This is a common situation these days. Malicious code has been developed to allow spammers to distribute their junk mail a variety of ways.
In the old days, we’d tell people just to be careful about posting their email addresses on web sites or newsgroups. Today, all it takes is an infected machine on which your email address is saved in an address book!
In order to combat spam, it’s now important for all computer users to keep their machines secured using the latest security software and by making sure operating system updates are done. Sometimes even this is not enough, since modern coders can defeat most commercially available Internet Security applications. Why can’t they use their powers for good instead of evil?
Be careful about designating email addresses or domains as trusted. Many spam filters, including our own, allow users to whitelist specific email addresses or entire domains. Imagine what could happen if you whitelisted the entire hotmail.com domain? That means anyone sending you a message with a return address from hotmail.com is going to get past the spam filter. Unfortunately, you can no longer whitelist your OWN email address! Spammers are sending junk mail to you with your own return address!
What’s a person to do? Make sure your security software is up to date. If you haven’t installed anything, please call ConnectNC to have a tech perform a security scan on your system and install your software. If everyone maintained good system security, we’d go a long way towards eliminating spam that comes from infected machines.
Last, but not least, never, ever buy from a spammer. They’re not sending you junk mail for fun. They’re doing it to make money. About ten years ago, one spammer told me that his employer made $30,000 in one day after they sent out unsolicited commercial email to a very large number of addresses. Their hosting and email accounts were cancelled, but it was well worth it to them. So, let’s try to make spamming an unprofitable venture. We should all agree that we’ll never buy anything that was promoted in an unsolicited message we received.
AOL has something they call an Email Feedback Report. ISPs can register with AOL so they’ll be notified any time an email message is reported as spam. Unfortunately for the sender, the entire contents of the message are left intact for the ISP to review. The Email Feedback Report protects the identity of the recipient, but not the sender. Therefore, any message reported to AOL as spam (either rightly or wrongly) gets sent to the sender’s ISP.
What does this potentially mean? It means that a sender’s love notes, racist or sexist jokes and personal and business information are revealed to the sender’s ISP if that message is reported as spam.
We try to inform our customers when a message has been returned to us by AOL. In MOST of the cases, the sender reports back that the recipient did NOT (either intentionally or accidentally) mark their message as spam. Therefore, we’re making the assumption that there’s some flaw in AOL’s mail system that tags messages as spam in error.
Because we see several of these a week, my own personal policy is to never send anything I would want to have kept confidential to people with AOL email addresses.
I just wanted to pass this along so people will be aware and take steps to maintain their privacy.
There are individuals who may send email to you, asking for your account password, or asking you to login to a web site to change your password. These people are posing as technical support people in an attempt to get your account password from you. Once they have your account password, they login to webmail and use your address to send out thousands of “spam” messages across the Internet.
There are a few steps you can take to make sure your account isn’t “hijacked” to use for spamming (sending junk email). First, and most important, never give your password to anyone who is requesting it by email. Don’t login to any web site to change your password or enter your current password on the request of anyone by email. If we feel your account has been compromised we’ll change your password for you. We’ll never email to ask you to do it.
You can read more about this kind of activity, called “phishing,” by going to the following URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing
Second, please make sure your password is strong enough to prevent someone from guessing it. If your username and password are the same, you’re a potential target for account hijacking. Your password should contain upper and lower case letters, numbers and some other character(s), such as symbols or punctuation. Here are a few examples of good and bad passwords.
GOOD passwords ————– M9ADu%3wQ! (good) NtiL@e_D5o1sig (even better – more characters)
BAD passwords ————- 1234 (one of the most commonly used and easily guessed passwords) spaniel (a word in the dictionary)
Please check your password here: http://tinyurl.com/safe-passwords If your password strength is not rated “strong” or “best,” it should be changed immediately!
If you have ANY reason to believe that someone has guessed your password, please change it immediately.
Your ConnectNC Account Manager: https://accounts.connectnc.net/
When analyzing how much of the email that comes into web hosting accounts, we discovered that it’s 94% spam and viruses. Thanks to our mail filtering device, most of that is blocked or quarantined. I went to google to look for stats, and found that our figure agrees with what’s reported by most other ISPs. A graph from one of our mail filters shows the severity of the spam problem, which is universal.
Increases in junk mail has required us to invest in mail filtering appliances and software, which is the case for many large companies and universities. However, not all companies can afford to make this investment. We offer mail filtering for web sites whether they are hosted with us or not. For a low monthly rate, your domain’s email can be protected. Pricing starts at $13.50 per month, for up to 10 mail accounts.
Using the service is easy. A simple change is made to your DNS. No software needs to be installed on any of your systems. We do still recommend that each of your machines has an anti-virus application installed. While most viruses are email borne, there are still risks associated with simply being connected to the Internet.
For more information, or to sign up, call us at 888-290-4601, extension 22.
