Archive for RCCGB FORUM Message Board for Members of the Roller Coaster Club of Great Britain to discuss club events and all things theme park related.
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Andy Hine MBE
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MensHeath.comHELP!
I'm getting 100's of e-mails everyday from MensHealth.com
I've blocked them, added them to my junk lists, added a rule to delete any e-mail with MensHealth.com in the subject, in the body, in the address line, but yet they still keep on coming.
Can anyone help me stop them? I already get over 400 e-mails a day and don't need to have to keep sorting these ones out as well!
Thanks!
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meatloaf
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Andy, I found this forum entry while doing a Google search for:
"menshealth.com" spam
"I have been able to successfully filter out this "menshealth.com" spam by setting up a message filter that looks for "Zinczenko" in the body of the message. Then I set up these actions:
Mark the Junk setting to "Junk"
Move the message to the folder "Junk"
Mark the message as read"
It might work, it might not
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Rogue
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Deaths pretty good with technology, he might have some tips. Also Matt might have some ideas how to block it.
Just googled it and found quite a few entrys for people having problems with the same things
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Coaster Police
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This email is not being generated from the MensHealth.com domain. It is spam purtaining to come from MensHealth. It has been identified that these emails ask you to buy something. This is part of a cybercrime scam and if you were to put in your credit cards details.... game over!!!!
It is trivially easy to "spoof" an email address, and therefore blocking emails from the MensHealth domain won't help. What you need to do is to look into the email and view the full email header (if you're client supports this). This should contain the senders real email address and/or domain - it is that you want to block... if not... try below.....
Alternatively consider changing the block criteria from email address to "contents" and pick some content that is both bespoke and unique to that email (i.e. it's unlikely any other emails will contain it, cause they'll get blocked too) such as "Zinczenko" described above.
The ability to tweak these settings all depends on what email you are using, either web mail (gmail, yahoo etc.) or a local email client such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird etc. as they all have different ways of doing this - but it should be possible once you can determine the source or bespoke content to block.
I also get this spam to my rccgb email account, but as I re-direct to a gmail address, the gmail anti-spam which is brilliant filters all these out and I only get real emails to this account, with the exception of about 3 spams per week which the filter misses out of over 400 spam per day.
Hope this helps.
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Death
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Re: MensHeath.comHail Nev, and anyone else who's been getting this spam.  | Andy Hine MBE wrote: | I'm getting 100's of e-mails everyday from MensHealth.com
I've blocked them, added them to my junk lists, added a rule to delete any e-mail with MensHealth.com in the subject, in the body, in the address line, but yet they still keep on coming. |
I've just checked a couple of my e-mail accounts and havn't been able to find any such e-mails so far, but as one of my practices is to never post my e-mail address online in plain-text, this isn't too surprising. 
What Meatloaf has said above would probabally help ye to avoid most or all of the menshealth,com e-mails that ye have been receiving. To learn more about safe posting of e-mail addresses online, see Section one below. 
| Andy Hine MBE wrote: | | Can anyone help me stop them? I already get over 400 e-mails a day and don't need to have to keep sorting these ones out as well! |
Without having seen one of the e-mails in question, I wouldn't be able to start suggesting techniques for dealing with them...But at a guess, I would imagine that either: - E-mail is being sent with a different harvested or made-up "from" address and domain each time, meaning that attempts to block by sender or domain would only work for that one particular e-mail. To avoid that, ye'd need to set up a spam rule that works on the message content itself, as opposed to the senders address or subject line.
. - Another technique used by spammers is to send the message as a bounced e-mail with thy address in the "from" field, which most mail servers will deliver back to the user as it's an error report. Again, setting up a spam filtering rule that works on message content - As suggested by MeatLoaf above - may help. Automatic blocking/junking of e-mail that appears to come from thyself should help avoid error return based spam, but also means that e-mailing things to thyself (As a lot of people do) may no longer work.
The biggest problem that ye may face thus far is the fact that thy e-mail address has been posted in plain-text form on the RCCGB website for years now, and I'd imagine that most harvesters will have probabally found and logged it already...And if ye don't notice thousands of differing spam messages each day, then thy spam filtering software is probabally doing a damn good job already! To allow for easier tracing of spam and where an address "leak" may have occurred, I use a technique that allows me to identify the original holder of my address straight away - See Section two for more info!
Farewell for now, be(a)st of luck getting one over the spammers, and apologies for the long post!
>> Death <<
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<Section one>
When posting an e-mail address anywhere online - Even on systems that should only display content to registered users - I always try and post it in a way that spam spiders would find difficult or impossible to read. The most effective method is to post the address as an image insted of text (Facebook does this)...And "skewing", distorting, or otherwise complicating the image - So that it's still readable by humans, but not by OCR software - Should generally ensure that most spam bots won't be able to read it. The e-mail address in my signature - Though not skewed or distorted - Is posted over a complex background, and most automated OCR software would experience difficulties in reading it.
When it's necessary to post e-mail addresses in plain-text (Like in one of these posts) a common technique is to substitute symbols for words or other characters. Bearing in mind that most spam bots will probabally be able to work past the common method by now (So they'd still be able to record addresses like spammed AT example DOT com) I use higher order characters when doing this insted. Umlauts, accents and numbers are quite useful for this, and an address like not_spammed ÄT example DÖT c0m would be less likely to be scanned by a spam bot.
<Section two>
Although I havn't posted my original "Brother Death" e-mail address online in years, that account still receives a ton of spam and phishing attacks on a daily basis. As lists of e-mail addresses are a tradable commodity between spam senders (Remembering that spam - Though disliked by everyone - Is pretty big business) once an address has entered "the system", it's unlikely that it'll ever disappear from those lists. 
To combat this nowadays and to identify where a spammer may have found my e-mail address in the first place, I've switched to using dynamic e-mail addresses - Which allow me to specify a unique address for each sender, and to identify the origin of e-mail by the recipient address.
Now one of the domains that I own is dieseldragon.co.uk, and I've set up a rule on there that redirects most e-mail sent to that domain to my main e-mail address - Although e-mail sent to "guessable" addresses (Webmaster, mailer_daemon and others) is automatically trashed. This means that I can give out specific e-mail addresses to all of my contacts, and the e-mail will still reach me at my general inbox.
As a working example: Any communications that I request from Arriva Trains Wales would be sent to treniau_arriva_cymru ÂT dieseldragon DØT co D0T uk, which is then forwarded to my main inbox at Google Mail. If I start receiving spam that was being sent to that address, then I would know that Arriva Trains had accidentally or deliberateley leaked my e-mail address. Then all I have to do is change the rule on the server so that e-mail sent to that address is automatically trashed, inform Arriva Trains about the leak, and assign them a new address for future communications!
Although this isn't really possible with web-based e-mail services like Hotmail, it should be possible to set-up with the rccgb.co.uk domain. An approach for web-based services could be to either junk anything that doesn't come from a sender in thy contacts list (Should stop about 90% of spam) or to set up two mailboxes, with mail from recognised senders automatically forwarded to mailbox 2, and everything else being caught in mailbox 1 (The address that ye'd give out) which would then simply need to be purged once a week.
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Coaster Police
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Re: MensHeath.com | Death wrote: | | The biggest problem that ye may face thus far is the fact that thy e-mail address has been posted in plain-text form on the RCCGB website for years now, and I'd imagine that most harvesters will have probabally found and logged it already... |
That is correct, but not since i've been running it. Although what you see on the screen looks like and behaves like an email address on the RCCGB Website, auto-bots that scan for these things in the HTML source of the page won't find them. All email addresses are coded using standard us-ascii based char's. It won't stop all the new spam (the clever stuff), but it will stop about 80%. The problem is that the email addresses will have already been harvested from before I took over, therefore short of binning them and making up new ones, once on the list - always on the list!
| Death wrote: | | Although this isn't really possible with web-based e-mail services like Hotmail, it should be possible to set-up with the rccgb.co.uk domain. |
It is, and i've done it!  Did ye not read my post 
Matt thinks . o O ( Too many Diesel fumes or should I say clag! ) 
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Paul H.
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Can I just say..................I would love to know what Matt and Death are talking about
And is this the place for Nev to admit to visiting dodgy websites and then try and blame spam mail.....your thoughts please
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Death
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| Paul H. wrote: | | Can I just say..................I would love to know what Matt and Death are talking about |
We're simply discussing various ways of setting up mail servers and forwarding systems to avoid getting tons of tin-packed rotton meat arriving in our mailboxes on a daily basis!
Anyhow...On the subject of dodgy websites, I thought I'd post a brief note to say that if anyone's thinking of giving the personality test at Match dot com a go, it's basically an alternative take on a Myers-Briggs (MBTI) type test with the end categories renamed and given rehashed descriptions. 
That, and - On a more personal opinion - Match dot com has got to be the most questionable of all the "professional" relationship sites I've tried thus far anyway...I was giving it a bash a few years ago and kept getting winks from very interesting looking people. Yet a quick bit of poking and TRACERTing later revealed that they were all coming from a Match dot com service centre in Bristol. Obviously they're still getting employees to wink "free" members from false accounts in an attempt to get them to fork out for their excessive membership fees... 
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butler
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| Paul H. wrote: | Can I just say..................I would love to know what Matt and Death are talking about
And is this the place for Nev to admit to visiting dodgy websites and then try and blame spam mail.....your thoughts please |
I would like to know this also. Perhaps it's part of an hillarious scetch at the bash.
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