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Spam messages

6 messages · Kenny Bell, Mario Emmenlauer, Marc Schwartz +1 more

Original
Kenny Bell
# 
Have others received spam messages after posting to this list?

The two problem emails are HodgesDonna485 at yahoo.com and
amykristen4003 at octbm.com.
3 days later
frederik at ofb.net
# 
Yes, I just heard from Amy Kristen who is "looking to meet new
guys"...
On Fri, Dec 02, 2016 at 11:31:56AM -0800, Kenny Bell wrote:
Mario Emmenlauer
# 
The problem is not specific to this list. Any kind of public
list may mean that other subscribers (or even the whole world)
can see your email address. So whenever you mail to a (public)
list there is a good chance that afterwards, you will get more
spam. Not really much can be done about it, at least not on
the side of the list, since any of the subscribers may be a
spammer, who can know...

All the best,

    Mario
On 06.12.2016 14:13, frederik at ofb.net wrote:
Viele Gruesse,

    Mario Emmenlauer


--
BioDataAnalysis GmbH, Mario Emmenlauer      Tel. Buero: +49-89-74677203
Balanstr. 43                   mailto: memmenlauer * biodataanalysis.de
D-81669 M?nchen                          http://www.biodataanalysis.de/
Marc Schwartz
# 
Hi,

This topic has come up previously, across the R e-mail lists and the spammers need not be subscribers (but could be), but simply reasonably competent HTML scrapers.

If you look at the online archives of the R lists, for example R-Devel for this month:

    https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2016-December/thread.html <https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2016-December/thread.html>

and look at the individual posts, there is only minimal munging of e-mail addresses, which is easily overcome with basic scripting.

This is further compounded by there being a multitude of other places on the web, where actively updated archives of the R lists exist, providing additional sources of e-mail addresses for spammers.

Some of the prior discussions had considered that we might preserve only the list address in the posts sent out (as some groups do) and fully scrape the sender's e-mail address from the post when distributed and archived. However, that approach is not without it's own limitations (e.g. would make cc's and reply-all largely useless, except for off-list discussion) and so no action has been taken since this seems to be a transient issue.

Regards,

Marc Schwartz

  
  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      frederik at ofb.net
    

    

      
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I agree that no action should be taken.

It's somewhat mystifying that the robot known as "Amy Kristen"
responds so quickly after my post, and with such regularity (so far
twice per hour), using perhaps several email addresses - and using the
correct "Reply-To" headers. But more mystifying is that she keeps the
same name the whole time. And lucky, I guess, because otherwise I
wouldn't know how to filter her out...

        
On Tue, Dec 06, 2016 at 10:02:11AM -0600, Marc Schwartz wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        

      
      
    

            

      
      
      
    

        

      
      
    

            

      
      
      
    

        

      
      
    

            

      
      
      
    

  
  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Marc Schwartz
    

    

      
      #
    

  


  

      
Hi,

FWIW, I checked the R-Devel subscriber list of e-mail addresses (as Co-Admin with Martin I have access). There are presently 1,296 subscribers to individual posts and 746 to post digests on R-Devel.

Neither of the two e-mail addresses referenced below as being the sources of spam are listed as subscribers.

A Google search of those two e-mail addresses also came up empty. The "octbm.com <http://octbm.com/>" domain is legitimate, though the web site is "under construction" and the whois information shows that it was registered earlier this year by a person in Bangladesh who seems to own a large number of domains:

  http://www.domainiq.com/email?mesba.cit06 at gmail.com

There are a lot of technical ways of falsely generating those two e-mail addresses of course and an inspection of the full e-mail headers might be fruitful, although there are ways of manipulating those as well.

Regards,

Marc