Thread: Can't Figure It Out

Originally Posted by urleebird

Every once in a while, I get one of these kind of messages in my email. I never open them, but can see what they say in the prieview window. Can anyone tell me what the heck they are all about? I'm so confused...

Bill,

The guy who does my hard and software maintenance recommends you switch the preview feature off. Apparently, viruses etc. in spam can implant themselves onto your computer more easily when the email is read through preview.

I hardly ever get that stuff but when a new message comes in, outlook asks me if I want to read it and I clicked yes. An email with a pic of watches opened up with a paragraph of nonsense below it. I knew in about 2 seconds I was screwed! Now I have JS.Feeb virus on my machine

I am with you Firestart, first offense is to be bashed in each kneecap with a ball peen hammer. After that you get the Joe Pesci "vise" treatment!

I get about 2 spam messages a day that still manage to bypass my spam filters(spamassassin, bogofilter and vipul-razor). 2 out of a few hundred that get caught every day, isn't bad.

Like the others said: you really should disable the preview window and either not use outlook or place it in the restricted zone, which disables about everything, else it can give you quite a bit of trouble. :/

As for the spam, just never buy anything from them and berate everyone that does or ever has. The only way to stop the spam is not buying from them via this channel anymore. Telemarketers also only keep calling because enough suckers buy via telephone.

Of course if you ever meet anyone that admits to sending this rubbish:

Bill,

My inbox gets tons of this kind of crap. Most is filtered out as spam but the spammers always find a way around the filter with giberrish like this.

I think that e-mail like this one are phishing (looking for valid e-mail addresses) since they don't peddle anything discernable that you can buy. You would be surprised how many people reply to spam, singnalling that it is a valid e-mail address with a gullible idiot at the other end. These databases are worth a lot of money, just like telephone numbers of suckers are worth a ton to telemarketers and fraudsters.

I saw a documentary on spamming and you can forget about the pimply faced teenagers behind the spams. These days it is an organized business with adults running the show. Organized crime is also a big player in spamming. Especially the stock tips. They use it in what is called "pump and dump"--pump up a stock value through e-mail campagns and dump your shares for a huge profit.

A spammer can make $50,000 to $60,000 per month and the companies using them make about 10 times that. There is a very strong business case for spam so it is not going away unless someone comes up with an e-mail model that charges to send e-mail. Right now they can send 1,000,000 e-mails for free so if those e-mails result in $100 sales it is good. If they had to pay $0.001 per e-mail it would cost them $1000 and that would kill their business.

Don't bother trying to make sense of the stuff just accept spam as the high price of free e-mail.

What we need are aggressive investigation, dogged prosecution and REAL penalties. This should be an international effort.
Another thing to worry about is the virus market. Antivirus companies fuel the development of new viruses to create public paranoia and push their products. This should be investigated and any company caught filling the cookie-jar should be crucified as an example.
The problem with most white-collar crime is that it's organized so people can hide behind corporations within corporations within corporations and it's very difficult to prove responsibility. Unfortunately there are no easy solutions.

Originally Posted by Kees

Bill,

The guy who does my hard and software maintenance recommends you switch the preview feature off. Apparently, viruses etc. in spam can implant themselves onto your computer more easily when the email is read through preview.

That is quite true I have suffered a meltdown from it before.
I only use web mail.
It is my regular connection provider but I only read it on line now!

Tony

Originally Posted by Sec162

I hardly ever get that stuff but when a new message comes in, outlook asks me if I want to read it and I clicked yes. An email with a pic of watches opened up with a paragraph of nonsense below it. I knew in about 2 seconds I was screwed! Now I have JS.Feeb virus on my machine

I am with you Firestart, first offense is to be bashed in each kneecap with a ball peen hammer. After that you get the Joe Pesci "vise" treatment!

Have a look here if you still have it!

http://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/viru...ame=JS_FEEBS.I


Tony