a difference? (And I think that everyone else should be relieved that the email address in one's profile still appears to be secure- it looks like this was limited to the CD swap monkeys.) And PF, you're forgiven. I don't think it's even necessary to change your MonkeyFilter ID (unless you want to put this behind you)- just let the hotmail people know your account needs to die, and you should be all set. Oh, and welcome to MonkeyFilter!
• What ambrosia said, PF. I wouldn't worry about changing your account -- and besides, as petebest knows it's a pain in the butt having to create a new account because you can't get your old username back.
• Great, thanks you guys! (Wow, this is a nice place!) One note, though: I read MoFi sometimes on bloglines, and I noticed that the RSS feed shows the email address of the poster - at first I thought that I could only see them because I was logged in to MoFi, but no such luck. I wonder if that fact puts your addy in danger?
• That would appear to be a very relevant point.
• strange. I'll check it out. Edit: I did and it does. i'll get it fixed somehow asap.
• PF good catch on noticing our addies in the rss feed...!
• rss feed no longer shows email address.
• I am just reading this thread now. As one of the CD Swap administrators, I will change the group distro list to all bcc's.
• I recieved an odd spam message this morning: From: "Elisabeth Brown" Add to Address Book To: my monkey address. Subject: www.monkeyfilter.com Date: Sun, 30 May 2004 16:04:27 +0800 Hi, I visited http://www.monkeyfilter.com, and noticed that you're not listed on some search engines! I would like to introduce to you an affordable service where we can help enhance your online presence globally. Search engine submission is an integral part of the success of your web site. Building a web presence means more than just having the right keywords. We offer a star solution that will produce guaranteed results. Our unique search engine positioning technology helps submit your website to over 300,000 search engines and directories every month. It takes only minutes to sign up for our service. We'll do the rest! You'll be surprised how simple it is to now reach out to an international market and increase the visibility of your website. Do let me know how I may assist you better with workmiracle.com! Best Regards, Elisabeth Brown Sales and Marketing E-mail: Elisabethbrown@workmiracle.com http://www.workmiracle.com Not interested in our www.workmiracle.com service? To be taken off our mailing list, please follow the instructions here. It even had a picture of monkeyfilter on it (from May 28th). Now, this came to my general all purpose address, so I get a fuck of a lot of spam on it, but its strange that it mentioned monkeyfilter (and only a day after I made my first posts for a month) considering our emails are hidden. Has anyone else recieved any messages like this?
• Weirdness. I wonder if it's someone that joined. It sounds a little complex for a bot. Did the picture attached have the user logged in?
• Nah, - just says Anonymous. And the wording of it suggests its just random spam that has somehow connected my email with monkeyfiler, because it seems to assume that monkeyfilter is my site, and that I'd want it listed higher on search engines to maximise ad revenues. Its a pretty expensive service too. $20 a month. Fuck me. What exactly do they do for that?
• take $20.
• I've had a near-identical one of these now (NOT quoting Monkeyfilter). What a terrible 'service', even if it were free. Automatically resubmitting every month is at best a waste of time, and might even get you banned from some places, I would think. It is not true, as they assert, that there is no difference between an automatic and a manual submission: automatic ones are excluded in many cases. And 300,000? Once you're on Google, you've got the majority of references you can ever expect, and half a dozen other places will deliver nearly all of the rest. Love to know what no. 300,000 is though - the links page of the Auchtermuchty Darts Club?
• the links page of the Auchtermuchty Darts Club? Notorious spamming bastards. Tread carefully.
• Spam asshat, Eddie Davidson (aka 'Spam King'), escapes from prison, kills his wife and 3 year old daughter before taking his own life.
• Jesus fuck.
• ugh, it used to be just a nuisance, but now spam kills? his poor family. :(