Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2003 21:53:31 -0400 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> To: sereciya@kurdistan.ath.cx Cc: chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: E-mail Scam, Addressess being collected of mailing list :: Advice Requested Message-ID: <20030414015331.GA4491@online.fr>
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sereciya@kurdistan.ath.cx wrote: > I just recieved an e-mail from "lawmbeki100@indiatimes.com", India, and > I recognized it as the Lawrence Mbeki Bank scam, which I heard about in > our discussions with some friends. More accurately, it's the Nigerian 419 scam. I receive such mail several times a week. Don't worry about it -- if you don't respond nobody will care. If you want to take it up with someone, first read http://home.rica.net/alphae/419coal/ BTW, the scammer was probably not from India: anyone can get an email account from www.indiatimes.com (like yahoo or hotmail). > I have reason to believe that these scammers are collecting e-mail addresses > of our mailing list users, Yes they are, indeed, yes they are. > I'm taking this very seriously and would like > ask the more experienced of you on what action to take next. As far as spammers harvesting your email address goes: There's absolutely nothing you can do to stop them, if you post to mailing lists like these which are archived on the web. (There are lists whose archives consistently hide email addresses. As it happens, the FreeBSD archives on http://doc.freebsd.org show all email addresses. Even if they ceased, other archives elsewhere would continue to show them.) As for what you can do to avoid spam: install a filter at your end, like spamassassin. Or get rid of your email address and get a new one (thus also losing any legitimate mail sent there). Don't use a work-critical, storage-or-bandwidth-constrained or "private" email account to post on mailing lists. Users on unix-hosted mailservers probably have access to multiple email addresses by adding a +bar to their username (foo+bar@example.com will be delivered to foo@example.com), as was discussed on this list last week. You can use some such address to post to lists, and use procmail to filter replies to a low-priority mailbox. This is supported by recent sendmail, postfix (I think), and qmail (qmail by default uses - rather than +, and requires you to have a .qmail-bar forwarding file, I think.) But you cannot remove your email address from the spammers' lists once they've harvested it. - Rahul
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