OT: Interesting Emails

[Gandalph]

Before I moved to Washington, I was getting 50-75 a day. I was in Washington for over 3 years. When I came back to Santa Cruz, I signed back on with my old ISP using the same nick since it was still available. When I set up my email account and downloaded new email......Yep, over 8000 emails and all of them spam, some of them pretty nasty spam that could have potentially caused problems, some nasty virii. It seems my ISP never deleted my original account and just reattached me too it when I came back. 3 years worth of spam, OH MY!!!
Needless to say, I asked them to delete that account and continue to use my own server account. On that one, I use 3 different email addy's and, surprisingly, receive an inordinate amount of spam at the seiv addy. I seldom see it, however, as I use a spam filter (GFI Mail Essentials) and have it set to delete weekly. I occasionally check to make sure it is not catching legit emails.

[Arkcon]

Raging Deadstar said:
"Is your sister unhappy at work and trying to waste the company printer ink?"

Ahhh. I dunno what to say -- my sister, she's just not the geek that I am. She hasn't heard of these sorts of things and its all new and magical for her. That's a nice way of putting it -- on some mild level you could say she's just not as computer literate as the average person you'll meet on these forums.

I sent her a link to a story on Fark, something about some high school in the midwest. It think it was directly connecting teacher pay to student test scores, or something, I can't even recall it.

Anyway, two weeks after I sent it, she responds, "Sorry, I don't care much for Britney Spears. Is that really your musical taste?" And I'm like, "Huh? Wha... jus ... What are you talking about?"

It appears she's missed the embedded HTML link and was just reading the advertisement Yahoo! Mail puts beneath it's sig. I just don't know what to say. I just assumed everyone knows about those ads on web pages, and ignores them. Somehow she gravitated towards it.

Another time, I'm at my friends house. I've emailed myself my bookmarks so I can access them from his computer. I fire up hotmail, and start browsing, and my friend points out the animated "Find a Mate" advert on the side. I say "I'm sorry, but on my computer its blocked, so I didn't even know it was there." "Oh, no, don't worry, go ahead and click, meet someone." He doesn't even get what I was doing, using my own email as a storage point for bookmarks.

He doesn't get it, I never pay attention to the rare advert that makes it past my cookie and image blockers. I didn't even notice it. I wouldn't buy anything that needs to be advertised that way. I mean, find a mate, by that method? It just doesn't occur to me.

[kerensky]

Well until i setup a new email address i got like 20+ per day. Now im getting one or two per day, which is okay...

Before I changed E-mail addresses I would get about twenty a day on average.

Now if you want to talk about volumes of useful e-mail, you should visit my dads work e-mail. On good days he gets less than fifty non-spam e-mail (you know, from people he actually knows). He's said that he's actually gotten over a hundred non-spam e-mails in one day!!!

[tesco samoa]

i get none as well.

[geoschmo]

I used to get 50 - 75 a day at work. Changing isp or email wasn't an option. Someone here mentioned a product called "IHateSpam" and let me tell you the difference is amazing. I get just a few a day now and they are quickly dealt with by one click. Some mornings I open my email and there are no spam emails in my inbox. It's so nice.

[Fyron]

Arkcon said:
Something suddenly possessed my sister to start to open, read and printout the emails from her spam folder at work. I told her to just forget about it, but she's intrigued. She's mystified at the contents -- random words, strung together from one of those text generators. I told her it was an attempt to beat spam filters -- so she asks, "Why?".

You know, I have no answer for that question. The spam filter finds it anyway, so it doesn't even work. They're not trying to sell her anything, there's no plaintext. There's no embedded image or HTML to send an infection, so I'm drawing a blank as to why the emails are sent.

They're from a German domain, so I'm just guessing the computer geeks at her school have script kiddie friends in Europe and they slam the networks at each other's school for the fun of it.

They are probes trying to get a read reciept sent back by mail clients set to send them by default when you read the email. Any read reciepts that come back go into a list of "valid" email addresses.

[Baron Munchausen]

Yep...

Now that I use Mozilla for my email instead of Outlook Bug-Express I have set it to NOT load images and other URLs in emails. You are just telling the spammers that they have a live one when you look at the email unless you deliberately disconnect before viewing it.

I generally get several spam Messages a day but nothing like what most people get. I managed to keep my email address very private/restricted for a long time so I didn't get much spam and was still using OE out of habit/inertia. But I got a 'phishing' attack email that loaded some sort of automatic script (invoking IE despite my default browser being Mozilla) and tried to send me to a website in China a few months ago and that was it for OE. Now I'm using Mozilla and Mozilla mail exclusively. No more Ieeee or Oeeee problems for meeee!

[Electrum]

I usually recommend to my friends that, when they get their main E-mail account from their ISP, give it ONLY to immediate freinds & family, telling them not to pass it on w/o talking to them first. Then I suggest that they open a free accout like yahoo or hotmail & use it when asked by Online sites for an address. That way when it fills w/ junk, they can dump it & start a new one easily.

[Atrocities]

Mindi said:
Be lucky you only get 8! I probably get about a hundred or more a day, Richard gets several times that. We finally did get a commercial product for spam for Richard's email when it started taking him over a half an hour just to download his mail in the morning.

Oh and when we went on vacation this past summer for two weeks? That took HOURS and HOURS to download before he could even start going through it.

Ouch. I would think that there would be a need for a product that would download your email for you while you were on vacation. Auto detect spam and delete it while preserving real emails. Hummmmm - with all the game developers that Shrapnel knows perhaps some could make this program and sell it through shrapnel?

[Atrocities]

Gandalph said:
Before I moved to Washington, I was getting 50-75 a day. I was in Washington for over 3 years. When I came back to Santa Cruz,

Another defector! The Evergreen state is GOD COUNTRY! Be sure to tell everyone down there to STAY in CA. Tell them that WA is a horrible backwards hillbilly place with dirt roads filled with horse and buggies.

Please.