G'Day,
seems, the www.scam.com artists found another way to send there very annoying e-mails via the Horizons Unlimited community.
Grant/Susan, any way to block this kinda crap?
Best regards & Seeya in the pub or on the road somewhere....
BUTCH
Founder / Webmaster
Red Devils MC Shanghai
http://www.butchshanghai.com


--- MR BELLO MOHAMMED <b_mohammed@fastmail.ca> wrote:
> Date: 1 Jul 2002 13:24:00 -0000
> From: "MR BELLO MOHAMMED" <b_mohammed@fastmail.ca>
> Subject: Message for Horizons Unlimited Motorcycle
> Travellers' Community
>
> Name: MR BELLO MOHAMMED
> Email: b_mohammed@fastmail.ca
> IP: 212.100.72.158
> Form:
> http://www.horizonsunlimited.com/com...tEnglish.shtml
> Message:
> i need you to assist me in transfering fund ATTN
>
> IT IS WITH TRUST AND CONFIDENCE THAT I MAKE THIS
> URGENT AND IMPORTANT BUSINESS PROPOSAL TO YOU. I AM
> A
> SENIOR ACCOUNTANT WITH THE NIGERIAN NATIONAL
> PETROLEUM
> CORPORATION (NNPC) HERE IN LAGOS. IHAVE BEEN
> ASSIGNED
> BY MY COLLEAGUES TO SEEK FOR A FOREIGN PARTNER IN
> THE
> TRANSFER OF THE SUM OF US$8 MILLION(EIGHT MILLION
> DOLLARS) ONLY. THIS MONEY AROSE FROM A
>

***Community e-mail address removed and message truncated by Susan.***

[This message has been edited by Susan (edited 01 July 2002).]

__________________
Somewhere down the road in China since '89 ~ along the route I've learned the hard way that pleasing everyone is impossible, but pissing everybody off is a piece of cake....TBR

Hi Butch

We have taken a lot of trouble to hide e-mail addresses from electronic collectors throughout the site. The Community e-mail addresses cannot be found by spambots, but someone took the trouble to send to them manually via the website form.

At this time, the only way to completely eliminate the possibility of spam is to remove the Community from the list on the Contact Community page. Which sort of defeats the whole purpose.

The long term solution is that we may require that people register and provide us with information about themselves before they can access some parts of the site, such as the Community contact page. That is a big step, and involves a lot of programming, but it would provide more protection to legitimate travellers and hosts.

In the meantime, just delete the spam and be glad they don't have your home e-mail address. I get at least a few a day direct to me!

Cheers
Susan

BTW, when you post an e-mail address in a message thread, such as you did originally with the Shanghai community address above, it then IS accessible to electronic collectors, so you've made the spammers job a lot easier!

[This message has been edited by Susan (edited 01 July 2002).]

__________________
Susan Johnson

Inspiring, Informing and Connecting travellers since 1997
www.HorizonsUnlimited.com

Hi Susan,
getting this african scam e-mails on my personal address as well. some even come out of "exile" in north america (can/usa) and europe.
just thought letting people know about the horizons unlimited comunity abuse and assume everybody who gets hit is smart enough to understand the BS behind this e-mails.
best way to deal with them is not answering in any form, doing that on my personal e-mail and seems successfull.
Thanks for keeping this great webpage going! Best regards & Seeya in the pub or on the road somewhere....
BUTCH
Founder / Webmaster
Red Devils MC Shanghai
http://www.butchshanghai.com

__________________
Somewhere down the road in China since '89 ~ along the route I've learned the hard way that pleasing everyone is impossible, but pissing everybody off is a piece of cake....TBR

Yes, the worst thing you can do is take up the offer to 'unsubscribe', then you've confirmed your e-mail address to them.

I'm using Outlook 2000, and the filtering on it is superb. Over time, I've developed a list of phrases in the subject heading which just go right into the Deleted folder without my even seeing them! Between that and the banned senders list, I'd say over 90% of the junk mail gets dealt with that way. The Rules Wizard takes time to set up, but well worth the effort, IMHO.

Susan

__________________
Susan Johnson

Inspiring, Informing and Connecting travellers since 1997
www.HorizonsUnlimited.com

I sent this reply to one letter I got, and they quite courteously stopped sending me any more:

Thank you for your letter. I am currently getting, on average, about one letter a day containing offers similar to yours.

I did reply to the first three letters that I received, and completed the transactions just as the Nigerians promised without any problems whatsoever. I now have $60 million dollars and have retired to a life of luxury in a tropical paradise, therefore I have no need to participate in any more of these transactions. It would be selfish and wrong for me to accumulate more millions than I could possibly spend in a lifetime.

So, would you please remove my name from your mailing list? This would save me having to sort through and discard the "junk mail" every day.

Thank you very much,

etc, etc.

Hi Guys

I was getting on average 4 a day of these annoying scams. I got so fed up that I closed the account.

I actually reported a nunber of the senders to their service providers but I never heared anything back.

I did think about putting in some kind of spamming set-up using key words but was worried that I might get legitimate emails rejected.Also they change their logon IDs daily.

Cheers

Julio

G'Day,
best remedy as of today, just reply in the subject line & message with http://www.nigerianscams.org

that one really shuts them up and stops the scam mails!
Best regards & Seeya in the pub or on the road somewhere....
BUTCH
Founder / Webmaster
Red Devils MC Shanghai
http://www.butchshanghai.com
***Scars are tattoos with better stories***

__________________
Somewhere down the road in China since '89 ~ along the route I've learned the hard way that pleasing everyone is impossible, but pissing everybody off is a piece of cake....TBR

Hi, wondered why I was getting all this shit in my inbox

yep! it's a fact. the nigerians got to me as well. should i take up their offer? lemme c..
that's 30% of 2.100m us + 30% of 1.350m dutch marks!!!(which in itself is remarkable since we use the euro as of jan. 1st 2002) hmmm just how many RTW's is that....?

__________________
GS to live, live to GS

Hi all!

The machines that sends u spam work automaticly,program sends random e-mails to random adresses.
For an example:usual adreses as:mike
a@xxxxx;mikeb@xxxxx;mikec@xxxxx;miked@xxxxx.....an d so on,combineing leters and numbers,gessing usual names,nicks and so on

So how to stop or at least minimise spam?

When u open an email acount DO NOT use your name as an adress(u will get tons of junk mail every day)like I did on my acount igor333@xxxxxx.xxx, i was geting aprox. 30 junk mails a day!
Chose ungessible adress,combination of leters and numbers(more caracters=less junk)

For my firs acount on hotmail.com i used my real first and last name,being from serbia my name is not usual(at least for spamers)and I did not get AN SINGLE SPAM since over 10 months when i opend it!

GOOD SIDE to unusial adress is that u get no or few unsolicited mails
DOWN SIDE is that someone is hardly to remember your adress unless writen down or in adress book of email client(eg.outlook)

AND DO NOT CHECK THE BOXES FOR FREE NEWS LETTER(eg. JOB OFFERS,HOROSCOPE,FREE STUFF,SPECIAL DEALS and like.

Hope this help!

If your acount is already spam infested there is no help u must close it and get a new one

P.S:Sory for speling errors,if any!

BeWell

jondoe

Here is the nice article about that:

How to cut spam without shooting your PC
By Monte Enbysk




Here's to the Michigan business owner who says "spam" wastes about 10 man-hours a week of his company's time.

And to the woman who has more than 800 e-mail addresses on her "blocked sender's list." And to the senior citizen who gets on average 24 spam messages a day, 25% of which are pornography. And to the woman who "unsubscribes" at every opportunity and still can't get off any spam mailing lists. And to all of you who feel you've been hoodwinked into "opting-in" when you don't want to.

I can feel your pain!

Spam, also known as "unsolicited commercial e-mail," is certainly today's scourge of the Internet. It now represents 20% of all e-mail on the Web, according to spam filtering company Brightmail. More than 100 of you responded to a recent column by my colleague Philipp Harper and merely reinforced my attitude about it. I average about 40 junk mails a day myself. And much of that is coming straight in to my business account.

So, we're all mad — and we won't take it anymore! Uh, well . . .

Truthful answer: We can take steps to cut back on the porn and other junk e-mail we get, but we can't get rid of it entirely. "There is no good mechanical solution to eliminate spam. If there was, we'd all be using it," says John R. Levine, author of "The Internet for Dummies" and a board member of the anti-spam group CAUCE (Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail). In addition, there is currently no federal law against spam, although an anti-spam bill is under consideration (see more below). So spamming is not illegal, but it would exist even if it was.

Here's my best effort at helping you — and me — reduce the amount of spam we get.

Check out the e-mail filtering and management services available on the Internet. They can't guarantee 100% success, but they can help you fight spammers. Here is a sampling:

Spam Buster, from Contact Plus. A filtering service that gets high marks from ZDNet.

MailWasher. A free e-mail checker that can eliminate spam and viruses (this company gladly accepts donations).

ePrompter. Another free service that enables you to see e-mail headers from multiple accounts before the messages hit your inboxes, so you can kill it for good in advance.

Spamex. For a small fee, you use disposable e-mail addresses that forward messages to your real e-mail address, which you keep hidden.

SpamCop. A spam reporting and filtering service, for a nominal price.

Brightmail. This spam-detection and filtering service for ISPs is now offered free to customers of Verizon's dial-up and DSL service.

In addition, free e-mail providers such as Hotmail allow you to block some spam messages and/or divert them into "junk mail" folders — although this may seem like putting a bottle cap on a fire hydrant. (Every reduction helps.)

And standard e-mail providers such as Microsoft Outlook and Eudora enable you to filter out recurring messages by setting up rules. The problem here is spammers rarely use the same return e-mail address more than once. Still, there are rules that can help you put a dent in it.

Ask questions about an Internet service provider's own spam filtration system before you sign up. Does it automatically block certain messages to its servers? Does it add certain words, symbols or letters to the header to identify potential spam (such as "ADV:" or "<POTENTIAL SPAM>")? Does it make any attempt to fight the spammers?

These are questions suggested by Don Blumenthal, Internet Lab coordinator for the Federal Trade Commission, who advises you to try a different ISP if you don't like the answers.

The free account (or America Online) trade-off: Expect more spam as the cost. Know upfront that signing up with a free e-mail account service such as Hotmail or Yahoo! — or a ubiquitous one such as AOL — will increase your chances of getting spammed.

Why? Because spammers mercilessly try random combinations of names and letters at Hotmail, Yahoo! and AOL. With so many millions of users, the spammers are bound to make a good number of connections under this draconian method. These providers continually work to fight spammers — and lose. As they get better at blocking spam, the spammers get better at getting around the blocks.

One possibility: Try a highly unusual combination of letters and numbers as an e-mail address. The drawback: If it is too unusual, you won't remember it, and neither will anyone else. (Note: Levine once talked an ISP into giving him an e-mail name of "no.spam." "You wouldn't believe all the spam I got," he says with a laugh.)

Avoid publicizing your e-mail address. The more your e-mail address is seen on Internet bulletin boards and in newsgroups, chat rooms and the like, the more you will be spammed.

Some advice from the FTC's Blumenthal: Have one e-mail address that you keep tightly controlled; give it only to close friends and business associates. Have another that you use more publicly, and for bulletin boards and newsgroups. You will get spammed there more, but you can check this inbox less frequently and at least feel like you are keeping spammers at arm's length.

Report spammers to your ISP, account provider and/or to the FTC. The most reputable ISPs or account providers have a complaint address such as Hotmail's abuse@hotmail.com. If your provider gets enough complaints against a particular spammer, it is likely to "blacklist" the mailer permanently.

Another option is the FTC, at uce@ftc.gov. Complaints to the FTC help the agency fight spammers who are scam artists, Blumenthal says. The complaints go straight to a database that currently has more than 8 million messages. "We look for scams only — right now that is all we can regulate," he says. "Spam is not illegal. But to whatever extent we can stop scammers, we can stop a lot of spammers too."

Read up on the proposed Unsolicited Commercial Electronic Mail Act of 2001. U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., introduced the bill, HR 718, in February 2001. It seeks to "protect individuals, families, and Internet service providers from unsolicited and unwanted electronic mail," and has some support, but has yet to get very far. For more information, search HR 718 at the Library of Congress Web site.

Outlawing spam is not as easy as it may sound. There are First Amendment and other conflicting issues, Blumenthal says. "Do you have a flat ban, or a ban with exceptions? There are a number of legal issues." Levine supports the bill, and notes that a federal law prohibiting junk faxes has been on the books since 1991. "I would point out that the Junk Fax Bill had similar issues."

Get further tips and advice from anti-spam activist groups. Fighting spam has become a cause for many. "Spam is not a technical problem; it is a political and social problem," says Levine, who operates the Abuse.net site. Similar activist sites include spam.abuse.net and the CAUCE site.

Last but not least, "unsubscribe" at your own risk. Should you click on the "unsubscribe" or "remove" links to get off mailing lists? Both Blumenthal and Levine agree: Do so only for messages from companies or organizations that you recognize and trust.

One of the spammers' nasty tricks is to get you to "unsubscribe" so they can validate your e-mail address. If you respond, they've connected; you are a real person. They can add your e-mail address to a list that they will use or sell. On the other hand, a company you know and trust may inadvertently spam you due to inept e-mail management. By responding, you've done them a service. So, to reiterate, if you don't recognize the mailer, you probably shouldn't "unsubscribe."











[This message has been edited by jondoe (edited 12 September 2002).]

[This message has been edited by jondoe (edited 12 September 2002).]

__________________
cheers

jondoe