OT: Virus Wars
 

In the Last twenty four hours I have received over 100 email virus between my three email accounts including my AST accounts, and my Earthlink account.

I thought Earthlink filtered these out.

Also spam is way up on my AST accounts. startrekmod and Atrocities are getting flooded.

WHO SOLD MY ACCOUNT INFO!!!! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif I mean http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon8.gif

Re: OT: Virus Wars
 

Posting email address on web sites and public forums can get them captured by web spiders, which go around collecting email addresses for spam lists...

Re: OT: Virus Wars
 

Yeah, recently I've been getting a few suspicious emails with mystery attachments, too. I immediately delete those.

Re: OT: Virus Wars
 

Say my email address is goeblog@worldcom.com

That would get spammed - alternative is goeblog at worldcom dot com - this negates web crawlign spiders

Doesnt stop spammers getting it by manual means but reduces the potential - if you use such web forums get a hotmail or yahoo address and use as an alternative account to youre main personal account - you can use that and just have it set to contacts from certain forums and no others. Or just use private message - its about protection.

ISPs dont really filter emails - cause mostly they also are the source.

Re: OT: Virus Wars
 

I think I read that there was a virus war going on between some virus makers.

That would be a war between Nortan and some other anti virus company. After all they are the ones making these virus, how else would they stay in business?

Think about it, you have a rogue operation making viruses so your parent cooperation can sell anti virus software and subscriptions to updates.

A sick little plan that I am sure Bill Gates wished he would have thought up.

Re: OT: Virus Wars
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Actually... it would be just as easy to program a spider to pick up on that as it would with the actual @ and .

Re: OT: Virus Wars
 

How do these programs work? I mean I sometimes get email from my self in my hotmail account.

Sent by pcpatrocities@akfalsdkjfasdpofjwoef[owasif.com

I FIND THAT MOST IRRATATING AND WOULD PAY REAL MONEY TO SEE THE MASTER MIND BEHIND THIS TAKEN OUT, LINED UP AGAINST THE WALL AND SHOT.

Re: OT: Virus Wars
 

I got the idea from somewhere that it was/is an India vs Pakistan virus skirmish.

Building up an army of zombie machines to use against each other, or something.

Re: OT: Virus Wars
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">AT, you may be on to something here. I'm sure we could get upwards of a million people to cough up a buck each...

Could we get a good hitman for a million bucks or what?! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

Re: OT: Virus Wars
 

Actually the authors of mydoom, bagle, and netsky are in a little fight.. which started, iirc, when netsky started removing mydoom, (ironic eh?) or was it bagle..

I can't find the original article I read on this. It was rather amusing actually.

But anyway, many worms these days spoof the from header, so they can really appear to come from anyone...

Re: OT: Virus Wars
 

You can type your e-mail like this.

Say mine was jaybdey@host.com

type

mocdottsohatyedbyaj

Then tell the person to remove "dot" and "at" and replace them with the real symbols and to mirror the other parts. Humans can do this easily, but it is hard for machines.

Or, when signing up for an Online mail account. Make your account (your real account name) have something like NOSPAM or REMOVE in it. Then when the spammer’s spyder sees it, it gets removed. But your real e-mail address really does have that in it. Again, explain this to whoever you are trying to communicate your add. to.

Also, you could make your e-mail into a picture. Open up any paint program and use the text tool to save your e-mail address, make it small and in black and white, save as a jpeg to keep the file size down as much as possible. Then refer someone to the picture. Machines have a hard time taking out words from pictures.

I get about 1 e-mail every 2 days on my real account, and it's never spam.

Re: OT: Virus Wars
 

We get a ton of spam here at work due to our emails being posted alot. It is mostly to the people that are on our sales team since the sales@addy.com is posted on the site. But we run a program called iHateSpam by Sunbelt Software and we hardly get any spam now. Some of it still gets through but the majority of it is caught by that program. I would recommend it to any company and I believe they ahve a Version for home Users as well.

Re: OT: Virus Wars
 

Well, based solely on your recommendation Rags I have downloaded IHateSpam and am going to give it the 30 day trial run. If it's as good as it claims to be it will certainly be worth the 20 bucks to register it.

Re: OT: Virus Wars
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I certainly hope that it works as well for you as it does for us, Geo. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

One day I was doing some upgrades and we were without it for 2 days and one user got an average of 300 spam emails per day for those 2 days. When we got IHS up and running again that dropped down to roughly 10-20 a day. I think it is even less now though. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif