About six months ago I started receiving spam emails from kbs(at)kennethbsmith.com that I most certainly did not send. They appeared to originate in China because they were promoting an ecommerce site that had a lot of Chinese letters in the headlines and captions. Since then I have been receiving more and more emails from kbs(at)kennethbsmith.com. I am not using the “@” symbol because I believe that they (the bad guys) can get my email address from anyplace that has it listed publicly, like this blog post. A bot can harvest it, put it on a list and then that list is sold to whomever. You have probably noticed that many netizens disguise their email address in this way. This has also resulted in me relying more on Yahoo! and gmail for my email correspondence. So many email accounts. So little time.
Sadly, spam is part of internet life. And is seems to be getting worse. I recently read that 75-85% of all email is spam. (Net-Security Org spam stats) Geesh! Googling, I see there is even a Spam-o-meter! Curretly 88.5%
Yesterday I received an email from a client who had just received spam from herself. (I looked and I had also received spam promoting 1001 Postcards From: kbs(at)kennethbsmith.com.) She wanted to know what she could do.
I called Bluehost, my internet service provider and talked to James. They see the internet from a meta perspective and one of the many reasons I like Bluehost is that their support staff (in Utah) is very knowledgeable and helpful. James confirmed my observations about spam but also my misgivings that not much can be done. But I remembered rercently receiving an email from Bluehost offering a new spam filter service, Postinti. James said it is the spam filter Google uses. Cost: $1 per month per email account. I signed up for the free trial that will end in mid August. I will post my updates here.This is for all spam to my kbs email account, not just the spam with my hijacked address.
UPDATE 11.22.11 Last week two of my Facebook friends commented that they had been hit by spam from a pornography site. Here is an excellent post about combating spam on Facebook from Mashable.com.
UPDATE 09.05.11 The NY Times tech expert David Pogue has a revisited Spam in this excellent post: Rethinking the Never Unsubscribe Rule for Spam (may need to log in).
04.26.10: Today the NY Times ran an article Spammers Pay Others to Answer Security Tests that shows the resourcefullnes and determination of spammers who are paying fifty cents an hour to freelancers in India and China to get past website Captcha safeguards.
UPDATE 08.08.09: Two weeks have passed. Postini is working just fine. Every night I get a Quarantine Summary. Usually about 10-15 bastards are snared. Only one True email caught and that was freed by clicking the “deliver” link. All in all, it seems hassle free and worth $12/year. Bluehost remains my ISP of choice.
UPDATE 07.25.09: Looking good. Had the filter on for 24hrs. Received an email from Bluehost Subject: Quarantine Summary 7/23/2009. I can see what has been quarantined. I see a spam email forwarded from my client is there. Thinking that she probably included a comment, I log into my Postini control panel and read her comments. So far, this seems to be working, though as I write this, I notice that one “Get your Diploma Today!” spam did get through. Fifteen were quarantined, four from kbs.