Fight against spam is getting out of hand.

[insulin]

Right Spam is a big problem we get it. Especially with free accounts... Now if you use yahoo-mail then some of you may have noticed that before you can send a mail that you need to enter those strange looking texts things. Trouble is some people like myself have real difficulty reading that stuff thus sending a mail have become a pain in the posterior! It takes me 10min to send an e-mail on yahoo... needless to say I am planning on dropping my yahoo account soon and if other free providers follow this trend then people like myself is going to have a hell of time with e-mail. So much so that the technology itself will become useless to us. No more mail... wonder how much it will cost to call my friends in Australia???? Or SMS

[Dave A]

Human verification systems are under severe pressure, that's for sure.

[IanF]

Google mail

The spam on google mail goes to spam folder, I go in once a day and empty. About twice a month I rescue a legitimate message.

[insulin]

Verification technology will soon have multiple levels of Verification. First was username and password, then came the distorted text verification and still if we look at the publications made by local net-news you will find that spam is just getting trough regardless. However the numbers did go down. The reason for that is because people mark the mail as spam and thus eliminating it. However now everyone is a suspect and I want to point this out. There are 4 users on my computer. 2 of them is also using yahoo besides myself. Now when I wanted to mail my friend aka the other user on my computer yahoo pop up with a strange massage saying suspicious activity detected! Now IF yahoo is not using tracking cookies how the hell will they know that both of us are accessing from the same computer? Well needless to say we set up g-mail accounts and it works just as well even better. However the question remains and that is “Is yahoo scanning your computer, or reading your mail?” Well according to that massage I got the answer is yes however I will see if I can’t get yahoo to repeat that massage so that I can get a print screen of it. But I think they are having a peak... Now what ever happened to our right to privacy??

[garthu]

I have noticed a HUGE increase in blog spam on my blog. I dont like using catcha - as Insulin points out there are many people who just dont like it or sometimes cant read it. I know I have problems sometimes. I use defensio anti-spam. This weekend 497 spam posts were made! Of those one was legit.

As much as i dont want to use it... looks like going to have to..

[insulin]

That’s the thing... you have to use it to protect yourself against spam... But my question is what happens if spammers develop a way around it?

[Dave A]

Spammers have been finding ways around it. That's why the verification systems are becoming harder to read for humans. It is inevitable that bots will be able to decipher those funny patterns better than humans can in the not-too-distant future, if we're not already there yet.

I dropped Captcha verification here more than a year ago because it simply wasn't working to keep the registration bots out.

[garthu]

Ok thats interesting and thanks for saving the hassle with catcha then.

Guess i just gotta keep emptying out my spam folder everyday...

[IanF]

Guess i just gotta keep emptying out my spam folder everyday...

Garth I see your blog is a wordpress one download WP spamfree it works great on my blog.

[garthu]

Thanks Ian. Get into it when got some time...

[twinscythe12332]

I guess it's inevitable that once a particular site/ email becomes busy enough, it attracts attention. my personal email receives 2-3 spam messages a month, and those I signed up for (imagine gateway, some software maker, etc). I wouldn't consider my usage to be big (about 2% of the 5GB mailbox :P since 20-something), but then again, I know people who use their mail to contact family only and get spam.

anywho, I use hotmail, it's awesome.

[garthu]

download WP spamfree it works great on my blog.

Thanks Ian, nice easy plugin, no hassles. Doesnt conflict with Defensio either so between the 2... it's gotta be a winner!!

[insulin]

A programmer friend showed me how your email gets jackpotted. Or that is what he called it. What it is is a program that uses names, surnames and random numbers. Now you will think it is ineffective right. You be wrong he showed me on his intranet how easy it got 20 hits in only 10 minutes. So get creative with your e-mail addresses. I have a Gmail account and I don’t get spam because my email address is creative enough that the program will not figure it out. It works...

[twinscythe12332]

oh right so if you've got something that hits your name like joe.blogs@gmail.com, it'll be able to find you. but if you're epsilon5delta9er@gmail.com, no luck.

[Yvonne]

Any chance the forum is being "used" to pass on scam?

I am experiencing problems frequently when I am in the forum.

Apologies I know almost nothing about IT.

I do have the latest version of bitdefender, and also have the forum site as "Safe" pop-ups permitted, otherwise I cannot open posts.
Frequently when I try to open a post my computer gives me a message saying a problem has occured and needs to shut down.

Does anyone else experience anything similar?

Thanks
Yvonne