To new user jerryjhon

[heyrick]

Hi,

I'm not going to say what, but something in your user registration set off alarm bells in my head.

And, sure enough, you're famous: https://www.stopforumspam.com/asn/24432

Please get in touch if you feel this is a mistake, otherwise I'll delete the account request Friday evening (French time).


Best wishes,

Your God (at least, around here ;) )

[DavidPilling]

I'm not going to say what, but something in your user registration set off alarm bells in my head.

You might as well block anyone from .ru

I'd ask them a question "what's your fav RISC OS computer?", and you'll find them answering "rock and roll".

It's bad when countries get a reputation - not fair to the often good legitimate users - presumably eventually the bad guys will work this out and stop using country domains on their emails.

I like that this forum has WYSIWYG editing by default.

[heyrick]

Actually it's worse, it's a GMail address, beloved of spammers everywhere...

[CliveSemmens]

Actually it's worse, it's a GMail address, beloved of spammers everywhere...

Oi! I have a gmail address...as do all my family...did we ad oughter change?

[DavidPilling]

Actually it's worse, it's a GMail address, beloved of spammers everywhere...

Oi! I have a gmail address...as do all my family...did we ad oughter change?

In my experience the emails to trust are ones that include someones's (realistic) name. I've always thought Google in the form of gmail had a better grip on spam than many.

If you ask the question what email address should I have to maximise my chances of my emails not being automatically sent to spam or rejected...

My emails are sent from IONOS (1 & 1), it is common to find some of their email servers black listed (by ip address) and occasionally the entire system will be. IONOS are a big hosting company on a world scale, yet Mr Yahoo can decide to block the lot.

I've found people where any email from a sender that is not known to them goes to spam.

It is all the result of civilisation coming to the Wild West, people don't like getting emails, so they are drawn to systems that don't overload them with email, those systems have broad definitions of spam.

Then there are the people making money out of spam black lists - more names on the list, the better.

[GrahameParish]

I run my own mail server, I have done for a few years. Before I moved I was with Virgin and although I didn't have a fixed IP address, it only changed about three times in nearly 20 years, as whenever I upgraded my router, I always cloned the MAC from the previous one so it always looked like the same router was connecting. Since the move into a more rural area I'm outside of Virgin's service area, so I had to go with BT. They don't supply static IPs on home connections, just as an option for business (= more expensive + payment for the static IP), so I'm using a DDNS service set up in the router to keep everything in line.

This is fine most of the time until one day I found my outbound emails were failing. It turns out the IP address that had been assigned this time was on a blocklist so gmail and others were rejecting my emails. Problem with the BT service is that although my router is on 24/7, it can still get reassigned a new IP address at will. When the current lease expires it rarely gets renewed with the same one, so it is entirely random - they are all from a wild variation of IP blocks, so there's no telling what I will get next time or who had it before me or how they used it.

[heyrick]

Oi! I have a gmail address...

As do I, and probably pretty much anybody with an Android phone linked into Google...

I've always thought Google in the form of gmail had a better grip on spam than many.

Google doesn't seem to deliver much spam to GMail users, but it does seem to be easy to have it act as a gateway to pass on spam, and the relative ease of making new GMail accounts means it is often used as a contact address by people looking to spam elsewhere. As in the current example.

yet Mr Yahoo can decide to block the lot.

You might find that it's SpamHaus and not Yahoo.

I run my own mail server, I have done for a few years. [...]  so I'm using a DDNS service set up in the router to keep everything in line.

I'm surprised it worked at all. I guess BT are lazy.
Dial-up/dynamic IP address ranges are supposed to be listed in the PBL (https://check.spamhaus.org/faqs/?id=PBL_what_is_it) to flag that it's an address that cannot MX mail.
If the machine tries to send mail, it will be accepted if sent with authentication (like SMTP AUTH etc) but any attempts to directly send or relay should be refused as a matter of policy.
This is supposed to be set up by the ISP, not SpamHaus, as the ISP are the ones who know which IP ranges are which.

My current IP (81.53.143.14) is listed this way for this exact reason. The alternative is that SpamHaus might block the entire ISP in order to force them to sort their crap out, as they famously did to Tiscali a fair few years ago (but, to be fair, Tiscali were asking for a clobber).

there's no telling what I will get next time or who had it before me or how they used it.

Yup. My mails, one day, were being rejected by a friend's server. He sent me the log files, I looked up the IP address and somebody had been a very naughty boy. I rebooted the Livebox, got a new IP, then it worked.

It may be that PBLs arose because of the problem of dynamic IP addresses. It's necessary to block an address that is spewing spam, but it's unfair to block that address for any length of time because other people will have been assigned it, and may find that their mails are failing.

There's no easy answer - not even kneecapping spammers with a sledgehammer (which, let's face it, would be an effective way to dissuade others from spamming).

[heyrick]

User added to the ban list. Upon logging on they'll see a brief explanation pointing to the stopforumspam.com page given above.

That said, their last login was three minutes after registration, so I guess the satisfaction of filling a forum with spam was just not possible on a system that needs manual intervention. ;)

I do wonder how a spammer from Manassas (Virginia, USA) managed to find this place. I've not posted any direct links to the forum...

[DavidPilling]

Google knows all about this forum:

site:https://heyrick.eu/ aldershot

How to say this... I am a spammer. I run worthy mail lists and people happily click the "this is spam" button. Just because they can't be bothered to unsubscribe properly. When I point out they "opted in", I just look worse.

Over at Yahoo, one has to join a scheme, when people click the spam button, one is obliged to remove them. Or Yahoo will block the entire membership of the list (and Yahoo includes various other famous names now).

[SKS1]

Google knows all about this forum:

site:https://heyrick.eu/ aldershot

How to say this... I am a spammer. I run worthy mail lists and people happily click the "this is spam" button. Just because they can't be bothered to unsubscribe properly. When I point out they "opted in", I just look worse.

Over at Yahoo, one has to join a scheme, when people click the spam button, one is obliged to remove them. Or Yahoo will block the entire membership of the list (and Yahoo includes various other famous names now).

Same here David. I have to put a prominent message in emails from our Geological Society telling eejit members not to hit the Spam button to junk their Newsletters... Then they wonder why they aren't getting any more Newsletters and complain about our poor service. Grrr.

And bloody BT and Yahoo just throw your messages away half the time without either sticking them in the recipient's Spam OR returning to sender as undelivered.

[GrahameParish]

If the machine tries to send mail, it will be accepted if sent with authentication (like SMTP AUTH etc) but any attempts to directly send or relay should be refused as a matter of policy.

I use the AuthSMTP service for outbound emails. I bought it in for a customer with their own domain who was with BT many years ago and tacked my low-traffic domains onto it as well. It was easier than having to preauthorise each domain with the ISP at the time so I stuck with it. And my customer still uses and pays for the service.

[heyrick]

Yes, I noticed.

The search tools suggest that https://heyrick.eu/aldershot/memberlist....ion=search is the origin; however this as far as I know it's internal searching?
Maybe it also fires off a request for Google to index things in the background?

[DavidPilling]

Other search engines do not seem to know about this place.

[GrahameParish]

The Googleplex knows everything, no matter how hard you try to hide from it...

[CliveSemmens]

GoogOLplex is still only a little number by the standards of this little article of mine... http://clive.semmens.org.uk/Education/In...verse.html