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"Increase in SPAM to Freeola hosted domains."

Hi,
I've mentioned this in the 'formmail problem' thread but thought it was worth raising in the 'Services' forum.

Over the last few weeks I've seen a rise in the amount of spam - all of a sexual nature to numerous domains and accounts.

Of course I appreciate there is no easy fix for SPAM but 3 of my Freeola hosted clients have now contacted me asking if anything can be done which has prompted this post.

Both my Outlook junk mail filter and GoogleMail's spam filter is correctly capturing the spam so the senders details must be reasonably static - so I can't see why Freeola's filters can't be updated to manage things better.

I've regularly been sending samples to Freeola's abuse@ address where you receive an automated email acknowledgement.

Could Freeola please provide an update here so I can reassure my clients improvements are in hand?


Thanks in advance :¬)



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hiya Hmmm,

Freeola saying they dont see the problem is crazy, the 5-7 spam emails i recieve on all freeola hosted domain email addresses are all of a sexual nature which is surely a problem, its a big problem if the email addresses are for third party customers. Come on freeola there must be something that can be done?

Anti spam scripts

I wrote a php web mail script where the user must complete all visible fields....
Your name
Your email
Subject
Message
plus a hidden field
When the user submits the completed form it goes through a validating script, firstly it checks the email address the user or spam bot submited belongs to a registered domain (making the sender traceable), if successful it then checks the hidden field, if the form was submitted by a human this hidden field should remain empty, if this hidden field is empty the validation continues to check all other fields before sending, if validation fails on any of the fields, you recieve message saying so, such as `this is not a valid domain, please try again` or if the hidden field is completed you'll get, `you don't appear to be human, please try again`. After updating a contact page with this form i no longer recieve the spam, making me believe the bot sending this spam is not a very clever bot.

Also freeola offer a php web mail script that includes anti spam via the captcha image method, meaning before the form is submitted the user has to correctly type in the numbers or letters they see within the captcha image, as most spambots can't read letters and numbers within an image they cant complete the field and therefore cant submit the spam.

ive run both these antispam scripts on domains that were getting bombarded with this unwanted & bad natured spam and so far its been successful.

And thats what i call an antispam script,lol.
Happy days and keep safe m8.

Hi Tappet,
I'm not sure what you mean by 'anti spam scripts' - Not all the accounts/domains in question have website 'fommail' ?

Where spam has stopped when you moved to your new host this does sound like they have more effective filters in place.


Even though a few of us have seen similar patterns in spam, unfortunately Freeola have said they don't see the problem...
- So getting any improvements done look rather tricky.







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lo all,

I have serveral domains hosted with Freeola and receive 5 - 7 spam emails (offering everything i need to please my partner) on all related addresses with the exception of 1, the exception is a website which includes 2 web mail forms, the 1st being the php script freeola offer for all to use and the 2nd being a php script i wrote myself and wanted to test, as i dont recieve any spam on the related addresses i guess both mine and freeola's antibot scripts work.

OUT OF INTEREST, DO THOSE OF YOU THAT RECEIVE THIS UNWANTED SPAM ON FREEOLA HOSTED DOMAINS USE ANTISPAM SCRIPTS?


Also 2 weeks ago (due to my website being intergrated into an instore epos system) i transfered 1 of the domains that received daily spam to a new host and kept the same email addresses, since the domain has been transfered i have not received any spam at all.

WOULD THIS MEAN THIS SPAM PROBLEM IS ISOLATED TO FREEOLA HOSTED DOMAINS OR COULD IT BE DUE TO THE NEW HOST FILTERING OUT THE SPAM?

We can but its fairly painful, you have to view the spam with the headers and copy and paste it into a new email. (I've tried it myself and it is hideously slow)

More information on this can be found here spamcop (in case you are wondering this is the software we use to complain to the ISP's in question).

ncrs wrote:
> I'll get the message changed as its incorrect, probably a
> misunderstanding of what the system is for by the person setting
> the autoresponder up.



Thanks.

As MS Outlook is a (very)popular email client perhaps you can also investigate to see if you can accept spam samples from this application?





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I'll get the message changed as its incorrect, probably a misunderstanding of what the system is for by the person setting the autoresponder up.

ncrs wrote:
> The header is there, but it gets reorganised by Outlook (for no
> good reason), and the software I'm using to place the complaints
> recognises they have been altered and won't generate the
> complaints.

That's a shame - can't you use the info to add the 'perps' to your spam filters?

Perhaps it would be an idea to add some more info (the format you can accept...) to your automated response when customers write to your abuse address? I would have continued to take the time to send in my spam samples for ever if I hadn't asked!!!

Response received from emails to Freeola's abuse@ address:

Thank you for your submission to the Freeola Email abuse system, your email will be used to help train our Anti-spam system and help to minimize the inconvenience of unwanted messages to our customers. With regards The Freeola Team




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The header is there, but it gets reorganised by Outlook (for no good reason), and the software I'm using to place the complaints recognises they have been altered and won't generate the complaints.

FWIW - [ re. Message Headers not available ]

I've tried sending emails (to myself) as attachments.

If I then drag the attached emails out of the email that contains them into another folder within Outlook then the Message Headers appear to be intact...





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Hi ncrs,
Yes I'm using Outlook (Office 2003).
It's not convenient for me to switch email clients I'm afraid.

Thanks for letting me know the email samples I've been regularly sending aren't usable - at least that'll save me some time! ;¬P

I would send some from my GMail account but this is set to automatically delete all spam.

Shame Freeola can't get a copy of the spam filters that GMail use...




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