Spam spam spam spam

[bobrk]

Is anyone else noticing a massive increase in spam over the last week or so? The spam filtering is working perfectly, but I see lots more coming in than usual.

Thanks,
Bob

[virtualmike]

I haven't noticed it over the past week, but In general, it seems to ebb and flow.

My email management system involves using a different email address for every entity that requires one. Each time one address gets compromised, I get a flood of spam for a few days, and then it trails off over the ten days. I imagine the same thing happens for people who only have one address, but there's no way to trace it to a specific source.

[lr]

Is anyone else noticing a massive increase in spam over the last week or so? The spam filtering is working perfectly, but I see lots more coming in than usual.

Yup. Until a few weeks ago, the amount of spam that made it through all the way for our domain was less than 1 per day, with about 5-10 per day ending up in graymail. Now we get about 5-10 spam a day all the way in the inbox, and twice or three times that in graymail.

I think the problem is not specific to Sonic; I've noticed the same thing at my work e-mail (and I work for a very large and extremely computer-savvy company).

Could this be a side effect of the attack on Spamhouse and the DNS trouble?

[kgc]

Are these spams all from celebrities with short bodies that consist mostly of just a link to a website? I saw of flood of these while on vacation last week. I doubt it is related to the spamhaus issues - more likely just the ebb and flow in the arms race and the particular spammer has managed to get an edge over the various filtering systems.

[bobrk]

Nope, a little of everything, but more volume.

[lr]

Nope, a wide mix. Viagra, stock scams, beautiful women from eastern european countries, life insurance. It's just that now more of it gets actually through.

Most be the influence of the moon's gravitational field ... like the tides.

[patty1]

Recently I've been getting nearly a dozen spams a day from the ".pw" domain. I found this entry on Wikipedia that indicates the domain just opened up to users a few weeks ago:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.pw

Does Sonic ever block entire domains that are entirely used for spam? If so, .pw seems like a perfect candidate.

I use procmail, so I'm not sure I can change any settings on my Sonic web-based anti-spam settings that would get rid of these before they come to my own mail filtering. Currently, I'm sending them to BLOCKFOLDER, but once I'm sure that's working properly, I'll start sending them directly to /dev/null. Nonetheless, I'd be happier if these damned messages didn't make it as far as my own recipes in the first place.

[jleake]

By default, procmail runs after Sonic.net spam filtering, so you can definitely use our web-based anti-spam settings in conjunction with it. (If you want procmail to run before the spam filtering, the file needs to be named .procmailrc-first.)

The easiest way to eliminate the messages before they make it to your rules would probably be to create a address blacklist in the Member Tools here. Since the messages are coming from many different addresses, you'll need to use the * character as a wildcard. In the case of blacklisting an entire top-level domain, you can make an entry for something like "*.pw".

[patty1]

Hi, Julianna. I am in fact running procmail first so that I can redirect mailing lists into a separate inbox. Then I think it goes to Spam Assassin. So your web-based tools won't do me any good, right?