Spam is killing me
Spam is killing me Well, the spammers are winning and it's ruining my site. It started back in May and it hasn't let up. All the spam is advertising a site in Taiwan called Shopping99.com. Basically they are sending spam as randomname (at) greggman.com and it's ruining my rep. AOL just banned e-mail from greggman.com and now I can no longer contact my friends at AOL. It's only a matter of time before yahoo, hotmail and other major providers do the same.

I don't speak or write Chinese so it's not like it's easy to ask them to stop and of course I doubt they would do it anyway. I tried to contact their ISP which has an English page but so far no luck. I also tried to contact their domain registar (enom.com) but so far no luck.

I turned on the pipe of bounced e-mails and got about 1000 e-mails in 6 hours. Note that those are only bounced e-mails, that means they are probably sending at least double that or more that are not getting bounced.

So, I don't know what to do. It feels like someone is invading my property and there's nothing I can do about it. I've put 7 years into this site, it's name, giving out my e-mail address to many people. Of course I can contact friends but I can't contact the thousands of people the only have my greggman.com address to contact me by.

It seems like my only solution is to change greggman.com to something else. Of course on top of sucking ass that is lots of work. All the links all over the net to my site will break. Many of my internal links will break as well.

If anybody knows how to fix this problem it would be great!

Note: They are spoofing. They are not using my e-mail servers. That means from their servers they are sending e-mail as random(at)greggman.com (trivial to do). People are working on a long term solution but that solution requires everybody in the world to switch to a new way of doing e-mail. The old (current) way is unsecure and allows easy spoofing and other problems.
Comments:

Ouch [ e ]

It's a horrible thing to happen.  Exactly the same happened to me in January this year: I went out to Korea and could only access my account via web mail at the local PC room... imagine my horror to find 6,000 bounced emails for "laymedad@max.tc".  The spammer was advertising a really disgusting site in my case, which was even worse.

The only thing I can say is that there was no lasting effect.  If AOL have any sense, they will re-enable email from your domain pretty soon.  A few months later and my max.tc domain was back to normal.  Good luck!  (and thanks for the pictures of Jeju, very useful)

posted by MaxChristianOctober 28, 2003 at 7:31

call enom [ e ]

A few weeks ago I read a story about a person with a similar problem and how he solved it. Try calling their ISP.

http://www.wired.com/news/po
litics/0,1283,60635,00.html

posted by dmaOctober 28, 2003 at 11:22

スパム対策　その３ [ e ]

私は、スパム、DM、メールボムに対する対策は２つあると考えています。

１　個人のPCで受信拒否する（メールソフトのフィルタ機能、Norton AntiSpam など）を使う。

２　プロバイダのメール受信拒否サービスを使う（無料、有料の場合あり）

基本的にスパム行為は、メールヘッダの偽装で発信元を特定できないケースも多いので

この２つの対処方法しかないように思えます。　

スパム対策　その４に続く。。。。。。。

posted by DoszilaOctober 29, 2003 at 6:24

[ e ]

ok, same happened to me. i'm in taiwan. i was put on some spam ban list, and had to fight like hell to get my email sent to europe. give me the traceroute to the ISP and the offending IP. I'll call the ISP and tell them I am your lawyer. You are a major Japanese distributor, and you will prosecute this to the FULL EXTENT OF THE LAW unless they stop allowing that IP to relay. Then I'll send them a nasty Chinese legal letter with a cc: to TWIX. This will at least get them scared enough to look at the traffic and understand the problem.

posted by corbettOctober 29, 2003 at 21:15

POPFile [ e ]

英語版です　ＰＯＰＦile

日本で有名な雑誌「ネットランナー」に紹介されていました。

posted by DoszilaNovember 17, 2003 at 9:44

spam nuiscance [ e ]

are you running your own email server? Who hosts your site? If they are using your domain name report them to your countries name registrar. If you are running your own server look at http://www.ordb.org/ for some advice on stopping open relays etc. Maybe http://www.spamcop.net/ can help too.

posted by ianintheworldNovember 17, 2003 at 13:49

[ e ]

Well, the same happens with my domain. Just random addresses put in front, interestingly most of them I put on my homepage once for testing and are total bogus... Don't know when it'll hit me like you but the day will come I'm afraid. How can a couple of people terrorize the world with crap like that. Hope all of them will soon just kick the bucket.

posted by AfriendwhofeelsthesameNovember 17, 2003 at 15:06

[ e ]

use spamassassin, (www.spamassasin.org), its easy to install and sits inbetween you and your POP server.  It cuts out 95% of the spam, I only get 1 or 2 a day let through now (as opposed to the 60 or 70 mails that get filtered)

posted by DylanNovember 19, 2003 at 21:35

[ e ]

Ah sorry, misread the message and got the wrong end of the stick, what's the point of them spoofing your mail address?  I didn't think AOL blocks based on the "reply-to" field, it blocks based on the IP addresses the mail goes through.

How is greggman.com registered?  Are the reverse-lookups for it set up correctly?  ie. can I do a dig -x <greggman.com's IP address> and does it display greggman.com?  *that's* what AOL is really fussy about.

Boycott anybody that uses AOL anyway, that's what I do

posted by DylanNovember 19, 2003 at 21:41

You'll be happy to see this. [ e ]

Greg & everyone. You'll be happy at this little spammer jab: http://www.wtop.com/?sid=150
989&nid=25

posted by wilsonJanuary 5, 2004 at 12:59

This sucks... [ e ]

The same thing has been happening to me too in the last view weeks and I've been looking around to see if others were having similar problems. Seems like there isn't much that can be realistically done about it. From what I can see of the bounced email I am getting back the spam is comeing from many different ip addresses so presumably these are computers that have been infected and have become mindless spam zombies. I'll post again if I come across any other advice.

posted by bitneekMarch 26, 2004 at 17:09

Fighting Spam [ e ]

I too have been having similar issues with Chinese Viagra Fiends hogging my domain name in their forged headers. I may try contacting the Chinese embassy to complain about the issue ... doing this is based upon the following theory:

The Chinese embassy will have people who speak English. The Chinese ISP will not likely have anyone who speaks English. The Embassy will want to avoid an issue, especially if news media is mentioned.

I wish you the best of luck. Let me know if I can help.

-Dave

posted by DaveMay 1, 2004 at 19:05