A new Spam assault on my sonic.net inbox

[Iceland_1622]

Dear sonic.net users. As of March 1st. my inbox has been hammered shut with spam for the very first time since I have been with sonic.net and I go back to it's founding days. What I desire to know is if "others" have woken up to say 34 spam messages that are designed to get *past* the Spam Assassin Software with ease as their score for hits is about 3.0 or even as low as 1.0

I am waiting to see if this will end or run it's course, however am I the only one at this time who is being targeted?

Let me know if the Spam filter at Sonic is working properly ( I suspect so and mine is set to the 5.0 threshold ) and if you are in a quandary with this as I am.

It's never ever been this bad, and my Gray Mail folder is full as well, so some is getting blocked. Something is up!

_Ash

[thulsa_doom]

one of the quickest ways to confirm that SpamAssassin isn't totally busted for you at the moment is to look at a recent message, view its headers (ctrl+u in my mail client) and look for a line that looks something like:

Code: Select all

X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.3.2 (2011-06-06) on d.spam.sonic.net
X-Spam-Level: 
X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.0 required=5.0 tests=T_RP_MATCHES_RCVD
	autolearn=disabled version=3.3.2

If for some reason SpamAssassin were completely failing, it would fail "open," letting everything through, but it wouldn't add these lines to the headers. It is pretty rare for that to happen, so if the headers are missing, the next thing I would check is the Spam Filtering settings in the member tools at https://members.sonic.net/email/spam/filtering/ just to make sure it didn't get explicitly turned off for some reason.

I personally have SpamAssassin with default settings on an email address I've had since 1998. Since March 1st the only commercial mail that's gotten through has been mailing lists from companies I've actually done business with (and never asked them to stop mailing me). Of course, normally during a given week the only proper spam that leaks through for me is some ads for Korean eyeglasses, so my spam load is probably not typical.

[patty1]

I've seen a big increase in spam reaching my inbox in the past few weeks, and I don't know why. Some of it is from the .eu domain, which I'm thinking about blacklisting. (I recently did that with ".me".) But most is from .com or another domain that's also used by legitimate mailers.

And yes, Sonic's spam checker is working. Here are a couple of examples:

X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.3.2 (2011-06-06) on b.spam.sonic.net
X-Spam-Level: **
X-Spam-Status: No, score=2.7 required=5.0 tests=DCC_REPUT_13_19,DKIM_SIGNED,
DKIM_VALID,DKIM_VALID_AU,HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_32,HTML_MESSAGE,MIME_HTML_ONLY,
RDNS_DYNAMIC,SPF_HELO_PASS autolearn=disabled version=3.3.2

X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.3.2 (2011-06-06) on a.spam.sonic.net
X-Spam-Level: *
X-Spam-Status: No, score=1.1 required=5.0 tests=DCC_REPUT_00_12,HTML_MESSAGE,
SPF_HELO_PASS,T_RP_MATCHES_RCVD,URIBL_JP_SURBL autolearn=disabled
version=3.3.2

Are there more spams coming to Sonic users these days that are not reaching distribution levels high enough to attract the attention of Sonic's spam filters? Or what's going on?

[Iceland_1622]

Patty;

Yes, and many thanks for the validation. Today I sat down and entered *@*.eu into the blacklist section of my filter settings and that is that so far. It seems to have shut it all off. When I woke today late and logged into my mail program, it was jammed with .eu spam ( the insertion point ). So sad that we all have to shut off Europe from our inbox but that is that for now until this settles down.

What I would like is to be able to "bounce" it all back however most of these domains are hidden there and are not really the point of entry and it would only create more havoc as it would just loop back. I have already blocked .ru and others as it alone was a toxic cesspool of spam. Next up? China!

Hope this is the end of it for now? Again thanks.

_Ash

I've seen a big increase in spam reaching my inbox in the past few weeks, and I don't know why. Some of it is from the .eu domain, which I'm thinking about blacklisting. (I recently did that with ".me".) But most is from .com or another domain that's also used by legitimate mailers.

Are there more spams coming to Sonic users these days that are not reaching distribution levels high enough to attract the attention of Sonic's spam filters? Or what's going on?

[patty1]

I found 8-10 spam messages in my inbox this morning. I used to get a handful every week.

Could a Sonic representative please weigh in on what's going on?

Thanks.

[spammity-spam]

yep same here. usually get zero spam, over the last few weeks its been a few per day. -im not really complaining though, spam on all my non-sonic accounts is also up recently.

[virtualmike]

Spam tends to go in cycles. I can go for a couple of months with little spam to my primary accounts, then have a couple of weeks where I get a bit of an influx.

I use disposable addresses for everything except friends, family, and business associates. I'm sure that I'd get a lot more spam if I used the same address for everything.

[patty1]

Has anyone found a good combination of scores that can be bumped up to fight the latest onslaught?

I looked at about 30 pieces of spam and found a number of tests that showed up repeatedly, but some of them (such as HTML_MESSAGE) are frequently used in legitimate mail, so I'm hesitant to increase the scores on those.