[Leica] OT: Protecting my email from spammers

[Spencer Cheng]

Peter, 

I am not particularly an expert at anything but I am opinionated on many things. :) 

Re: #1 - I’ve read somewhere that spammers can figure out lightly obfuscated email addresses. Whether they will or not depends on their business model.

Re: #2 - I doubt if the bad guys will use OCR. The cost of OCR (and figure out when to use OCR) likely exceed the commercial value of your email address.

Re: #3 - I run my own spam filter (fairly stock spamassassin) on my own mail server as well as use other email service.  Spam filtering reduces my spam count from a few thousand a day to maybe 50/day. My mail program has it’s own spam filter which takes pretty well care of the rest. This is for email addresses like this one which has been on the ‘Net for about 20 years. If you are using gmail, Google takes care of spam filtering.

There is a wave of new style of spams (getting harder and harder to spot) which has been active for the last few months that address you by 1st name and pretends to be money related. The attachment seems always to be a ZIP file.

Never click on attachments or those shortened URL even from people you know or companies (especially if you are using Windows and even if you are not!). When in doubt, phone and ask.

Anti-virus programs are of marginal use since like most armies, they are ready to refight the last war, not ready to fight the next war. Better than nothing perhaps but they offer a false sense of security.

Regards,
Spencer

> On Dec 16, 2016, at 19:00, Peter Klein <boulanger.croissant at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Given all the spam I've been getting on my old personal address, I want to protect my new personal address from bots and Web crawlers. My new Web host does offer spam filtering, which I've enabled. Here are a couple of question for those of you who are pros or talented amateurs at this sort of thing.  Feel free to tell me I'm being overly paranoid or overdoing it if I am.
> 
> 1.  To what lengths do the crawlers and bots go to find addresses to spam?  Do they only look for clear text? Are they fooled by constructions such as "nospam at getlost dot org" or "nospam [at] getlost [dot] org" or similar?  Do ordinary people who are not computer experts know how to deal with such addresses?
> 
> 2. What if, instead of a mailto link, I put a link to one of these two pictures on my Web site:
> <http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/pklein/temp/spohrborg.jpg.html>
> <http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/pklein/temp/spohrborgDiag.jpg.html>
> Are the bad guys using OCR technology to pull addresses out of pictures?  If so, might the second of the two pictures be more likely to fool them?  And again, would they be less likely to be understood by ordinary people?
> 
> 3. I set up an "out of office" autoreply on my old address describing the situation, but not telling recipients the new address, because that (I assume) would also inform all the spammers.  I've emailed my new address to people I know.  Sometimes that isn't enough.  Suppose I were to put a link to one of the above pictures in the autoreply?  Or linked to my initial page on the gallery, with text instructions to go to the temp folder, go to page 3 and open the last picture?  Would that expose me to further danger?  Or are the bots not programmed to deal with things like that?
> 
> Thanks for any help!
> 
> --Peter
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Leica Users Group.
> See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information