{"id":1301,"date":"2013-10-28T07:30:27","date_gmt":"2013-10-28T14:30:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/?p=1301"},"modified":"2013-10-29T04:53:43","modified_gmt":"2013-10-29T11:53:43","slug":"out-damned-spam-out-i-say","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/?p=1301","title":{"rendered":"Out damned spam! Out I say!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Blognosticator<\/a><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t use Gmail.<\/em> I have nothing against Google<\/em> or their e-mail offering, but I just don\u2019t use it. I use the Mail<\/em> application provided as part of the Macintosh operating system. I have done this for years (decades?). Several people, including my son Patrick, have told me \u201cJust use Gmail. It will solve your problems.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Mail<\/a><\/p>\n

But I don\u2019t use it. I continue to use the Apple Mail<\/em> program. And for a mail server, I host my own as a part of my web site and business strategy. I can control the size of attachments, I can issue new e-mail addresses and delete them as I need.<\/p>\n

The reason my son and others suggest that I use Gmail is that is has such spectacular spam filters. It kills almost all incoming junk mail, leaving only the mail you intend to receive, and that\u2019s great. There is a service offered by Google for those like me who host their own e-mail servers. This service will filter your e-mail, killing spam on the fly, and then forwarding it to your mail server. This service was once available under the trade name Postini,<\/em> but that service has now been absorbed into the Google Business<\/em> services.<\/p>\n

I plan to try that soon because my level of frustration has risen to the boiling point. I really must find a way to stop the junk mail, and I will \u2013 soon.<\/p>\n

In the meantime I use Apple\u2019s Mail software and its very powerful Rules<\/em> to eliminate gazillions (perhaps quintillions) of unwanted e-mail messages.<\/p>\n

These filters work quite well, and they are easy to configure.<\/p>\n

Example: you are receiving spams every day, or several times a day, from a bulk e-mailer who does not run an honest business. There are many of these out in the world, one of which is currently making me crazy. The e-mailer is clever. They use a different (usually hijacked) domain as the \u201csender\u201d of each spam message, and they have an \u201cunsubscribe\u201d button at the bottom, but checking it doesn\u2019t unsubscribe you, it makes matters worse. Many spammers do this; when you click \u201cunsubscribe,\u201d it confirms that your e-mail address is valid, and they then sell your address to other spammers who start sending unwanted mail to you.<\/p>\n

For a few days last week I was getting about 25 spams a day from this e-mail spammer. They all sported different sender addresses (one appeared to come from me!), and they all have the same general appearance. At the bottom is a message from the \u201csender\u201d which is not text, but a GIF image of text. If I examine the HTML code of the e-mail, I discover that my e-mail address is embedded in the HTML code. Clicking it would send my response to the spammer, indicating which e-mail I had clicked on, and confirming that I am here. I don\u2019t want to do that.<\/p>\n

When I open the raw source of one of these spam e-mails, it contains a bunch of seeming gibberish, like this:<\/p>\n

<!--\r\n<div><span><p><i>\r\nindividuals involved, he was taken into custody tonight about 9 p.m. and\u00a0charged with murder.\r\n\"He said Aliahna's body was discovered shortly after the interview.\r\nFries\u00a0would not disclose the motive for the killing or the manner of\u00a0death in Aliahna's murder, only that Aliahna's body was discovered in northern\u00a0Allen County.\r\nAliahna was reported missing on December 23 and investigators believe the\u00a0crime occurred sometime before that time.\r\nInvestigators do not believe any other individuals\u00a0have knowledge as to what happened to Aliahna.\r\nEarlier Monday, The Journal Gazette\u00a0reported that Aliahna and her sisters were staying with Plumadore because their\u00a0mother had been sick with the flu and Aliahna's stepfather works at\u00a0night and sleeps during the day.\r\nPlumadore told the newspaper Sunday that he\u00a0left the three girls in his mobile home about 6 a.m. Friday\u00a0and went to a gas station about a mile away to buy\u00a0a cigar. Authorities have said the store's surveillance video shows him\u00a0\r\n<\/i><\/p><\/span><div>\r\n--><\/pre>\n
As you can see, the entire block of copy is \u201ccommented-out\u201d ( <– and –> ) inside the HTML code. Its purpose is to perplex spam filters. With what appears to be real text, this e-mail might slip through a spam filter, and arrive in your in-box (it landed in mine this morning).<\/p>\n
\"If<\/a><\/p>\n
This is Mail\u2019s Rules menu (it\u2019s in Preferences). Notice that you can select from a long list of criteria related to the incoming mail: To, From, Subject, etc.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n
With Mail\u2019s Rules, I can search for anything in the incoming message: the sender, the addressee, the Title, the content, and more. When there is something common in these spams, like a block of hidden text (like the above) that is the same from spam to spam, I can search for it, and delete the message.<\/p>\n
\"What<\/a><\/p>\n
I call this the \u201cwhat to do\u201d screen that indicates to Mail what you want it to do once it identifies a spam e-mail. In this example I have selected \u201cDelete Message\u201d from the available actions. It\u2019s equally easy to do something positive with incoming mail, for example, highlight every mail from your mom with red, or move every message from the office into a different folder.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n
There are, though, messages that don\u2019t respond to Mail\u2019s Rules. I cannot figure out why. If I can read the text in the Raw Source of an HTML e-mail, and I can search for it when reading the Raw Source, then I should be able to automate the find, and do it automatically. But, some just won\u2019t be scrutinized by Mail.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s how I handle a typical spam: I look for something that is consistent in all of the incoming spams. I recently discovered that the sender was making a small typographical error in each one. They put a space in front of a comma in one line of all the spams. It was something like this: \u201cTo unsubscribe , click here.\u201d It was the space after \u201cunsubscribe\u201d and before the comma that allowed me to delete every incoming e-mail that had that characteristic. It worked for several weeks, then the spammer changed the copy and removed the unintentional typo.<\/p>\n
Now I\u2019m getting them again.<\/p>\n
At least in the short run I was able to delete the offensive e-mails. Now I have to look for another vulnerability.<\/p>\n
I wish I didn\u2019t have to do this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I don\u2019t use Gmail. I have nothing against Google or their e-mail offering, but I just don\u2019t use it. I use the Mail application provided as part of the Macintosh operating system. I have done this for years (decades?). Several … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,25],"tags":[188,67,187,186,189],"class_list":["post-1301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business-2","category-software-2","tag-deleting-unwanted-e-mail","tag-spam","tag-spam-e-mail","tag-spam-filtering","tag-unwanted-e-amil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1301"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1301\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1323,"href":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1301\/revisions\/1323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}