Phishing e-mails

[Chris43]

Unfortunately spam is one today's frustrating side-effects of open access ont he internet. Luckily, my ISP seems pretty efficient at sorting them out. Only a very few now get through, maybe 1 or 2 a week, whist my spam mailboxes get between 300 and 500 a day!

A lot of that is down to someone somehow cloning one of my emal addresses, and using it as the from address in spam itself. After 2 months of up to 3000 messages a day - all emails from my address that were rejected as addressee not found or rejected by spam filters - they suddenly stopped. And since then BT has been doing a stirling job of not transferring them into my inbox.

I suppose the easiest thing in a way would be to transfer to a different provider, or to cancel with BT and resign with a new address. But I have just added some new email addresses, one for forum use, one for purchases, one for financial stuff, and one for family and friends. I then just use my PC client (I use Outlook) to collect mail form all of these mail addresses inboxes.

If any get compromised, then I can simply delete it and add another. So far the two that seem to get a fair amount are the addresses I use for forums and for purchases. No real surprise there.

I work on the principle that I might miss an email because it is incorrectly filtered as spam into the spam box of the ISP mail system. But that this is OK, as if someone really wants to communicate with me then they won't just rely upon email. And that goes for financial stuff in spades.

Tedious, isn't it. But better, in my view, than having a lot of restrictions.

[David_K]

You guys should be worried,
I get around 300 of theese beeeeeping things every day. Most are filtered of to a junk box but around 20-30 get through. I have received spoof ebay and paypal messages almost daily for the last 2 or 3 years and I must think that there is more viagra advertised by SPAM than is produced if my inbox is anything to go by. The most annoying one is the offer to sell me a CD with up to FOUR MILLION email addresses and the software to bulk email my own spam type messages. The best are the ones in Cyrilic and other obscure symbolic langauages which I can't even read.
Don't blame the Phorum specifically, the moment you send an email to anyone there is someone out there harvesting it and selling it on. Changing address or ISP will only temporarily delay this process.

David Kirkbright

[Phil Hocking]

I know Roy, if anyone wanted to track me down they could do it easy - my name is all over the place. I'm not blaming the forum for the phishing e-mails though, I'm sure these bots or whatever it is they use would ferret out an e-mail address however you used it. I just thought it was worth pointing out this particular one as it purports to be informing you of a security breach hoping to get you to breach that security! What a shame that a few people have to spoil things for everyone else.

Phil

[Roy]

The internet always has had its dangers and it is as well to be as aware as possible of the weak points but if you put it into context we all elect to do dangerous things in our life because the benefits outweigh the risks. For instance most of us choose to drive a car.
Ps What was your best price on Viagra David? :-))) No, no, I really feel I am getting my own back on the drug salesmen as they don't seem to have realised that anyone my age gets them all for free in the UK so they are wasting their resources!:-)))))))