4:33 pm on Mar 18, 2013 (gmt 0)
About 50% of all junk mail on the net emerges from just 20 internet service providers (ISPs), a study has found.
The survey of more than 42,000 ISPs tried to map the net's "bad neighbourhoods" to help pinpoint sources of malicious mail.Study: 50pct of All Email Spam Comes From Only 20 ISPs [bbc.co.uk]
Many of these networks were concentrated in India, Vietnam and Brazil. On the net's most crime-ridden network - Spectranet in Nigeria - 62% of all the addresses controlled by that ISP were seen to be sending out spam.Networks involved in malicious activity also tended to specialise in one particular sort of malicious message or attack, he discovered. For instance, the majority of phishing attacks came from ISPs based in the US. By contrast, spammers tend to favour Asian ISPs. Indian ISP BSNL topped the list of spam sources in the study.
9:19 pm on Mar 18, 2013 (gmt 0)
This is nothing new. I've been routinely blocking all these countries (plus Turkey, China, Russia and Taiwan) from every server I have set up for the last decade.
That list probably includes the top 20 most popular free mail services. On one site we have a sign up form for a free service and the subscriber needs to validate their email. So many people have so many different email addresses... if they don't receive their confirmation mail they sign up using another email address and so on. Some don't even remember their correct addresses.
Billions of dollars worth of data wasted in spam traffic and all they have to do is stop providing free mail services. What's wrong with the mailbox that one's ISP provides with their internet service?
What's wrong with the mailbox that one's ISP provides with their internet service?
Most people will change their ISP at least once every few years.
9:02 am on Mar 19, 2013 (gmt 0)
What's wrong with the mailbox that one's ISP provides with their internet service?
The free services are usually pretty effective and block bulk mailings from their accounts. On the other hand my original ISP regularly had its IP addresses blacklisted because it did sweet F.A. about botnets using its cusomters' infected machines.
10:04 am on Mar 19, 2013 (gmt 0)
Most people will change their ISP at least once every few years.
Most people change their free mail service more regularly to get away from spam.
Almost everyone I know has had the same free email address for years, apart from one or two who switched away from Hotmail at some point.
My ISP had its mail server blacklisted for being an open relay.
Almost everyone I know has had the same free email address for years
Sure, so do I. But I keep that one for elite contacts. Anything used for general business and correspondence needs to be disposable and is.
The e-mail address you get from your ISP changes every time the ISP gets a new owner-- and no, they don't auto-forward. The old address simply disappears. If the phone company worked that way you'd have to tell everyone a new number every other year. The preceding sentence probably had a lot more meaning ten years ago when people didn't change cell providers every five minutes with accompanying change in entire number, possibly including area code. But still.
This is a major annoyance when sites insist on using your e-mail address as your account name. Let's see now, did I join this service when I was on AOL, or Cox, or something dot edu, or...
@lucy24 - When I sign up to siteA, I create a disposable email from one of our domains that uses siteA@ - if you find spam going to that address you know where it came from. NO, it's not enough to have one or two disposable email accounts, I want to know exactly who lies and who tells the truth "We will never sell or trade your email address... honest".... we'll see.
Waste of time? Not at all: less than 60 seconds to log in to server, create new email, forward that to a "personal" email address and finish the sign up to siteA. The tricky part is replying to those using an email client that doesn't really have those credentials but it's very rare that a siteA type site is going to need replies; like this very forum, the email account is just for notifications.
Spam it, sell it or spoof it, I'll delete it. Anyone remember a time when some sites wouldn't accept signups from email addresses that weren't major ISPs? I don't feel like I missed anything by not having signed up to them, matter of fact, I'm pretty comfortable with it.
anyone remember a time when some sites wouldn't accept signups from email addresses?
Sure do. In fact we used to reject mail sent from web forms using Hotmail addresses. Even today, if someone is using a free mail service, we realise that they are not using their domain mail address and probably have many different disposable email addresses. So many in some cases that it takes weeks for them to find your support response.
If your clientele are companies, allowing them to use disposable email addresses for purchases and support is an absolute waste of time. How in the blazes will they ever get proper support and be advised of critical software updates?
With ISPs the old address can disappear
Not if they are using an email based on their domain. After all, if your clients have web sites and email @ their domain, why settle for anything else. What else can they expect when seeking your expert advice at the expense of your time? So they should at least use a legitimate email address.
After all, if your clients have web sites and email @ their domain, why settle for anything else.
This only works if the person at the receiving end can get your mail. I remember when I first registered my domain name I was told-- by a fellow human, not by the host-- that I wouldn't be able to use it for e-mail because it wasn't an ISP. Remember when cyberpromo sprouted a dozen new aliases every other day? ISPs simply slammed their doors and would accept mail only from known domains, which mostly meant fellow ISPs.
Except, of course, for services like AOL that fought spam with one hand while handing out unrestricted free trial accounts with the other. Sigh. I can remember people getting banned from forums and coming back half an hour later with a new name and IP after, presumably, pawing through that week's trash and fishing out the latest Free Trial CD.
@lucy24 - I remember when I first registered my domain name I was told When was that, back in the 90s? I remember hearing the same advice back then but in the last few years it hasn't been an issue for any of ours.
9:03 am on Mar 26, 2013 (gmt 0)
More recent than that-- but the person I heard it from had had her own domain for a lot longer, so she may have been going by early experience. (I just looked it up. She goes back to 1999. Things were different then.)
I've never tried sending e-mail from my own domain, though. I only use it for incoming-- and not much of that.
If nothing else, it prevents the ghastly blunder of forgetting to set one of your addresses to auto-forward. See, ahem, unrelated thread elsewhere in foo.
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