Warning: Hong Kong purchase leads to enormous amount of SPAM mail

[richardcook]

Just a heads up on spam: I purchased a very nice, brand new, carbon

fiber tripod on the big auction site. The supplier was a Hong Kong

company. The deal was smooth, the tripod is great, and I saved about

US$65, which is a lot of money to me. However, immediately following

the deal I started to get a lot of spam mail ("Refinance Now and

Save!" and "Women know that Size Matters!", etc.). The supplier

denies selling my email address. My computer security experts tell me

that everything I am getting is coming from HK and that they are

using a 'jumper' program that uses every available open relay site

(an email term, sorry) to create a new flood of messages to me. At

peak, I have had a hundred a day, each with a unique senders address

and many consuming a lot of time to download. The $65 seems much less

important now. My computer server people are blocking sites (over 100

at present) that generate this stuff but it is an ongoing struggle.

I'd recommend that you thinnk long and hard before buying anything

from overseas that involves the use of any electronic transaction

that reveals your email address (e.g. every email you send and

virtually all the transaction services) to the computrs at the other

end. My sources tell me that this is quite common in Hong Kong. It's

a shame.

[bill_barton]

Richard,

 

It's not the HK site that is the problem but the "on the big auction site" I never had alot of spam until I went to "you know where" and made a purchase. Then it was all over with spam, I have not purchased

anything else "on the big auction site" and it is just now starting to slow down two years later.... It really stinks.

bill

[art_haykin]

I get an averge of 50 spams a day, and it takes me about 2 minutes to delete the bulk of them every morning. Then a few trickle in all day. So what is 25 more??!! Nothing, repeat NOTHING can be done about them that is effective. Get over it! *~*

[sorin]

If you're using Outlook you might wan to look into <a href="http://www.sunbelt-software.com/product.cfm?id=930">http://www.sunbelt-software.com/product.cfm?id=930</a>. I use it (Outlook XP) and it works pretty good. The outlook express version (I used it with Outool express 5) didn't work that good.

[p._neil_ralley]

I agree with Bill. The facts that the dealer you bought your tripod from is in HK and the spam is originating from there are probably coincidences. Do you use your email address as user-name for auctions? If so you might want to rethink...

[paul_coppin]

Its not likely the "big auction site" - but it could be your ISP or its network, or the links you connect to from a page on the "big auction site" (why are we afraid to say "EBAY"?) A large number of small minded american mass marketers are using email bulk listers that originate from deep in China. After some 75 transactions I have no spam issues with Ebay. I have seen an increase after activity on some photo list sites, particularly the ones for which I am a registered member. :) You might query your ISP as how they prevent their servers and their network relays from being "botted" or spidered. My ISP instituted a front end spam guard and it has reduced the crap siginificantly.

[george_caramanna]

I have made many camera purchases from HK and never had any problem with additional spam. Please note that spammers use HK and other asian-south pacific addresses as a conduit for spam.

[jay_.]

Several acquaintances of mine have purchased Gitzo CF tripods direct from www.robertwhite.co.uk for about half the USA price, a saving of several hundred dollars, and received no spam mail.

[uncle_ziba]

Richard, I agree with the above posts that it's probably not the hong King shop who put you on bulk email lists. The spammers create accounts on ebay for the sole purpose of extracting e-mail addresses.

 

Manually blocking spam sites on the server side is the least effective thing your network admins could do. There are several programs that use heuristic or score based techniques to detect spam and they are very effective (contrary to what Art says, who seems to be an expert on everything:-). I use one of the free ones and it eliminates the VAST majority of spam. I also used to get 50 spams per day but with this software I get just a few in a week. Cheers

[rick_falck]

I get gads of spam in my 2.5 year old hotmail account (which I can limit to 12-20 a day with their filters), a few (maybe 5 a day) in my 1.5 year old AOL account, and none yet in my 7 month old attbi account. I use have used all accounts at E*BAY, so I don't think it is E*bay itself that is selling email IDs. I use my AOL account for this site still, and for net purchases other than E*bay.

 

If it gets out of hand, have your ID changed with your ISP and start over. Or you can use email filters. Outlook and AOL do not provide any filtering.

 

I haven't looked into getting a filter program yet, but would start here:

 

http://download.com.com

[ahaohio]

My tactic is as follows: Each spam has a "referred to" website. I locate where that website is hosted (traceroute) and email a complaint to the upstrams provider. Actually pretty efficient. Quite often the sites are closed down and the spam stops.

[richardcook]

I am impressed by the volume and the specificity of the replies and I thank all the responders for their candid comments. It is quite interesting to see how varied are the views of the MF forum members.

[ike k]

Hi,

 

Bought bunch of stuffs from them and mostly rollei but never had spam problem and it could be from any site that you visited at the same time or even before the transaction, i always have spam emails just don't read it and trash it right away wasting your time, that's what i always did and use your other email for confidential matter.

 

Ike

[solja]

For what it's worth, I found that when spam problems get bad, filtering for who you WANT mail is more efficient than building a "Junk E-mail" list.

<p>

I use Outlook 2000: first I went through my inbox and identified people and mailing lists that I actually wanted mail from, I added them all as "Contacts" then went into the "Rules Wizard" and set up a rule so that any mail from those people in my "Contacts" list went to my Inbox - all others went to the "Deleted Items" folder. When I'm checking e-mail, I just browse the "Deleted Items" folder for anything that looks legit. If I don't see anything, I just empty it, otherwise I add the legit e-mail address to my "Contacts".

<p>

You can go one step further and add another rule that sends mail sent ONLY to your e-mail address (but not from a Contact) to a "Suspected Junk" folder. A lot of spam gets sent as Bcc: or to a large group of like e-mail address - those would still go to the "Deleted Items" folder, but e-mails <i>just</i> to you would go to a 'suspicious' folder that would be easier to browse through.<p>

It's pretty sad when you get more spam than legit, personal e-mails!

[raymond_tai]

I live in Hong Kong and regularly buy and sell on that auction site. For years I

never had any serious spam problems until my sister from the US sent me an

e-greeting card a year ago and weeks later I was getting over 50 per day from

what seems like US companies offering porno, Viagra, credit services, etc. I

do get spammed from local HK companies but they are in Chinese.

[berj_bannayan]

My technique for dealing with spam is to have 2 e-mail addresses. My spam magnet (wandering_berj@hotmail.com) is what I use whenever I sign up for anything online (purchases, memberships, etc). I check this account from time to time and clear out all the junk but I expect no important e-mail at this address. I get about 100 spams a week on this one. I do use this address for my photo.net membership so I usually scrutinize the incoming mail for anything that looks photo.net related.

 

I also have another account (whose address I won't print) that I give only to my friends and family. I get maybe 2 or 3 spams a week on this address because I control it's exposure. If I do get mail at my Hotmail address from someone I want to correspond with then I pass on my spam-free address.

 

This way I keep spam annoyances to a bare minimum. Your mileage may vary.

 

Berj

[brit]

Yes SPAM is very annoying. "IF ONLY"...If only we could all work together and put a bit of time to one side and actually go along with their sales ploy..lead them on just enough so that they are spending a considerable amount of *their* time and resources on fake adresses and phone numbers. Given time I'd hope that cyber spam would either drive the spammers out of business or make that marketing ploy a very unpopular tactic.