A Taste of their own Medicine



  • I am pretty good about not giving a real email address when I shop online. I even have a couple of throw-away addresses I use when the site is anything less than known to be trustworthy. Unfortunately, one of the "honest" places from which I bought something sold their email list and I got on the wonderful world wide wicked woodie list. Now my home email gets several spams for cialis and viagra every day.

    Since it's too much trouble to have everyone I know update their contact list with a new email address for me, I fire up the old spam blocker, and my inbox is now clean.

    BUT the spam folder is now full of this sort of junk. I spent a couple of weeks forwarding all the junk to spamblocker.notcaught@verizon.net and abuse@verizon.net, but no luck. Finally I call VZ and demand to know why my $50 spam blocker can trap this crap but they can't. Their response? Download our updated spam blocker and block it on your pc.

    In other words, VZ can't be bothered to trap this crap at the server; they'd rather forward countless copies to all their customers.

    I decided to give them a taste of their own medicine. I set up a couple of rules with REs that seem to trap most of the crap, and auto-forwarded it not only to the addresses listed above, but to their direct support email address, as well as several highly placed managers at VZ, with my own message: if you stop this spam from coming to me, then there won't be anything to auto-forward to you.

    </sigh>



  • I won't be surprised if Verizon responds by stopping all spam sent to you.  And stopping all legitimate email sent to you.  And stopping all web browsing, bit torrenting, and news reading by you.

    The good news is that they will also stop charging you $40 a month. 



  • Are you sure about the last part?



  •  Server-side spam fltering is a pain in the ass when you're dealing with false-positives.  I once lost an email about plane reservations and what identifying documents to bring to a job interview.

     / My spam filter is just my own domain with any addresses forwarding to me unless I setup an alias putting them somewhere else.  On-the-fly dummy addresses.



  •  it's probably a liability thing.  If _they_ block a critically important email because they think it's spam, the customer calls up and bitches once he finds out.  But if a _customer's_ spam blocker blocks a critically important email and they miss it well hey, that's their fault.

     

    On another note, that's why I use gmail's tagging ability.  If I sign up for an account at, say, abc.com, I'll do so with myemail+abc@gmail.com.  It gets delivered to myemail@gmail.com, but with the tag intact so if you start getting spam to that address, you can filter off the tag and delete everything coming to that tag.  (Unfortunately, it doesn't help you if you're not already using gmail, and a crafty spammer could theoretically parse out the tag, but I doubt many would bother putting in the effort to do that).  



  • @vt_mruhlin said:

     / My spam filter is just my own domain with any addresses forwarding to me unless I setup an alias putting them somewhere else.  On-the-fly dummy addresses.
     

    I've had similar problems in the past.  The best spam filters will reject dodgy content, but still save you a copy in a local archive.  That way you get the best of both worlds - you miss the spam, but you get a copy saved in case it made a mistake.

     I'll not plug my service which does this for you, but the technique itself is definitely the best approach.



  • @snoofle said:

    BUT the spam folder is now full of this sort of junk. I spent a couple of weeks forwarding all the junk to spamblocker.notcaught@verizon.net and abuse@verizon.net, but no luck. Finally I call VZ and demand to know why my $50 spam blocker can trap this crap but they can't. Their response? Download our updated spam blocker and block it on your pc.

    ...And what, precisely, do they recommend for those of us who use Linux or Mac OS?

    (Not that I live in an area served by Verizon anyway...)



  • @codeman38 said:

    ...And what, precisely, do they recommend for those of us who use Linux or Mac OS?
     

    <joke>Switching to a real operating system.</joke> 


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