[Discuss] Torrent of new spam

[edwardp at dr.com (edwardp at dr.com)]

Spammers have become so much more sophisticated in recent years, that if 
(as a test) you or someone created an account with a username that makes 
absolutely no sense: udkpboqaxt, that account would likely receive spam 
at some point. It's as if spammers are sending it addressed to every 
possible combination of letters for a username.

Comcast has apparently been having an issue with their mail filter 
recently. One address is using a whitelist, only messages from specific 
e-mail addresses are allowed to come through, all others are deleted at 
the server. Within the past two weeks, three spams (so far) have managed 
to pass through this filter, arriving in my inbox. None of them 
originated from an allowed sender.


>
> Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2017 13:04:50 -0800
> From: "Rich Braun"
>
> About 3 weeks ago, one of my email addresses found its way into a new list
> that led to bombardment of 30-50 spams per day. I got rid of forwarding on
> that address and redirected it into a honeypot folder that (if need be) I
> could eventually use to detect and divert future spam.
>
> Suddenly, this morning my primary email address apparently found its way onto
> that list. Almost all the spams have Subject Lines That Are Spelled In All
> Caps, which might make for a useful filtering rule. Until I come up with a
> solution, I'll have to manually delete several unwanted emails per hour--for
> the foreseeable future.
>
> Apparently this new spammer has figured out a way to get past the RBLs and
> SpamAssassin filters that I've had a lot of success with in the past.
>
> Is this a sudden new/widespread problem, or did I just get unlucky with the
> combination of my email addresses and the (now fairly old) spam-control
> software I've been using?
>
> -rich
>