I don't even use Outlook Express, and right now there's 133 waiting to fetch, plus I've had over 500 emails today from purported Microsoft and "postmaster", and "undeliverable mail" and bug warnings. And they are HUGE!!! Takes over an hour to "fetch" the mail. So far, it has only hit one of my e-dresses though. The other is just getting the regular amount of spam.
Best my ISP could suggest was to go to
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and delete the undesirables right off the server. But with so many, that's a huge task in itself.
Take care.
Brian Laws>I have already had to go to the Earthlink Webmail site 3 times to
But some of us have really really tight security and dont need to mung up an email addy.
Gunner
" >> ......The world has gone crazy. Guess I'm showing my age... I think it dates from when we started looking at virtues as funny. It's embarrassing to speak of honor, integrity, bravery, patriotism, 'doing the right thing', charity, fairness. You have Seinfeld making cowardice an acceptable choice; our politicians changing positions of honor with every poll; we laugh at servicemen and patriotic fervor; we accept corruption in our police and bias in our judges; we kill our children, and wonder why they have no respect for Life. We deny children their childhood and innocence- and then we denigrate being a Man, as opposed to a 'person'. We *assume* that anyone with a weapon will use it against his fellowman- if only he has the chance. Nah; in our agitation to keep the State out of the church business, we've destroyed our value system and replaced it with *nothing*. Turns my stomach- " Chas , rec.knives
Too right. And it isn't all that difficult. In a 'few' words Update, update update. Hit that windows update button in your start menu and get with it. This latest virus is using a vunerability that was addressed almost two years ago. Sheesh! Also get and use *any* email client that isn't Outlook! I use Rebecca - not a free program - but it has served me very well for several years.
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I use outlook express to read newsgroups but the address book in this program is blank and it is *not* set as my default email client. The return address in my outlook express is provided by spammotel
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. This is a free service and allows anybody to send me a legit reply to any post but stops spam dead in its tracks. A good anti-virus program is also essential and there are free ones that will protect your machine. I use a paid program
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there are free versions out there but you generally get what you pay for. Also essential is a firewall program and they can be free as well. Check out
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. Dats it! Do these few simple things and you are protected.
Standard disclaimer - I have no affiliation with any of the links I have placed in this post other than a satisfied user.
Practice safe computing and make this www world a safe place for everyone.
Download Mailwasher, set up the filters to delete: From Catagory: Email, post, error, MS, Microsoft, Corporation, Postmaster,storage, net
In the Subject catagory: error, pack, update, upgrade, message, patch, returned, announcement,bug, net
You can do this with (1) filter by making more "rules" in the same entry. use the Either/any radio button.
Leave your email program off..but leave Mailwasher running and occasionally simply tell it to process the mail. If you see any posts that are obviously the virus..add the word in either the From or Subject catagorys that didnt get caught the first time around.
So far..Ive killed a little over 2000 emails since 8am, all automaticly.
Gunner
"Anyone who cannot cope with firearms is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house." With appologies to RAH..
Well I got two (one to each of my two email addresses). Now I don't want anyone to feel that I have been slighted but there were a few more in the garbage pail run by my ISP.
This is a program called "ASK". It holds any of my email for a week while it waits for a confirmation from the sender. Since most Spam senders won't send a confirmation the junk gets deleted.
I find it difficult to believe people will open these attachments but apparently PT Barnum was an optimist.
Incidentally Forte Agent allows one to peek into the attachment without opening it.
Yes I was gettimg a little weary of deleting so I went searching for a delete all key and found one in my mailwasher program under the heading of "Email". Now I just delete all and undelete anything I want to keep.
I've been getting about 30 per hour for the last couple of days. That works out to about 4 MB per hour. I have upgraded Norton and it just methodically deletes the buggers.
But my ISP is really getting me p*********d. Seems that they block the account when it gets to 15mb. (Which takes about 4 to 6 hours at the present rate.) And they leave it blocked when you delete stuff. So every morning I have to call tech support to turn my account back on. And then they have the gall to tell me that I need to upgrade my software to handle it! Pure bunk!
I have a program called 'P> I have already had to go to the Earthlink Webmail site 3 times to
There are several valid reasons for not mangling your e-mail address... and several more good reasons for not cross-posting off-topic messages to multiple newsgroups. For instance, I wouldn't even waste my time trying to figure out if the
85257 was part of your anti-spam campaign or part of your actual e-mail address... most people are smart enough to use capital letters for their anti-spam; so I would assume the 85257 is part of your real address if I had to guess. Although, since there are no "lower case" numbers... that would be just a guess. If someone has information to share with me regarding a post here, I certainly don't want to make it more difficult than it has to be... for them to contact me with it. Also, the free news server that I've been using for the past 3 or 4 years requires that I use a valid e-mail address when posting through their server. Since it is by far the best news server that I've ever used... it's more than worthwhile to follow their rules. Live and learn? How about "Let the firewall and anti-virus programs worry about it!" David
1) Wasn't really designed with security in mind.
2) Based of of Outlook. Reference back to #1 in a big way.
3) Not customizeable enough.
4) +90% of email viruses are outlook-only.
Well, these are the things people tell me. I use Linux, and Kmail running with Spamassassin works like a charm. :)
Ernie Leimkuhler wrote in news:190920030259234665% snipped-for-privacy@stagesmith.com:
At present I use a email client that allows downloading the subject headers alone, so instead of having to download every email body. I can quickly look at the headers and see which of the emails are spam, select them and delete them from the server, without downloading the whole mess of emails to my comp first.
Since you are not using Windows, I do not know a similar freeware program that would work on the Mac, but for those using Windows, they could use Popcorn 1.48
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I too have been mail bombed over the last few days and have used Popcorn to download headers alone, select the spam emails by looking at the headers alone, and delete the bodies from the server. Most email programs allow for filtering, but the crap is still downloaded to your machine, then filtered.(with these latest email bombs with attachments that can be a lot of crap to download) Using a program like Popcorn allows just downloading the headers,(very fast) and deleting the actual emails from your mail server, without downloading the full email bodies/attachments to your machine.
for a free email box with 6 megs storage. Beats the hell out of hotmail. And no banners or popups
Gunner
"Anyone who cannot cope with firearms is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house." With appologies to RAH..
Mailwasher allows you to delete the mail off of the server without getting it to your machine. In addition, questionable emails can be looked at with no fears of exciting any of the virii that are out there as the program merely shows what the file is made up of rather than trying to interpet any part of it. I've gotten another 1600+ of that stuff again today and it took about half an hour to just get the headers of everything over and processed. The filter mechanism also works well and I had maybe 20 emails of the other crap like the Morgage spam to deal with.
-- There are more Democrats on the Calif. Special Election than Republicans! Go count if you don't believe me! Bob May
A while ago, OE shipped by default with a cute device called the "preview pane" turned on. This shows you the top of each of your mail messages in sequence without you doing anything explicit to open the message - including when you know the next message is a virus or spam. It apparently ran some executable attachments automatically too. How could anyone imagine this was a good thing to do?
Even now, if you open HTML email it renders the whole thing, basically using code from Internet Explorer - including loading images that are on a remote server somewhere, not embedded in the email itself. Some people embed "web bugs", single-pixel transparent (i.e. invisible) images into HTML email, with every outgoing email getting a unique name for the bug. Then when OE/IE fetches the bug using the name in the HTML message, the server that the bug is on knows exactly which mail recipient opened which email message at what time. This is used to track (a) which email addresses are live, (b) who has read their email and when. If you don't *want* people tracking your email reading, you might be concerned about this.
Also, the original reason I gave up on OE (after trying it for an hour) is that it sucks all of your email messages in all of your mailboxes into one single giant database file. From then on, if you want to search for anything in any of your messages, you've got to use OE to do the finding. And if OE ever corrupts the database, I wouldn't give you good odds of ever straightening it out. In comparison, Eudora stores email in a tree of directories, with one directory for each Eudora mail folder, and one plain text data file for each mailbox (plus a separate index file for each mailbox). With this structure, you can read any one mailbox into any text editor, or use any text-based searching method (e.g. Windows Search, Unix grep) to search for phrases in your mailbox(es).
Basically, I think having all your email in a single database makes as much sense as having all the stored state info for all user commands in a single database called the registry.
I wish it was just related to OE - I use Netscape and am getting about 50 of those every hour - email is basically unusable at the moment as my ISP space is filled up so quick that no genuine mail gets thru - just gets rejected.
Some people need a hot welding rod right up their....
I agree Gunner that including your addy in your mail and posts enables this problem - unfortunately for me my ISP doesn't let me post if I try to use anything other than my real address as a reply etc. Bugger it.
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