Phil Harrison

Two questions... [My PC has McAfee AV & Firewall, Spy Doctor, Spywareblaster and Spybot all running or used regularly]

Firstly - among the Spam which evades my ISP there are always two or three "Postmaster" Return type messages, of various sorts, some of which will quote my e-mail address accurately as the sender, and some of which don't. Does this mean that, despite my care, my machine is forwarding spam unknown to me?

And

What is the nature and purpose of spam which merely quotes (say) a couple of lines from Lord of the Rings but appears to have no other payload whatsoever?

TIA

Kieran_Burns

iTrader: (1)

1. Someone is spoofing your e-mail address, you can very easily edit the sender address and the remote smart host simply returns misaddressed e-mails to what it sees as the sender.
2. Anti Spam filters use a lexical analysis tool and 'count' the number of spam phrases in an e-mail ("buy this now", "viagra for whatever"). These additional phrases 'water down' the spam phrase percentage and attempt to get them through the filters

bob269

types of spam

http://images.google.co.uk/images?q=...=Search+Images

hope this helps

Phil Harrison

Thanks Kieran. On 1) Should I be worried? On 2) Understand the principle, but (e.g.) the first two lines of 'Lord of the Rings' don't contain anything remotely resembling "viagra" or "Rolex", and therefore appear to be purposeless....

Cheers

Phil

Kieran_Burns

iTrader: (1)

1. No - nothing you can do about it. Just ignore the e-mails. Always best to run scans once a week anyway, just to be sure

2. Sorry I must've not made myself clear (I do that) I meant that the (Lord of the Rings) phrases are in there to 'water down' the spam phrases. This way there is a lower percentage of spam phrases in the entire e-mail. This way the filters don't trip when they see the e-mail (or so they think)

Phil Harrison

Ah-ha..... presumably this works if the SPAM payload is in html?? I never read in html, for obvious reasons, so I hadn't checked my LOTR message for html - until now that is! Rolex it was!

Phil