Spam increase

[kastaway]

I too noticed lots more spam coming through, beginning about three weeks ago. Especially backscatter.

I modified my sieve script, which helped a bit. But whereas before this problem started a few weeks ago I never got *any* backscatter or spam, the deluge would not stop.

Silly me. Turns out it was a warning signal that Fastmail was on a death spiral, again. First the greater level of spam, then extra-slow web interface, and then the servers crashed.

Back up your emails, and hone your redundancy plans, boys....she's going down. Again.

[robmueller]

My goodness, one disk corruption and it's a "death spiral"

This is an interesting observation about spam, we've noticed something very similar as well.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061030-8111.html

Rob

[Riz Day]

I saw this in a post from Brong in one of the outage threads -

--------------------------------
It's amazing how little things - even an IMAP server that can accept messages faster because it's more lightly loaded - can cause other faults like\ the spam processing machines melting down because they're not being rate limited by the rate that they can deliver and hence the process load shoot right up, they overheat, the processor chokes its speed to compensate and then mail backs up. There are always side effects and you don't want to rush things...
--------------------------------

Is this relevant or does this only apply to the the machines during the outage?

Riz

[kastaway]

Originally posted by robmueller
My goodness, one disk corruption and it's a "death spiral"

This is an interesting observation about spam, we've noticed something very similar as well.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061030-8111.html

Rob

Well, the article is about an increase in spam beginning from June. These forums started getting double the complaints, and I personally started to be annoyed by spam for the first time since using FM, beginning in September [edited from "October"].

Anyway, something happened. A lot more complaints, means FM was letting in more spam. For whatever reason(s).

A month or two later, the service fails. For whatever reason(s).

[Shelded]

Originally posted by BrianRepko
Spamhaus.org, which hosts blacklist for a good portion of spam on the internet has lost its DNS entries and the company that snatched them up is asking for a ton of cash in order to get it back.

The increase in spam may have something to do with this.

I have read that this is still being litigated and that there is nobody who has been ordered to do anything who must do anything. So spamhaus still in the game. You have other info?

[Shelded]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10...et_spam_surge/

Fastmail must be the cause of the spam everywhere.

For whatever reason.

The internet is about to fold.

[popz]

I am a full member and have had about half a dozen extra spams per day recently, but I noticed a couple of clues that may help explain this.

1. Nearly all the spams are of the same type, one I haven't seen before: relating to cheap stocks expected to rise sharply in value over the next few days.

2. I tried blocking these emails using the stock's four-letter abbreviation, e.g., "LITL", but that didn't work because the part of the email describing the stock isn't text, it's an attached image.

I think this is a new wave of spam, using new techniques to get around FastMail's spam blockers. Some of them even make it into my inbox, although FM correctly sends most of them to my spam folder. If I'm right about this being something new, it will take time to construct and implement a defense.

I don't think it's a failure of FastMail's software, but rather, the next round in a never-ending fight.

[robmueller]

It is yet another excalation in the spam war.

I've noticed two things:
1. These new spams started hitting us 1-2 months ago. Others may have seen it earlier, but that's what we observed
2. A lot of these have been new hosts not on existing RBL lists. Also they're mostly images, with random text, and few other identifying characteristics. That's why they've been getting through. http://tqmcube.com/tide.php
3. It seems the IPs of these new machines are now getting on RBLs. I've noticed less and less getting through, and more and more RBL spamassassin header hits
4. I've installed the FuzzyOcr plugin on one of our spam servers to see how much load it generates and how good it is at detecting this sort of spam. Not all messages will be processed by it yet, about 50% will. This is just a test phase right now.

Rob

[boczkowski]

hmmm. I came here looking for an explanation as to why my guest acct is starting to get spam.

I've had fastmail for, oh, 2 years maybe and am very happy with it as a free email service. I just wondered why all of a sudden I was starting to get spam after having none at all until about 3 or 4 weeks ago.

As the general thrust of recent posts appears to suggest that this is simply the next wave of spamming - what's the suggestion to a guest acct holder?

I'm currently telling the web interface to 'report as spam' ans then to bounce from the junk folder.

What's the official line?
What would my actions actually acheive?

As mentioned above, my spam is also an image attachment, in ALL cases.

first post:be nice

[JRobert]

Wecome aboard, boczkowski!

'Reporting as spam' currently only collects data to be used for a future anti-spam measure. It won't have any immediate effect on your account.

Advanced spam filtering (the next step up from what's available to you now) comes with Full or higher level accounts. That's probably not what you wanted to hear, but there it is. I'd probably ride out this wave of zombie attacks before I made any major account changes. It may or may not improve, but finding out we're in it for the long haul (if that's how it should turn out) may affect the choices you want make. Let's hope it doesn't go that way.

-jeff-

[Sherry]

Originally posted by boczkowski
I'm currently telling the web interface to 'report as spam' ans then to bounce from the junk folder.

The spam button is not yet used to train each individual account. Here's the quote from Rob:

Reporting spam currently doesn't train the bayes filter, however it does put the spam into a corpus that will go to build your bayes filter when we enable it, so it is still useful.

Also, it is very rare for a bounce to be sent back to a real spammer. Spam is usually sent from a fake address or the address of an "innocent" person. Sorry, I know this doesn't help you with your spam problem.

Welcome to the EMD Forums

Sherry

Edit: I see Jeff typed faster than I did but I guess two answers are better than none.

[boczkowski]

Jrobert, Sherry

thanks for the explanations - they more than answer my questions.

Thanks for that. I guess I'll wait and see what occurs over the next 2-3 months and make a decision then

cheers people