noel alanguilan

the other day i received an e-mail which looked a lot like spam but it didn’t get filtered. i took a closer look and i found out that the address of the sender was my e-mail address and it was sent to the same. i’m absolutely sure i didn’t send anything with a subject “january 74% off” let alone to myself. and with yahoo! doing my mail serving needs i’m sure i didn’t. they would only allow a limited number of e-mails per day.

this is interesting. curiosity gets the best of me and i opened it up. it just contained an image. i set my mail reader not to show me any images when i open an e-mail. i’m not about to start with this one.

the juicier part would be to look at the e-mail headers. its that part of the message that is not normally seen by the reader. in part, it is used as a troubleshooting aid to look for kinks in the mailing system. it has the data from what service provider it came from, which mail server received it, and where it was sent. all e-mail programs would have a way of letting you see the full headers of a particular e-mail. i use yahoo’s web interface and the headers is located on the right side of the open e-mail message.

click on the full header and you’ll get to some of the e-mail internals.

the first line in the screenshot above is suppose to be the sending address — who sent it. the second line with the return path is the e-mail address that will be put in the to: field when you click on reply. the fifth to seventh line (received) is interesting. it shows where the e-mail was supposedly sent from — a dsl subscriber in russia — and which server in yahoo! received it.

i got another spam with the same subject and opening the headers reveals something similar but the fifth line (received) is different. it says intel sent it but when i checked the ip address the sender is from poland. hmmm…

two similar mails from two different countries. this leads me to the conclusion that the spam mail wasn’t sent by me (or yahoo!) but by a botnet that is posing as me.

you may have received something similar so you can likely check it using the steps i took.

disclosure: i do not like spam and i do not and will not knowingly send any. i take great pains to make sure of that. my firewall here only allows sending via one particular yahoo! smtp server. and we don’t even use pop mail. all of us use yahoo!’s webmail interface.

there is e-mail spam and, if you have a blog, there’s comment spam.

its always going to be there. its a fact of internet life. you live with it.

if you can’t then i can think of a thumbful of ways to avoid it:

• do not get an e-mail address. if you do get one, do not use it and do not publicize it.
• do not get your own blog. if you do get one, do not post anything and do not publicize it.

those should be easy enough to follow. but beware. if you stray from those instructions you will get unwanted stuff in your net space. guaranteed.

should you decide to live like the rest of us, there are software and web services out there that can actually help in keeping your spam at a manageable level.

for e-mails i use yahoo’s spamguard plus. it had its ups and downs when i started using it but once the program started learning from me which e-mail message is spam and which is not then my inbox started to quiet down. its still not perfect though and i get to see 2 or 3 spam mail a day. but that’s good enough considering that my bulk folder contains more than 34,000 spam messages as a write this.

i should mention that spamguard plus is only available with yahoo! webhosting and business mail service.

the standard yahoo! mail gets spamguard (no ‘plus’). that’s the version that doesn’t have the learning capability of the plus version but at least its still there. better than nothing.

for comment spam, i use askimet running with wordpress. it doesn’t catch everything and once in a while i still see one or two comment spam in the moderation queue but it does filter most of it.

the point is, its next to useless to get all worked up and get your blood pressure all ballistic about one or two unwanted e-mails/comments which may be from legit sources anyway. just mark them as spam if you don’t want them. let the software do the rest for you.

remember, its always going to be there. its a fact of internet life. you live with it, set it aside and then move on to other mundane things.

splogs is defined as spam-saturated blogs or blogs full of comment spam.

get askimet or defensio people.